Stories indexed with the term ‘Arbor Vinous’

For over 40 years, Ann Arbor wine retailer Village Corner was a fixture on South University, near the University of Michigan’s Central Campus, until it closed last November to make way for a student high-rise at 601 S. Forest.

Dick Scheer, an iconic figure in Michigan wine circles, owned the store that entire time. When it closed, Scheer stashed his inventory in temporary quarters, took his Terminator turn – “I’ll be back!” – and pledged to reopen shortly in a venue with better parking, as he told Sandra Silfven of the Detroit News.

Then, nothing. Scheer went to ground, keeping his own counsel as he sought a new location, to the not-infrequent exasperation of long-time customers and members of the media alike.

Until last week, when the website of Michigan’s Liquor Control Commission (LCC) spilled the beans: on March 17, Village Corner applied to relocate its beverage licenses to another campus-adjacent address.

North Campus, that is.

The new location, at 1747 Plymouth Road in The Courtyard Shops, sits between No Thai! restaurant and Jet’s Pizza, in a storefront formerly occupied by Tanfastic tanning salon. [Full Story]

Ricky (walks in the front door): Lucy, I’m home!

Lucy (runs up and plants a smooch): Ooh, hi honey!

Ricky: Tonight we celebrate the band’s big record deal! Did you remember to buy the Cristal Champagne?

Lucy: Oh, Ricky, you’re going to be so proud of me!

Ricky: And why is that?

Lucy: Remember you told me that Cristal costs $250?

Ricky (suspiciously): Yes?

Lucy (pulls bottle from behind back): Look! I found a bottle for just $8!

Ricky (visibly upset): Lucy, that’s not Cristal. It’s not Champagne, it’s cheap Cava from Spain. See, it says “Cristalino”! That means “little crystal.”

Lucy: Oh, that’s OK. I’m just going to drink one glass.

Funny? Maybe not so much. Especially if you’re the maker of the sparkling wine formerly known as Cristalino, a Vinous Posse top value pick in the last two December budget bubbly shoot-outs.

Howcum? Back in 2006, Louis Roederer, producer of Champagne-to-the-rap-stars Cristal, found fault with the similarity in name and foil labels of the decidedly down-market Spanish Cava.

Next step: Federal court, for a lawsuit against Cristalino’s owners for trademark infringement. [Full Story]

Although local restaurant wine markups vary widely, you might figure that wine prices in the cutthroat-competitive supermarket world would be more consistent, one to the next.

You’d figure wrong.

One fine example: Italy’s ubiquitous Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio. Fuhgedabout its modest crowd-sourced ratings; the wine’s a staple on most grocery store shelves, including seven of the eight Ann Arbor supermarkets I visited in late October.

If you’re a west-sider who shops at Plum Market, you’ll pay $17 to take home the current 2009 vintage.

Wanna spend more? No problem. On the south side, Meijer sells the same bottle for $19. Joe’s will Trade one in exchange for $21. And if buying the wine at Whole Foods makes you no healthier, its $24 price tag is likely to perk up the chain’s bottom line.

But if you really have money to burn, head east toward Hiller’s for the daily double: you’ll settle for the prior year’s vintage and they’ll soak you for $26 – a whopping $9 (53%) more than Plum’s price.

This may be an outlying example, but it’s far from atypical. The survey found prices on individual bottles can vary as much as 80% among the eight local markets, and your total tab for the identical assortment of wines will be 30% higher or lower, depending on where you shop. [Full Story]

In the far corner, wearing synthetic trunks: Steve Heimoff, west coast editor of Wine Enthusiast magazine. I pilfered part of the column title from him; fortunately, Steve’s pretty laid back about such things.

Unlike “natural, schmatural” wine, over which he turns apoplectic: “‘Greenwashing’ is the perfect way to describe a large part of the whole natural, green, sustainable, organic, biodynamic thing. Everybody wants to portray his practices as purer than the other guy’s practices. It’s a holier-than-thou world out there, and IMHO that goes for the whole greenie-natural crowd.”

And here in the near corner, Ann Arborites Stacey and Rob DeAngelis, dressed in the all-natural cloak of DeAngelis Cantina del Vino, whose tasting room opens later this month. It’s the only winery with an Ann Arbor mailing address, though you’ll find it deep in Scio Township.

Not for them, the typical 21st century winemaker’s arsenal of chemicals, sulfites, color enhancers and designer yeasts.

What’s in the wines? “Just the grapes,” says Stacey DeAngelis, whose picture appears on their label.

She’s not kidding. [Full Story]

Imagine a restaurant that thrives and grows based on its friendly service, consistent products, strong marketing and support for and from its community.

But peek in the kitchen and you discover packaged mixes, pre-sliced produce, shortcut recipes and commercially-prepared dishes, straight from a central commissary or food-service supplier.

Its primarily pre-packed ingredients never spoil, but neither do they ever taste truly fresh. Menu items don’t vary from one visit to the next, thanks to consistent sourcing and preparation – but neither do they ever excite, or rise above the overall uniformity and mediocrity of their processed flavors.

Now imagine that this restaurant is, instead, a winery. And let’s consider the curious case of downtown Saline’s Spotted Dog, which just announced a capacity-tripling expansion accompanied by positive nods from some local media.

The affable John Olsen, a refugee from the world of corporate tech support, looks up from behind the tasting counter as you enter the Spotted Dog, a brick-walled, 1,600-square-foot storefront just off the corner of Michigan Avenue and Ann Arbor Street.

Olsen, who co-owns the winery with his wife, Jill, is tediously affixing labels to a batch of newly-filled bottles. Such is life at a micro-winery, where hand labor often stands in for expensive and space-consuming machines. [Full Story]

These days, lots of Ann Arbor restaurants – and even some brewpubs – are offering wine lists of reasonable quality. So why would anyone want to BYO when they eat out?

How about:

• You’re itching to try a tiny, locally-owned place – call it Jamaican Jerk Pit – whose owners can’t afford multi-thousand dollars to secure a liquor license. But you fantasize how great a cold bottle of Red Stripe might taste alongside that jerk chicken or curried goat.
• You’re feeling the economic pinch, and the wine markup at many restaurants presents a budget-busting deterrent to going out. So you eat at home, and pour a glass or two of wine. Cost: one-third of its restaurant price.
• You enjoy a restaurant’s cooking, but its wine list is particularly short and dismal. With a better beverage selection, you’d probably eat there more often.
• You squirreled away a special bottle of high-end Cabernet for a landmark birthday or anniversary. Now’s the time – and you’d like to celebrate with a meal at your favorite “special occasion” eatery, accompanied by your special occasion wine.

If any of these scenarios hits home, ponder this: though laws vary, most larger states across the country – California, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and even Texas – allow you to legally tote along a bottle of wine when you go out to eat at a restaurant.

Here in Michigan, not so much. Except for a couple of small, largely unknown loopholes – which we’ll get to in a minute – beverage law in the GSOM (that’s Great State of Michigan) prohibits restaurant BYO. [Full Story]

For a brand-new Michigan winery that’s only put out one wine – under someone else’s license, no less – Old Shore Vineyards is getting a lot of buzz.

Vinology owner Jon Jonna made first contact during the crush of WineFest’s Wine Crawl.

“You need to taste this Pinot Gris,” he said, pouring liquid into my glass from the bottle he was clutching.

He was right. Despite sub-optimal tasting conditions, the wine impressed.

A couple of weeks passed. Wyncroft Winery owner Jim Lester blew through town for last month’s Chronicle rosé tasting. “Did you hear about Old Shore?” he asked. “And did you know that Dannielle is from Ann Arbor?”

No, I didn’t.

Then a Tweet fluttered by from Andrew Gorsuch, The Produce Station’s wine loving general manager. His follow-up email raved that the 2008 Pinot Noir (a test run, not available to buy) flaunted “an amazing balance of fruit and tannins … Although it was not for retail sales, it gave me a preview of what is to come …”

OK, time to find out what all the excitement’s about. [Full Story]

Don’t point the finger of blame at Hieftje, Lesko or even RichRod for this one. In-the-know locals assign responsibility where it clearly belongs.

It’s all White Zinfandel’s fault.

Last week, San Francisco Chronicle wine columnist Jon Bonné penned a sentence I wish I’d written to describe a peculiar phenomenon: “The more people drink rosé, the more mediocre rosé appears.”

During the 1980s, the national craze for mediocre-by-design White Zin so came to define rosé that no “serious” wine drinker wanted to be seen sipping something pink from a glass.

It’s taken the market for high-quality rosé nearly a full generation to recover from the hangover. [Full Story]

Visualize the Ann Arbor Art Center’s WineFest as the Châteauneuf-du-Pape of fundraisers.

The annual wine-and-food extravaganza, on tap May 6 through 8, bears a surprising resemblance to the multi-grape assemblage of the flagship wine from France’s southern Rhone, blending supporters of the century-old arts institution with a panoply of local glitterati out for some innocent merriment, plus a dollop of area wine cognoscenti keen to sample and acquire some hard-to-find bottles.

So it’s a good fit that Honorary Chair Laurence Féraud, the first French winemaker to chair WineFest, comes from first-tier Châteauneuf winery, Domaine du Pegau.

And just as some Châteauneuf producers (but not Pegau) have adapted their wines to changing customer preferences for early-drinking, more fruit-driven styles, so the 28th annual WineFest sports a different look from years past.

“We’ve thrown everything up in the air and had it come down in a new format,” says Art Center president Marsha Chamberlin. “It’s going to be this bright, colorful upbeat format in a very stylish location. We’re trying to make this an event that people can enjoy on lots of different levels.” [Full Story]

It’s all over except for the lawsuits.

A court in southern France has convicted a dozen wine producers and merchants in what Agence France-Presse called “one of the biggest scams ever to rattle the world of wine.”

Their crime? Duping U.S. wine behemoth E&J Gallo by substituting cheaper grapes for Pinot Noir in 1.5 million cases of wine they sold to Gallo for its moderate-priced “Red Bicyclette” label, in the process pocketing nearly $10 million in illicit profits.

Did Gallo ever tumble to the scam? Au contraire.

The French and British press, which require scant encouragement to paint Americans as loutish arrivistes on matters of the grape, pointed out with barely-restrained glee that no one at Gallo detected the counterfeit juice, either by tasting or testing. And no whistle-blowing American wine critic ever raised the cry, “This can’t be Pinot Noir.”

One defense lawyer even had the gall to plead for acquittal of his client by dryly noting to the court, “Not a single American consumer complained,” while The Times (U.K.) went so far as to tweak Washington Post wine critic Dave McIntyre’s lavish praise of wines from the region.

But it was a French police fraud squad, in the role of a real-life Inspector Clouseau, that brought the scheme to light. [Full Story]

Man does not live by wine alone.

Indeed, prudence dictates frequent hydration breaks when consuming a significant quantity of any alcoholic beverage.

And George McAtee – “I’m like a water sommelier” – hopes you’ll pour your next chaser from one of the clear Bordeaux bottles he hand-fills with artesian spring water, sourced 150 feet under McAtee Organic Farms, in western Washtenaw County, near Grass Lake.

Supplier of Michigan’s only water sourced and bottled on a registered organic farm, McAtee is critical of both municipal water systems and large, commercial water producers, which he terms “commodity bottling.”

Though his farm’s faucets flow with the same water he bottles, he adamantly tells a visitor, “Don’t call my water tap water!” [Full Story]

“Wines change over time, just as we do,” Master Sommelier Claudia Tyagi tells the packed room. “So tasting wine is like taking a snapshot in time.”

It’s 8:30 a.m. on Groundhog Day. But instead of awaiting Punxsutawney Phil’s prognostication, more than 70 of us have fishtailed through the snow to MSU’s Extension Center near Benton Harbor for a master class in wine evaluation.

Now we’re face-to-face with banks of elegant glassware at a most atypical hour. Nearly all of southwest Michigan’s winery owners and winemakers sit at the long tables, joined a gaggle of grape growers, wine retailers and restaurateurs. Two wine geeks from Mattawan celebrate their 30th anniversary with a day off to taste wine. Along with one sleep-deprived, road-weary wine writer.

Joining Tyagi at the head table are Ann Arborite Chris Cook, Superintendent of the Michigan Wine Competition, and ex-pat sommelier Rick Ruebel, lately decamped from Detroit for the warmer clime of Charleston, South Carolina.

Over the next eight hours, we’ll glean tips on how to taste and evaluate wines. So peer over our shoulders as we prepare to take 75 snapshots of the Lake Michigan Shore wine region. [Full Story]

As a benighted former president was wont to say, “Let me make one thing perfectly clear.”

My track record for New Year’s resolutions plumbs the depths of RichRod’s Michigan win percentage. Were things otherwise, the first days of 2010 would find me significantly lighter, fitter and wealthier.

But – in another context – Dr. Johnson sagely observed the triumph of hope over experience. So herewith follow 10 resolutions for current and wannabe wine lovers to consider in the New Year. One size doesn’t fit all, so pick and choose accordingly. [Full Story]

Champagne price wars? Sacre bleu! What blasphemy!

But recessions produce unexpected consequences. The New York Times – while observing that “bargains are a crass notion for the industry, which carefully cultivates its image of luxury and glamour” – nonetheless reported recently that U.S. retailers are starting to discount high-end Champagne labels.

Price decay has already spread downmarket in Britain, where consumers are reaping the benefits from a glut of unsold bottles in Champagne’s massive underground caves. A full-throttle price war rages at the lower end of the market, and brand-name Champagne under $20 is the new normal.

Are we likely to see such dramatic price cuts locally? No bets – but in an early bellwether, Costco recently dropped the price on its Kirkland Champagne by $4, to $22. That nabbed it a spot in the Vinous Posse’s holiday roundup of under-$25 bubblies. [Full Story]

Eat your heart out, John U. Bacon. While the football Wolverines plummet weakly toward the depths of the Big Ten, a very different Michigan eleven just beat up big time on its arch-rivals from Ohio.

This squad doesn’t strut its talents in the Big House or cavernous Crisler. Its slightly smaller – but decidedly more refined – field of combat lies a couple of miles north on Main Street, around a crystal-bedecked tasting table at Vinology Wine Bar.

Earlier this week, the second annual Ohio vs. Michigan Wine Clash turned into a rout, as eleven of Michigan’s finest wines drubbed a like number of Buckeyes during back-to-back judgings in both Ann Arbor and Columbus. [Full Story]

Ann Arborite Bill MacDonald makes some of the best Michigan wines you’ve never tasted.

There’s a good reason his “MacDonald Vineyard” label never appears on retail shelves or restaurant wine lists. As an amateur winemaker, he can’t peddle his wares commercially.

But you might envy those fortunates on his holiday gift list. For three straight years, from 2006 through 2008, the Michigan State Fair’s wine judges awarded him the large blue ribbon that denotes the state’s top amateur wine.

The number of years he entered? Three, 2006 through 2008.

Retiring undefeated this year, he stepped up several weight classes to enter the Indy International Wine Competition, which draws hotshot amateurs from around the country. His 2008 Pinot Gris – made from grapes grown in the small Old Mission Peninsula vineyard he and his wife bought in 2003 – took home a Double Gold medal.

Unfortunately, while MacDonald’s vinous talents were impressing judges, his day job was teetering. Last year, after 26 years as a real estate appraiser, he found himself downsized as collateral damage from a bank merger.

Never missing a beat, he quickly leveraged those blue ribbons into a first wine industry job, as winemaker for Spartan Cellars, the non-commercial winery where grapes from MSU’s experimental vineyards go to ferment.

We sat down at Vinology over a glass of Riesling to talk about growing grapes and making wine, and began with a quick spin in the Wayback Machine. [Full Story]

Feel like celebrating a special occasion with dinner out and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Champagne?

If you decide to clink your flutes at Gratzi, get ready to pay $105 for the privilege. But walk around the corner to West End Grill and you can raise a toast with the identical bubbly – for just $70.

Maybe you prefer a rich California red, like Duckhorn’s 2006 Napa Valley Merlot. At Mediterrano, a bottle will add $77 to your dinner tab. But you’ll save a sawbuck if you pair it with Pacific Rim’s Asian cuisine, where it’s only $55.

These oddities popped up from a dig into Ann Arbor restaurants – specifically, which ones offer customers the best value for their wine dollar. After riffing through a stack of wine lists, here’s the bottom line: some places in town soak you for 50% higher markups than others. [Full Story]

Here’s a one-question pop quiz. The sticker on the bottle says the wine won a gold medal at a major competition. But one quick sip convinces you it’s the foulest plonk to cross your palate in weeks.

Your first reaction is:
     
A. “Who made this wine? I could make better wine than that!”
B. “Who bought this wine? I could pick out better wine than that!”
C. “Who gave this wine a gold medal? I could hand out awards better than that!”

Did you pick “C”? You may have a future as a wine judge. Read on … [Full Story]

It’s a summer weekend. The household to-do list is out of the way, or else you’ve set it to “vibrate only” for another week.

So what now? That’s easy – it’s time for a winery road trip.

Luckily for us, four wineries have taken up residence within an hour’s drive south and west of Ann Arbor; a fifth opens its tasting room later this summer. You can plot a circle route to visit all of them in a single day, with time left over for lunch in Jackson or Tecumseh, or a picnic under Cherry Creek Winery’s new pergola. Alternatively, target one or two wineries for an easy afternoon jaunt. [Full Story]

A couple of months back, this column took former Ann Arbor City Council member Steve Kunselman to task for his hesitance to seek advice on moderately priced red wines to try.

It’s even possible that the word “chicken” came into play.

Chalk up a victory. Steve advises me that he’s retrieved his inner wine curiosity, and now makes his presence felt at more than one local store, regularly requesting red recommendations.

I hope his resolve extends to white wine, too. With warmer days here, many wine drinkers dial back their red consumption and begin eyeing some chilled whites to sip on the deck or accompany lighter summertime meals.

The operative word in the previous paragraph: chilled. As in “not cold.” Or, as Cellarnotes succinctly put it, “In general, we tend to drink our white wines too cold and our red wines too warm.” [Full Story]

Did you know that Monroe was once Michigan’s grape-growing capital – but nobody’s ever figured out if they made wine there?

Or that Chinese coolies who arrived to build the U.S. railroads ended up stomping huge vats of grapes for California wineries during the 1870s?

Neither did I.

I gleaned these tidbits from Dan Longone, curator of “500 Years of American Grapes and Wine,” on exhibit through May 29 at the University of Michigan’s Clements Library, on South University just east of UM president Mary Sue Coleman’s house.

If you visit, expect a cornucopia of grape and wine ephemera, from early British books instructing New World settlers on grape cultivation to a wine list from Detroit’s London Chop House, circa 1969.

A sign called my attention to the 1827 American origins of the word cocktail: “If Europe brought wine to the New World, we brought the cocktail to the Old.”

Bordeaux versus a Martini? Not much contest there.

Those Monroe grapes? The French originally settled the area and named the Riviere Raisin – which Anglicizes as Grape River.

Longone will give a public talk on the exhibit at 3 p.m., May 10, at the library. If our two-hour conversation offered any kind of preview, this born raconteur will offer tales aplenty about grapevines and their pleasure-giving progeny. [Full Story]

Our dinner group was chowing down at the home of former City Council member Steve Kunselman, who wandered over as I discreetly nibbled on a chicken leg.

“This afternoon I was in Village Corner and saw they had a great wine selection,” Steve said. “I wanted to try something new, but it seems like whenever I look for a bottle around ten bucks, I always end up buying brands I already know – Glen Ellen, or sometimes Meridian, because I don’t know which others are good.”

I’m convinced that refrain is hard-wired into the Y-chromosome. Males are constitutionally incapable of advice-seeking for snippets of “guy knowledge” we don’t innately possess. The same guy who drove around lost in pre-GPS days instead of asking for directions feels Y-shamed to walk into a wine store and own up to an inability to intuit which bottle among the hundreds on display he should purchase.

Even flying solo, Steve probably didn’t risk beverage purgatory. In today’s hyper-competitive wine marketplace, thousands of labels from around the world scramble for scarce shelf pace. Truly vile bottles rarely make the cut at credible wine stores. [Full Story]

Two charter members of the Vinous Posse dropped by the other day, carrying a treasure from their cellar.

It wasn’t a bottle of wine. They were carefully coddling a copy of the Holiday Wine Catalog from Ann Arbor’s Village Corner – circa 1977.

A quick flip through its pages elicited a classic “AHA!” moment: the eye-opening realization that my 401(k) might be riding significantly higher in the water if its early-on stock acquisitions consisted of Château Lafite and Château Latour, instead of GM and Citigroup.

Of course, that assumes my forbearance from indulging in too many celebratory pours out of the profits.

Like many long-term collectors of less-than-opulent means, I frequently joke that I can’t afford to drink the older wines in my cellar, let alone replace them at today’s prices. The price run-up among first-tier wines over the last 20 years has been little short of breathtaking.

But it wasn’t until I saw Village Corner’s price tag on a 1967 Château Mouton Rothschild – $21.95 – and compared it to the $600 tab on the soon-to-be-released 2006 vintage that it struck me how many years I may have been making wrong-headed investments. [Full Story]

Maybe you’d like to unwind with some friends after work over a glass of wine and bowlful of mussels. Perhaps you want to grab a quick bite before – or after – the evening show at The Ark. Or you may simply need to escape an onrushing case of midwinter cabin fever.

Whatever the reason, a good wine bar can scratch the itch. Compared with a brewpub or bar, people expect wine bars to offer a quieter ambience and more sophisticated level of food, along with a selection of interesting wines available by the glass.

But the four downtown Ann Arbor wine bars we visited quickly demonstrated that this generic definition of “wine bar” is infinitely bendable and expandable. Local wine bars range from a complete wine-centric focus to a simple rechristening of a restaurant’s lounge area.

So I decided to head out to the wine bars, and take them on their own terms. What does each one set out to do, and how well does it succeed? [Full Story]

OK, I’ll ‘fess up. I’m becoming a locabibe.

What’s that? Let’s start with “locavore,” which Oxford University Press unilaterally proclaimed as 2007′s word of the year:

The locavore movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.

And locabibe? That would be a locavore on a liquid diet. Locabibes are the folks at the next table in the restaurant who ask for filtered tap water instead of Evian, thereby skipping a heavy plastic bottle schlepped halfway around the globe to deliver essentially the same product that flows for free from the kitchen faucet.

Or, it’s possible that they’re merely cheap. [Full Story]