Summer Drinking

Last weekend, the sun beat down on Napa and Sonoma, hitting highs of nearly 40 degrees. Temperatures are normally in the low 30s, cooling down at night to pleasantly moderate temperatures (which is why the two counties are such good grape-growing areas), but when it's that warm the heat stays, making the nights very uncomfortable. There have been a few, brief heat spikes like this over the summer, which is one of the factors (including the lack of rain) that has made 2015 such an awkward vintage.

the different stages of Zinfandel all on one bunch

In many parts of Napa and Sonoma, the harvest of the white grapes has already begun, with the black grapes not far behind. The stress the vines have been under this year is likely to make the quality of the 2015 vintage good, but production is going to be relatively low - which is a good thing after some bumper vintages.

Aside from the effect of the hot weather on the grapes, another pressing question arises. What to drink? I need wine that's refreshing but complex enough for food, beer that's light and summery but not bland, or a cocktail that's not too intense and hot. Here are a few of the things I've been drinking to combat the hotter days.

Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA (6.4%; $9.99 for a 6-pack)

new label on the left, old on the right: same great beer

Not surprisingly, the warm weather has seen me drinking beer more often, particularly IPAs. American IPAs are much hoppier and drier than their malty British equivalents, which makes them perfectly refreshing for this warm weather. From San Diego to Seattle, the West Coast has a host of options to choose from, of which Oregon's Deschutes is a great example.

The first time I tried this beer was two years ago in Portland, on a rainy September evening. As delicious as it tasted then, it takes on another level in the summer sun. Most beers are made using dry hops, which give beer that recognisably dry, bitter taste. For the Fresh Squeezed, Deschutes also use fresh hops, which provide green, herbaceous aromas - almost the beer equivalent of a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. To add to this green freshness are pungent citrus, grapefruit aromas that come from the Citra and Mosaic hops, all together creating a lively, refreshing IPA.

El Maestro Sierra Fino ($15.99)

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I recommend a sherry for some summer supping. A fino - or its close equivalent, manzanilla - is an ideal counter to the heat: light, pale, and dry, but with enough complexity and weight to be satisfying on the finish. Finding good sherry in Napa is not the easiest of tasks, but El Maestro Sierra are a producer widely enough available. Their fino has a nice nutty salinity to it, with lightly baked apples and a woody backbone from four years in old American oak barrels. It's wonderfully refreshing, yet subtly sophisticated, a drink to sip on the porch while watching the world slowly go by.

Dirty Dick's Downfall

This is my own take on a variation of the classic Negroni. It's 60ml gin (in this case, Sipsmith's London Dry Gin), 15ml dry vermouth, and 15ml Punt e Mes (which I use instead of Campari), with a lemon twist. That's a lot of dry, bitter flavours, but that's what I like to drink in the summer - drinks that are too sweet, no matter how high the acidity, can feel a bit too weighty. It also provides an always welcome opportunity to toast the fall of Richard Nixon, referred to in the drink's name.

Tascante Ghiaia Nera 2012 ($20)

 

The obvious and common thing to do in the summer is to drink white wine, but somehow the tannins and fruits of red wine are what I often turn to in the evening. Maybe all the times I've visited the south of France, Italy, and Spain, where red wine dominates despite the climate, have led me to associate drinking tannic, drying red wines with hot weather. I drank this Sicilian wine (made from the high-quality grape Nerello Mascalese grown on the slopes of Mt. Etna) last weekend as the evening very slowly cooled, together with a delicious pizza. The high acidity makes the wine extremely refreshing, while the integrated tannins and red fruits paired perfectly with the pizza's sauces, cheese, and meats.

The key to any drink that works in the summer is having an almost bitter dryness, together with a refreshingly high acidity. That acidity and complexity is also necessary when pairing with food - and we need to eat in this heat too. The temperature of the drink is, to some extent, less important - if you're stuffing ice into a cider to cool you down, you may as well be drinking apple juice.

A Year in the US

It's now a year since I flew into the US. A lot has happened in that time: I've got married, gained my green card, and started working. I've tasted several hundred California wines and partially finished in San Francisco the WSET Diploma I started in Manchester. And day-to-day I've lived the American life that I'd only briefly witnessed on holidays and TV. Here are some cultural observations on the US, and maybe how the US has changed me.

view from the Mayacamas mountains towards San Francisco

tipping

Getting used to tipping no matter what the service - though it's usually good - took some getting used to. Buy a beer and tip a dollar, even if you've been waiting five minutes and the glass isn't full. Go to a restaurant and all of a sudden the expensive meal becomes very, very expensive when you add a gratuity - again, regardless of whether the food was good or arrived on time.

After a month or so, it became second nature to me, adding on the 20% without even thinking about it. And now I find myself complaining about not being tipped. I'm working in a tasting room, where I serve five pours of wine, talk extensively about wine and the weather, and look after each set of customers for around 45 minutes. And receive next to no tips. This has always been my problem with tipping culture: in certain situations you are supposed to tip (bars, restaurants, the hairdresser, taxis) and so you do; in others, there is no expectation to tip, and so you don't. Somehow I need to integrate the concept of automatic tipping into tasting room culture.

wine and regulations

Tasting rooms are unlike most found in Europe. They range in style - some are big and ostentatious, others are small and intimate, designed to reflect the ethos of the winery. Especially in the Napa Valley, tour buses and limousines pour into tasting rooms, depositing drunken groups of visitors eager to spend lots of money.

every winery has a dog

This is part of a very different wine culture. For a start, it's still young, to a certain degree recovering from Prohibition. Many drinkers like their wines sweet (even reds); others claim to abhor sweetness in their wines and complain about dry wines being sweet. Understanding of wine is very much varietal driven which results in a lot of resolute prejudice - "I don't like Chardonnay. It's too sweet."

Regulations are another hangover from Prohibition. A winery cannot serve food unless the customer buys wine with it: a concept I kind of like. Wine, such an integral part of the California economy, cannot be shipped to many other states because those states (Kentucky, Oklahoma, Louisiana, New Jersey, Pennyslvania) don't want their people drinking too much booze. That's right, Louisiana, home of New Orleans, won't allow wine to be sent directly to people's homes.

driving

The US has one particular rule that makes driving a nightmare: you can both undertake and overtake cars. In theory, this opens up the road and makes passing slower cars easier. In practice, it leads to drivers hogging one lane because they're too scared to change lanes. And this often means four cars all lined up next to one another going the exact same speed. Roundabouts are scarce. Instead, there are stop signs at every junction at which every driver has to halt even if there isn't a car in sight. Outside a major city such as San Francisco, public transport is virtually non-existent. With this dependency on the car and rules which directly clog up traffic, driving in California is slow, often stop-start, even outside rush hour. It's the one negative aspect of living in this warm, sunny, wine-soaked state.

San Francisco

I've lived in some interesting cities - cocky Manchester, dirty Dublin, and mad Madrid - but my visits to San Francisco have revealed a city quite like no other. It's unforgettably beautiful, surrounded by water and mountains, rising on its own small peninsula. It's vibrant, each block revealing its own character, bars and restaurants driven by youthful enthusiasm. There are established, well-to-do areas and edgy quarters still emerging from industry and neglect. On one visit, a taxi driver described it to me as "beautiful but dysfunctional," which is very accurate. The city is full of roadworks and construction, trying and failing to keep pace with a constantly growing population, bringing traffic to a regular standstill. Rent prices are impossibly high, and commuters sit in rush hour traffic around the city for hours on end. For all its attractions, I'm not sure I could live in San Francisco.

the wine itself...

Napa Valley wine is uniformly expensive and uniformly Cabernet Sauvignon. There are some extremely good wineries in Napa, but I wish there were more variety and more affordable wines available. Land in Napa is so expensive, though, that it's difficult to make wine without having to charge high prices - which is why everyone sticks to Cabernet because that's what customers will pay money for.

The price of wine is not only a Napa problem. California wine is either dirt cheap or expensive. Far too few wines offer truly good value for money. Here in California, that doesn't matter too much as people are willing and able to pay, but if California is to compete on the global stage with Chile, Argentina, South Africa, or Australia it has to produce more competitively priced wines.

Outside Napa, there's wonderful variety. Name a grape and someone somewhere makes a varietal wine out of it. Sonoma produces everything from Pinot to Zinfandel, with obscure French and Italian varieties in between. Paso Robles has exceptional Rhône blends. Santa Barbara and around is known for Pinot and Chardonnay, but has perhaps the greatest potential in California for Syrah. And then there are the hippies in the Sierra foothills, sometimes - whether deliberately or accidentally - producing great wine at decent prices.

...and other drinks

I'd argue that California is still behind the rest of the States in its craft distilleries - although in Germain-Robin they have the original and best, producing brandies from cool, wild Mendocino as good as the greatest Cognacs. I am surrounded by great breweries, all producing very drinkable, hoppy IPAs as well as their own distinctive creations: Bear Republic in Healdsburg, Lagunitas in Petaluma, Sierra Nevada in Chico, and, best of all, Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa, as well as a host of up-and-coming microbreweries. It's a good time for a beer drinker to be in California.

boo to the metric system

I've become so accustomed to fiercely dry, hoppy IPAs that on a brief trip back to the UK the malty bitters I'd been drinking all my life were quite a shock to the system. Other aspects of American life I've found more difficult to become accustomed to. The US is the only country I've ever visited which defiantly avoids the logical metric system: recipes call for cups and ounces; temperatures are only given in fahrenheit; the twenty-four hour clock is never used; and an American pint is smaller than a British pint, one unit of imperial measurement I am familiar with.

Californians talk about the weather a lot, even though every sunny, warm day is the same as the last. A life of sunshine and no rain - now that's something I've begun to take for granted.

Russian River Brewery

California isn't just about wine, and the first place I visited on my trip was Russian River Brewery, on the recommendation of @drinkaddition who rates it as one of the best American craft breweries there is. The impression he gave me, though, was of a small-scale microbrewery surrounded by upscale wineries, fighting for beer in the middle of wine country. Instead, what I found was a thriving brewpub in the Sonoma town of Santa Rosa; @winebizkid and I had to wait forty minutes to get a table and it was clear everyone was in the mood for beer and not wine. 

This reflects the status of craft beer in the US at the moment. When I visited Portland, Oregon, last September, the crowds at craft breweries and brewpubs were similar: packed with young and old, men and women, all happily exploring flights of beers of intense flavours and extreme styles. American craft brewing isn't just about IPAs, but porters and stouts, wheat beers and blondes, and full-on Belgian-style sours.

In fact, so successful has Russian River Brewery been, it has had to cut back on its availability: demand was too great for it to meet and now it doesn't supply outside of the area, probably explaining why so many are flocking to the brewpub itself. They make too many beers to mention here - we tasted 18 - so I'll just focus on the most representative styles. 

an afternoon's work

IPA

A style which developed in the nineteenth century to preserve beer for long periods of travel, IPA is a dry, hoppy, and sometimes maltier beer than a classic English bitter. An American IPA is even drier and hoppier, with lots of pine nut and grapefruit aromas, with spices coming from the American hops. The two IPAs we sampled were good examples of the American style. Blind Pig IPA (6.75%) was hoppy and very aromatic, with a tangy finish. Pliny the Elder (8%) is the brewery's most popular beer and takes the IPA style to an extreme. They call it a Double IPA, meaning more malt and hops, which gives the beer a very dry finish, with strong pine aromas, and not as fruity. This is a fantastic beer, but that bitter hoppiness is intense. 

My favourite beer, perhaps because it was so English, was the Row 2/Hill 56 (5.8%), made from Simcoe hops from Yakima, Washington (where most American hops are now grown). A pale ale, rather than an IPA, it had many of the characteristics of the above IPAs - grapefruit, pine nuts, a dry, dusty finish - but the hoppiness was more subdued and balanced, making it a great drinking beer. 

Porter/Stout

The difference between porter and stout is a difficult one to distinguish. Part of the confusion comes from the difficulty in defining porter: it's an historic term which has meant different things at different times. It can be brown to dark, hoppy, malty, or neither, medium or high alcohol. If it's black, roasty, and intense, then it may as well be a stout. Stout is more carefully defined - it's a strong black beer - but it's the Irish version that we all think of - made from roasted barley to avoid taxes on malt, making it creamier and more coffee like. 

The OVL Stout (4.5%) was more in this Irish style, with its toast, smoke, roast, and coffee aromas, but its low alcohol meant it was balanced and not too overpowering. Shadow of a Doubt (9.86%), an "Imperial Porter" ("imperial" referring to a higher alcohol beer exported for the Russian monarchy), had that roast coffee flavour, but because of the high alcohol was much sweeter, with caramel and toffee. 

Belgian Style

After my last trip to the US, I wrote about the increasing popularity of "sours" - stinky, funky beers made in a similar manner to lambics in Belgium - so it's no surprise that Russian River make excellent examples in a whole range of styles. The Little White Lie (5%) was a classic Witbier, an historical style dating from the eleventh century when it was the first kind of beer to be hopped. Now, however, the flavours in a Witbier come from spices, as well as the unmalted soft wheat used in the recipe. This Little White Lie had been spiced with bitter orange peel, coriander, and cumin, making it like a creamy, wheaty gin and as ideal for a warm, summer's afternoon.

The rest of the complex range of Belgian-style beers all have similar hard-hitting religious names - Perdition, Damnation, Defenestration, Rejection, Salvation, Sanctification, Supplication, and Consecration. We tasted all of these, but here are my favourites: Salvation (8.75%) is a strong dark ale, with malt, roast, smoke, spice, and lots of complexity, a long, drying finish lingering on to plum flavours. Sanctification (6.75%) is brewed with a long, cool fermentation, using only the funky Brettanomyces yeast. Those stinky aromas were well in balance, with sour citrus flavours. The final two beers were full-on, complex, and mature. Supplication (7%) is aged for 12-15 months in old Pinot Noir barrels alongside sour cherries; the long ageing allows different yeasts - Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus (the latter two yeasts really contribute to any stinky, old-sock aromas in a beer) - to develop. The last and most complex beer of the extensive line-up was Consecration (10%), aged for 4-8 months in Cabernet Sauvignon barrels, with the same putrid yeasts. Whereas the Pinot Noir flavours in the Supplication were masked by the sour cherries, the Cabernet aromas were apparent - tobacco, cedar, spice, and dried fruits (the beer had been aged with currants in the barrels).

While waiting for our table, I popped into the nearby Barnes & Noble and purchased a copy of Tasting Beer: An Insider's Guide to the World's Greatest Drink by Randy Mosher (real name, I can only assume). Perusing this book while tasting 18 beers in a range of styles traditionally made all over Europe and the USA was education brought to life. Going to beer school on a Saturday afternoon is a lot less like detention and more like a whole lot of fun.