2008 Napa Valley Syrah

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The cool, breezy Carneros location with a north-facing exposure guarantees that our hillside Syrah gets plenty of the all-important hang time it needs to develop full, ripe, rich flavors. Winemaker Geoff Gorsuch comments that “2008 was an extremely challenging vintage that left us with distressingly low yields, but the flavors are there in spades. This wine is bursting with cherries and spice!”

Flavor profile: Big, rich flavors of ripe cherry, strawberry, sweet plum and cocoa with anise and spice. Firm tannins.
2008 Vintage: A dynamic growing season with surprisingly low yields of flavorful berries showing great intensity of color and flavor

Drink now and through: 2014

Food Suggestions
Our Syrah is the perfect partner for simple, rustic fare like wild game, slow- cook dishes and grilled sausages. With its origins in the south of France, Syrah complements the flavors of the region particularly well. Colleen’s Kitchen has several recipes matched with Syrah including her new Rabbit Cacciatore.

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NVWR® 114 – ZAP: Zinfandel Advocates and Producers

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If you love Zinfandel, you need to know about ZAP, which is short for Zinfandel Advocates and Producers. The organization was formed in 1991 to promote red Zinfandel as a world-class wine. Duane Dappen, owner of D-Cubed winery and president of ZAP, is here with us to talk about it.

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• Visit goosecross.com where we have over 80 carefully researched educational articles available for you
• Enjoy our 2-minute audio Fun Facts on the world of wine and food
• Our video library offers a show and tell on wine production and enjoyment
• See if you can ace our Wine Trivia Challenge!
• Visit Colleen’s Kitchen for delicious recipes, paired with wine

Estate Cabernet and Short Ribs With Coffee Cocoa Sauce

Happy New Year! All of us at Goosecross wish you a happy and healthy 2011!

On these cold winter days we always turn to comfort food – the kind that warms us from the inside. Colleen developed the recipe for these slow-cooked short ribs to warm your kitchen and your heart. The fork-tender short ribs with their deep, smoky flavors, ancho chiles and rich cocoa sauce paired with a glass of our rich, fruity Napa Valley Estate Cabernet Sauvignon are all you need to chase away the winter chill.

Ingredients:

2 dried ancho chiles, stemmed, seeded
1-1/2 cup boiling water
1 small onion, quartered
2 cloves garlic, quartered
1 tablespoon finely chopped canned chipotle chiles in adobo sauce
1 teaspoon adobo sauce
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
1 tablespoon lime juice
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
3-1/2 pounds beef short ribs
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon olive oil
1/4 cup brewed dark roast coffee

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Soak the ancho chiles in the hot water until softened, about 20 minutes, then drain in a colander set over a bowl. Reserve the soaking liquid for braising.

In a food processor, chop the ancho chiles, onion, garlic, chipotle chiles with sauce, syrup, cocoa, lime juice, and 1/2 teaspoon salt.

Pat the ribs dry and sprinkle with the pepper and the remaining salt. Heat the oil in a large, deep skillet over medium-high heat. Brown the ribs on all sides then remove to a plate.

Turn the heat down to medium-low, then carefully add the chile puree to the skillet and cook stirring, 5 minutes. Add the reserved chile soaking liquid and coffee and bring to a boil.

Return ribs to skillet, the liquid should come about half way up the sides of the meat. Cover tightly and braise in oven until very tender, 3 hours. Serve ribs over polenta.

Basic Polenta
4 cups water
1 cup polenta
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter

Directions: In a medium saucepan, bring the water and salt to a boil. Gradually add polenta, stirring constantly until thickened, about 20 minutes. Blend in the butter. Serve with short ribs.

Serves 4

Discover more great recipes in Colleen’s Kitchen

Purchase the 2007 Goosecross Estate Cabernet Sauvignon in our online store.

Sauvignon Blanc/Fumé Blanc

Are they the same thing? Yup – pretty much. Sauvignon Blanc is the grape; Fumé Blanc is a marketing name that was made up by Robert Mondavi to sell Sauvignon Blanc at a time when it wasn’t popular. Others adopted it. He got the idea for the name from the French Sauvignon Blanc of the Loire Valley in France called Blanc Fumé. Clever, no?

For practical purposes, it’s sort of traditional for Sauvignon Blanc to be un-oaked and Fumé Blanc to be oaked, because Bob Mondavi barrel aged his Fumé. But, it won’t always hold true.  More information

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What’s an AVA?

It’s important! When I buy wine, one of the first things I look for on the label is where the grapes were grown, which, in America, is the AVA or appellation. It’s the number one influence on wine character. Heck, in most of Europe, wine is named and sold in terms of location, not variety!

It turns out that in America we use the terms appellation, district and AVA pretty much interchangably, even though they don’t mean exactly the same thing. You should know that the AVA (American Viticultural Area) can only be used by a region that has convinced the federal government that it has a distinctive combination of soil, climate and topography which, in turn, contribute to identifiable regional wine character.  They also need to see a history of wine production in the region. Wines named for states don’t fall into that category – in this country, if it’s just a place, it’s an appellation.

AVAs don’t have to be smaller, in fact there are some that straddle states (!), but they usually are. For instance, the Napa Valley AVA produces about 4% of California’s wine. The sub-AVA of Yountville, where Goosecross is located produces a small fraction of the larger Napa Valley AVA. A single-vineyard wine, like our Estate Cab is about as specific as you can get, coming off of a fraction of our 9.5-acre home ranch. There are many who think the more specific the appellation, the more distinctive the wine.

Federal law requires an 85% minimum of the grapes come from the AVA in order to use it on the label.

This can get complicated, so click here for more information.

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Seven Cool Things About Zinfandel

1. It’s THE California heritage grape. Before prohibition, it was the number one wine grape in California and the vast majority of red wines were Zinfandel based. Today, it’s number three.

2. Why so popular for over a century? It’s delicious! Expect ripe, spicy, very-berry flavors: raspberry, boysenberry, bramble, pepper and spice. The list goes on… It’s often pleasantly jammy!

3. Tastes great when it’s young. The best can be aged, but to get the fruit drink it young.

4. Zinfandel and Primitivo have the same DNA (this discovery thanks to your tax dollars at work) From its original home in Croatia, it traveled to southern Italy, where they called it Primitivo, and to the east coast, where it had several different names, yea, long ago. It came to California some time during the gold rush and we finally settled on the name Zinfandel.

5. It’s really fun with food! Great with pizza and tomato-based dishes. Perfect for barbecued almost anything!

6. You can taste an amazing number of Zinfandels later this month at the Zap festival!

7. Our podcast interview with the president of ZAP (Zinfandel Advocates and Producers) goes live tomorrow!

Too many others to list: More on Zinfandel

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Ice Wine (Eiswein)

What better topic for a cold, January day! While our harvest finished way back in October, many an ice-wine producer is gearing up now. There are sketchy stories told about wine being made from frozen grapes at various times in history, but the official history begins around 1960, in Germany.

It’s amazing what people will do to make a little sweet wine: Trooping out in the dead of winter, in temperatures well below freezing, to harvest grapes that are frozen solid! Are they nuts?!

Then, it’s rush back to the winery to press them while they’re still frozen. Since the water in the grapes has crystallized, what comes out of the press is very sweet juice that’s also quite concentrated in flavor. It makes exquisite dessert wine! Believe it or not, a number of producers believe this process is easier and less costly than making late-harvest wine, another winemaking oddity.

This stuff isn’t going to be cheap. Obviously, the yields are low, but think about the risks! During all those months of waiting for harvest the grapes can be eaten by birds or other wildlife or simply rot! The best-known sources of ice wine are Germany, Austria and Canada. Serve well chilled  More information

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What Makes a Good Year?

As we say good-bye to 2010, it seems like a good time to ask, yes? Of course, we’d love to take credit for a good year, but it’s really the weather. If you look at famous wine-producing regions world wide, we all have fairly mild, Mediterranean climates. And we all want the same thing. Enough sun and heat to get the grapes ripe and not much more – and plenty of rain, but NOT during harvest. That’s a good year.

And, of course, every wine region has its complaints.

In many of the famous European winegrowing regions they worry that they won’t get enough heat and sun and they’ll be forced to make wine from less that perfectly ripe grapes. You know what under-ripe produce tastes like – not very flavorful and a little on the tart side. It’s pretty much the same with wine. Under-ripe grapes make wine that’s tart, thin and not very flavorful – therefore, no fun. And, they also worry about ill-timed rain causing rot.

It’s the opposite, here in sunny Napa Valley. Some years we complain that it’s too hot and the grapes are getting sweet faster than the flavors are maturing. Since the sugar provides the alcohol, we’re concerned that the wine may be a little too generous in that regard, which can feel a bit hot on your palate. Or, if we harvest at low sugar, to assure a moderate alcohol, we might sacrifice a bit of flavor maturity. Thank heavens, harvest rain is rarely an issue for us.

So, we meet in the middle. The warm vintages are the best ones in cool climates and the cooler vintages are the better ones in a warm growing region like Napa Valley.

It’s very interesting that ever since the topic of climate change has come up, we’ve had remarkably mild, cool weather here and some truly fine vintage years. But, that’s a topic for another day!

More on vineyard cycle

2011 Vintage Recap (podcast)

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