VinoWeek - Episode 42 - How To Fix Bad Wine

The effects of climate change are prompting farmers to look more closely at how much water they use and need to sustain their crops. Bill and I start the podcast by discussing dry farming; the pluses and minuses. Have you ever opened up a bottle of wine, poured a glass, tasted it and thought meh? It just seemed like something was off, or worse yet it was undrinkable. Maggie Rosenberg and Trevor Hagstrom, regional food researchers have come up with some hacks to make those wines go down a little easier. We’ve mentioned all of these hacks before at one time or another in past podcasts, but this is a great refresher. Let us know what you think about these ways to fix bad wine. TN Coopers, a company based in Santiago, Chile, has been using Labrador retrievers to track down the source of TCA and TBA in wineries. After working in South America for many years the company is now looking to bring its specialized service to Northern California. Many winemakers would say Mandy Heldt Donovan is flirting with disaster, but that’s not the way she sees it. The Napa winemaker is intentionally inoculating her wine with Brettanomyces, an extremely hard to control spoilage yeast. Is she searching for a niche wine market? Perhaps she’s leading the way to a new trend in winemaking? In any event she has a long way to go, as for now she only produces about fifty cases. Bill and I discuss these topics and many more in this weeks addition of VinoWeek. Thanks to everyone for listening. Cheers!

The wine of the week is the 2007 Flaco Tempranillo. Flaco is a slang term for a friend as in “Qué pasa flaco? - what’s up dude? It’s a fun and not so serious expression and the wine is fun and care free as well. Tempranillo depending on where it is grown can exhibit very different expressions; from lighter elegant wine styles to full throttle, palate punishers. Flaco is on the lighter Pinot Noir spectrum of wine styles. It’s 100% Tempranillo that is organically and dry farmed from vineyards around the city of Madrid. The color is a bright ruby red, translucent on the edge. The wine displays red fruit, cherries, lavender and garrigue aromas on nose. On the palate pretty lifted red fruit flavors are complemented by it’s soft, silky, elegant profile. Its juicy fruit, soft texture, coupled with ample acidity make it immediately likeable. Flaco is fermented and aged in stainless steel and concrete tanks so there are no wood flavors to get in the way of the lovely fruit. The current vintage retails for about $7 and they made about 40,000 cases, so it should be fairly easy to find.

A beautiful elegant expression of organic tempranillo from vines around madrid