Have you ever ordered the wrong wine accidentally at a restaurant and ended up paying the price? If you eat out enough and order wine off the list, chances are this has happened to you at least once. However it takes a certain amount of carelessness to accidentally order a $2000 bottle of wine accidentally instead of one that costs $110. But that’s precisely what a New York diner did a while back, and they recently wrote to the New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni, to ask what was the appropriate thing to do in this situation. Specifically, what they should do when, after having drunk the wine and finished their meal, someone realized that they had spent more on the wine than they might on their monthly mortgage payment.

The question to Bruni, was simply whether the restaurant bore any responsibility for this having happened and therefore whether the diner was justified in seeking any restitution from the restaurant.

It’s a tricky question. On its face, clearly the restaurant cannot take responsibility for what customers order. Thinking that they should police whether people can actually afford the wine they are ordering is akin to suggesting that they should police whether people who have peanut allergies are ordering things that contain nuts. Caveat emptor, I believe is the operative phrase.

Yet at the same time, restaurants, in the interest of avoiding such mishaps, which make for unhappy folks on both sides of the transaction might certainly be able to cautiously and tactfully try to avoid such occurrences. The trick, of course, involves how to make sure a customer knows the price of the wine they’re ordering without questioning their judgment or their solvency.

It’s not an easy thing to do. Of course, for a lot of diners, stopping a sommelier or waiter from opening a bottle they’ve brought to the table isn’t easy either. Many people are intimidated by even the ceremony of a bottle being presented to them before opening that they don’t bother to really read the label to make sure it’s the wine they’ve ordered. Even experienced wine lovers can gloss over that step. I was recently on a business trip and eating in a very dimly lit restaurant and didn’t notice that the Chateauneuf-du-Pape Blanc that I ordered was the same winery’s red until it hit my glass.

Is a restaurant at all to blame for serving one of the worlds most expensive wines to a customer who clearly didn’t really want to drink it? In my mind, not at all. But check out the full story and see what Bruni and more than a hundred New Yorkers had to say about it.

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Simple and fresh, citrus and pear; a good food wine and an exceptionally good value.

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A favorite white wine in the Languedoc, Picpoul de Pinet - “the lip-stinger” - isn’t well-known around the world, which helps make it a bargain.

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So, you have waited until the last minute to plan for the big day. Now, just what are you going to do to impress your sweetie?

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A casual visit to Florida’s largest winery, in the lake-studded hill country west of Orlando, can be a pleasant surprise if you’re willing to think outside the box.

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Some of my favorite cookbooks date back to the 1970s, when we sure used a lot of eggs, butter and cream! Here’s a lighter version of a favorite Pierre Franey pork chop dish of the era.

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OK industry folks, listen up. You’ve all got products to sell. You need to make a living and feed your kids. But there are good ways to market wine, and there are stupid ways. It’s time to end the stupidity.

California Wine Month, Year, Decade, Day, Afternoon
Which brilliant lobbyist or bored politician came up with this idea? For years I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell the idea behind this non-event actually is. So let me get this straight. The governor puts his signature on a piece of paper (which he probably doesn’t even read). Then a lot of press releases go out over the wires saying “It’s California Wine Month” (oh, if I had a nickel for every one I’ve gotten) and only one or two lackluster journalists with nothing better to do around the country write cutesy stories about it. And then… wine sales go through the roof? You’ve got to be kidding me.

Last year we won a Silver medal for this wine at The <insert crappy, middle of nowhere> County Fair
This is so wrong on so many levels. You won the medal last year, so what does that have to do with this year’s wine!? And for the sake of argument, let’s say you just won a medal for this year’s wine. Good for you. But who cares? County fair medals are only marginally more respectable than those PHD degrees that you can pay $49.95 for by mail. Sure accolades are great, but gold medals from fairs aren’t worth your effort. Mostly because they’re so easy to get, and pretty much everyone who wants one can have one. If I only had a nickel for every gold medal winning wine I tasted that ended up being awful….

Wine Brands for Women
This is just plain insulting. Sure, men and women are different, but every wine that is “targeted” towards women implicitly suggests that what women really want from wine is better branding, rather than better wine. Frankly some of the best palates I know are women, and they could care less what color the label is.

Wine Brands for the Millennials
Ditto on the insult, folks. You’re not going to convert new wine drinkers by pandering to them and repackaging wine as some hip new beverage. The much coveted Millennial generation spends more money on eating out than any other generation before, and we’re not talking about fast food. This generation may have some of the most refined palates of any American consumer, and what they’re going to care about is how your wine tastes. Not how it’s packaged. So what you do is just make great wine, and then think about how to get the story of your wine out in ways that Millennials can easily find it. Your winery does have a Facebook page, right?

Green Wine
I know. I know. This is like telling people to stop selling umbrellas when it’s raining outside. But really people, come on — does the fact that your winery is carbon neutral, solar powered, raptor friendly, biodynamic, etc, have to be your crowning achievement? Of course you should be doing these things. They’re morally right and economically sound, but they shouldn’t be used to sell wine. They should be used to make better wine that costs less.

Paris Hilton
Enough said.

Critter Wines
Telling people to stop making wines with animals on the labels is like telling crack dealers that they’d make more money being shoe shine attendants. It’s true, putting an animal on the label of your wine makes it sell some (quite large if my fuzzy memory serves) percentage better. But just because we can, doesn’t mean that we should. If only because once you start, there’s no telling where it could end. We’re running out of the cute animals, for starters. Now we’re on to the large cud-chewing mammals, and frankly they’re not what I like to think about when I pick up a bottle of wine. Even worse, the next thing you know people will start marketing wine made by the critters, and then….well, then I think we’re pretty much looking at the end of civilization as we know it.

Readers: which ones have I missed?

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Make good wine. Price it right. Then tell good stories about it to people who care. Spend your marketing dollars on sincerity, not on sizzle.

Thanks to Arthur at redwinebuzz.com for the link on the critter wine.

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Friends and acquaintances often ask for recommendations on where to go in Napa, and I always tailor my response to my understanding of how serious they seem about wine. The majority of such petitioners are just looking to have a bit of the “Napa experience” and so I send them to a mix of my favorite wineries on the valley floor that are easy to find, and that produce wines in various styles and price points. For those who are serious about wine, and want to spend the entire day tasting some of the best wine they can, I always send them up Spring Mountain.

Regular readers may recall that on occasion I have actually admitted that Spring Mountain District is my favorite Napa appellation. I try to avoid having favorites, and I try even harder to avoid sharing them publicly, but dammit, it’s true. Across all of Napa’s AVA’s, I believe the producers on Spring Mountain to be making the most consistently excellent wines — wines with character, bright fruit, and a distinct sense of place — of any single AVA. Sure there are superstars that I love elsewhere, but in my opinion, the average quality of a Spring Mountain wine is higher than in any other Napa appellation.

It is impossible to discuss Spring Mountain without conjuring up the eponymous winery and estate, which is the largest and arguably the most storied vineyard on the mountain. Spring Mountain Vineyard and its 845 acres of property are descended from and comprised of several separate estates whose histories go back to the very beginnings of winemaking in Napa.

In 1873, a German immigrant named Charles Lemme acquired 285 acres of land on Spring Mountain, 65 of which he planted with grapes in 1874, including the very first Cabernet Sauvignon to be planted in the area. Two years later he built and established the first winery on Spring Mountain, which he named La Perla (the Pearl). This winery would be sold two decades later to the Schilling family who combined it with another vineyard and incorporated the Spring Mountain Vineyard Company in 1903.

Around 1890, an enterprising spirit with the extremely appropriate name of Fortune Chevalier purchased a large plot of land on Spring Mountain and began construction of a winery. Chevalier, who was 76 by then, spent only a few years producing wine before he handed the reigns of the estate over to his son George. Faced with impending prohibition and the devastation of his vineyards by the vineyard pest Phylloxera, George Chevalier sold the winery, which changed hands several more times before falling into relative disuse until the 1970’s when it was revitalized under the Chateau Chevalier label.

At the same time Chevalier was constructing his original winery, a man by the name of Tiburcio Parrott, the son of the wealthy U.S. Consul to Mexico, John Parrott, was given a gift of 800 acres of land on the slopes of Spring Mountain by his mother. Settling down in the small town of St. Helena, Parrott soon became friends with the Beringer brothers, Fredrick and Jacob, who he called “Los Hermanos,” a name by which the German brothers soon became known throughout town. The Beringers inspired Parrott to build a winery estate, and introduced him to their architect Albert Schroepfer, who built Parrott a massive home that Parrott dubbed “Miravalle” for its view of the valley below. Nearly 100 years later, this Victorian mansion and the working vineyards surrounding it would become the set for the Falcon Crest soap opera.

In 1992, the secretive Swiss banker Jaqui Safra purchased the Miravalle, La Perla, and Chevalier properties, and in the few years that followed, transformed them into a single, stunning estate whose terraced hills are easily some of the most picturesque vineyards in California.

Spring Mountain Vineyard’s wines are made by Jac Cole, a U.C. Davis trained winemaker who made wine at Charles Krug, Stags’ Leap Winery and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, among others before ending up at Spring Mountain in 2003. Cole, along with longtime friend and vineyard manager Ron Rosenbrand meticulously farm the 135 separate vineyard blocks that make up the forested and expansive winery estate. Cole jokes that when he first arrived at the winery, “I needed GPS to find not only the location of each block, but where the heck I was in relation to the winery!”

Each of these blocks, covering a total of about 225 acres, and making up roughly 25% of the vineyard acreage on Spring Mountain, is densely planted with vines trained in the unusual (for Napa Cabernet) head-pruned style known as the Gobelet Method. This method of growing grapes, without the more common trellises that support many separate cordons of grape vines, yields fewer grape clusters and smaller berries, according to Rosenbrand, and softer, more expressive aromas, according to Cole.

Each of the vineyards 135 blocks are harvested separately by hand, double sorted, and 100% destemmed before beginning fermentation, which varies in its use of whole berries depending on the particular tannin profile of the individual block. The red wines are aged in a mix of French oak barrels, with generally about 50% of the barrels being new each year.

Keeping each of the blocks separate until a final, gargantuan blending session, Cole assembles each wine through careful tasting, saving the best blocks for the winery’s flagship Bordeaux blend called “Elivette.” In addition to this blend, the winery makes a straight Cabernet Sauvignon, a Syrah, a Sauvignon Blanc, and little known to most, a tiny amount of Pinot Noir, a varietal most people would never attempt to grow on Spring Mountain.

Full disclosure: I received these wines as press samples.

TASTING NOTES:
2003 Spring Mountain Vineyard “Elivette” Bordeaux Blend, Spring Mountain District, Napa
Dark ruby in color, this blend of 88% Cabernet Sauvignon, 9% Merlot, and 3% Cabernet Franc smells of a deep loamy concoction of wet earth and tobacco with high notes of oak. On the palate it is rich and velvety with lush cherry flavors, excellent acid balance and mouth-coating tannins. The finish is long and surprisingly very oak influenced, with vanilla and toasted oak signatures — surprising because generally only about 50% of the barrels used for this wine are new. Despite tasting a bit too much of sweet wood, there’s no denying this is a stunning wine. 1910 cases produced. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $70. Where to buy?

2004 Spring Mountain Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Spring Mountain District, Napa
Dark garnet in the glass, this blend of 90% Cabernet Sauvignon, 8% Cabernet Franc, and 2% Petit Verdot has a nose of rich chocolate and cherry cola. In the mouth light dusty tannins surround juicy fruit flavors of cherry and plum, and sweet oak flavors rise to coast through the substantial finish. Also a bit heavy on the wood, but far from a hard wine to drink. 2800 cases produced. Score: around 9. Cost: $50. Where to buy?

2004 Spring Mountain Vineyard Syrah, Spring Mountain District, Napa
Medium to dark garnet in color, this wine has a nose of strong white pepper aromas that I hardly needed to put my face in the glass to smell. On the tongue, white pepper is also a prominent flavor, along with black and red cherries and a hint of cassis. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $44. Where to buy?

2003 Spring Mountain Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Spring Mountain District, Napa
Medium to dark garnet in color, this wine smells alluringly of pipe tobacco and what I can only describe as redwood bark. In the mouth, sweet tannins shape flavors of chocolate and cherry and grip the mouth lightly as the wine finishes just slightly shorter than it should. The current lack of satisfying finish shouldn’t keep anyone away, though, as this is a very nice wine. Score: around 9. Cost: $50. Where to buy?

2005 Spring Mountain Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc, Spring Mountain District, Napa
Pale green-gold in the glass, this wine has a grassy nose of gooseberry fruit. In the mouth it offers apple and citrus flavors with a nice minerality that is marred by a hint of plastic-like flavor in the finish. Score: between 8 and 8.5. Cost: $25. Where to buy?

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