Beaujolais is a great year-round wine. It’s excellent with a wide variety of dishes, from seafood to outdoor grilling to hearty stews. And, of course, for one day in November, Beaujolais Nouveau is a great excuse for a harvest party. So, like Meryl Streep, it can be whatever you want it to be, without ever losing its own character. But we especially associate Beaujolais with fall, maybe because its life and vibrancy remind us of the changing colors of leaves and beautiful weather.
Dorothy J. Gaiter & John Brecher
Dorothy J. Gaiter & John Brecher
Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher conceived and wrote The Wall Street Journal's wine column, "Tastings," from 1998 to 2010. Dorothy and John have been tasting and studying wine since 1973. In 2020, the University of California at Davis added their papers to the Warren Winiarski Wine Writers Collection in its library, which also includes the work of Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson. Dottie has had a distinguished career in journalism as a reporter, editor, columnist and editorial writer at The Miami Herald, The New York Times, and at The Journal. John was Page One Editor of The Journal, City Editor of The Miami Herald and a senior editor at Bloomberg News. They are well-known from their books and many television appearances, especially on Martha Stewart's show, and as the creators of the annual, international "Open That Bottle Night" celebration of wine and friendship. The first bottle they shared was André Cold Duck. They have two daughters.
August 23, 2024The modern California sparkling wine industry is very young. Jack and Jamie Davies were among the pioneers when they founded Schramsberg in Napa Valley in 1965. In 1973, Moët & Chandon founded Domaine Chandon in Napa and it was such a big deal that we had a sparkling-only dinner at its onsite restaurant in Yountville on our honeymoon in 1979. Chandon led a surge of interest among foreign companies to make bubbly in the U.S. Considering that sparkling wine has been made in Champagne for hundreds of years, the development of Méthode Champenoise wines in the U.S. has happened in the blink of an eye.
Hope Goldie, whose chemist father made wine at home in Washington, studied enology and food science at UC-Davis and worked at Opus One, Stags’ Leap and Rutherford Hill Winery before joining Darioush in 2005. She has held various winemaking jobs there, from enologist to assistant winemaker to director of winemaking and, now, vice president of winemaking. John met her earlier this year during the Wine Writers’ Symposium at Meadowood Napa Valley. She is charming, funny and deeply knowledgeable, so we were eager to catch up and ask her some questions, including the simplest: Why Viognier? While it’s widely planted around the world, especially in the Rhône Valley, where it’s especially famous in Condrieu, it’s fairly unusual in the U.S. and even more unusual in Napa Valley, especially as a stand-alone varietal. In 2023, there were 2,555 acres of Viognier in California and 88,063 acres of Chardonnay, according to the California Grape Acreage Report. And last year, the report noted, there were only 117 acres of Viognier in Napa compared to 22,945 of Cabernet Sauvignon.
July 26, 2024We had a rosé we enjoyed very much recently that costs around $12 a liter and in some places even less. It was so good that we reached out to the winemaker to ask how he could make such a nice wine for that price. His answer was charming, much like the wine.
Rosé is easy – and hard. Clearly, it’s easy to pump out oceans of OK rosé, since there are so many on shelves. But making a good rosé – a wine with character, a beverage that earns the right to be called wine – is another matter.
Some rosé is excellent. Some is really bad. Most, to us, exist in a kind of in-between zone. We have been tasting rosés for months to prepare this column and our notes on some will show you what we mean:
“Perfectly OK and tongue-wetting, but there is not much to it. It’s kind of meh.”
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July 12, 2024“Diversity, equity and inclusivity. I hate those words together. That’s a program, that’s a seminar for 30 minutes you get from your corporation,” said Ikimi Dubose-Woodson, 42. She’s executive director of The Roots Fund, TRF, a nonprofit whose mission is to help Black, indigenous and people of color and other underrepresented people enter or rise in the wine industry, and soon, the spirits industry. It provides financial support, wine and business education, mentoring and job placement. “I want to work with people who want to work, not have meetings, and I want to do real work and create real change and that’s the only thing I want to talk about. While I’m doing this for my people, the education and awareness piece is for everyone.”
We had a wine the other night that we rated Yech. This is special. When we began taking notes on wines 50 years ago, we created a very personal, and simple, informal rating system. It ranged from Yech to Delicious! In-between were OK, Good, Very Good and Delicious.
Over time, we’d guess the chart of our wines would look like a snake that swallowed something large: Most wines fit in the middle. From time to time, we have a wine that we find Delicious. Of all the wines we taste, just three or four each year rate Delicious! That means the wine didn’t just taste great and was beautifully made and seemed intentional, but that we found it genuinely exciting.
June 14, 2024At wineries, parents and their offspring who have joined them in the business can have fraught relationships. And sometimes their disagreements are elemental: They are about grapes, nature. We have no way of proving this, but it seems to us that more generations are leaving their wineries, or the winemaking, to their daughters, and that creates a particular kind of dynamic. (We have two daughters, so we know something about this.)
May 31, 2024A vitis vinifera, Cabernet Franc is one of the world’s great grapes, of course, a fundamental building block of great Bordeaux and Bordeaux blends around the world. It’s the standout red grape in the Loire region of France, used to make stunning Chinon. We've been fans of Cab Franc from Long Island, N.Y., for many years and have had some outstanding examples from California.
May 17, 2024We’ve been drinking wines from Alsace for decades and have especially enjoyed those from Domaine Paul Blanck in Kientzheim. So it was wonderful to finally meet Philippe Blanck, who runs the business now with his cousin Frédéric.
May 03, 2024These are the times that try people’s souls; the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in these crises, shrink from the service of their world. (Sincere apologies to Thomas Paine, The American Crisis.) As our daughter Zoë would say, “Word.”
We’re not going to list all of the crises that are visiting our planet. Even if we could, before you finished reading this there surely would be many more to add to it. But if we are to stay here, all of us together, we must find a way to proceed. Yes, you are in the right place. This is a wine column. We think our collective explorations with wines can help us all weather these distressing times. There are life-affirming lessons in those bottles, and no, we’re not suggesting that you rush to get to the bottom of them. We’re suggesting a meditation on what wine can mean.
