A favorite summer salad takes on a Hungarian accent in this luscious variation with sour cream and paprika.

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There are a million and one wine events to go to out there, so I try to restrict my postings to basically just the largest public tastings or those events that offer the most impressive opportunities for wine lovers. Every once in a while, though, an event comes along that doesn’t quite fit well into any category, yet represents an intriguing opportunity for those interested in experiencing something less mainstream in the world of wine.

The Elevation of Wine bills itself as the first ever symposium dedicated to high-altitude viticulture and winemaking. This is as surprising as it is intriguing, for some of the top wines of the world often offer altitude as one of their distinguishing characteristics, yet it seems there has never been any event focusing on high altitude winemaking before. From Argentina to Italy to Austria to New Zealand, not to mention Napa, high altitude is often synonymous with significant diurnal shifts in temperature that are generally accepted to positively influence the flavor and complexity of grapes.

So the idea of spending a couple of days listening, thinking, and talking about the relationship and impact of elevation on wine is an alluring opportunity. It certainly makes me wish my day job were a lot less demanding. Alas, I can’t just truck up to Lake County for the day in the middle of the week, even if they are offering helicopter rides over the vineyards.

But perhaps you can. The event consists of a full day of seminars and tastings covering various aspects of “elevation” from its impact on grape growing to the chemistry of the finished wine to marketing. If you can get yourself to Lake County next week, it’s bound to be a very interesting day.

The Elevation of Wine Symposium
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Snows Lake Vineyard
11545 Perini Road,
Lower Lake County
Middletown, CA 95461

Tickets are $275 per person for the full day seminar and can be purchased online.

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Forget that nasty stuff that your old aunt kept in a cut-glass decanter. it’s high time for us to shake out the old prejudices and give Sherry another chance.

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I very nearly passed this over as a blog topic. I found it barely newsworthy, but Arthur, one of my regular readers pinged me about it the day after the story broke and I’ve been thinking about it off and on ever since. I’ve come to the conclusion that we all need the opportunity to occasionally regain perspective on the world of wine, and this recent news story provides just such an opportunity.

The story to which I refer was a little snippet from Decanter’s news service which offered the results from a recent study of British wine drinkers (arguably some of the most wine savvy in the world) in whom there was a near total absence of understanding of what Biodynamic meant, and a supreme lack of interest in purchasing organic and fair trade wines.

Many of us wine lovers live in a world as foreign and bizarre to the normal wine consumer as the San Francisco Bay Area is to United States politics as a whole. It’s simply a question of being in a completely separate universe. While I certainly don’t assume all my readers live in that world with me, the reality is that most of you, even those of you who would consider yourselves wine amateurs know much more about wine than the “average” wine drinker in this country, and certainly, it seems, than the average UK wine drinker.

I recently spoke as part of a panel for an event put on by an organization called Wine 2.0, which consists of individuals and organizations who are trying to use the latest in technologies, many of which fall under the banner of a set of technical and social innovations collectively dubbed Web 2.0, to change the way that business is done in the wine world. The closing question to the panel I sat on was: “what do you think is the single largest opportunity in the wine business today?”

The results of this UK survey perfectly highlight my answer to that question, which I will paraphrase here for brevity.

The biggest opportunity in the wine world are the tens of millions of people who are responsible for making Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay and Beringer Vineyards White Zinfandel the most popular wines consumed in restaurants in America. They are also the people who have never tried Grenache, the people who think all Riesling is sweet, and yes, the people who have no idea what Biodynamic wine is and that all organic wine tastes bad.

Let us not forget that these people, not just in America, but in the UK, and even in France (gasp ! did you know that 95% of the wine consumed in France is non-appellation designated table wine?), really represent the average wine drinker, and these people are the ones that drive the economic engine of the wine industry. These are the people who do not know enough (or cannot afford) to buy wine at anywhere other than a grocery store. These people are the ones that through no fault of their own are responsible for the economic crisis that the French wine industry faces, and the same ones that are responsible for creating the bug eyed monsters of the more elite wine world: the YellowTails and the Fred Franzias.

So I offer to you a challenge, one that I actively work on every time I get the change. Do not proselytize, do not crusade, but do look for every opportunity represented by an inquisitive person, an open mind, and a budding young (or old) palate to open the doors of the wine world a little larger. There’s plenty of room in here.

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On the fruit-forward side, this budget-priced wine from California’s Laurel Glen offers a good example of Mendoza Malbec. Yes, they call it “Malbec.”

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The old, worn wooden trugs that laborers once used to haul in grapes at harvest have been replaced by plastic bins, but these antique vineyard tools still whisper the secrets of times gone by.

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Full of plums and pepper with a subtle note of Loire minerality, this fine Loire Valley red uses the moniker “Côt.”

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Dennis Schaefer is not in Santa Barbara any more, Toto. Our Central Coast correspondent reports in this month from Galicia in far northwestern Spain, called “Green” Spain for its cool, verdant aspect. The wine region here is Rias Baixas (REE-us BUY-shass), and the grape is Albariño.

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