Month: June 2025

Each month, Power Tasting features a Place to Visit when someone is on a wine tasting trip.  These are not wine-related locations, but interesting spots in some region of Wine Country that deserve a visit when in the area.  Many are fairly obvious, like Paris, Porto or Vienna.  Others are popular with tourists who come into that area.  But there are a few that are forgotten; actually, it is more that they are overlooked.

These places are never destinations.  We just happened to be in them and found them charming and welcoming.  There were no buses; no crammed parking lots and virtually no visitors other than ourselves.  San Gimignano in Tuscany was like that the first time we stopped there; now it is as crowed as Times Square.  We can even remember when it was difficult to find lunch in Healdsburg.  The kind of places we are talking about are still unspoiled.

A Buonconvento street scene.  Photo courtesy of castellotoscani.com.

When you’re wine tasting in Tuscany you may find yourself on the road from Siena, on your way to Montalcino.  There will be a sign pointing to Buonconvento, literally meaning the “good convento” but interpreted by the locals as “a happy place”.  We once pulled off the road and found ourselves at a standup cappuccino bar, with a few older folks staring at us. They were friendly but curious, wondering “why are you people here?”  In fractured Italian we explained that we just wanted some coffee and a rest stop.  They, in broken English, urged us to take a look around the town. 

The streets were clean; children were playing; and the local church was quite pretty with some interesting frescoes.  We have read since that it is considered to be one of the most beautiful villages in Tuscany.  We can’t speak to that, but it was very typical of what we expected a Tuscan village to look like and were glad to have stopped.

Peniches along the Canal du Midi in Poilhes.

Another such village is Poilhes in southern France.  There is some dispute how to pronounce it, but the closest we can get is “poo-yeh”.  There are vineyards surrounding the commune extend as far as the eye can see, so the surrounding area is a great destination for learning about Languedoc wines. 

You can drive from one end of Poilhes to the other in about two minutes.  If you don’t blink, you’ll see the Canal du Midi and rental boats called péniches moored there at the end of the day.  There’s a chic restaurant we found overrated, but the boating tourists flock to it.  We preferred a simple café nestled under a spreading platane tree, run by a couple of British emigrants.  Even more so, we loved wine store-cum-hotel called Vinauberge, which we have profiled previously.  There is a huge selection of local wines that can be sampled by the pour.

There’s nothing much going on in Poilhes.  You can walk along the canal or visit the cemetery with its poignant memorials to wartime dead.  That’s about it.  And that’s the point.  It’s a great place to do nothing.

There are fashions in cars, clothes and cosmetics.  And there are fashions in wine, even in the popularity of wineries to visit.  When we first started visiting Napa Valley, there were not nearly as many wineries as there are today.  And not all of them were open for tasting.  The top attractions were names like Mondavi, Chandon and Heitz.  Small, out-of-the-way wineries were barely talked of. 

The view from Storybook Mountain winery.  Photo courtesy of NapaValley.com

But those in the know, mostly West Coast friends would tell us, “If you get as far as Calistoga, you must go to Storybook Mountain winery”.  Frankly, it sounded more like a ride at Disneyland than a winery.  So we went and we liked it very much.  It is hard to call Storybook a forgotten winery, especially since they have been making wine there since 1883.  But people no longer whisper its name anymore, so we will speak of it, out loud.

Storybook isn’t exactly off the beaten path, but it is at the northern end of it, four miles north of Calistoga.  Go only a little further and you’re in Knight’s Valley.  It’s way up in the hills, perhaps why it’s not so well known these days.

The name of the winery is a story in itself.  It was started by a German immigrant named Adam Grimm, who was soon joined by his brother Jacob.  So: the Brothers Grimm, hence the storybook.  Their label is a fox trying to reach up to some grapes, which is an Aesop fable not a Grimm fairytale.  But you get the idea.

The ancient caves at Storybook Mountain.  Photo courtesy of Crafted Brands.

After Prohibition, the winery was abandoned until a scholar named Jerry Seps bought it in 1976.  From the outset, they planted Zinfandel and that’s the grape used in the wines for which Storybook is best known.  They make four of them plus a Zin rosé.  They also have a Cabernet Sauvignon and a single white wine, a Viogner.

One of the great attractions in visiting Storybook is the beauty of the place.  All visits include a tour and a tasting.  The caves survived from the times of the Grimm brothers.  The land is surrounded by a redwood grove, which is part of the tour.  The views from Storybook – it is a mountain – are ravishing.

Come to Storybook for the wine and the views, but also appreciate the history.  It isn’t only that the land was producing wine grapes for over 100 years.  This vineyard has roots (pun intended) in Europe but also in the revolution in American winemaking that began in Napa Valley in the 1960’s and 70’s.  They served Cabernet Sauvignon at that famous taste-off in Paris in 1976, so Storybook couldn’t have been there.  But they have had their wines served at White House dinners and they were among the first, along with Ridge and Trefethen, to see the potential in the Zinfandel grape for wine greatness.

So take the tour, enjoy the views and sip the wines, knowing that you are partaking in a story (also intended) that goes back deep into Napa Valley’s past.

Power Tasting’s motto is “Know what you like.  Remember what it’s called”.  Developing a taste memory is one of the most difficult skills to develop for wine professionals.  For us amateurs, it’s enough to be able to keep in mind some general characteristics, such as “X winery makes light, fruity Pinot Noirs” or “A typical Napa Valley Chardonnay is buttery and oaky”.  For all the importance of remembering, there is also something to be said for its counterpart: forgetting.

  From the movie Sideways. Photo courtesy of 20^th Century Fox.

When entering a tasting room, we have to forget what we’ve read, heard or tasted previously and bring an open mind (and mouth) to evaluating what we’re being served.

• The only thing that matters is what’s in the glass.  We have had occasions to return to a winery whose products we hadn’t cared for.  We have had some happy surprises, such as at Napa’s Black Stallion.  And we have also had more disappointments than we like to remember.  Perhaps ownership of a winery changed hands, or they hired a new winemaker or maybe they just hit a bad year.  Focus on the wine in front of you and you will improve your tasting acumen.
• Don’t always trust your first sip.  This is especially the case when the server opens a new bottle in front of you.  We have often experienced that at home, with good science behind our reaction.  Every wine label has a warning: “Contains sulfites”.  They’re used to kill germs and prevent spoilage, but they also may leave a slightly sulfurous gas in the bottle.  In part, that’s why we let wine breathe, but that’s not always possible in a wine tasting setting.  So forget the first taste, swirl the wine somewhat aggressively to let the gas escape and taste it again.
• Don’t let your memories fool you.  It’s a natural human tendency to approach an experience with expectations and then let those expectations override the current reality.  This is more than being in the moment, as previously recommended. It requires an active effort not to think about what you think you remember (not always the same as what you actually remember).
• Stick to your guns.  You can and should continue to have your own opinion about a wine even though other people are trying to tell you that you are wrong.  Almost by definition, there’s no arguing taste (although that’s exactly what we do when we go wine tasting).  So if you like a wine and everyone else in your party detests it, you can forget their complaints.  It’s a good wine…for you.
• One bad day doesn’t rule out a winery forever.  We have written before that you ought to give a winery a second chance.  The mightiest hitters sometimes strike out.  The Nobel Prize winning author doesn’t always write a masterpiece.  And sometimes the most renowned vineyards come up with a poorer wine.  So, as we say in Brooklyn, fuggedaboutit.

When we go wine tasting, we look forward to discovering wineries and wines that we never knew about before.  For as many years as we have indulged in this avocation, we still make wonderful discoveries each trip.  But we also find ourselves visiting some wineries repeatedly because we know their wines and appreciate the opportunity to taste them again.  This is especially true with limited edition wines that are only available at the winery. 

So imagine our disappointment when we arrive at a tasting room only to find that certain of our favorites are not available.  It’s a shame when they’ve run out of a particular wine, but it’s near tragic when we find that the wine we were looking forward to is not longer being made.  Well, tragic is a bit strong, but it does make us sad. 

This problem only applies to wines from certain places, in our experience.  In Europe, they’ve made the same wines from the same grapes in the same places for centuries.  They’re not about to change now, and there are often laws preventing them from doing so.  Only in the United States and Australia do they make wines that come and then go. So we’d like to pay homage to some wines we’ll never taste again.

Preston’s iconic Moscato Curioso poster, framed and hanging on our wall.  There’s a smile here, because the yard in front of the Preston winery is crawling with cats, which they love.

• Long Island’s North Fork now boasts over 60 wineries, but the first winemaker to turn a potato patch into a vineyard was Alex Hargrave in 1973.  In 1999, he sold his winery and vineyards to a noble Italian family, who now operate Castello di Borghese.  Today’s wines have a distinctively Italian character.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but they’re different from what the Hargrave Vineyard used to make on the same land.  For their time, they were unusual wines, as the region was trying to develop its own style.  They aged nicely but there’s no way to taste anything like them any longer.

• Decades ago, we travelled to the Hunter Valley in Australia.  A winery in the region, Tulloch, was serving something they called, humbly, Tulloch’s Table Red.  It tasted to us like sunshine in a bottle, and we bought several bottles.  A few years later we were in Sydney and searched for it in local wine stores, only to be told that it was an experiment by the winery and they no longer made it.  All we were left with was the memory.

• Finally, Joseph Phelps in St. Helena, Napa Valley, used to sell a Rhône-style wine that they called Vin du Mistral.  (The Mistral is a seasonal cold wind that blows over Provence.)  It was very reminiscent of the wines from the southern Rhône valley and it was quite affordable.  Phelps discontinued it in 2008.  They now have a wine by the same name but it’s not the same wine.  The grapes now come from Central Coast vineyards in the Santa Barbara and Paso Robles areas, not Napa Valley.  And it’s no longer inexpensive.