Joel Goldberg

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.

Why ban something most other larger states allow? The short answer: because we can, thanks to the U.S. Constitution’s 21st Amendment, AKA 1933’s repeal of Prohibition. Its relevant section:

2. The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.

(“Intoxicating liquors” is boilerplate legalese for beverages of all types and strengths. To me, that’s both unduly pejorative and not entirely descriptive – especially when applied to lite beer.)

The wording represents ‘30s-style political compromise. To induce three-fourths of the state legislatures to ratify Prohibition’s repeal – including some whose constituents remained dubious about legalizing a popular relaxant that might provide governments with much-needed tax revenue in a period of massive deficits – each state could craft its own rules to control the substance’s sale, use and taxation.

Seventy-seven years later, the resulting patchwork of state and local beverage laws – including those that control BYO – defies rational explanation.

In both California and New York, restaurants licensed to serve alcohol can let customers bring their own beverages; unlicensed places can’t. But New York carves an exception for “businesses with fewer than 20 seats, which are permitted to offer BYO even without a license,” according to GoBYO, a highly-recommended, easy-to-use resource with a massive database of BYO-friendly restaurants, their policies, and the laws that govern them.

Texas tacks in the opposite direction; it bans BYO anyplace that’s licensed to serve all kinds of alcoholic beverages. Unlicensed restaurants, or those licensed for wine and beer only, are free to allow BYO.

Pennsylvania and Illinois pass the buck. Each municipality in those states can decide whether or not to allow BYO, and how to regulate it, if at all; default mode is wide open. One finds a free-for-all BYO city, like Chicago, next door to DuPage County, which recently had the temerity to ban BYO – but only at strip clubs (don’t ask).

Michigan law, while consistent statewide, is especially confusing. No words in the Liquor Control Code simply say, “Customers can’t bring their own alcoholic beverages into a restaurant.” Instead, several different sections touch obliquely on BYO.

This paragraph, from Section 436.1901, covers places that already serve alcohol:

(5) A retail licensee shall not, on his or her licensed premises, sell, offer for sale, accept, furnish, possess, or allow the consumption of alcoholic liquor that has not been purchased by the retail licensee from the commission or from a licensee of the commission authorized to sell that alcoholic liquor to a retail licensee.

A restaurant (or bar) breaks the law if it lets customers consume any beverage it didn’t acquire through a state-sanctioned distributor. There’s a lot on the line for a place caught in violation; the Michigan Liquor Control Commission (MLCC), which polices its licensees, can impose fines and suspend or even yank a liquor license for repeat offenses.

But one significant loophole exists; it’s called “hotel.” Section 436.2021 exempts licensed “resort area” hotels from those pesky consume/possess prohibitions:

(4) This act and rules promulgated under this act do not prevent a class A or B hotel designed to attract and accommodate tourists and visitors in a resort area from allowing its invitees or guests to possess or consume, or both, on or about its premises, alcoholic liquor purchased by the invitee or guest from an off-premises retailer, and does not prevent a guest or invitee from entering and exiting the licensed premises with alcoholic liquor purchased from an off-premises retailer.

Nowhere does the Liquor Control Code define “resort area,” leaving it subject to individual interpretation. The hotel industry clearly had a good Lansing lobbyist when the law was passed.

Surprisingly, none of the locally-owned hotels that I contacted knew about this provision.

Steve Kasle, proprietor of Mercy’s at the Bell Tower, replied with a quick “it’s illegal” when asked about BYO. When informed that his hotel-owned liquor license might provide the opportunity to allow BYO, Kasle said he would check into it, and “might consider it” in the future, on a case-by-case basis.

Around the corner, at the Campus Inn, executive chef/food and beverage director Dan Tesin confirmed that he quietly accommodates the occasional BYO request, without charging a corkage fee – even though he was unaware of the legalities.

“It’s never been an issue; our restaurant is basically for hotel guests who are in town at the University of Michigan or on business, and they don’t typically bring wine,” Tesin said.

There’s no mention of BYO on the Victors Restaurant menu, and Tesin estimates that less than 1% of his customers ask about it.

At Weber’s Inn, probably Ann Arbor’s busiest hotel restaurant and recipient of a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence, restaurant manager Rob Massau makes no bones about the BYO policy: “We try to discourage it.”

“We do not allow BYO on wines that we carry,” said Massau. “Our wine prices are extremely reasonable.”

Weber’s lets other wines into the restaurant for a $10 corkage, though that isn’t publicized, Massau said. “Absolutely no alcohol” can be brought in for banquets or other private events.

But further afield, one savvy restaurant guy takes full advantage of the law to boost his hotel’s food business.

The Townsend Hotel’s Rugby Grille, another Wine Spectator award winner in the heart of downtown Birmingham’s “resort area,” has displayed a hefty $25 corkage fee on the bottom of its dinner menu for the past year and a half.

Keith Schofield, its smooth-spoken, wine-loving general manager, developed a strategy to turn BYO into a profitable, relationship-building enterprise. He explains the policy as an accommodation for his upscale clientele.

“Many of them have pretty amazing cellars,” said Schofield. “It started out as, ‘I’ve got this special bottle; can I bring it in to have with dinner?’ I started getting more and more requests, and they were things that we didn’t have on the list, so we decided it would be the right thing to allow it.”

Economics also played a role. “It’s a recognition of where the economy was,” said Schofield. “I’d rather have you come in and have dinner in my restaurant, and have a cocktail, and I’ll open your bottle of wine for a corkage charge. Enjoy yourself!”

The savvy Schofield did his legal research before adopting the policy. “You don’t want to mess with the MLCC. The liquor license is much too valuable.”

BYO Welcome: The Rugby Grille in Birmingham's Townsend Hotel will open and pour your bottle – for a price. (Links to larger image)

That’s how he ran into the hotel BYO provision.

“The breadth of the hotel license allows us to do it here, whereas a freestanding restaurant may not have it,” he explained. “The guy across the street – he can’t offer it.”

“I talked with one of the MLCC legal people. I said, ‘This is where I’m from, this is what I’m proposing to do. Can I legally do it?’ And he said, ‘Yes, you can, according to my understanding of the law.’ And I said, ‘Thank you very much.’”

Schofield says that customers who bring their own wine tend to be collectors who don’t take undue advantage of the policy. “They’re typically bringing in very nice bottles of wine, and they’ll typically also buy a bottle off the list.”

But even where it’s legal and publicly advertised, BYO represents a blip compared to the restaurant’s total sales. Schofield confirms that “around 5%” of his customers currently bring in their own wines.

He remains publicly “neutral” on whether the policy has been profitable for the restaurant, but he does say that “business is good” and his BYO customers “typically dine well and spend more.”

Plus there’s a personal perk: customers often pour a taste for their server or Schofield. “I’ve tasted some amazing wines as a result,” he said.

When it comes to unlicensed restaurants, the wording is clear. It’s spelled out in Section 436.1913:

(2) A person shall not consume alcoholic liquor in a commercial establishment selling food if the commercial establishment is not licensed under this act. A person owning, operating, or leasing a commercial establishment selling food which is not licensed under this act shall not allow the consumption of alcoholic liquor on its premises.

But this isn’t just about restaurants. No establishment – of any type – may accept “consideration” for allowing BYO:

(1) A person shall not do either of the following:

(a) Maintain, operate, or lease, or otherwise furnish to any person, any premises or place that is not licensed under this act within which the other person may engage in the drinking of alcoholic liquor for consideration.

(b) Obtain by way of lease or rental agreement, and furnish or provide to any other person, any premises or place that is not licensed under this act within which any other person may engage in the drinking of alcoholic liquor for consideration.

For the final touch: the word “consideration” doesn’t mean what you think it does. It’s not just the corkage fee you might be charged by an unlicensed restaurant. It’s any money that you pay to anyone for anything:

(5) As used in this section, “consideration” includes any fee, cover charge, ticket purchase, the storage of alcoholic liquor, the sale of food, ice, mixers, or other liquids used with alcoholic liquor drinks, or the purchasing of any service or item, or combination of service and item; or includes the furnishing of glassware or other containers for use in the consumption of alcoholic liquor in conjunction with the sale of food.

Note the words “any service or item.” Those are the words that prevent Michigan salons or spas from legally pouring you a glass of wine while you luxuriate in their care.

Once more, you have a loophole: guests at events in unlicensed venues, like a rental hall or someone’s barn, don’t pay “consideration” to attend – unless you count the wedding gift you brought. So nothing prevents the hosts from providing alcohol for their guests to consume, as long as the venue’s owners don’t mind.

In 2007, the MLCC confirmed this loophole in writing, saying they “received numerous inquiries regarding the legality of non-licensed businesses allowing consumers to consume alcoholic beverages in their establishments.” A rare MLCC public statement that reaffirmed the illegality of BYO for “consideration” also stated:

This law would not prohibit a wedding reception, retirement party, open house, or other similar event that is held in a non-licensed facility whereby the attendees were guests and were not charged any fee whatsoever.

Enjoy the wedding!

And if, by some chance, you know an establishment – licensed or unlicensed – that doesn’t always observe the letter of the law when it comes to BYO, please keep it to yourself, or among a few trustworthy friends. Do NOT post it on Yelp.

Your fellow wine lovers thank you.

Michigan Wine Competition: The Stars Shone Black

On Tuesday, Aug. 3, I joined fellow Ann Arborites Christopher Cook, David Creighton and Dick Scheer – plus 21 other assorted winemakers, Master Sommeliers, merchants and journalists – to judge the 33rd annual Michigan Wine Competition, at East Lansing’s Kellogg Center. In a sign of Michigan wines’ growing national reputation, a record 10 out-of-staters judged this year, including winemakers from New York and California.

Assistant winemaker Joe Ohanesian, left, and Winemaker Lee Lutes brandish the Black Star Farms trophy trio.

But we could have just stayed home and dictated a laudatory press release about Black Star Farms.

The Leelanau Peninsula winery and satellite facility on Old Mission Peninsula won three of eight “Best of Class” trophies, and seven gold and double gold medals.

While the number of gold medals remained steady, the total medal count dropped from 267 (67% of entries) last year to 220 (55%) this year.

In part, chalk that up to Michigan’s less-than-stellar 2008 and under-ripe 2009 vintages, whose wines are garnering fewer hosannas than the 2007’s that preceded them. But equal credit goes to Competition Superintendent Chris Cook, who exhorted judges to mint fewer medals, especially in the lowest bronze tier, in order to boost the competition’s reputation.

Here’s the rundown of trophy winners by category:

• SPARKLING: 2008 Black Star Farms Sparkling Wine
• DRY WHITE: 2009 Black Star Farms Arcturos Pinot Gris
• SEMI-DRY WHITE: 2009 Black Star Farms Arcturos Riesling
• ROSÉ: 2009 45 North Blanc de Pinot Noir (2nd consecutive vintage winner)
• DRY RED: 2007 Bowers Harbor “Erica Vineyard” Cabernet Franc
• SEMI-DRY RED: NV Lawton Ridge “AZO” (Chancellor/Chambourcin)
• DESSERT: 2008 “42″ Ice Wine, Fenn Valley (2nd year winner for the same wine)
• FRUIT: Uncle John’s Franc-N-Cherry (Cabernet Franc and Cherry blend)
• JUDGES MERIT AWARD: 2009 Chateau Fontaine Woodland White (Auxerrois)

You can read, download or print the full list of medal winners here.

About the author: Joel Goldberg, an Ann Arbor area resident, edits the MichWine website and tweets @MichWine. His Arbor Vinous column for The Chronicle is published on the first Saturday of the month.

Joel Goldberg

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.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to rosé. Several years previously, a tidal wave of insipid German Liebfraümilch washed up on our shores to commit long-term mayhem on the demand for Riesling. More recently, the Merlot boom reached a precipitous end the instant its inherent mediocrity was declaimed by no less an authority than Myles in the movie “Sideways.”

Rosé’s recent comeback was long overdue, in large part because it’s the perfect warm weather wine. Fans of classic rosé prize its fresh fruit aromas and flavors, balanced by crisp acidity and, on occasion, a hint of sweetness.

A flight of rosé consists of many colors.

It also pairs well with summer foods from the grill, at a season when big, high-alcohol reds seem less appealing. Rosé is heartier and more flavorful than white wine; just as chilling but not as filling as beer.

Rosé lovers associate these characteristics with regions that don’t traditionally over-ripen grapes or manufacture wines with palate-numbing alcohol levels – primarily France and Spain. It’s not coincidence that no Ann Arbor retailer suggested a single California or Australia rosé to include in this month’s tasting.

As a fruit-driven wine, the normal rule for rosé-buying is, “The younger and fresher, the better.” You’re nearly always best-off with the most recent vintage – currently, 2009 – and should regard with extreme suspicion bottles more than two years old.

Multiple roads lead to rosé. But they begin with a single fact of grape physiology: except for a few oddball varieties (like the hybrid Alicante Bouschet) the juice inside almost every classic red grape is nearly colorless.

Go ahead and stomp on some Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir or Syrah. They’ll bleed clear.

We get red wine by crunching red grapes and leaving the fermenting juice to make nice with all those red skins in a tank or barrel. Color leaches into the juice as they soak together; so do the tannins and other flavor components. Leave ‘em together long enough and the embryonic wine turns red.

Now think of classic rosé – also known as direct-to-press – as red wine lite. Give the juice and skins a chance to canoodle for a few hours to a few days, then press the skins before too much color and tannins are extracted. Voilà! You’ve got rosé – or at least you will once the fermentation stops.

Winemakers who use this method can choose the optimal moment to pick grapes dedicated to rosé, typically before they ripen as much as the same varietals destined for red wine. These less-ripe grapes yield wines with lower alcohol, more acidity and lighter, fresher fruit flavors than fully ripe grapes from the same varietals – an optimal recipe for quality rosé.

The second approach involves what the French call saignée (say: Sayn Yay!) – but we’ll stick to its less elegant Yank translation, “bleed-off.” Instead of pressing the skins after a short soak, the winemaker opens a valve to let some of the juice bleed off the skins. Both batches continue their fermenting ways, one with and one without additional skin contact.

This double-barrel strategy lets winemakers turn a single batch of  grapes into two wines. The bleed-off goes into the bottle as rosé, while the red wine remains in the tank and gets a color and tannin pick-me-up from its super-sized skin-to-juice ratio.

Wyncroft Winery's Jim Lester takes a sniff; Vinous Posse member Clay Johnson takes notes.

Think of it as blood-doping for red wine.

The downside is that bleed-off requires a built-in compromise. Winemakers who bleed off in order to improve less-than-optimally ripe grapes will get some additional concentration in the red wine, but they’ll still face an unripe flavor profile. Or if they use grapes that have reached full ripeness, the bleed-off juice carries less acidity and a full wallop of alcohol – not exactly a desirable recipe for the best quality rosé.

But if purists find bleed-off rosé slightly unsavory, they go livid over the third (and cheapest) route to make pink wine: blending white and red wines together to create ersatz rosé. Essentially, it’s white wine with color added from a tiny percentage of red.

Last year, this internal spat turned into a highly public political free-for-all, as old-school European rosé producers – led by France – fought and successfully defeated a European Union proposal to let EU winemakers produce rosé this less expensive way, in order to compete more successfully in export markets.

Boycotts were threatened. Individual EU countries vowed not to allow such wines to cross their borders. On more than one occasion, the word “sacrilege” came into play.

Of course, while the debate ran its course, our French friends conveniently overlooked an exception already in place for one of their own famous exports: Rosé Champagne, which marries Chardonnay and  Pinot Noir in just the manner they found so objectionable.

Oops.

What’s to Drink?

The Vinous Posse corralled 18 rosés, half from France and the rest a hodge-podge of origins: Spain, Italy, South Africa, and Chile. With one exception, all came from the 2009 vintage. Many are available at multiple places around town; the stores and prices listed indicate the source of our samples.

Jim Lester, owner/winemaker of southwest Michigan’s tiny, high-end Wyncroft Winery, sat in with the Posse for this month’s tasting. “My mouth is just ringing with rosé,” he was heard to mutter at the end of the evening.

With some trepidation over the less-than-ripe 2009 vintage, we included two Michigan rosés you won’t find on local shelves. Old Mission Peninsula’s 2 Lads, whose website calls last year “the most challenging growing season in Michigan history,” makes a top-notch but idiosyncratic Cabernet Franc Rosé that’s only available from the winery.

Tabor Hill’s well-priced Cab Franc Rosé frequently finds its way to my dinner table alongside summer fare. We cadged a bottle of the just-released 2009 from the winery; it will show up on local shelves once stocks of the currently-available 2008 are exhausted.

Though the price tag squeezed our tasting budget until it screamed “Ouch!” we included a bottle many wine lovers consider the peak of the rosé-maker’s craft, Domaine Tempier from France’s Bandol region, just off the Mediterranean coast. At $37 – nearly double the next-highest priced wine – I had to wonder: would the Vinous Posse deem it worth the money?

We tasted all wines blind and rated them on a scale from (White Zin be better) to (Forget summer – we’d drink this anytime). Only small differences separate each category, wine styles vary widely, and tasters often disagree (sometimes vocally) over the bottles. So check the notes along with the ratings to pinpoint styles, grapes and regions that match your palate.

Top rosé: Chateau de Lancyre, the "after" picture.

Recommendations

Bragging rights go to the Syrah and Grenache-based CHATEAU DE LANCYRE from Pic Saint-Loup in southern France, which flaunts the balance of vibrant fresh fruit and acidity that defines top-drawer rosé. It’s available at several local stores, priced in the upper teens, and just nosed out the spendier and more elegant DOMAINE TEMPIER, another group favorite, for top score.

If you, like most people, treat rosé as a summer sipper rather than wine for contemplation, three good values stand out in the $6 to $12 range. South Africa’s MULDERBOSCH CABERNET SAUVIGNON earned consistently high scores among all the tasters, who enjoyed its juicy, watermelon character.

Michigan-grown TABOR HILL CABERNET FRANC makes a good choice for those who prefer their rosé on the light, crisp side, with a hint of sweetness. And the least expensive wine tasted, the mass-produced and widely available LA VIEILLE FERME, also from southern France, shows less fruit than many of its peers, but merits consideration at $6 or $7 as a pleasant, refreshing quaff.

Ratings

2009 CHATEAU DE LANCYRE, Pic Saint-Loup, France (Arbor Farms, $19). 50% Syrah, 40% Grenache, 10% Cinsault. Touches all the right notes for a big-boned southern French rosé – rich floral nose, ripe, bright fruit flavors and reasonable acidity. “A ballerina of a wine in pink tulle!” enthused one imagery-obsessed member of the Vinous Posse. OK, fine.

2009 DOMAINE TEMPIER, Bandol, France (Morgan & York, $37). Unmistakably unique. Pale onion-skin color, elegant, pitch-perfect balance, with some tar and Oriental spice, thanks to the Mourvedre grape. Consensus reaction to sipping this alongside some homemade black olive tapenade on a slice of baguette: “Oh my God!” Definitely worth trying if you’re up for the splurge.

2009 MULDERBOSCH, Cabernet Sauvignon Rosé, Coastal Region, South Africa (Everyday Wines, $12). TOP VALUE! Toast the World Cup with this gem from the Cape. Deep salmon color, described by one taster as “Costa Rica sunset.” Slightly herbal, spicy and dense, watermelon flavors. A rich, juicy rosé that should hold its own alongside well-seasoned fare from the grill.

2009 CHATEAU MORGUES DU GRES, Nimes, France (Village Corner, $14). Salmon colored and full bodied, with interesting lemony aromas and flavors. Beautifully balanced but fairly simple.

2009 TABOR HILL Cabernet Franc Rosé, Lake Michigan Shore, Michigan (Currently available from the winery; in stores soon at about $11). TOP VALUE! Paler than previous versions, with a slight sulfur nose that blows off, from its recent bottling. Light, elegant, berry fruit and great acidity, red pear finish. Several tasters thought this was French; “A daily wine that should be on everyone’s table,” said one.

2009 VILLA DES ANGES, Languedoc, France (Arbor Farms, $11.50). Predominantly from Cinsault grapes; viscous mouthfeel and more concentration than many of the others. Bright berries and red fruits. Several tasters agreed with the suggestion that it would match well with grilled lamb.

2009 CHATEAU DU DONJON, Minervois, France (Village Corner, $15). 40% Syrah, 40% Cinsault, 20% Grenache. Medium pink. Hints of melon, strawberry and cotton candy; one taster likened it to “watermelon Jolly Rancher.” Slightly hot finish.

2009 DOMAINE DU POUJOL, Languedoc, France (Morgan & York, $15). Vibrant light pink color. Everyone branded this as a lightly fragrant, simple summer quaffer with a hint of lean and salty mineralty on the finish that led one taster to suggest it would go well with oysters. “Boat wine,” said another.

2009 DOMAINE DU SALVARD, Cheverny, Loire Valley, France (Morgan & York, $17; Sold Out). From northern France’s Loire Valley, an unusual blend of Gamay and Pinot Noir. Pale pink, strawberry and cherry notes, with its northern origins evident from a higher-than-average level of bright acidity.

2009 LA VIEILLE FERME, Ventoux, France (Trader Joe’s, $7.50; Plum Market, $6). TOP VALUE! Another Grenache/Cinsault blend from southern France. Watermelon color and a red currant nose. Nicely balanced with a rich, round mouthfeel, but not a lot of fruit.

2008 MAGHINARDO Rosato, Emilia, Italy (Everyday Wines, $15). The lone Italian in the tasting, we made an exception for this vintage 2008, the most recent rosé from this late-releasing winery. An unusual, somewhat rustic wine that had tasters reaching for “sweet and sour” descriptions – boiled sweets, red apples and grapefruit, berries and acidity. Sweet wins out at the finish.

2009 MUGA, Rioja, Spain (Plum Market, $12). Lightly fruity but austere, with some tannins in evidence. “Like pink Champagne without the bubbles,” said one taster. Another suggested it would be best served alongside a Zingerman’s ham sandwich.

2009 ROSÉ DES KARANTES, Languedoc, France (Whole Foods on Eisenhower, $14). Mourvedre/Syrah/Grenache. Darker color and some spice from the Mourvedre, but only moderate amounts of simple fruit and a finish that drops off quickly. An attractive label, widely available around town.

2009 2 LADS, Rosé of Cabernet Franc, Old Mission Peninsula, Michigan (Available from the winery; $17). Deepest color, easily a “light red,” and most controversial wine on the table, with divergent scores and comments. Cherry, significant sweetness, nice acidity and surprising tannins for rosé. Shows its pedigree from a less-than-ripe vintage with herbal and green pepper notes. “This is a stylistic statement,” noted one taster, approvingly. “The average consumer will find it puzzling,” said another.

2009 VEGA SINDOA Garnacha Rosé, Navarra, Spain (Whole Foods on Eisenhower, $9). Very consistent scores and comments on this Spanish version of Grenache. Fluorescent pink color, watermelon flavors and a round, nicely balanced palate fall off to an astringent, slightly hot finish.

2009 COMMANDERIE DE LA BARGEMONE, Aix en Provence, France (Whole Foods on Eisenhower, $16). A wine of much disagreement; “Overcropped saignée” was one taster’s assessment of this leaner effort, but not everyone agreed, as some folks found reasonable amounts of red fruit, with one reference to a “knuckle-dragging rosé.”

2009 CALCU, Colchagua Valley, Chile (Plum Market; $12). 50% Malbec, 40% Syrah, 10% Carmenere. “If you like strange, this is your wine,” said one taster – and that sums up the consensus. Descriptions not usually associated with quality wine flew around the table: Rhubarb, grapefruit rind, tar, burnt rubber, barnyard funk – though one taster did suggest it might work well with spicy sausages.

2009 LE PAVILLON DU CHATEAU BEAUCHENE, Côtes du Rhone, France (Plum Market, $8). Well-priced for a Rhone rosé, but not very much to like inside. Dull, slightly oxidized fruit, described by one taster as “bruised apple,” leads into a bitter finish. Possibly a defective bottle.

About the author: Joel Goldberg, an Ann Arbor area resident, is editor of the MichWine website. His Arbor Vinous column for The Chronicle is published on the first Saturday of the month.

Joel Goldberg

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.”

The makeover starts with new digs for Saturday evening’s main event: the former Pfizer facility on Plymouth Road, lately demedicalized into the University of Michigan North Campus Research Complex. Kalamazoo-based BIGThink arts collaborative will create a series of supersize installations designed to generate a sense of community throughout the space.

Hardcore bidders can hunker down for the live auction in a new, Vegas-style “bidders’ pit.” This way, explains Chamberlin, “people who aren’t into the auction don’t have to be forced to be quiet and sit and listen. They can enjoy the wine and food and each other, while the bidders can keep focused.”

Focus-worthy auction lots include two sets of Bordeaux out of the cellar of über-collector Ron Weiser, from the outstanding 1961 and 2000 vintages, a ten-bottle assortment of 1998 and 1999 Châteauneuf-du-Pape, donated by Honorary Community Chairs Rich and Karen Brown, and a ten-year collection of the ever-popular Marilyn Merlot.

Also on offer: a half-dozen travel packages, home-prepared meals by local chefs Craig Common and Scott MacInnis, and dinner at The Lark – with a bottle of 1989 Château Margaux thrown in.

On Thursday, May 6, Féraud will pour five of her wines for a Winemaker Dinner at Mediterrano. This will be the only chance during the weekend to taste two vintages of Pegau’s upscale Châteauneuf, Cuvée Laurence.

A sold-out “Wine Crawl” joins the weekend mix for the first time on Friday evening, May 7. Participants will start at the Art Center on Liberty Street to meet the Honorary Chair, then wind their way through a series of downtown drinkeries – Babs Underground Lounge, Café Felix, Gratzi, Mélange and The Chop House – sampling a small food and wine pairing at each.

Ticket pricing also receives a facelift, with the introduction of a second tier for Saturday’s event. The new General Admission ducat ($100) buys entry to the strolling supper, wine sampling and the rare wine bar, along with open seating at the live auction.

Those who spring for the Patron level ($200) receive the traditional WineFest perks, which include a custom wine glass and reserved seats for the live auction. They also get in the door an hour earlier for a reception with Féraud and an early-bird chance to snap up silent auction lots at “Buy It Now” prices.

Chamberlin said that signups were running about 50-50 between the two ticket levels.

Whether or not the new format and prices succeed in boosting interest in WineFest, many observers feel that change is long overdue in the face of a long-term slide in attendance and revenues for what was once the area’s premier charity event.

A decade ago, WineFest’s Saturday event regularly sold out more than 500 tickets and raised upwards of $250,000 for Art Center programs, representing as much as 1/3 of the organization’s annual budget.

This year’s take is projected at a mere $70,000, and the current rate of signups suggests that Saturday’s event may have difficulty reaching its goal of 400 paid attendees.

Chamberlin acknowledges that the Art Center has been forced to “wean itself off” dependence on WineFest for operating funds, and today counts on the event more to fund new projects.

The area’s economic travails account for a large chunk of the decline, especially in the area of corporate support, which Chamberlin says “has dried up.”

But critics also suggest that the event’s organizers failed to adapt to the proliferation of competing charity circuit wine events and a steady decline in the once-generous level of auction donations from left coast wineries and area collectors.

“No one was proposing anything new for years,” one WineFest insider put it succinctly.

“Part of the issue for me is whether there is an audience for WineFest any longer, in the form we currently know it,” Chamberlin said. “One of the things we’ve tried to do this year is create a broader appeal for it.”

Some of that appeal arrives in the person of the charismatic Laurence Féraud. I caught up with her while she multi-tasked at home in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, preparing a Thai green curry dinner for her two children as we chatted on the phone.

Féraud – petite, dark and intense, with a ready laugh and strong entrepreneurial bent – graduated from oenology school in Paris and returned to Châteauneuf as the region’s first female winemaker in 1986. A year later, she and her father, Paul, extracted their 17 vineyard acres from the Féraud family holdings to make their own wine under a new label: Domaine du Pegau.

She was in a celebratory mood when we spoke, saying she’d just signed “a big check” to purchase three additional acres in Châteauneuf, bringing Pegau’s current holdings to just over 50. Better still, the new vineyard comes planted with excellent vines, in the prime “La Crau” section of the appellation.

Our conversation (she’s bilingual) began with her family’s long-term ties to Ann Arbor, thanks to her father’s friendship with retired UM Professor J.C. Mathes and his wife, Rosemary, who began to spend summers in Provence about 35 years ago.

At almost the same time that Féraud and her father struck out with their own winery, Mathes begat J et R Selections to import southern Rhone wines into Michigan.

It was a match made in Provence.

Joel Goldberg: Tell me about your family’s history with J.C. Mathes.

Laurence Féraud: He’s a very close friend to us, like a member of the family. All of his life, he spent two months minimum in the south of France, and he was very close to the people. Then one day, he decided to import the wine.

[Robert] Parker started to speak about Châteauneuf-du-Pape – that was in 1992 – and everything expanded so fast. J.C. was our importer, and his business grew so fast. Like me, he was so happy about this increasing enthusiasm for Provence.

JG: You had your own property before you created Pegau, but you didn’t bottle wine under your name?

LF: I was studying, and my father worked with his parents and his brothers and sister; it was the family domaine. But when I arrived, I worked for one year with all the family, which was not very convenient for me [laughs]. So I proposed we create our own name.

JG: What does Pegau mean?

LF: It’s a clay wine pitcher. The original was found around the Pope’s palace [in Châteauneuf]. They did some excavations and some antique research; this clay pitcher is from the 14th century, from the Pope’s period.

JG: When you started out, you were the only woman running a domaine in Châteauneuf. Even though you had an education as a winemaker, was it hard for you to have people take you seriously?

LF: Yes, in the beginning it was a bit difficult. Sometimes the men clients wanted to visit only with my father. And my father really insisted; he said, “No, my daughter knows more than I do because she studied enology and she speaks English. He always tried to convince people to visit with me.”

Laurence Féraud, dressed for the harvest: Not her sister. (Photo courtesy of Laurence Féraud)

Also, I worked in the vineyard. At the beginning, the people – they didn’t laugh, but they said, “This is work for men.”

But I knew how to work in a vineyard, and dress like the men in the vineyard. But I also knew how to have a shower and how to be dressed like a woman, with high heels. When I come to an auction in Michigan, I know that I am not in a vineyard. So I am dressed different. I know how I have to be.

The people here, they didn’t understand that we can have a different face. When I am working during the harvest, making wine, picking grapes, because I have a scarf around my head, people would think I was Fatima. [roars with laughter].

Or people would say, “Oh, we met your sister at the wine fair.”

And I’d say, “No, I haven’t got any sister. It was me.” They were so shocked; they couldn’t believe it.

JG: So do you have any advice for women who are trying to make it in the wine business?

LF: My advice is to be strong, because we are better than men. [laughs]

No, our palate is quite developed, because for centuries we stay at home, we do the cooking, we have a sense of taste.

JG: There are many different grapes that can go into Châteauneuf-du-Pape. What blend do you use?

LF: It’s a blend of all the vineyards we have. About 45 acres of the vines are more than 45 years old.

There is already what we call co-planting. So the blend is already in the vineyard. Because 45 years ago, they planted blended. In fact, they still do.

The blend of Pegau is 80% Grenache, 15% Syrah, 4% Mourvedre and 1% mixed types of grapes.

JG: The newer properties you’ve bought in recent years, were those already planted?

LF: They were already planted, and in good condition, and in La Crau, in the best place. I can tell you that I paid more, but the result is the more I pay in the beginning, the less I have to work after. Because when you want good quality, a good vineyard will give you good grapes without too much working.

1990 Domaine du Pegau: Robert Parker started to speak. (Photo by the author)

JG: How many bottles of Châteauneuf do you make?

LF: I produce 80,000 bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the Cuvée Reservée, and 6,000 to 8,000 bottles of Cuvée Laurence.

JG: And Cuvée da Capo? [The estate’s top wine, made in small amounts in better vintages. The 2007 got a pre-release score of 98-100 points from Robert Parker.]

LF: When I do the Da Capo, I’m not doing the Cuvée Laurence. The Cuvée Laurence is easy to do every year; it’s an extra aging of the Cuvée Reservée. When it’s a perfect harvest and a perfect vintage, then I am doing the Cuvée da Capo, not the Cuvée Laurence. So the production is exactly the same.

JG: You also have a second line of wines under your own name.

LF: Starting in 2001 and 2002, I created another company called “Selection Laurence Féraud.” I’m not buying or producing wine, but I do the selection. I go to different cellars, different producers, I taste the different wines and I blend.

I created a Vin du Pays d’Oc [from the Languedoc] called “Pegau Vino,” and I have a Séguret [a less-known Rhone village].

“Plan Pegau” [a non-appellation table wine] existed under Domaine du Pegau, but the quality was not consistent. So I decided to have more consistent quality, and to blend in a big volume in another place. We could not do that at Domaine du Pegau.

I blend 50% of the Plan Pegau from the Domaine, with some other wine – enough to have the quantity for 60,000 bottles in one bottling. We sell that wine for export, with a screw cap.

JG: So you’re becoming a negociant? [merchants who buy wine produced by others and sell them under their own brand]

LF: If I look at my job name, it’s blender [laughs]. In French, we say assembleur, which is nicer.

JG: How many countries does Pegau distribute in today?

LF: Thirty countries, 80 wine importers around the world.

JG: What wines will you be pouring in Ann Arbor for WineFest?

LF: On the 8th, all the people will have a cocktail of Pegau Vino. Then we’ll have the Séguret, then the Plan Pegau, and then the Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Domaine du Pegau red.

JG: Are you serving either the Cuvée Laurence or Cuvée da Capo?

LF: Cuvée da Capo? For over 100 people? No, it’s impossible. [Roars with laughter] But what I’m giving for the auction is Cuvée da Capo in a magnum, three Cuvée Laurence, a weekend at a B&B I have in Châteauneuf, a day with me in the vineyards, and lunch or dinner at my place.

WineFest tickets are available at the website, or by phoning the Ann Arbor Art Center at 734-994-8004, x101.

About the author: Joel Goldberg, an Ann Arbor area resident, edits the MichWine website and tweets @MichWine. His Arbor Vinous column for The Chronicle is published on the first Saturday of the month.

Joel Goldberg

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.

Their audit of wine brokerage firm Ducasse produced a puzzle: records showed that Ducasse bought bulk 2006-vintage “Pinot Noir” from producers in France’s Languedoc region for about 60 cents a bottle at a time when the premium variety’s market price was hovering close to $1.00.

Investigators followed the money – and juice – straight to wholesaler Sieur d’Arques, who purchased the bulk wine from Ducasse and subsequently supplied Gallo with 18 million bottles of Languedoc “Pinot Noir” for Red Bicyclette.

Unfortunately, there was a problem. Pinot Noir isn’t widely grown in the region, and 18 million bottles substantially exceeds the entire annual crop of the producers involved – a fact not lost on French authorities.

Bottle of Red Bicyclette Pinot Noir

Tests revealed that Red Bicyclette Pinot Noir from 2006 and possibly earlier vintages – already fobbed off on Gallo’s unwitting U.S. customers for $7 to $10 a bottle – contained a blend of Merlot and Syrah, varieties worth roughly half the price of Pinot Noir.

By the time police and judges finished untangling things in late February, a dozen producers and dealers were found guilty of dipping their tastevins into the fraud.

But their fines and suspended sentences amounted to barely a slap on the wrist. Ducasse manager Claude Courset, fingered as the scheme’s mastermind, drew a $60,000 fine and a six-month suspended sentence according to La Depeche newspaper. His firm took in nearly $5 million in profits.

Still unclear: Was Gallo the unwitting dupe of its French partners, as it claims, or – as some in the blogosphere have hinted – an all-too-credulous “see no evil” co-conspirator? Even if they lacked the tasting chops to identify the bogus grapes, weren’t they a little too slipshod not to DNA-test a wine they needed to meet consumer demand during the post-Sideways Pinot Noir boom? Shouldn’t they have been aware they were purchasing more “Pinot Noir” than their Languedoc producers had available?

We may eventually find out. Since U.S. law holds wine importers responsible for the veracity of their labels, revenooers from the Treasury’s Tax and Trade Bureau are hot on the case. As far as the TTB is concerned, Gallo’s claim to being hoodwinked by the French may not exculpate their sale of – but failure to detect – 18 million wrongly labeled bottles.

For its part, Gallo told the Washington Post’s McIntyre that it would “work with the appropriate U.S. authorities to determine any next steps required for potentially mislabeled pinot noir in the marketplace.”

(Meanwhile, the Red Bicyclette website continues to remind visitors that its wines are cultivated “with Old World passion and simplicity … like the charming lifestyle of Southern France.”)

Since no American business imbroglio winds down without the grace note of a class action suit, a Los Angeles law firm has gone to court against Gallo and Sieur d’Arques to seek “restitution and damages for the fraudulently sold wine.”

In a press release that cries out for a faux outrage voiceover by Jon Stewart, lawyer Eric Kingsley alleges that both firms “engaged in unfair competition, false advertising, and fraud … for passing off inferior Merlot and Syrah grapes as Pinot Noir.”

Kingsley also notes, “Winemakers will take advantage of an unsophisticated public especially in the $10 a bottle category where these bottles were priced.”

But why didn’t some wine-savvy tasters or critics detect the fraud?

Over at carriage-trade Forbes Magazine, “lifestyle editor” Eric Arnold offers a ready riposte: “No oenophile in his or her right mind would ever buy Red Bicyclette.”

But in an industry often mocked for its tolerance of poseurs, pedants and more than a few out-and-out charlatans – not to mention high-end collectors chasing rarities – Arnold may vest unwarranted confidence in the sophistication of his readership.

Lest they draw solace that only downscale bicyclistes could fall for such shenanigans, let me introduce German rare-wine impresario Hardy Rodenstock who, for two decades, regularly located, poured, and sold dozens of high-end wine rarities from centuries past.

“Rodenstock’s circle of drinking buddies included some of the most seasoned collectors on the planet, and he also lured a number of eminent wine writers to his events, including the Wine Spectator’s James Suckling and the most important critic of all, Robert Parker,” according to an article in Slate.

His stature may have peaked in 1998, when he staged a tasting of 125 vintages of Château d’Yquem (no, that’s not a typo) that attracted a pantheon of international wine glitterati and fawning coverage from the world’s wine media.

But an undercurrent of suspicion always trailed Rodenstock, even among those coddled by his hospitality. In 1994, British wine power couple Serena Sutcliffe and David Peppercorn bit the hand that poured for them by publicly questioning the authenticity of multiple 1920s-era vintages of Château Petrus that Rodenstock served from 6-liter bottles at one of his annual extravaganzas.

Or, as a 2007 New Yorker article questioned, “How could one collector find so much rare wine?”

It now appears that he didn’t have to.

Today Rodenstock stands accused of duping all those friends and other supposedly savvy collectors into buying the rarest of all counterfeits: bottles of 18th century Bordeaux purported to have once belonged to Thomas Jefferson, America’s first great wine collector.

(Benjamin Wallace, whose 2008 book The Billionaire’s Vinegar spun the emergent Rodenstock saga, notes that President Jefferson, “in his first year of office, spent $2,800 of his $25,000 salary on wine.”)

Rodenstock claimed his Jefferson bottles – engraved with the initials “Th.J” – to be a recent discovery, unearthed behind the false wall of a Paris basement. He steadfastly declined to disclose additional information about them, such as who found the bottles, where and when, and how many bottles were in the cache.

A single bottle from Rodenstock’s hole-in-the-wall stash remains the most expensive bottle ever hammered at auction, sold by Christie’s for $155,000 in 1985. (The winning bidder: Christopher Forbes, scion of the magazine family. A certain symmetry emerges.)

Florida oil billionaire Bill Koch offers a different perspective. “Rodenstock is charming and debonair. He is also a con artist,” reads Koch’s court complaint.

Koch, the billionaire with a 40,000 bottle wine cellar behind Wallace’s title, filed suit in 2006 against Rodenstock for selling him, through third-party dealers, four fraudulent Jefferson bottles: one each of 1784 and 1787 Branne Mouton (now known as Château Mouton-Rothschild), and 1784 and 1787 Lafitte (now “Lafite-Rothschild”). His cost: $500,000 in 1988.

Although Rodenstock’s attorneys have managed to delay trial on the case for several years – in large part by disputing the jurisdiction of U.S. courts – the wine world now widely views the Jefferson wines and, by extension, most of Rodenstock’s other elderly finds, as fakes that he produced or, at the least doctored.

In no small part, that’s because experts hired by Koch determined that the glass in his Thomas Jefferson bottles may date from the 18th century, but parties unknown powered up 20th century electric tools to engrave the lettering on them.

(Highly recommended: a 20-minute YouTube video in which Master of Wine David Molyneux-Berry, former head of Sotheby’s wine division, describes how he identified the latter-day-etched Jefferson bottles and connected Rodenstock to numerous suspected counterfeits in other high-end cellars.)

The German magazine Stern – which called Rodenstock the “Indiana Jones of the bottles” – said it has located a printer who copied antique labels on old paper for Rodenstock to use. Analysis of the glue used to attach some of Rodenstock’s labels showed it contains chemicals that didn’t exist when the wines were allegedly produced.

Meanwhile, the litigious Mr. Koch has filed multiple suits against an assortment of collectors, auction houses and dealers from whom he purchased bottles that now appear counterfeit – most of which can be traced back to Rodenstock. His determination to root out counterfeit wines, and the enemies he’s accrued in the process, earned him a December cover story in the Wine Spectator

Then, just this week, Koch dropped his biggest bombshell to date. He filed suit against Christie’s International, claiming that the London-based auction house “has engaged in a pattern and practice of selling counterfeit wines for many years.”

According to the Wine Spectator, Koch says he has located the two German engravers who carved the initials into Rodenstock’s Jefferson bottles, and has ex-Christie’s employees willing to testify that the firm and its former wine director, Michael Broadbent, were lax about investigating counterfeits.

Billionaire Koch says he’s spent $7 million on his investigations, with little hope of recovering the majority, even if he wins his lawsuits.

None of Koch’s cases has yet come to trial, and there’s no prediction of what outcome the TTB investigation or class action suit will bring for Gallo. So we have no way to know who’s the biggest fool at last.

Meanwhile, have a good April.

About the author: Joel Goldberg, an Ann Arbor area resident, edits the MichWine website and tweets @MichWine. His Arbor Vinous column for The Chronicle is published on the first Saturday of the month.

Joel Goldberg

“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.

What to Taste?

The first step in tasting wine is deciding what wines you’re going to taste.

A formal place-setting for a wine tasting. The blue "spit bucket" facilitates disposal of wine remaining in the glasses after each flight, among other uses. Bread clears the palate. (Photos by the writer.)

No hard rules apply. At home with friends or neighbors, a tasting theme might be as simple as “Chardonnay pot luck” or “Bring a red wine you bought this week for $10.” Those with deep cellars (or fortuitous friendships) may plunge into such esoterica as “Vintage 1991 Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa’s Howell Mountain” or “Ten years of Chateau Beaucastel.”

With adequate notice, I’m available to attend either of the latter.

But today, we’re going to run the Lake Michigan Shore Marathon: eleven wine flights that range from three to twelve samples apiece, each featuring a single grape variety or blend.

Set the Table

The only essentials for casual wine tasting are a single glass and some wine. All else is optional.

Optional, but desirable.

Fortunately our hosts today have kitted out the tables with a more complete tasting regalia:

Chris Cook of Ann Arbor demonstrates proper use of the spit bucket.

• Large-bowl tasting glasses that taper slightly toward the top let you first swirl the wine to aerate and release its aromas, then daintily insert your shnoz to shniff the results.
• With multiple glasses at each place, tasters can flip back and forth among wine samples, comparing their qualities and letting them rest for a few minutes to see how they change with exposure to air.
• Everyone eschews the value of placemats with numbered circles for each glass – until one of your fellow tasters wails the inevitable, “I think I may have mixed up the wines.”
• Neutral-flavored bread or crackers clear the palate between tastes. Consider them absorbent sponges for the mouth.
• Water tumblers (with bottles or pitchers for refills) serve multiple purposes: to rinse glasses, refresh your mouth and keep hydrated.
• A small, opaque cup lets you discreetly expel the remains of each taste. Optional if you’re only sampling a few wines. But as the numbers swell toward 75, a mere half-ounce swallow of each would equal a bottle and a half by the end of the day. “We don’t want our judgment to be clouded by noon,” Tyagi dryly admonishes us.
• Large buckets or pitchers distributed around the tables play the same role, somewhat less elegantly; they also facilitate disposal of wine remaining in the glasses after each flight. In polite company, these are known as “pour buckets” or “dump buckets.” My crowd calls them “spit buckets.”

Taste the Wine

Volunteers dispense small pours – two ounces or less – from the bottles into each glass.

Claudia Tyagi examines a wine's color against a white background.

Bottle labels lie cloaked behind wrappers, so we don’t know which wines we’re tasting. Adding to the fun: we’re told that at least one bottle in each flight is a “ringer” – a wine made elsewhere in the world from the same grape variety.

Tyagi explains that this blind tasting procedure “evens the playing field, so you don’t go into the wine with any mental preconceptions, except what you pull in from your eyes, nose and mouth. Basically, we’re playing wine sleuth.”

“So start with the visuals. Use your eyes; everything about the wine tells you something.”

Visuals include clarity, brightness, and color, which are best evaluated by looking at the wine against a white background, like a napkin or the back of your tasting sheet. White wines can range from nearly colorless to tawny, reds from opaque purple to brown.

Tyagi reminds us to swirl the wine in the glass and “look for tears, sheets or legs; these demonstrate the alcohol or sugar in the wine.”

Swirling also releases the wine’s esters and aromas. That lets us start to smell – the second part of the tasting process.

The nose is our primary sensory organ, says Tyagi; it can detect far more nuances than our sense of taste alone.

We’ll first sniff each wine for overt olfactory flaws. Perhaps there’s the wet cardboard smell of a tainted cork, or whiffs of sulfur, acetone, vinegar and funkiness, indicating contaminants or a fermentation gone awry. Do these nasties blow off after a few minutes in the glass, or have they permanently damaged the wine?

Then it’s on to more subtle considerations. Is the aroma delicate or powerful? Does it show secondary bouquet from years in the bottle, or the fresh primary fruit aromas of a recent vintage? What specific aromas do we identify – fruits, flowers, spices, herbs, earthiness? Can we detect the unmistakable toast, vanilla or butterscotch of oak?

Before you taste, it's always good form to get a wine's nose.

We take a sip and swirl it around. How sweet is it – bone dry, medium or very sweet? Are the fruit flavors the same in the mouth as we picked up on the nose? Do the non-fruit flavors harmonize with the fruit, or are they at odds? If it’s a red wine, do the tannins make us feel like we’re rubbing our tongue with a piece of sandpaper?

How long does the wine’s flavor last? Tyagi reminds us that the finish is “incredibly important. The longer the wine talks to me and tells me wonderful things, that is a measure of its greatness.”

Evaluate the Wine

Finally, we’re ready for the last item on the table: the tasting sheet.

Hundred-point scoring systems dominate the consumer wine world, their simplicity to use and commercialize winning out over a lack of specificity and precision.

But today’s tasting sheet doesn’t ask anyone for a score. It focuses instead on the characteristics of each wine: sweetness, acidity, finish, complexity, flaws. That’s more useful information for the growers and winemakers in the room, since it reflects how the tasters assessed the choices they made in the vineyard and winery.

A tasting sheet helps tasters to organize and record their impressions.

One criterion on the sheet – “Varietal Accuracy” – is tricky. Unlike dog shows, no single “breed standard” exists for grape varieties. Most can display a range of aromas, flavors and other characteristics, depending on the climate and soil where they grew and how the winemaker turned them into wine.

Michigan-grown Riesling or Cabernet Sauvignon may have bright, fresh fruit flavors, a medium body, and high acidity. The same grapes from Australia or California are likely to be softer and fuller-bodied, with lower acid and riper flavors.

What makes a wine “varietally accurate”? Probably the best answer: if its dominant aromas and flavors seem to come from the requisite grapes – as opposed to additions, manipulations, or flaws – and those flavors integrate in a balanced, harmonious manner.

Postscript: So What’s to Drink?

The panel selected a top wine for each grape variety, plus a top Meritage/Bordeaux blend.

Pinot Gris: 2008 St. Julian “St J” – 800.732.6002

Chardonnay: 2008 Hickory Creek “Zero Oak” – 269.473.2089 269.422.1100

Riesling: 2007 Hickory Creek – 269.422.1100

Pinot Noir : 2008 Karma Vista “Stone Temple Pinot” – 269.468.9463

Syrah: 2007 Domaine Berrien – 269.473.9463

Cabernet Franc: 2005 Tabor Hill – 800.283.3363

Merlot: 2007 Contessa – 269.468.5534

Cabernet Sauvignon: 2007 Domaine Berrien – 269.473.9463

Meritage: 2008 Karma Vista – 269.468.9463

Those that might find their way into the Goldberg household include the Hickory Creek Chardonnay, Domaine Berrien Syrah, Tabor Hill Cab Franc, and Karma Vista Meritage.

Because of limited production and uncertain distribution, most of these wines aren’t available from Ann Arbor area retailers, but they can be purchased and delivered directly from the wineries or their websites.

About the author: Joel Goldberg, an Ann Arbor area resident, edits the MichWine website and tweets @MichWine. His Arbor Vinous column for The Chronicle is published on the first Saturday of the month.

Joel Goldberg

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.

Joel Goldberg: Tell me about the first wine you ever made.

Bill MacDonald: I was 16 or 17, and had just learned about fermentation in science class. So I made a wine out of Welch’s grape juice and a little packet of Red Star Yeast. When the bubbling stopped, I just capped it. I think I used an old vodka bottle.

JG: How’d it turn out?

BM: Awful. It was sweet and mildly alcoholic.

JG: It’s a long way from that to becoming a vineyard owner and winemaker…

Bill MacDonald checks on the ripeness of grapes for the 2009 vintage.

BM: My sister and her boyfriend have a place in the Russian River [Sonoma County, California] where they grow grapes. The first time I crushed grapes with them, I said, “I want to do this.”

In 2003, my son was going to Northwestern Michigan College, in Traverse City. When we went to see him, we visited Peninsula Cellars, on Old Mission. Right next door to their old schoolhouse was a seven-acre parcel of land for sale.

We bought the property. It already had about 1,000 grapevines on one acre – 50% Pinot Gris, 50% Lemberger – that were planted in 2000.

Now, I knew nothing about grapes. Fortunately, we had a vineyard manager and I knew they’d be properly cared for. So I said, “OK, I’ve got a vineyard. I’d better learn how to make wine.”

JG: How did you start?

BM: The first year, 2003, the weather was a disaster; there was no crop. But we went to the Finger Lakes and bought 10 gallons of Seyval Blanc juice.

The next year, I went to a wine supply place in Dundee and bought some five-gallon pails of juice, some red and some Pinot Gris.

JG: You didn’t make wine from your own grapes?

BM: No, we sold them to Peninsula Cellars. I didn’t have the equipment to use fresh fruit. The next year I bought the crusher/destemmer, press and other equipment.

JG: Where do you make your wine?

BM: Right here in Ann Arbor, in my garage.

JG: So you’re a real garagiste?

BM: Exactly!

JG: Do you age any wine in barrels?

BM: I used a 15-gallon barrel last year for a Lemberger/Cabernet Franc blend.

JG: You’ve also made wine from Pinot Meunier. [A red grape grown in Champagne, closely related to Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris.]

BM: In 2007, our vineyard manager, Jim Thompson, said, “If you want free grapes, a vineyard up the road has some Pinot Meunier – help yourself, pick all you want.”

I said, “Free grapes? Sure!” It was mid-November when we picked it – myself, my wife and my daughter. We drove up, picked, and came back to Ann Arbor in one day. The grapes were around 25 or 26 brix. [A measurement of sugar content; at 25 or 26, they were extremely ripe.]

At first I didn’t like the wine, so I put the carboys in a corner of the basement and forgot about it. I tried it again in February and said, “Wow! This is like another wine! So I bottled it.”

JG: Every winemaker has a horror story, when something went terribly wrong. What’s yours?

BM: My first year, when I bought those 10 gallons of Seyval Blanc. I had two five-gallon glass carboys. I’d heard somewhere, “Oh, you should raise them a little bit off the floor.”

So I put them on paint cans – and one of the cans slipped. Crash! Five gallons of wine, 50% of my total, all over the basement floor. I think my swear words are still echoing around the house.

After that, I put the carboys on the ground and didn’t worry about extra aeration.

JG: What wines are you currently making?

BM: Of course Pinot Gris and Lemberger, and a Lemberger rosé. I always make rosé – love rosés! This year, I’m hoping to find some fairly ripe Pinot Noir, maybe do a Pinot Noir rosé.

JG: How much wine do you make?

BM: About 300 bottles a year, total.

JG: Did you ever have any formal winemaking lessons?

BM: No. I subscribed to Winemaker magazine, read some books. And talking to the northern winemakers has really helped. Recently, Lee Lutes [winemaker at Black Star Farms] has been really helpful.

JG: Tell me about all those medals.

BM: My first competition was sponsored by Winemaker magazine. I sent in my 2005 Pinot Gris and got a gold medal! So I was encouraged.

Then I heard about the State Fair, so I sent in my Pinot Gris and Lemberger. They were the only two wines I made, and I got two blue ribbons. They select Best of Show from the blue ribbons, and I got that for the Pinot Gris.

After three years, I got all blue ribbons and Best of Show each year. So I thought I’d better retire.

Label from a bottle of MacDonald 2008 Pinot Gris. The wine took home a Double Gold medal at this year's Indy International Wine Competition.

JG: Was it Pinot Gris that won each year?

BM: Pinot Gris the first year, then Chardonnay. Last year was Cab Franc, some grapes I bought from Leelanau County.

JG: After this year, the Michigan State Fair won’t be there any more.

BM: That’s pretty sad; it’s the oldest state fair in the country. I keep hoping we’ll get bailed out, but who knows?

JG: Which wine won your double gold at Indy this year?

BM: It was my 2008 Pinot Gris. This year I gave it a little residual sugar, but it had acid that offset it. Kind of like a Riesling, where you’ve got a little bit of sugar, but high acidity, too. That gives it a good balance.

JG: Earlier this year, we ran into each other at a seminar for people thinking about starting a winery. Where are you on that?

BM: That was a great seminar for me. Everybody thinks, “Oh, I’d like to be a winemaker and have my own place.” But for me, it made me think, “I don’t want to own a winery.”

JG: Really?

BM: At this stage of the game, I’ve been working for 30 years. I’m afraid that if I owned one, it wouldn’t be fun any more.

JG: If you’re not going to start your own winery, do you see yourself in a second career as a winemaker somewhere?

BM: That’s really my goal, to make wine up north.

JG: Do you plan to plant more of your vineyard?

BM: I’d like to. We have some area up above, we can increase our Pinot Gris if we want.

We have some low areas, too, where we’d like to build a house. So we’re figuring, “If the house is here, where can we put additional vines?” We can maybe plant another acre if we work it right.

JG: The rest is too low to plant?

BM: Right. The cold air just goes right through there, through part of the Lemberger and a little of the Pinot Gris. Just in that first row, you can see where the cold air flows.

JG: At what point do you take over running your own vineyard?

BM: When we move up there. We love Ann Arbor and we love Traverse City, which has all the restaurants, the film festival, and so on. I don’t know that we could leave either one of them.

We’re talking about having some kind of structure, maybe a pole house or a barn with a finished second floor. Right now, I’ll just go up there and throw a tent up. But the last couple of times I did that, I’d be asleep and they decided to come through with the tractors and do spraying at two or three in the morning. That’s the best time for them, because the air is still.

JG: A lot of the things you enjoy up there are also things that people like about Ann Arbor.

BM: Absolutely. They’re the two best cities in the state, as far as I’m concerned.

JG: Do you still sell your grapes to Peninsula Cellars?

BM: No, this year it’s Bryan Ulbrich at Left Foot Charley. I can learn a lot working with him; he’s a great winemaker.

JG: This has been an extremely cool summer up there. What are you doing differently in the vineyard this year to help ripen your grapes?

BM: A lot of it is canopy management. We’ve really pulled off a lot of leaves to open up the fruit zone to the sun. I was up there a few weekends back and dropped a lot of the green fruit. I know it’s not going to ripen, so we can let the energy go into the rest of it.

Bryan was thinking about making a Cab Franc/Lemberger rosé, so maybe if we don’t get the ripeness for red wine he can use it for the rosé.

JG: Do you think you can actually get good fruit this year?

BM: I’m always an optimist, but this year will be a challenge.

I’m basically a minimalist in my winemaking. Ideally, you get the grapes right from the vineyard and they’re perfect. But there are always things you can do in the cellar – add sugar, reduce acid a little bit. I don’t like to do anything, but I’m not afraid to.

JG: Old Mission wineries have done well in some recent wine competitions, like the Michigan Cabernet Franc Challenge. Is there something special about the climate or soil conditions there?

BM: I think it’s a combination of location and maybe the winemakers are doing things a little differently. Riesling does really well there, while I haven’t had any really great southwestern Rieslings.

JG: How did you land your job making wine for MSU?

BM: I talked to [MSU viticulture professor] Paolo Sabatini and he said, “Yes, I need a winemaker for the variety trials.” I’ve also been working in the vineyards, mostly southwest but a little bit in the northwest.

JG: Even though you’re not an academically trained winemaker?

BM: Yes, but a lot of it is experimental wine. It’s not necessarily the wines I would make.

For example, we grew Riesling and Cabernet Franc at three different crop levels, so they could test the difference. You make all the wines the same way. There’s no adjustment.

JG: Because they want a totally controlled experiment.

BM: Exactly. And that’s a problem for me. Will they let me make the best wine I can? No, because that’s the protocol.

JG: Is the vineyard work part of the job description, or just something you’re interested in?

BM: A good winemaker has to know what’s going on in the vineyard. It sounds clichéd, but everything really does start there.

JG: Have you been a wine drinker your whole life?

BM: I really have. Even in my twenties, I had an old book where I collected labels and made comments about them. And the same wines I was drinking then I’m drinking now.

JG: What wines do you drink at home?

BM: I used to drink mostly whites; now I’m shifting toward reds. And rosés during the summer.

I like Sauvignon Blanc, such as those from New Zealand; it has the same crisp acidity as Michigan wine. I like to experiment a lot. Any new varietal I see, I’ll say, “Ooh, let’s try it!”

JG: If an aspiring amateur winemaker wanted to get started, what would you recommend?

BM: You can start off making “kit” wines. They’re like a recipe, but you can get the basic chemistry and learn about racking. I’ve had some kit wines that are pretty darn good.

But I wanted to jump right into juice. There are a few good basic home winemaking books you can read through. I read everything I can lay my hands on, over and over again. There’s a lot of chemistry to learn.

Bryan Ulbrich says that a lot of what I do is intuition, sort of “I think I should do it this way.” So far, that’s worked out.

JG: Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good?

BM: In my case, I think luck has a lot to do with it.

______________________________

At a time when many local charities and nonprofits are feeling the pain of Michigan’s economy, it’s difficult to single out any for special attention.

But a wine writer would be remiss not to mention that area chapters of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation build their fall fundraising around a series of “Wine Opener” events in several Michigan cities.

The Foundation’s Ann Arbor’s Wine Opener happens on Friday evening, Oct. 9, at the Lake Forest Golf Club. Details and ticket information are available from the Foundation website.

About the author: Joel Goldberg, an Ann Arbor area resident, edits the MichWine website and tweets @MichWine. His Arbor Vinous column for The Chronicle is published on the first Saturday of the month.

Joel Goldberg

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.

Restaurants commonly sell wines for two to three times their retail price. If you’re watching your budget, such steep markups can encourage you to eat at home more frequently, or deter you from ordering wine when you do eat out.

Local wine historian Dan Longone put it bluntly. “My god, they’re charging $30 and it’s a $10 retail bottle… We generally won’t order it.”

Many consumers apparently agree. While wine sales remain strong through the recession, overall numbers hide some underlying trends: retail sales have surged while those in restaurants dipped. That fits the pattern that 60% of restaurants nationwide currently report decreased sales.

California wine writer Dan Berger, who judged at last month’s Michigan Wine Competition, suggested this spring that high wine markups, which can double the cost of a simple restaurant meal, are a prime culprit behind lagging restaurant sales.

“That has left many restaurants with a lot of empty chairs on midweek nights; some are light on weekend nights, too,” Berger wrote.

Berger also points out that restaurants don’t pay retail for their wine, but instead buy at the same wholesale prices that stores do – about 1/3 under retail. That translates into marked-up prices that can reach an astonishing four times what the restaurants paid for the wines.

But signs are emerging that this may be changing, at least elsewhere. Just a few days ago, Galveston, Texas, wine columnist Laura Elder wrote that restaurants in her area were “uncorking aggressively lower prices on their most expensive wines to get consumers pouring through the doors.”

Standard industry apologia points to the costs that restaurants incur for glasses, storage, and the service to open and pour the wine. But those costs can’t justify this level of pricing, which exceed the markups on the far more labor-intensive food portions of a meal.

Nor can the majority of restaurants (save a few, like The Earle) explain high markups by pointing at their long-term investments to buy and cellar wines. Today, most restaurants offer primarily current releases that they buy as needed from area wholesalers.

So how does Ann Arbor’s restaurant pricing stack up? To find out, during August, I wheedled or downloaded wine lists from nine local restaurants: Café Zola, Grange, Gratzi, Logan, Mediterrano, Pacific Rim, Paesano’s, Real Seafood, and West End Grill.

While some of the restaurants clearly offer more and better choices than others, we’ll save that discussion for another column. All but the pickiest wine drinkers should be able to order an enjoyable bottle at any of them.

But that’s not the point of the exercise. Where will you find the best values and where will you overpay?

To find out, I price-checked a half-dozen bottles from each of the lists against their current retail prices on the shelves at Plum Market, divvying up the selections as much as feasible among white, red and sparkling; foreign and domestic.

Then came the number-crunching – calculating the markups on the retail price for each wine and each restaurant.

(I also calculated each restaurant’s markups based on their estimated wholesale cost, assuming a retail markup at Plum of 30%. Since this is an estimate, I avoided using it for much analysis.)

Variations on individual wine markups were striking. They varied from as little as 6% (that Duckhorn Merlot) or as much as 400% (Cristalino Rosé Cava at Café Zola) above retail prices.

Differences between restaurants were equally striking, if less extreme, with markups ranging from 84% over retail at the lowest (Pacific Rim) to 184% above retail at the highest (Real Seafood).

At the lower markup restaurants, you frequently find wines for less than double their retail price, others at just slightly more. At the other extreme, markups on individual wines of three times retail are common.

Overall, the restaurants broke down cleanly into three distinct groups.

WALLET-FRIENDLY (Restaurant prices less than double retail price):

• Pacific Rim (184%)
• West End Grill (187%)

IN-BETWEEN (Restaurant prices 200% to 220% of retail price):

• Mediterrano (214%)
• Grange (218%)
• Logan (218%)

HIGH MARKUP (Restaurant prices over 250% of retail price):

• Paesano’s (259%)
• Café Zola (261%)
• Gratzi (273%)
• Real Seafood Company (284%)

(If you’re curious, here’s a list of the wines used in the survey and the spreadsheet with the numbers.)

In practical terms, how does this translate when you eat out?

On average, a bottle that retails for $20 will cost you $37 at Pacific Rim and $57 at Real Seafood. Your mileage will vary, of course, depending on the individual bottle you select.

Or flip that around. Let’s say you want to spend $35 for a bottle of wine with dinner. At Gratzi, you’ll typically be buying a bottle that retails around $13. West End Grill is more likely to offer you something you’d see in a store for $19.

Of course, with a few exceptions like Veuve Clicquot, listed at five of the nine restaurants, you won’t find many of the same wines at multiple places. So if you have a strong hankering to pair Italian food with a good selection of less-common Italian wines, you’ll probably still want to head to Gratzi or Paesano’s. Enjoy your wine and don’t worry about the extra dollars.

In no particular order, here’s a few more observations gleaned from the wine lists and price data:

• It’s a pleasure to report that Sex is widely available throughout Ann Arbor, at prices ranging from $27 to $32. That would be Leelanau-based Larry Mawby’s slightly sweet bubbly, produced under his M. Lawrence label.
• Many restaurants traditionally took outsize markups on Champagne and other sparkling wines, on the theory that people sought them out to celebrate special occasions and would pay a little extra for the privilege. Some Ann Arbor restaurants still subscribe to this theory, so caveat emptor if you hanker for bubbly.
• Some restaurants specialize in certain countries or types of wine to complement their cuisine or cater to the restaurateur’s proclivities:
  -
  • Gratzi’s and Paesano’s lists are unsurprisingly Italianate.
  • West End Grill tilts heavily toward the U.S.
  • Pacific Rim offers numerous smaller and offbeat producers that might appeal to wine geeks.
  • Logan offers the broadest list, with over 200 choices.
  • Despite its locavore-oriented concept, only eight wines on Grange’s list come from Michigan. Half of them are Mawby bubblies.
  • Real Seafood primarily stocks bottles under $50.
  • On the higher end, Café Zola’s Reserve list offers a sizable selection between $100 and $250.
• Some restaurants set a minimum price for anything that appears on the list, regardless of how little they pay for them, in order to cover overhead and profit. If you’re price-sensitive, it’s a good idea to know this before you walk in the door.
• Café Zola plays this strategy ruthlessly, with a $34 minimum. They charge $35 for a bottle of sparkling Cristalino Rosé from Spain that Plum sells for $7. At an astounding 500% of retail, that’s the single most egregious markup in the survey.
• That leads to a related maxim: The lowest-priced wines on a list often represent the poorest values. Many savvy buyers figure that better values live just a few dollars above the opening price points.
• Second related maxim: Just because you’re not paying a lot of money doesn’t mean a wine represents good value. Real Seafood offers one of the lower-priced lists in the sample, yet topped the chart for markups.
• Best deal in the survey: That 2006 Duckhorn Merlot for $55 at Pacific Rim, just $3 over Plum Market’s retail. “They must have gotten a special deal on it,” observed Plum’s wine manager, Rod Johnson.
• Is it coincidence? The survey’s two highest-markup restaurants, Gratzi and Real Seafood, are owned by the same company, Main Street Ventures.
• West End Grill has some of the better prices across the board, but it’s of concern that many whites on their current list come from previous vintages. Even with good storage, the overwhelming majority of white wines are best on release or shortly after, and don’t benefit from aging.

Now the main thing: Wine is meant to be enjoyed, not nitpicked to death. So once you’re done with the price comparisons, don’t forget to treat yourself to a good glass of wine!

About the author: Joel Goldberg, an Ann Arbor area resident, edits the MichWine website and tweets @MichWine. His Arbor Vinous column for The Chronicle is published on the first Saturday of the month.

Joel Goldberg

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 …

Tuesday, August 4, marks the 32^nd Annual Michigan Wine Competition. Twenty-four judges will descend on East Lansing’s Kellogg Center to pass judgment on a record 390 Michigan wines from 42 wineries – everything from bone-dry sparklers to odd concoctions sporting names like “Cherry Port.”

(The Gold Medal Reception, open to the public and highly recommended, happens two days later; more information is on the Wine Council website.)

To most wine drinkers, the judging process carries the same level of opacity as the crafting of sausage or legislation. To wit: wines go in one end; medals come out the other.

So let’s Chronicle what goes on behind the screen. NOTE: This column doesn’t “report” a single wine competition, as a news story might, but takes some literary license to combine actual occurrences from multiple occasions and recreate approximate times, in order to convey the range and flavor of the judging experience. Photos are from the 2007 and 2008 Michigan Wine Competitions.

The paper "donuts" on the stems keep judges from confusing the wines.

7:00 a.m. Morning arrives too early in the Kellogg Center hotel room, its green-and-white-accented décor alien to the Ann Arbor psyche. I instantly regret my over-enthusiastic participation in last night’s festivities – i.e. the judges’ welcoming dinner.

8:05 a.m. Meander downstairs to the warren of seminar rooms occupied by the Michigan Wine Competition. Quickly pass by the staging area, where a half-dozen volunteers are organizing glasses and opening bottles for the morning tasting flights, sequestered from judges’ eyes.

First order of business: locate my name tag, judge’s packet, bagels and coffee. Not necessarily in that order.

Murmur hellos to other judges, few of whom move quickly or speak loudly this morning. Most are familiar, since competitions tend to recycle their judges, barring unavailability or significant faux pas committed the previous year.

A surprising number live or work around Ann Arbor, starting with Competition Superintendent Chris Cook, wine writer for Hour Detroit and frequent judge at competitions nationwide. His job today: think fast on his feet, lubricate problems, keep things moving.

Other locals on the panel: David Creighton, late wine writer for the late Ann Arbor News; Kristin Jonna of Vinology; Village Corner proprietor Dick Scheer; Ron Sober, veteran judge and new wine blogger for AnnArbor.com; and Chaad Thomas, former Paesano’s wine guy, now co-owner of Ann Arbor-based US Imports.

A handful of heavy-hitter out-of-state judges – like Californians Scott Harvey (winemaker) and Dan Berger (writer) – cycle semi-regularly through Michigan’s judging ranks. This helps to build nationwide street cred for the state’s wines.

Master Sommelier Madeline Triffon judges some wine.

8:23 a.m. Grab one of four chairs at Table 6, where I’ve been assigned to judge. Open the packet and look through our tasting agenda.

In general, competitions taste bubblies first, followed by whites, reds, fruit and dessert wines. Each table evaluates different categories; while we’re busy with Pinot Grigio, the next table over may be slogging through Chardonnay.

Good news – our first flight is dry sparkling wines! If you must taste wine at 8:30 in the morning, bubbly is the best way to ease in gently.

8:25 a.m. The other Table 6 judges wander over; handshakes all around. Our table head is Master Sommelier Madeline Triffon, who runs wine for the Detroit-area Matt Prentice Restaurant Group. Master Sommeliers are rock stars of the wine world, and Madeline is a headliner: the first woman to receive her M.S. in America and past head of the Court of Master Sommeliers.

Beyond that, our table has a typical mix of judges: one guy works for a wine distributor, a second teaches winemaking at an out-of-state university. I write about wine.

8:33 a.m. Chris Cook welcomes the judges and talks about the competition format.

In the past, some have grumbled about the high percentage of medals handed out; last year, 73% of the wines entered went home with one color of metal or another. For 2009, they’ll eliminate “Honorable Mention” and tighten the criteria for bronze medals, which they hope will rein in the count.

We’re ready to judge.

8:47 a.m. Five flutes of sparkling wine arrive in front of each judge at Table 6. Numbered paper doughnuts circle the stems so we can’t mix them up.

Chris Cook lifting a bottle of wine out of a bucket.

We’ll taste everything blind. Other than the category – “Brut Sparkling” – and the vintage (all but one in this flight are “Non-vintage”) our judging sheets provide no clue about what’s in the glasses set before us.

Quiet descends on the room as 24 judges start to swirl, sniff and sip. An opaque cup resides on the right, to receive our oral deposits after each taste; spitting is mandatory if we hope to survive the day. Most of us take notes that we can match to unmasked wines later in the day.

8:59 a.m. Madeline asks, “Everyone done?” and starts to poll Table 6 for verdicts on the first flight. Each of us is expected to say one of four things: Gold, Silver, Bronze, or No Medal. If everyone concurs, we’re on to the next wine. If just one judge dissents, the majority rules unless the outlier wants to argue a case to the group. Social norms and time pressures make that unusual.

Our judgments on wine #1: Gold, Silver, Silver, Gold. The day’s first deadlock.

Here’s where the table head’s diplomatic skills come into play. Madeline needs to wheedle consensus out of four opinionated tasters, each of whom secretly believes he or she has the best palate at the table, without provoking irritation that could play havoc with our ability to work together the remainder of the day.

We take two minutes to discuss what we like – or don’t – about the bubbly, tossing around wine-geek terms like toast, biscuit, and residual sugar. One Silver switches to Gold, leaving me as the lone dissenter.

I toss in the towel. I won’t object to the table awarding Gold. But I won’t switch to make the vote unanimous, either. That would give the wine a rare Double Gold medal – an honor of which it isn’t worthy.

9:16 a.m. Through with the bubblies! We medal all five wines; in addition to the first Gold, we’ve handed out two Silver and two Bronze. Servers clear the table of flutes.

I frequently vote one rank lower than other judges. For two years, I’ve been among the lobbyists to reduce the medal count. In practice, that means eliminating a high percentage of current Bronze medalists and lowering many Silvers to Bronze.

9:21 a.m. Flight two arrives: Dry Riesling. After a quick conference, our table agrees to tackle the entire group of 13 wines at one go, rather then splitting it into two separate batches.

Thirteen tasting glasses move from rolling carts to the space in front of each of us, piled two rows deep. The table takes on the look of a glass factory gone wrong.

Tasting this many wines simultaneously represents a trade-off. On the positive side, we can sample the full range before awarding medals to any of them.

On the downside, it’s nearly impossible to retain a palate memory of each wine as you move through an assemblage of this size, even with serious note taking. At least I can’t do it; Robert Parker might be able to. So I’m constantly back-tasting samples I’ve already tried to re-check my remembery.

It also doesn’t help that young Riesling changes rapidly as it sits in the glass, even over short periods. So the first wine I sample tastes totally different when I return to it 10 minutes later.

10:17 a.m. We’re done, but what a marathon. The sentiment will fade, but at the moment if I never taste another Riesling, it will be too soon.

First thoughts: the much-hyped 2007 vintage proves to be as strong as anticipated. That unusually warm and ripe year gave birth to 11 of the 13 Rieslings we tasted; three of them got Gold medals, though again no Double Gold. Overall, 11 out of 13 wines medaled. That’s not surprising; Riesling is one of Michigan’s stronger grapes.

Time for the servers to clear the battlefield.

10:25 a.m. Now up: six wines classified as “Proprietary Dry White,” a catchall for winemaker-concocted multi-grape blends. Entries vary wildly; some seem little more than thrown-together small lots and leftovers; others appear seriously assembled to complement each grape’s qualities.

But we don’t fall in love with any of them; the worst elicit notes like “clumsy” and “swamp water.” We eventually medal three of the six: two Silver, one Bronze. I concur with both Silvers, but would have skipped the Bronze.

10:53 a.m. Finally – red wine! More specifically, nine glasses of Cabernet Franc from 2006 and 2007.

Setting up the battlefield.

Vintage variation tells the story here. Unlike 2007’s ripeness, 2006 was a “difficult” year for Michigan reds. (That’s winespeak for “The weather really sucked.”) A cool summer and early fall kept most red grapes from full maturity. The result? Mostly light-colored wines with low fruit concentration, high acidity and lean, unripe flavors.

In theory, competition judges aren’t supposed to compare wines in a flight. Each should earn a medal, or not, based on its own merits relative to a quality scale that resides in the judge’s brain.

Sometimes that’s difficult to put into practice. The 2006 Cab Francs in this flight fare poorly next to their riper, more concentrated 2007 siblings. Among the six 2006 Cab Francs, we award just one Silver and one Bronze.

But 2007 is a different story. This highly-anticipated red vintage has just three samples in our flight, released with little or no oak aging. We quickly award one Gold and two Silvers, with no significant disagreement – and the judges’ conversation centers on forthcoming wines from the vintage.

11:30 a.m. Everyone’s excited; it’s time for the first sweepstakes of the day: Dry White.

“Sweepstakes” determine the Best of Class trophy winners. Since Michigan doesn’t award a Best of Show, the competition’s highest prizes are at stake.

The concept sounds simple, but the logistics are daunting. Every Gold medal winner earns a spot in its class’s sweepstakes. Each judge tastes each wine, and votes for Best in Class. The top vote-getter wins.

But in the backroom, pressure is building. Staff and volunteers must quickly identify all Gold medal winners and print tasting sheets listing them for the judges to use, locate the extra bottles of each reserved for this purpose, pour samples for each judge, and distribute them to the tables.

The Dry White sweepstakes takes a nerve-wracking turn after judges vote a bumper crop of 17 Gold medals, all but three from 2007. That means 408 glasses need to be poured and labeled, and 17 delivered to each of the 24 judges.

One Gold-winning Rosé slips in among the whites, because Michigan doesn’t produce enough Rosé to warrant a separate Best of Class trophy. We can’t vote it the “Best White” trophy, but Chris Cook explains that if it receives enough votes, it will be eligible for the discretionary “Judges’ Merit Award.” It does.

We each taste our 17 wines, and we’re ready to vote. No discussion, no hair-splitting over medals.

Judges with more than one top pick can cast multiple votes, but the list stratifies quickly; over half the wines receive three or fewer votes. The winner: a Riesling originally judged at our table. Later in the day, we’ll find out it’s the 2007 Chateau Fontaine Dry Riesling, from Leelanau Peninsula.

12:11 p.m. Not a bad morning’s work: Table 6 tasted 50 wines, handed out five Gold medals, and joined with the other judges to select a Riesling as the competition’s “Best Dry White.” And all the judges are still speaking with one another.

After booting up the laptop for a quick update to the live-from-the-competition blog on MichWine, it’s off to lunch in the Kellogg Center’s State Room. No one seems very interested in a glass of wine with the meal.

After lunch: Table 6 judges flights of Traminette, semi-dry Pinot Grigio, semi-dry Whites, and fruit wines. A raspberry dessert wine from the final group gets the only Double Gold medal we hand out during the entire competition.

Palates start to fatigue. After 75 wines, I’m unable to identify subtleties that might have jumped out at 10 this morning.

Robert Parker, at his peak, was reputed to be able to taste and evaluate 200 hefty red wines in a day. I am clearly not, nor will ever be, Robert Parker.

Excellent logic exists behind the standard procedure of tasting lighter, drier wines early in the day, and saving in-your-face dessert and fruit wines for last.

We finish sweepstakes judging for the remaining classes. Luckily, none has more than nine Gold medalists to choose among.

Ructions ensue when the judges, led by Kristin Jonna, rebel and refuse to pick a Best of Class Sparkling Wine from among the three possibilities, deciding that none of the Gold medalists deserves the honor.

We vote the Judges’ Merit Award to the Rosé we tasted earlier, which turns out to be 2007 Pinot Noir Rosé from Bowers Harbor, on Old Mission Peninsula.

Things wrap up at 3 p.m. Just a few minutes later, we’re the first people in the state to learn which wines we’ve just judged as Michigan’s best.

About the author: Joel Goldberg, an Ann Arbor area resident, edits the MichWine website and tweets @MichWine. His Arbor Vinous column for The Chronicle is published on the first Saturday of the month. Listen online to Joel’s recent interview with Lucy Ann Lance.

Joel Goldberg

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.

The wineries in our area belong to southeast Michigan’s Pioneer Wine Trail. I’ve linked local maps to help you find each of them, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to print the full trail map before you hit the road.

Sign for the Southeast Michigan Pioneer Wine Trail.

Unlike the southwest corner of Michigan, or the peninsulas bordering Grand Traverse Bay, the federal government hasn’t designated an American Viticultural Area (AVA) in this part of the state. In practical terms, that means area wineries can only use generic “Michigan” labels on wine from locally grown grapes, instead of the more specific AVA appellations you see elsewhere, such as “Lake Michigan Shore,” “Leelanau Peninsula” or, for that matter, “Napa Valley.”

But that’s primarily of academic interest. These are genuine, from-scratch wineries, not the ersatz “make-your-own-wine” storefronts popping up like toadstools around the state.

If you haven’t sampled Michigan wines recently, you’re in for a surprise. They’ve improved dramatically in the past decade, as state winemakers learn which grape varieties perform well in our climate, and how to coax the best wines from each.

Still, don’t expect the Pioneer Wine Trail to replicate a drive through Napa Valley. Just plan to enjoy your visits at several welcoming wineries, sample a number of well-made local wines and, if you’re so inclined, chat up the pourers to glean some information and grab a few bottles to take home. I’ll mention a few medal-winners and personal favorites as we go.

Winery tasting rooms can turn rowdy on weekends, especially as boozers behaving badly disembark at their fourth or fifth stops of the day. So if you’re a winery noob, or want a quick refresher course, herewith a few tips on tasting room etiquette:

• Tasting rooms are great places to try different styles of wine without the need to buy a bottle. So don’t hesitate to experiment.
• But you can’t taste everything, so tell the pourer your likes and dislikes. If you hate sweet wines, don’t waste time and wine with the Late Harvest Riesling.
• You’re not required to slurp down everything they pour – that’s why tasting rooms provide empty containers (technical term: dump buckets) on or behind the counter. Feel free to request and use one.
• Tasting rooms may be the sole venue you encounter in daily life where it’s considered polite to spit. Take advantage of the opportunity to polish your technique. But avoid the floor; instead, consider the dump bucket as your personal spittoon.
• Also avoid comments about “pig swill” at top voice in front of other visitors and employees pouring you free wine. If the pourer asks your opinion on a wine you detest, brutal candor isn’t mandatory. A quiet “it’s not my style” should suffice. Then dump it out and request a different sample.
• Consider a weekday visit if it fits your schedule. Crowds diminish substantially and pourers have more time to talk shop, if you’re so inclined.
• Tasting rooms aren’t public charities designed for your entertainment, but important income and expense centers for small wineries, like those in our area. Consider making a purchase if you find wines you enjoy.

OK, ready to go? Head west on I-94. First stop in 25 minutes, just off Exit 147.

LONE OAK 

The first thing you’ll probably notice as you drive up to Lone Oak’s winery/tasting room? The vineyard that surrounds the building, planted in 1997, features some of the most butt-ugly grapevines in the state.

The vines aren't pretty, but they make it through the winter.

But proprietor Kip Barber, former owner of a Detroit-area woodworking business, doesn’t worry about aesthetics. His unique, low-to-the-ground design lets him cover those vines with straw to survive the winter. And that, in turn, lets him grow varietals, like Cabernet Sauvignon, not commonly seen in this part of Michigan.

You’re likely to find Kip’s wife, Dennise, pouring behind the tasting room counter when you arrive. She knows lots more about wine than you do, and will gladly share – so ask!

Two to try: 2005 Vin du Roi (Wine of the King). Just released, a dry Bordeaux-style blend of four estate-grown varietals: 30% each Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot, plus 10% Petit Verdot; it’s a dark, brooding wine with the ability to age. $25.

Kip ferments his Red Raspberry wine from ripe Michigan berries, not the juice or concentrates some places use. Even if you’re not crazy about sweet fruit wines, you may want to try this gold medal winner; tart undertones nicely balance the sugar content. Perfect accompanist for dark chocolate desserts, albeit somewhat pricey for a fruit wine at $19 the half-bottle.

Lone Oak Vineyard Estates    MAP

8400 Ann Arbor Road, Grass Lake

517.522.8160.

Tasting room open 12-7 p.m. daily.

SANDHILL CRANE

Located just east of Jackson, a couple of miles from I-94, Exit 145, Sandhill Crane is one of my favorite user-friendly Michigan wineries to visit. On busy weekends, it seems like everyone in the buzzing tasting room knows everyone else, and just dropped in to socialize over a glass of wine.

Sandhill Crane winemaker Holly Balansag, daughter Pauline, and some Late Harvest Riesling.

Sister team Heather Price and Holly Balansag run the show, with an extensive supporting cast of family members, pourers and hangers-on. Winemaker Balansag clearly learned little about self-restraint while growing up; Sandhill Crane offers a lineup of wines that far exceeds most wineries twice its size. Whatever your vinous proclivity, they’ve got something – and, more likely, several somethings – for you to taste.

(By the way, don’t be surprised if some of their wines or staff seem familiar; Sandhill Crane also operates a tasting room much closer to Ann Arbor, inside the Dexter Cider Mill, during fall cider season.)

Two to try: Legacy commemorates the Washtenaw Land Conservancy’s recent expansion into Jackson County, and its new moniker as the Legacy Land Conservancy. A dry white blend of half Vignoles from the winery’s vineyard and half Chardonnay from a grower near Lake Michigan, it recently took a gold medal at the Great Lakes Wine Competition. The winery donates $4 from each $20 bottle to the Conservancy.

Another gold medal winner, the 2008 Late Harvest Riesling isn’t cheap at $25 for a half-bottle, but it’s an extremely enjoyable after-dinner sipper – and just the thing to impress out-of-state guests who don’t believe Michigan produces good wines.

Sandhill Crane Vineyards    MAP

4724 Walz Road, Jackson 49201

517.764.0679

Tasting room open 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 12-6 p.m. Sun.

CHATEAU AERONAUTIQUE

Note: Tasting room will open late summer, so call before you go. Not on the trail map – go west on I-94 to Exit 138, then north on US-127 to Rives Junction. 

Chateau Aeronautique is taking off in late summer.

First came France’s garagiste (say: garage east) wineries, tiny boutiques that handcraft wine in the owner’s garage. But later this summer, Michigan will present its first hangariste. Yup, that’s a winemaker who crushes grapes in his home’s attached airplane hangar in an airpark just north of Jackson.

Lorenzo Lizarralde, a pilot for Delta at Detroit Metro, is getting ready to release nine wines, some from grapes grown in the Lake Michigan Shore wine region, others – surprisingly – from a small vineyard north of Brighton.

The winery officially opens Sept. 26, to coincide with his neighborhood’s annual fly-in, but Lizarralde plans a “soft” opening once he finishes the tasting room, currently under construction.

One to try: Lizarralde made just 50 cases of his stunning 2008 Cabernet Franc Reserve from grapes grown in our backyard, near Brighton. Bright cherry aromas, ripe, dense fruit with just a hint of toasty oak.

Chateau Aeronautique    MAP

1849 Rives-Eaton Road, Jackson 49201

517.569.2123

Tasting room open weekends, starting late August or September.

CHERRY CREEK

Unquestioned champion for the area’s coolest winery building, Cherry Creek houses its tasting room in a beautifully respiffied 1870 brick schoolhouse along busy US-12, just west of Michigan International Speedway.

Cherry Creek's tasting room is housed in a former 1870 schoolhouse.

Owner/winemaker John Burtka recently added a pergola out back; picnic tables invite you to lay out your own spread or, on weekends, order from the winery’s tapas menu while you enjoy a glass or bottle of the house juice.

Two to try: If your summertime wine diet includes well-chilled dry rosé – and it should – don’t miss sampling their 2008 Riviera Rosé, made from 100% Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, selling for $16. Bright cherry and strawberry flavors abound; it’s a warm weather favorite at the Goldberg house.

No, it’s not wine, but you’ll see one wall of the tasting room lined with showcases of homemade fudge, at six pieces for $10. If you’re a non-traditionalist, give the Cayenne Chocolate a try. Think of it as you might a high-alcohol Napa Cabernet: rich and mouth filling when it hits your palate, followed by a noticeable burn on the back end.

Cherry Creek (Old Schoolhouse Winery)    MAP

11000 Silver Lake Hwy (corner of US-12), Brooklyn 49240

517.592.4663

Tasting room open 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. daily (wine can’t be poured before noon on Sunday).

PENTAMERE

It took work, but Pentamere crafted its name from a unique mangling of the Greek and Latin for “five seas” – in other words, the Great Lakes. When it opened in 2002, Pentamere became Michigan’s first entry in the “urban winery” trend, locating its production facility and tasting room in a downtown storefront while contracting to purchase grapes from growers elsewhere.

The winery's in the basement: Pentamere winemaker Dan Measel.

(Trivia: their first choice for a winery site was Ann Arbor, but they found downtown real estate here too pricey. So our loss became Tecumseh’s gain.)

True to its name but unique among Michigan wineries, Pentamere buys grapes from growers around the entire Great Lakes region, trucking them to downtown Tecumseh where winemaker Dan Measel sets out the crusher in the back alley and pipes the juice directly into the fermentation tanks in the basement. If they’re not busy when you visit, ask for a quick tour!

Two to try: You’ve bought their fruit, now try the wine. Pentamere makes its Harvest Apple wine from apples grown by longtime Ann Arbor Farmers Market fixture, Kapnick Orchards. Crisp, flavorful and just slightly off-dry, it makes a perfect summertime aperitif alongside fruit, cheese or lightly spiced meats. $11.

Michigan isn’t as well known as Ontario for Ice Wine, one reason Pentamere bought the grapes for its 2005 Vidal Eiswein from a grower in Niagara-on-the-Lake. This is a double gold medal winner – rich, syrupy, honeyed apricot and relatively cheap for Ice Wine, at $35 for a half-bottle. At the very least, pay ‘em a buck for a taste – it’s worth it.

Pentamere Winery    MAP

131 E. Chicago Boulevard, Tecumseh 49286

517.423.9000

Tasting room open 11 a.m. – 7 p.m. Tues.-Fri., 10 a.m. – 7 p.m. Sat., 12 – 5 p.m. Sun.

About the author: Joel Goldberg, an Ann Arbor area resident, edits the MichWine website and tweets @MichWine. His Arbor Vinous column for The Chronicle is published on the first Saturday of the month. If you’d like to keep up with local wine events, visit MichWine’s Ann Arbor wine calendar. To list an event on the calendar, submit it here.

Joel Goldberg

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.”

White wine straight from the fridge – around 35 degrees – sequesters all its aromatics and much of its flavor behind the cold. Think: moderately alcoholic, slightly acidic ice water. Not exactly yummy.

But a few degrees higher, in the 45 to 50 zone, all the scents and tastes come out to play. That’s why, at white wine tastings, you’ll frequently spot a crowd of strange-looking people, bowls of their glasses cupped in hot, sweaty palms, swirling the wine to warm it up.

This month’s white tasting parallels the reds from two months back: high value, less formulaic wines in the $10 range, suggested by local retailers. Based on their feedback, we ratcheted up the top of the price range by a buck, to $13.

This time, my request for retailer recommendations also cloaked a slightly more nefarious purpose. Two weeks back, importer Bobby Kacher launched a minor mondo-vino controversy when he told must-read blogger Tyler Coleman (a.k.a. Dr. Vino), that it was close-to-impossible to find high quality U.S. wines selling under $12 – exactly the range of our tastings.

So it seemed informative to unobtrusively measure the national origins of the wines that our savvy Ann Arbor retailers were suggesting as their best bets for the money.

The short answer: they’re not from around here.

Among the 24 combined entries in our red and white tastings, just three were made in the U.S., as opposed to nine from France and six from Italy. This month, the Vinous Posse also got to sample wines from Austria, Portugal and South Africa (though none – in either tasting – from Australia or New Zealand).

In other words, Kacher may be onto something.

The Vinous Posse’s top-rated white bottles come from countries that don’t necessarily trip off the tongue when we think of high quality wine – South Africa’s “Goats in Villages Viognier” and Portugal’s Quinta da Alorna “Arintho.” The Viognier – with a  rating we didn’t expect to hand out in this price range – was suggested by Rod Johnson at Plum Market. It’s one niche of a great wine marketing story that began a decade back, when Fairview Winery created the “Goats do Roam” brand, a South African wine that played off the name and style of France’s Côtes-du-Rhône.

The label quickly became the best-selling South African wine in the U.S., leading to such logical brand extensions as “Goat-Roti” and “Bored Doe.” It didn’t hurt their reputation that the wines were actually excellent value for the money – or that the French, displaying a galling lack of humor, filed an international complaint against Fairview for trademark infringement.

(A few years back, I helped a friend, George Heritier from Detroit’s wonderful Gang of Pour wine site, assemble a fuller tale of the brand; his article and (now dated) reviews are still worth a read.)

Finally, a shout-out to Audree Riesterer at Whole Foods on Eisenhower Parkway, who offered two green-pedigree selections to taste – one organically produced in Austria, the other, named “Sustainable White,” from Parducci in Mendocino, Calif., which bills itself as the first carbon-neutral winery in the U.S.

Though neither copped a top rating, both represent enjoyable, earth-friendly wines – at least if you overlook the energy needed to transport their weighty glass bottles to Michigan.

So What’s to Drink?

Wines are rated from to . The Vinous Posse doesn’t grade on the curve, so  represents a decent, enjoyable bottle.

Please take a moment to scan the reviews along with the ratings – they contain lots of information about wine styles and food pairing that will help you select the right bottle for your needs.

Label from Goats in Villages Viognier.

2007 GOATS IN VILLAGES VIOGNIER, Paarl, South Africa (Suggested by Rod Johnson, Plum Market; $10). A great outing for this aromatic grape, as long as you’re not expecting $60 Condrieu from France’s northern Rhône, where the varietal originated. Big, peachy floral nose follows up with a lusciously rich, well-balanced, mouth-filling body. “Good all the way to the gums!” said a member of the Vinous Posse. Enjoy with grilled chicken, or just savor it slowly on its own. Be sure not to serve too cold, or you’ll kiss those great aromatics good-bye.

2007 QUINTA DA ALORNA “Arintho,” Ribateno, Portugal (Suggested by Mark Smith, Arbor Farms; $13). Pale green color and a honeyed nose, followed by – surprise! – some light spritziness in the mouth alongside apricot and ripe banana flavors. A great, light food wine; serving suggestions from the group included mild cheeses, grilled shrimp – especially – fresh strawberries.

2007 DOMAINE CHÊNE, Macon-Villages, France (Suggested by Dick Scheer, Village Corner; $12). Unoaked Chardonnay grown in one of the less prestigious quarters of normally pricey Burgundy. A rich, yellow color and aromas of ripe melon lead into a silky-smooth palate with a bright acid snap on the finish. “Kick back in your Adirondack and enjoy,” said one of the tasters.

2007 TERRAZZO “BIANCO,” Esino, Italy (Suggested by Dick Scheer, Village Corner; $10). A blend of 80% Verdicchio (as in the Marchetti, below) and 20% Trebbiano, from the Marche region on Italy’s Adriatic coast. Light, crisp and refreshing, with a lemony minerality that begs for food. Our tasters salivated over thoughts of sipping this next to a piece of crusty, buttery garlic bread. Great summertime wine.

2008 DOMAINE DES CASSAGNOLES, Cotes de Gascogne, France (Suggested by Alex Pratt, Morgan & York; $11). Made from Colombard and Ugni Blanc grapes in the Gascony region, south of Bordeaux and north of Spain on France’s Atlantic coast. Pungent grapefruit and grassy aromas followed by a crisp, well-balanced and powerful palate, with some passion fruit notes. Would do well alongside rich, buttery foods.

2007 DRY CREEK CHENIN BLANC, Clarksburg, California (Suggested by Giri Iyengar, Everyday Wines; $12.50). The grape’s from France’s Loire Valley, the growing region is inland California, east of San Francisco and south of Sacramento. And the wine’s luscious, with ripe peach aromas, a smooth, creamy texture with stone-fruit flavors and a long finish. Nice for sipping on its own.

2008 HOFER, GRUNER VELTLINER, Niederosterreich, Austria (Suggested by Audree Riesterer, Whole Foods on Eisenhower Parkway; 1 liter bottle, $10). One of the more unusual selections in the tasting, with Austria’s Gruner Veltliner grape, from the state of Lower Austria. A grapefruit and lemon zest nose, light but round palate. People suggested serving it with manchego cheese or raw oysters. The liter bottle, with its pop-off beer cap, gives it a big bang for the buck.

2007 KUENTZ-BAS, Alsace, France (Suggested by Alex Pratt, Morgan & York; $13). In Alsace, they call this type of wine “Edelzwicker” – a house-blend of regional varietals like Pinot Blanc and Gewurztraminer. The latter grape shows up in delicate, floral, rosewater aromas, which one less-admiring taster termed “bubble gum.” Slightly off-dry, pear flavors and a lemony acidity that dances on the tongue. Food suggestion: slices of summer sausage on hearty wheat crackers.

2007 MARCHETTI, Verdicchio dei Castelli de Jese, Italy (Suggested by Rod Johnson, Plum Market; $12). The same grape as the Terrazzo, above, from a nearby section of Italy’s Marche region, and another great-with-food selection. Rich, round mouthfeel with minerality and lemon rind; a strong presence without being overbearing. We’d enjoy it with simple but rich fish preparations, such as sea bass or pan-sautéed trout.

2007 PARDUCCI “Sustainable White,” Mendocino, California (Suggested by Audree Riesterer, Whole Foods on Eisenhower Parkway; $10). Sauvignon Blanc, Muscat Canelli, Tokai, and Viognier blend, from a producer claiming to be the first U.S. carbon neutral winery. Approachable, delicate, easy-sipping wine, very pale color and faint floral notes on the nose, with a slightly hot finish. Food pairing ideas ran in the direction of shrimp, scallop and spinach greens.

2008 DOMAINE DE BALLADE SAUVIGNON BLANC-COLOMBARD, Cotes de Gascogne, France (Suggested by Giri Iyengar, Everyday Wines; $11.50). Our second contender from this region on France’s southwest coast, this substitutes Sauvignon Blanc for Ugni Blanc. Golden straw color, initially rich, ripe and flavorful followed up with a tart grapefruit/citrus aftertaste. One taster termed it “Adult-sized lemonade.” Fine with richer cheeses, but no food necessary.

2007 CHATEAU DE CARIZIERE, “Sur Lie,” Muscadet, France (Suggested by Mark Smith, Arbor Farms; $12). Made from Muscadet grapes grown near the mouth of the Loire River on France’s Atlantic coast. Sharp acidity without the fruit to match, along with some funky and sulfur notes. May simply be an off bottle, but not to anyone’s taste.

About the author: Joel Goldberg, an Ann Arbor area resident, edits the MichWine website. His Arbor Vinous column for The Chronicle is published on the first Saturday of the month. If you’d like to keep up with local wine events, visit MichWine’s Ann Arbor wine calendar. To list your event on the calendar, submit it here.