We admire innovators – true innovators look for new ways to do things. They push the old toward the new with a special sense of what is needed to push everything forward toward the future. There are innovators in every field, including wine.

We recently tasted some wines that are coming from one of California’s wine innovators, Steve Matthiasson. Steve and his wife, Jill Klein, operate the artisan winery, Matthiasson. In his day job, Steve is a consultant and vineyard manager for several properties in Napa and Sonoma valleys, but when he takes off that hat, he transforms into a pioneering winemaker.

Matthiasson produces around 500 cases per year of three different wines: the Napa Valley White Wine, Napa Valley Red Wine, and Red Hen Vineyard Merlot. Each wine is made from Californian grapes using a mix of Old and New World winemaking techniques. The WineEnabler.com crew tried the current offering of Matthiasson’s wines on this past Monday night. [click to continue…]

I am always on the lookout for house wines. You know the wine you open on Wednesday night or after the first bottle is gone and your friend doesn’t look like they intend to leave anytime soon. House wines are an important part of any wine drinker’s cellar, and they need to meet certain criteria.

First, house wines need to be good, if not great. Even if it is Wednesday or your friend is overstaying his or her welcome, you still have to drink the stuff and it might as well be something that you enjoy. For house wines, I prefer a light-medium to medium bodied white and a medium-full bodied red. Full bodied wines are more difficult to pair with food and are frequently too much for a follow-up bottle.

The acid level in a house wine is also important. The acid needs to be somewhere in the middle, with enough acid for food, but not too much. We often serve our house wines before or after dinner and too much acid is not a good thing in a cocktail wine.

My last rule for a house wine is that it cannot cost more than $15, and I prefer they cost less than $10. The cost restriction is the one that makes looking for house wines the biggest challenge. If I could spend $20 a bottle, this would be no problem, but as you approach the $10 mark, things get difficult.

My suggestions for house wines

NV Fiano di Avellino DOCG ($6) – This wine made from the Apaina grape was traditionally a sweet wine. Modern winemaking techniques produce an elegant, dry wine that features aromas of hazelnut or German chocolate cake. The wine is smooth in the mouth with enough acid and a medium long finish. This offering from Gaetano de Forino is a great buy and a wonderful wine.

2007 Cupcake Chardonnay ($10) – I found this wine at the 1st Annual Wine Bloggers Conference. When we tried it, the entire table concluded that this is a fun party wine. Creamy citrus flavors are suspended in a slightly sweet, medium body wine that delivers. The wine has enough acid to stand-up to food, but so much that you cannot enjoy this wine by itself.

2007 Mâcon-Lugny Les Charmes Chardonnay ($10) – Les Charmes is the most imported white wine from Burgundy and with good reason. The wine is produced from a single vineyard where some of the vines are nearly 100 years old. Made without oak, the nose is floral with slight hints of minerality. In the mouth, the wine is medium bodied with a clean and crisp feel. This is another wine that will serve well as an aperitif or as a part of a wonderful dinner.

2006 Stump Jump White ($10) – d’Arenberg produces this wine from grapes grown in the McLaren valley. The blend made from Marsanne, Sauvignon Blanc, and Riesling is a consistent winner. With a floral nose, good acid, and a medium long finish, you might find this wine to be your go-to wine for mid-week.

2006 Protocolo Tinto Vino de La Tierra de Castilla ($6.25) – This wine made from 100% Tempranillo shows dark fruit and earth with dusty tannins. This is a really good wine for the price.

2006 Bodegas y Viñedos Jalón Viña Alarba Old Vines Grenache Calatayud ($9) – I love Grenache, and finding an old vine Grenache for under $15 is hard to do, and finding one under $10 is almost a miracle. This inexpensive, light bodied Grenache shows red fruit and berries with a medium long finish.

I hope you enjoy these wines as much as I did, and if you have a house wine you want to share with us, chime in.

We had our annual anti-Valentine’s day party two  nights ago, and it was a blast. Everyone brought something, and my wife and I filled in the rest. We had barbeque from Lockhart, gulf shrimp, farmer’s market goodies, and stuff from the garden all whipped up into a feast. Of course there was wine to go along with this good stuff, and we tried them all to see what paired the best.

One highlight of the food and wine parings included boiled shrimp and cocktail sauce with Riouolo Prosecco Vento ($10). This off-dry sparkler was full of sweet apples and acid aplenty to go with the gulf shrimp. I really enjoyed this wine with the shrimp, but it would be a little sweet for me as an aperitif.

We also tried Riouolo’ Spago Rosso, Sheraz ($12.50). Sparkling red wines are somewhat of a curiosity. I have been served sparkling red wine in Germany, and it is made by several producers in Australia, but this is my first Italian. The wine is opaque and the froth a pleasant purple. In the mouth, this is a medium-full bodied, dry sparkler with dark fruit. The Spago Rosso was a hit with smoked sausage we had brought home from Smitty’s Barbeque in Lockhart, Texas.

We also had a bottle of ’07 Laurenz Singing Gruner Veltliner ($13). We liked the ’06 Singer from Laurenz and the ’07 was just as good. This vintage has a little more body than the previous, but is still a medium sized mouthful of fruit and light. We really enjoyed paring the Veltliner with a mushroom, onion, and goat cheese tart that was accompanied by a garden salad. The sweetness of the onions and the tangy goat cheese simply played with the wine — it was great.

Perhaps the most interesting pairing of the evening was a sweet potato gratin from Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill Cookbook and the 2006 Macon-Bussieres Le Monsard from Dominique Lafon ($25 on close out). The gratin was rich and sweet with a little heat that simply married the mineral acid of the Monsard.

We finished with chocolate covered strawberries and a bottle of Perrie-Jouet. Everything was simply wonderful, it was another great party without Hallmark.

If I open a corked bottle of wine, I’m usually pretty pissed off about it. Though I’ve started saving all my receipts and taking back corked bottles, the culprit is usually some bottle that I’m excited about trying. It happened on my birthday, it happened with a nice Gamay meant to pair with some fantastic mushroom risotto, and on and on…

Well, a friend of mine recently sent me an article that offers a way to remove cork taint from a bottle of wine (the tip originally appeared in the New York Times). While I wouldn’t try the method on an expensive bottle of wine, I plan to try this with the next cheap, corked bottle I get, even if only to use it as a cooking wine later on.

The idea comes from Andrew Waterhouse, a professor of wine chemistry at the University of California, Davis. He says that to remove the cork taint, you pour the wine into a bowl and mix it around with a sheet of plastic wrap. He says that this works because the molecule that causes the cork taint odor, 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, adheres to the polyethylene plastic wrap, removing it from the wine’s liquid.

Anyone else ever give this a try? If so, tell us how it worked out in the comments, and we’ll let you know what we think as soon as one of us tries it.

Now is the time that I am supposed to write a post about pairing chocolate and wine or what champagne goes with flavored massage oil, but I just don’t feel like it. Valentine’s Day is designed to get you to feel bad unless you spend lots of money on your significant other.

My wife and I usually spend the evening with a few friends. We love spending time alone, but doing it on command seems contrived. Our Valentine’s Day dinners are always a lot of fun. The food is good, we drink good wine, and nobody eats alone on the day that being alone means “loser”. Besides, we find that people who are not pretending to enjoy one another are a lot more fun. [click to continue…]

Over the past couple of months, we’ve been looking into alternative wine packaging. The packaging technologies we’ve investigated are bag in box (BIB), Tetra Pak, and plastic wine bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET).

Interest in alternative packaging increased dramatically last year when the price of oil headed toward $150 per barrel. You might think that interest would be slowing with the dropping price of oil, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Everyone I talked to told me they see continued growth across all types of alternative wine packaging, and the rate of acceptance appears to be accelerating. The main reason for the market’s continued growth are lower manufacturing and delivery costs combined with a desire to reduce the environmental impact of a bottle of wine. [click to continue…]

January is a great month to eat oysters. The name of the month has an “R” in it, and the waters along gulf coast have cooled off, producing plump, sweet oysters with just the right amount of brine. Here in Austin you can get oysters from several local fish mongers, and the WineEnabler.com crew has developed a taste for them this winter.

Of course, we have to pair the oysters that Michael has been shucking with something, and we decided to try bubbles. We know that the classic pairing for oysters is Sancerre, but Sancerres have gotten a little pricey. A good Sancerre these days costs more than $20, and that is about 3 to 4 times the price of a dozen oysters, so we decided to look at other choices, such as Cava and Prosecco. These sparkling wines from Spain and Italy can be excellent values, offering lots of taste with good balance for just a few bucks. [click to continue…]

Interest in the environmental impact of the wine industry has been a topic for sometime. Analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of wine suggests that the way wine is packaged, how it transported, and how far it is transported are the major contributors to the overall carbon footprint of a bottle of wine.

Of the three major contributors to wine’s carbon footprint, the wine package is the element most under the control of the winery. This has prompted some wineries to consider containers other than the traditional glass bottle. We reported earlier on plastic (PET) wine bottles and the widespread use of bag in box (BIB) technology for wine, but there is another player in the alternative wine packaging market – Tetra Pak. Most people in the U.S. think of juice boxes or maybe chicken stock when we think about Tetra Pak containers, but there is a lot more to it. [click to continue…]

Update: Our visual change-over is underway!

Hello to our readers! I just wanted to write a quick note to let you all know that the entire WineEnabler.com site is about to look a lot different. We’ve been working on a redesign that is about to go live.

The site updating may start as early as tonight and will be finished by the weekend (hopefully). We welcome any thoughts you may have on the new layout, and if you have ever wanted to suggest an improvement to our site, go ahead!

Thanks, and see you on the other side.

Continuing our recent trend of food and wine pairing parties, we looked to the sea this time for inspiration, driven by the fresh red snapper found earlier that day at a local farmer’s market. For this wine and food pairing party, we decided to serve:

• Malpaque and Gulf oysters on the half-shell with cocktail sauce
• Sopressa salami
• Dates stuffed with Stilton cheese and wrapped in Serrano ham
• Baby arugula salad
• Red snapper with Provencal sauce
• Quiche with caramelized onion
• Quiche with tomatoes
• Mushroom risotto made with mushroom stock

The oysters were from Central Market on Lamar. The salami and date dishes both came primarily from Phoenicia on Burnet. Both the quiches, as well as the red snapper, were bought that day from the Austin farmer’s market downtown at Republic Square. The arugula came from Neil’s own garden. [click to continue…]