I don’t really see anyone actively pursuing “green” as a strategy for selling wine in the state of Washington. In the November 2008 issue of Wine Business Monthly the “Direct to Consumer” offering is about teaching tasting room staff how to speak on issues of sustainability to enhance the visitor’s experience and make them feel even better about buying the wine. Whether it is pesticides, water conservation, migrant labor or fuel efficiency, the article argues that the staff interfacing with customers should be able to speak intelligently on the topic. I would argue that a winery’s PR and marketing should speak intelligently on the topic as well. If you can make your customer not only like your product but feel good about themselves for buying it, you have a customer for life. California wineries are taking this issue on and even have a conference. At which a California winery was awarded the Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Award. C’mon Gregoire, you’re not going to let the opportunity to promote a $3 billion state industry pass you by, right?

So, now we get to where the rubber hits the road – you and me aka – the consumer. What are we going to do to promote greener purchases beyond taking our shopping home in cloth bags? If you live in the state of Washington and drink wine from any further away than Oregon or the Okananagan Valley, you are not drinking green. If you are drinking from Europe or South Africa you need to rethink your priorities. Hey, I get it. I love a great Bordeaux, Nebbiolo, Rioja and even a Stellenbosch Pinotage but I would rather spend my carbon going to those places and drinking locally while I am there. Being on the left coast makes wines from Chile, Australia and New Zealand not exactly green, but greener than European wines; the opposite is true for our friends and family on the East coast. It is actually greener for them to drink the wines of Europe than California or Washington. A greater reliance on rail transportation over trucking and air might help balance that out but I am no transport specialist.

Oh, and if you live in a state that has a wine region, support it. Visit wineries, buy the wine in your local store, sign up for the club if you like their product. Buying direct ensures more profit for the winery and helps them to thrive so you can keep buying local and being green.

Now is where I tell you to get your nose out of the air and seriously consider alternative packaging. Twist top and artificial “cork” wines have less spoilage than traditional cork wines. The condition of the cork tells you the wine has survived its shipment and storage – that’s it. You still have to taste the wine in order to truly determine that it is in the condition the winemaker wanted it to be when it is served. So can all the silly cork rituals and taste the damn wine already. The fact that a cork can be a major failure point in packaging should be enough to move people away from its use. Unfortunately, the wine snobs of the world continue to vocally prefer cork thus promoting the continuing depletion of cork trees and the reluctance of wineries to move away from its use.

Another thing that needs to be seriously evaluated is the glass bottle. It’s heavy and cheaper to make from new material than from recycled. Not all wine regions have a good source for recycled material bottles (and by good I mean one that is local, competitively priced and with consistently high quality) so it undermines the purpose of paying more for recycled material and then burning a lot of fossil fuel to put it in the winery.

I think consumers need to seriously consider “the box.” After all when wine was first produced they put it into clay jars that were sealed with less appealing things than a cork. A 3 liter box of wine weighs the same as a 750 ml glass bottle of wine and all of its materials are recyclable. “Box” and TetraPak containers are completely capable of protecting wine without imparting any foreign taste to the wine. There are many quality producers of recycled material box components and shipping the packaging is significantly cheaper than shipping empty glass bottles. Yes, losing the bottle means losing the ritual and romance of opening a bottle of wine. Decant it, light some candles and get over yourself.

I doubt that we will see any winery anywhere in the next year announce that they are switching to all box or TetraPak containers. But if a winery was to announce to its club members that they will be doing exclusive alternative packaging vintages I would be interested to see the reaction. If you love wine and you love the planet, perhaps you can give up the bottle.

So go drink some local wine (if you are in a western state without a resident wine industry Washington wine counts as local) and make your voice heard on issues of sustainability in the wine industry. Here are a few of my local favorites:

Sleight of Hand Cellars – Spellbinder is a great red blend for $18
DaMa Wines – Their Riesling is a lovely little prize at $16
Ash Hollow – The Somana is a great white blend at $20
Spring Valley Vineyards – Their Nina Lee (100% Syrah) is one of my favorites and my go to gift wine – $50
Cullin Hills Winery – Thanks to Nabil at Seattle Wine Co for turning me on to their Viognier (sold out)

Cheers!

So I couldn’t be happier to find a Google Maps app for directionally challenged lushes. You have to love the “happy hours at this very moment” checkbox. Unthirsty, where have you been all my life?

I’m off to get that drink!

I really need to get out of the house more, or not be left alone for so long!!

We should do a “Cinema Don’t Spit” when this comes out!

The pork thing is pretty easy to figure out too, though. Think about it. Most of the major world conflicts are between non-pork eating cultures. India and Pakistan. Iran and Iraq. Isreal and the Palestinians. Etc. I mean, you don’t really see a whole lot of Italians and Spanish going at each other, do you? And yet you do see a whole lot of Italians and Spanish sitting around drinking wine and munching on excellent ham. So there you go. Anyway, the secret to world peace, I’m ever more convinced, is a big old pig roast. Just think about it. Get all these bigwig muckety-mucks down to W’s ranch for some good beer and a barely solid pig that’s been slowly turning on a spit for a few days over a low fire…The thing is, after something like that, you’re incapable of not loving your fellow man. I just want, if W gets around to trying this little endeavor, to be given a share of that Nobel Peace Prize for having come up with this brilliant idea in the first place. In fact, I’d say let’s just do it at my Pa’s farm, but the whole secret service thing would probably make the horses nervous.

Anyway, in the same vein of the mutually enhancing properties of alcohol and pork, this editor dude named Josh Karpf has a description of his search for the perfect pork martini on his Web site www.foody.org.

It’s a brilliant idea, not too far from another porky endeavor Pete and Mike and I will make millions off of one of these days. But it’s also such a hoot of a read. For example:

Tasting was overseen by a collection of sprightly, generic-yet-authentic Cole Porter oldies such as “Let’s Do It,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” and “Always True To You in My Fashion.” Hot, salted Chinese “imitation” egg noodles and tap water were on hand to clear the palate. And there was even a lovely blond in the room: me.

The sweet dried pork Martini, despite the lack of apparent surface oil, coated the bottom of my upper lip with a tangy pork greasiness. I was casually impressed, though I began to worry about what the more visibly oily pork vodkas would later offer. The chilled Martini had a piggy bouquet beyond its plain pork-vodka aroma. Was that the endothermic effect of the chilled liquor alerting the nose, or the action of the herb-steeped vermouth? I sipped a little. No aftertaste or aftereffect beyond the expected tummy warmth. Little flavor at all, in fact. Dried meats would seem less than optimum.

The ground pork Martini’s scent was powerful with essence of pork patty. This is not a cocktail for the pork Martini dilettante: Like specifically demanding from your bartender a “vodka Martini” instead of the understood default gin Martini, you’ll have to specify the “pork patty Martini” instead of a vanilla version, and make sure he or she fries the pork just right, searing the surfaces, draining the fat, and not letting it burn while you chase Naomi or Leonardo into a restroom. Come back when it’s mixed. Wow. This Martini packed a pork wallop. The aroma was overpowering, I have to admit. But that masked the oil; I saw the oil before, really, see my comments under “Transmogrification,” supra, but I tasted no oil. I declaim this a Martini you will love or hate, no middle ground. You could get drunk on the bouquet alone, a secondary high. Your neighbor will notice — and I mean your next-door neighbor, as you mix this at home, not the crackhead on the next barstool — and ask “Hey, is that pork you’re drinking?” “Yes!” you trumpet proudly. A great way to make new friends. Unless he or she is a vegetarian. But who wants a vegetarian friend?

You should, most definitely, take a look at the site too, if not to read the rest of the article, then at least to see the rather unnerving photos of the various pork martinis he tried.

And elsewhere on his site, Tales from the Coop, his take on meetings from the Park Slope Food Coop should appeal to those who’ve ever been on any sort of board that drove them crazy.

To quote Mike:

Americans are also expanding their wine horizons: Wine drinkers are often weaned on Napa merlots and Sonoma chardonnays but then become more adventurous, dabbling in Loire whites, Rhone reds, and other imports. Many find they prefer the foreign stuff, which usually has a lot more character and goes down better with meals. (California wines tend to be abusively oaked, high in alcohol, and low in acidity, making them distinctly food-unfriendly.)
But none of this adequately explains the contempt so many oenophiles now seem to feel for California wines. They aren’t just shunning them; they are cursing them. At any gathering of wine fanatics, you’re apt to find one person, and usually more, who will claim to have entirely sworn off California. The manager of a major East Coast wine store recently told me he no longer sets foot in his shop’s California section unless a client can’t be convinced to try something else.
….
In fact, California produces almost nothing worth drinking for under $15, a failure that borders on criminal. Finding something in this range that is merely inoffensive is a challenge, a point underscored by a recent feature in the Los Angeles Times. The paper gave four local sommeliers $300 each to come up with a list of good, fairly priced wines (fairly priced was loosely defined). Of the 39 wines selected, exactly one was from California. “There’s no price-quality ratio in California anymore,” David Rosoff of Opaline restaurant explained, “Great mistakes were made here …”

The biggest mistake is vanity: Most of the California producers with the means, skill, and desire to make good wine seem to measure success by the price tag on the bottle and would sooner flog pickles than “devalue” their brand by selling a $15 cabernet. You’d think one of California’s star oenologists might be inspired by the examples in France of great winemakers—Aubert de Villaine and Dominique Lafon come to mind—who are happily slumming it on the side, producing terrific, inexpensive wines from satellite appellations. But apparently that isn’t the California way.

OK, there are a few exceptions. Mike lists Ridge, which is generally great, and I am of course a huge fan of David Bruce (especially the luscious Petite Syrah that Bob and Terry cellar).

OK, now I’m ready to leave the office and drink. I’m going to try to stay for at least another hour.

Boxed Wine. One in five glasses of wine consumed by Americans comes from a box, reports Frank J. Prial in The New York Times. “We’re third,” he continues. “In Australia, boxes have half the wine market and in Norway…they claim a third.” In Britain, “the market for boxed wine is growing twice as fast as that for bottled wine.” Ryan Sproul, who markets a three-liter, Napa Valley 2001 Chardonnay called Black Box, says boxed wine is growing in popularity “because consumers have come to realize that the wine is more important than the packaging.” The quality of the wine inside does count, of course — Black Box actually “won a silver medal in a competition sponsored by The San Francisco Chronicle.”

The truly surprising thing here, however, is that boxes make great wine vessels. That’s because the “triple-layer clear-plastic…bag that holds the wine” inside the box is airtight. The bag contracts as the wine is dispensed, keeping remaining wine in “perfect condition, for a surprisingly long time.” It’s an innovation claimed by the Australians, which they say dates back 30 years. It is most associated in America with cheap, sweet wines, sold mostly in “supermarkets and working-class liquor stores.” The typical American box of wine, marketed by vintners such as Almaden and Franzia, holds five-liters and sells for “$8 to $12 , or $1.35 to $1.75 a bottle.”

Labels like Black Box, however, are selling for 25 bucks a box. Australia’s BRL Hardy has a line of chardonnay, shiraz and merlot priced at $16. A “magnum-size, organic bag-in-the-box wine called Our Daily Red,” actually depends on boxing — because it contains no sulfites it “soon becomes unstable in an opened bottle.” In London, “a recent tasting…featured 30 bag-in-the-box wines, all of them serious entries from France, Spain and Italy.” Mr. Prial concludes: “We Americans are still pretty insecure when it comes to wine. We still place undue importance on the bottles, labels and corkscrews. But, as the figures show, we’re changing.”