Capping Out

~It seems there’s a story behind every little detail connected to wine. For instance, there appears to be a story behind the reason for capsules, those sometimes plastic, sometimes light metal often-colorful things that cover the cork and the top portion of the neck of the wine bottle.
~The story I’ve heard is that back in the nineteenth century, when the butler was responsible for opening the wine bottle, some butlers did a bait and switch; they poured the good wine for themselves upon delivery, filled the bottle with plonk and then re-corked it.
~The capsule, or foil as it is sometimes called, was designed to prevent the butlers from doing their nasty deed.
~I make no claim on the validity of this story. In fact, knowing that the cork was being stamped with the producer’s logo, etc., to prevent similar kinds of activity, makes me think the capsule story is made up.
~Capsules seem more likely to have been invented to “finish” the look of the increasingly slick wine package.
~Many old capsules were produced from lead, but you know where that will get you today…
~A tin or metal alloy was—and still is—used, but that sometimes leads to a fine, thin cut on a thumb or finger.
~Plastic seems the capsule of choice these days, when the producer chooses to apply a capsule, that is.
~It seems some producers have been doing away with slipping the capsule over the cork, preferring instead to top the cork with maybe a dot of hardened wax and let the cork show through the glass. It works for me. A bottle with no capsule gives me one less thing to pull at in order to get to the wine, which after all is why I buy the bottle in the first place.
~No capsule also likely cuts producer cost.
~The environment probably also benefits from the vanishing capsule. I don’t think any material used for wine bottle capsules is biodegradable or if there is one it likely takes longer to degrade then the life of a small universe!
~I know for certain one wine bottle topping that doesn’t biodegrade: the screwcap—at least my recycler says so.
~A few weeks ago I was told that I had to take the metal thing that remains as the second half of the screwcap off the bottle neck before handing the bottle over for recycling.
~Fine, I said, I’ll take them off, and then I stupidly tried to do it.
~I am a proponent of the screwcap. I have found no reason not to like its use, until now.
~The fact that the metal screwcap is nearly impossible to completely remove from the bottleneck and that it is not biodegradable makes me rethink my enthusiasm for the product.

As I write this entry, I am thinking about my feelings for wine closures and capsules. Here’s the tally:

I like cork, but hate TCA infected corks, which seem to show up on the most expensive bottles of wine or at the most anticipatory dinners.

I hate those plastic things that are supposed to look and act like cork—they don’t, in either case.

I can live without the capsule; it serves no purpose that I can discern, except that it looks nice.

The screwcap is a great alternative closure: it has yet to bring me TCA; it is not intended to look or act like a cork, and so it doesn’t; it is truly easy to open. Alas, it is a problem for the environment—bad, bad.

~If you want my advice wine industry, do away with corks, plastic thingies, screwcaps, and of course capsules. In fact, do away with bottles.
~If you want my advice government regulators, allow wine producers to sell their wines from small casks or stainless tanks so that customers can bring our own containers and fill up from the tap.
~Such a change would lower the cost of wine, promote social interaction as we gather around the keg, and it would help the environment.
~Look closely—is my tongue in my cheek or is it not?

Copyright, Thomas Pellechia
October 2007. All Rights Reserved.

SO2 Reprise

~OK. I’ll do it one more time. I’ll write about sulfur dioxide, a subject that doesn’t seem ever settled, especially when dealing with that ridiculous CONTAINS SULFITE warning on wine labels.
~Most of us in the business know that the warning was the result of pressure by anti-alcohol lobbyists to make people believe that wine is a dangerous product because it includes one of the sulfites, the one known as sulfur dioxide (SO2).

I’ve read that about 1% of 4 million asthmatics in America are the only people at risk of serious sulfite-induced side effects, and there is hardly any record in the U.S. of serious side effects connected to SO2 and wine.

Yet, few anti-sulfite conversations concern dried fruits or packaged foods, which likely contain as much or more SO2 than wine?

Again, worry over SO2 in wine is a ruse—but one with legs.

~The lobbyists’ message has been heard by many: people still believe sulfites cause headaches—no scientific evidence to support that b.s.—and people still believe that sulfites are always, under any circumstance, inorganic. Generally, sulfur dioxide production is the result of decaying matter, which makes it a rather organic process, but that’s splitting hairs, as it is not carbon-based, which apparently is the definition of organic matter...
~Are you still awake?
~I’m not necessarily against non-intervention wine production. In fact, I applaud attempts to stay free of chemicals in grape growing and winemaking. But there are both exceptions and extenuating circumstances, as there are in any subject matter.
~Many non-interventionist wine producers pound their chests about how they don’t spray their vines against pests and diseases and how they don’t use commercial yeasts to start fermentation (a subject that is so fraught with confusion that I have yet to establish the best way for me to present it to readers).
~The non-interventionists carry the theme into the winery with no fining, no filtration, and no SO2 additions.
~To be sure, some non-interventionists produce fine wines. But some also produce pretty awful wines, and some who get by with a drinkable product, may put forth unstable wines that don’t hold up too well in the bottle over time.
~Again, I don’t condemn non-interventionists but I do condemn those who practice it from the vantage point of a blind spot such as “making wine like grandfather used to make it.”
~In the Italian-American Brooklyn community where I was spawned, grandfathers produced great vinegar among one or two drinkable wines. Those guys pressed, fermented, barrel aged and bottled their wine. Their only intervention was to move the product from place to place. Many of them had no idea what “topping up” meant or what a carbon dioxide blanket could do to slow down oxidation during wine transport.
~Vinegar was often the result of grandfather’s winemaking, and vinegar can be a drawback of non-intervention professional winemaking, too.
~If a non-interventionist doesn’t know when, how or doesn’t care to top off barrels properly all the political belief in the world may not help the wine survive.
~If a non-interventionist can’t recognize an off odor from bacterial activity, all the political belief in the world won’t help correct the problem.
~If a non-interventionist is against correcting problems out of sheer political beliefs, all the science in the world will not be brought to bear on the resulting products, and all the centuries of knowledge might as well have been thrown down the same drain that the wines may need to be thrown down.
~I have tasted a few non-interventionist wines that clearly illustrated what can be wrong when political beliefs meet with scientific realities.
~Whether or not a winemaker wants to believe it, SO2 additions can protect wine from various bacterial attacks and from the effects of oxidation, especially when the winemaking practices may require extra protection.

The latest information I’ve read is that SO2 in wine may not prevent oxidation directly but it may help the wine by some indirect activity.

However it does its work, SO2 was discovered in second century Roman winemaking as a means to address the percentage of wine that turned to vinegar each year; I believe something around 10 percent was lost to the acetobacter bug, a bug that cannot thrive without oxygen.

In modern times, the U.S. government identifies acceptable levels of volatile acidity (a condition caused by chemical reactions concerning acetobacter and ethanol in wine).

Volatile acidity is often a precursor to vinegar but can also be manifested as ethyl acetate development, giving wine the smell of furniture polish.

Proper SO2 additions can prevent these problems.

~When no SO2 is added as part of the non-intervention winemaking regimen, the producer is exempt from the CONTAINS SULFITE labeling requirement, provided the naturally occurring SO2 produced from fermentation does not exceed 10 parts per million (SO2 levels are routinely monitored in most wineries).
~The lack of a label warning often interprets in the marketplace as winemaking that is pure or—dare I say it—organic, but as far as I know the definition of pure or of organic neither includes quality nor “drinkability.”
~When I buy wine, I want it to be drinkable, with or without SO2 additions. Based on my experience thus far, the odds that I will get what I want appear to be stacked against non-intervention.

Government SO2 discussion
Organic Nonintervention

Does SO2 help?

Copyright, Thomas Pellechia
October, 2007. All Rights Reserved.

I'm back.

~When I decided to make my recent trip to northern Italy, I discovered a few others who would be visiting the Piemonte region around the same time (it was also truffle season).
~My relationship with the people who were visiting Piemonte stems from contributions on a few wine-oriented bulletin boards on the Web. I had met only one of the people in person—once—but he is so disliked on many bulletin boards that others wonder why I even talk to him.
~I talk to the fellow because I understand that he is harmless and that he is also interested in wine rather than in talking about wine. He says that some of the things wine geeks post online drive him crazy; something we have in common!
~The difference between us is that his responses often cause a fight.
~Anyway, I avoided meeting up with wine geeks on my travel through Piemonte and into Valtellina. My trip was by invitation from a Danish wine importer named Henrik to whom I am deeply indebted for his hospitality and the meetings he had set up for me.
~Thanks to Henrik, I met with many producers that I’ve never heard of and likely will not hear of in the U.S. until small, passionate importers discover them.
~I got the distinct impression that many of the Italian producers I met don’t say what they really feel about wine geekdom for fear of antagonizing the flow of American money, even if the dollar is rather worthless right now.

Every time I changed dollars into euros I not only lost money, I felt like I was a citizen of a Third World economy.

The dollar is so worthless that a few producers told me they are not making money in the American market and therefore they are looking to Asia right now.

~One or two producers, however, did tell me how they feel.
~By design, the Piemonte producers I met were not the names most Americans will recognize: no Gaja, no Giacosa, and no Conterno, all names that surely understand the value of wine geekdom. But I already know their wines. Meeting them would serve little purpose— whether it is real or perceived, I don’t do well genuflecting to royalty.
~Still, with a few exceptions, the wines I tasted were outstanding. The exceptions included some producers who aren’t careful in their methods and some who seem to think wine is supposed to be wood.
~In Italy the word “barrique” has lately become idolized—well, not the word but the process, a process that too many producers overdo because, as one producer told me, “It’s what Americans want.”

“Barrique” refers to aging wine in small French oak barrels, a concept that was just about unheard of in most of Italian wine production until two or so decades ago.

~"It's not what all Americans want,” I told the producer, but he only knows what he is told and what people seem to have learned from wine magazines, not to mention what tourists buy from him.He admitted that he does not drink barriqued wine at home.
~When I pointed out the promotion value of magazine ratings he seemed indignant, going into a dissertation on why he does not stoop so low as to beg for reviews. I got the feeling someone was forcing him to produce over-oaked wines.

One producer said to me that he already knows the quality of his wines and he doesn’t need Gambero Rosso’s glasses or American point scores to make him feel any better (Gambero is a major wine review magazine in Italy that assigns numbers of glasses to rate wine).

It seemed that, like me, these producers have trouble genuflecting.

~To my taste, the “barrique” method wipes out many otherwise perfectly fine wines. I wish Italians would stop doing that to their wines. Some producers commit the crime on Barolo and Barabresco, but most of the criminal activity is perpetrated on Barbera.
~At two producer’s cantina, I tasted side-by-side Barbera of the same vintage, one in the traditional method and one with the added French barrel aging time. When subjected to “barrique” treatment, the normally racy, often acidic Barbera is offensive to me, like chewing on a wooden front deck that had been soaked in acid.
~One producer seemed impressed that I managed to identify his Barbaresco wines as typically traditional. He had been ridiculing Americans who visit the big names to taste wines that he dislikes.
~Fortunately, the tradition behind producing Barolo and Barbaresco is still strong in Piemonte as well as the Sforzato tradition in Valtellina. The tradition in each region does not preclude oak, rather it highlights judicious use of barrels. When done right, the tradition offers stellar wines.
~Still, the “barrique” stuff made me wonder to what extent the New World truly influences Old World winemaking, and to what extent the influence may be good or bad.
~I suppose the jury is still out, but I know where I stand on the issue.

Copyright, Thomas Pellechia
October, 2007. All Rights Reserved.

It's Idyllic!

~In the vernacular of the nineteen fifties, television offered America the Little Ole Winemaker, a jolly man with a singsong voice and a nice pair of lederhosen. He was supposed to represent winemaking at Italian Swiss Colony Wines, one of the largest operations in California back then.
~Surely, the old man was a marketing ploy. Italian Swiss Colony had long before shed its Old World immigrant roots. It had become part of Louis Petri’s United Vintners, which also owned Inglenook in the nineteen fifties.
~In fact, it was those Little Old Winemaker television ads that helped bring Italian Swiss Colony wines across the nation.
~Those winery names don’t mean as much these days as they did back then, but the idea of a little old man making personalized styled wines ain’t dead yet—just read the back label.
~I wish someone would hire me to write wine back labels; some of the stuff is truly sadly done, from the hokey concepts to the special wine industry grammar that often defies the English language.
~Alas, I may never get the chance to be one of those back label writers; I write mainly nonfiction!
~The little old man on the many back labels still produces wine with the family tradition as his guide. He grows only the finest grapes, picks them at their peak of ripeness, gently crushes them as if they were his infant children needing a loving squeeze, and then watches over them day and night, like they really are his children.
~By the time he gets the wines into the bottle, the old man must feel as if he is sending his kids off to college—but when these kids leave they bring money in, not take it away.
~In truth, few of those little old winemakers exist these days, especially in California, where it costs more per acre of prime land than it would to buy a small country. Most of the family wineries that have survived are either part of a bigger company or quite big themselves; and any remaining little old winemakers likely have blackberries with them in the vineyard, to give and receive information from their multiple properties, some of which are tended by robot-like computers and then, at harvest, are picked by the robot’s offspring.
~In the winery, the old winemaker doesn’t need to get up in the middle of the night any longer to make sure that the red wine fermenting cap is punched down. The vineyard computer’s cousin likely takes care of that kind of activity now, just as sure as the computer takes care of a lot of the winemaking processes from pressure during pressing to temperature control while in tanks.
~Even the bottling line, which often was the final purview of human wine production intervention, is almost on automatic control.
~It’s nice to think of the idyllic life of a vintner, and idyll may still be an accurate description for some winemaking, but it isn’t exactly an accurate description for most wine production.
~The idea of a dedicated old man hunching over his oak barrels in the wee hours of the morning to make sure that we get the very best in wine quality sells just like the words “natural” and “organic.” But wine is often about big money; if you don’t believe it, read below about the money recently spent on the Charles Krug Winery.
~I snicker at some of the back label gibberish, but I suppose I am equally captured by the idea of a dedicated person giving singular personal attention to his (or her) wines. That’s why I still read back labels and that’s why I still search for such wineries. They exist, but generally they will be found these days in unlikely places, perhaps in the 46 United States that are not part of the top four wine producing states in the country. (I hear some of them indeed exist in NAPA—see the link below.)
~One other type of winery that gets my attention is the one that thinks about the environment. It may not be obvious, but beyond the potential pollution of the environment through grape growing, wineries are major water and energy users. That’s why the story in the GREEN link below makes me perk up.
~One day I'll get to write that back label. Who knows, maybe when I do I'll wrap myself up in the idyllic and forget reality? That could be nice.

NOTE: This will be my last entry for September. I am going to be traveling. I’m scheduled to return in early October and am aiming to make the next VinoFictions entry around October 6.

Krug NAPA GREEN

Copyright, Thomas Pellechia
September, 2007. All Rights Reserved.

Once was blind but now I see

~What are the pros and cons of blind wine tasting?
~What is blind wine tasting?

Depending upon the situation, a blind wine tasting is either a parlor game or educational.

A blind wine tasting is also a way to evaluate wines professionally, which is, to me, its best application.

~There are two types of blind wine tastings.
~In one type of blind tasting, you know the identity of the wines, but you are not told which wine is hidden in which brown bag and in which order the wines will be served.
~The other type of tasting is called a double-blind; you neither know the identity of the wines in the tasting nor the order in which they will be served—in my view, you should not be told the grape or wine types in the tasting.
~Ringers are thrown into many blind tastings. At parlor games, they are there to fool tasters; in a professional setting, they are there to gauge the tasters’ consistency.
~In any blind tasting, the bottle shape and neck capsule should be hidden from the tasters—whether consciously or unconsciously, some use these as clues.

With the exception of the rare or trained person, most of us are not deeply in tune with our perceptions.

We have heard stories of people who once could see but after having lost sight have gained a heightened sense of smell, hearing, and/or direction; they are forced to trust their innate perceptive abilities and their abilities grow stronger.

~Most of us are not good at taking the time and thought needed to recall smells and tastes. Indeed, some of us have problems identifying what it is we smell and taste, even with eyesight intact.
~It’s one thing to have a memory of a particular wine, but it’s quite another to have a memory of particular sensory stimulus; the trained taster instinctively attempts to marry the two and so, the trained taster has a far better chance at identifying wines correctly in either a blind or double-blind tasting. But even trained tasters have problems, especially if they spend time trying to gather clues.

Clues can sabotage your training by fooling you.

~I have no interest either in fooling others or in proving myself to them, which is what many parlor blind tastings turn out to offer.
~I believe that blind tasting is essential for professionals, mainly for technical/quality purposes (I am partial to double-blind, but that method has become a rarity in wine competitions). But if you must engage in them in your parlor, it’s best for every blind taster—trained or not—to go with instincts.
~The odds are that if untrained tasters listen to their senses rather than what they think they know or are supposed to know, their unconscious memories will provide the best information on which to form an opinion.
~Oh, and a blind tasting should always be a silent tasting. What someone says during a tasting often takes on the power of suggestion over others.

The one thing a blind tasting should not be able to do is to make the taster like something that the taster does not like.

With that in mind, how is it that some tasters who hate a particular wine can proclaim it the best in the blind tasting?

~Damned if I know the answer to that question.
~Maybe the tasters aren’t properly trained, maybe clues fool them, maybe they try too hard, maybe they are influenced more by labels than by wine, or maybe a combination of many things.
~Maybe the real reason that I dislike the parlor game is because this thing about liking a wine at a blind tasting that one did not generally like before the tasting—it has happened to me...

How-to

Copyright, Thomas Pellechia
September 2007. All Rights Reserved.

Indigenous marketing

~For years I’ve been telling people who take my class or read my columns and/or books that the thing separating wine produced from grapes and other fermented fruits is that grapes are the only fruit, when ripened, that have the right volume of sugar and natural yeast to produce a minimum of 8% alcohol. This week I find that I may have to restate that belief.
~First, I received my copy of the recent edition of Wines and Vines Magazine; in it is a story by Tim Patterson about yeast and wine alcohol. Patterson claims that the high alcohol wines coming on the market today may be the result of commercial yeast strains, but they may also be the result of poor understanding of yeast fermentation plus inaccurate grape sugar readings.
~Second, a California winemaker whose wines Robert Parker, and others, have rated highly, posted on the Parker-centric Web bulletin board that he routinely gets high alcohol (as much as almost 20%) by fermenting with “indigenous” yeast only and by adding no nutrients to the fermenting must.
~I had a problem with this winemaker’s claim mainly because I was taught, and prevailing wisdom seemed to be, that indigenous or locally wild yeast cannot ferment much beyond 15% alcohol—they weaken and die off at that point.
~I started a thread on the bulletin board about yeast fermentation and I was rewarded with a bunch of grape grower and winemaker posts that both explained and confused the situation.
~Based on the marathon thread, it remains likely that so-called indigenous or wild yeast may not be able to ferment much higher than 15% alcohol, but it is equally likely that we may never know that for sure.
~The advent of commercially viable yeast cultivars was an advance in winemaking in that it gave more certainty over a fermentation, especially that the fermentation would not be easily interrupted and it could also ferment almost to complete dryness and to higher alcohol.
~The commercial yeasts supersede indigenous yeasts—they take over the fermentation from the locals. What’s more, when their yeast populations grew and spread into the winery and then into the air, the commercial strains mixed with the indigenous wild strains, making unclear which yeast strain either starts or finishes a fermentation.
~The information regarding questionable indigenous yeast strains heightened my problem with the above winemaker’s claim that he used only indigenous yeast and added no nutrition yet he routinely got alcohol in excess of 18%. Plus, he did this while taking in grapes from vineyards in various locations and fermenting his wines at a local cooperative facility, where no one would know how many yeast strains have been let loose into the atmosphere.
~The odds of this fellow’s yeast being indigenous seem so low as to make his claim seem like a complete marketing ploy, and marketing it is—many of his followers/consumers place value in his desire to produce “natural” wines.
~Water and sulfur dioxide have been added to wine for many centuries, so a case can be made that they are “natural” winemaking methods. But modern-day use of the word “natural” carries the implication that the producer of the food or drink doesn’t do much more than stand by and let nature take its course, which in winemaking would likely be a total disaster.
~I suppose this is a long-winded way of saying that I think food and drink purveyors should be silenced when it comes to using the word “natural.” All production is a manipulation of some sort; the only natural food and drink production is the one that happens in the fields when no human or other animal steps in to “guide” things.
~This post is also a way of admitting that, while I want to shed light on truth in wine, on the subject of fermentation I have to accept that I cannot do so. It’s simply too complicated, even for those who ferment commercial wine, for me to make a definitive statement about what goes on with yeasts and fermentation.
~On the bright side, many in the wine business have told consumers all along that fermentation is a most difficult process to understand and to unravel; they were not lying to us.
~Thanks to that tiny organism called yeast, wine remains a wonderfully mysterious product, and I am of course happy that the yeasts do their work. I don’t, however, enjoy wine that is hot with too much alcohol.
~I don’t care whether or not a wine seems balanced otherwise, when the alcohol exceeds 14% by volume I generally tune out.

I’m talking about table wine here.

I drink and enjoy fortified wines that come in between 15% and 20% alcohol, but not for the same reason I enjoy table wine. I like table wine with dinner; fortified wines I sip, possibly with cheese, nuts or chocolate.

Then, there is the exception: a hearty soup, and even some fish dishes, paired with sherry.

~I also tune out when I detect that a wine producer is trying to bs me, as in telling me that the high alcohol of the wine is the “natural” result of letting things happen.
~That kind of marketing message does not ring true.
~Besides, if allowed to do what they want to do, grapes would likely turn into vinegar and then into something resembling varnish—naturally.

Wines&Vines Bulletin Board1 BulletinBoard2

Copyright, Thomas Pellechia
September 2007. All Rights Reserved.

Credibility

~A long time ago, longer than I care to remember, or admit, I drank Gallo products. Not that I don’t think Gallo products are worth drinking; in fact, many of them are superior wines, as the Gallo company is one of the most sophisticated wine producers on earth, and it has spawned some fantastic winemakers as well as wine marketers.
~The Gallo products I drank those many years ago had names like Thunderbird, Twister, and Boone’s Farm. Hey, I was young!
~In any event, the story goes that the Gallo formula for Thunderbird came about after company sales reps noticed a store in Oakland selling cheap wine with packets of lemonade. The point being, Gallo saw an opportunity and seized it.
~Back then the domestic wine scene was woefully deficient. Some marvelous wines were being produced in California, but not many Americans were drinking them. United States citizens only recently started to take to table wine on a large scale, finally surpassing beer consumption in 2005 and in 2006.
~Today, with mass products like Yellow Tail and Charles Shaw wines, the latter known as Two Buck Chuck (TBC), the price of some table wines make it unreasonable for even the most novice of novices to resort to drinking T’bird and its ilk, unless of course the idea is alcohol rather than taste (T’bird comes in at 20 percent by volume).
~While the cheap table wines with mass appeal may not offer the excitement or even the adventure that vintage premium wines offer, those among us who want to get started with wine or who simply can’t afford a so-called great bottle each day at least have better options than we had 40 years ago.
~The Gallo brothers were known as ruthless, tireless, aggressive, and shrewd. They certainly were smart. They knew the domestic market and they knew how to profit from it.
~The same can arguably be said about one particular man whose family owns the Charles Shaw Brand, among many other brands.
~Fred Franzia makes himself known. He has been in trouble with the law, he was on the outs with his father after dad sold the original Franzia wine and name to corporate interests, he fights with grape growers, he petitions the Supreme Court; in other words, he may be in the Gallo mold.
~Where Franzia differs is that the Gallo family did not blatantly court the press. Franzia seems to glow in the press’ limelight, spewing as much crudeness as print will allow. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he was using the press...
~Recently, an article about Fred Franzia showed up on CNNmoney.com, under Business 2.0 Magazine (which I have heard has since been discontinued, but I don’t know for sure).
~The article rehashed much of the stuff about the rise of TBC and its parent company, Bronco, plus the many outrageous things that Franzia has said and done and continues to do and say. For that, it is just an article about seeming ongoing news.
~My problem with the article is neither the subject matter nor the fact that it is old news, but what I read in the first paragraph and then subsesquent to the paragraph.
~One of the things I learned about writing as a journalist is that you need to grab the reader in the first paragraph. You can’t do that effectively with a glaring mistake such as placing Haut-Brion in Burgundy, which is what the article does.
~After encountering that glaring error, instead of reading the article, I was looking for more problems—that’s not how you want to grab the reader. The writer lost credibility.
~As the profile proceeded, the interviewer interjected himself into the interview, a style of writing that makes me feel as if there is an agenda behind the article, and that makes me feel manipulated.
~By interjecting his views or opinions into the profile, the author takes on an added responsibility to know the subject. When this particular author treated with derision the fact that after decades in the wine business Franzia refers to grapes as “varieties” instead of “varietals,” he tipped his hand.

Grapes are classified first as within a species and then as varieties within the species; wines named after grapes or showing a particular grape’s characteristics are called varietal wines or varietals for short; varieties is a noun; varietals, used to describe a wine, is an adjective.

Franzia’s reference of grapes as varieties was correct.

The writer either did not know his subject or his grammar.

Halfway through the article, I stopped reading.

~I am not against writing opinions, I’m engaging in the practice right now. But I am not crazy about interjecting opinions inside a seemingly fact-based personality profile, and I certainly am against erroneous facts.
~Fred Franzia may be all the things that people say he is and he may be half of the things he says he is. He may also be a media hound who keeps his name out there as a means of free promotion. I don’t know any of this to be or not to be true.
~I do know that the possibility existed that I might have learned something about the wine industry or at least about a particular wine company had the writer not sabotaged his own effort.

Where were the editors at money.com?

~Finally, it bothers me that the article was not written to a wine drinking audience but as a news item, which means there may be some unknowing consumers traveling Burgundy right now looking to visit Haut-Brion and to find out which grape varietals they use for their wines!

The article

Copyright, Thomas Pellechia
September, 2007. All Rights Reserved.