The Wine Knows

Eroica, the international Riesling collaboration between Ernst Loosen of the Mosel and Chateau Ste. Michelle of Woodinville, Wash., is a decade old.

The USDA this afternoon released its annual grape harvest report for Washington state, and Riesling has surpassed Chardonnay as the Evergreen State's No. 1 wine grape.

In 2008, 28,500 tons of Riesling were harvested, compared with 28,000 tons of Chardonnay, 26,100 tons of Cabernet Sauvignon and 25,400 tons of Merlot.

For the next 30 days or so, we will all be partaking in a variety of holiday meals, beginning with Thanksgiving on Thursday and running through Christmas (and possibly New Year's Day) dinner. Between dinner invites and holiday parties, you may be expected to provide some wines.

I just got off the phone with Jim DiBonis, CEO of Ascentia Wine Estates, which last week purchased Columbia Winery, Covey Run Winery and Ste. Chapelle from Constellation.

We had a long-ranging conversation about DiBonis' new company and where the Northwest fit in, and the big take-away was this: One of the biggest reasons for wanting these three Northwest wineries was Riesling.

Once upon a time, Gewürztraminer was a grape variety of some importance in Washington. Part of this was the thinking that Washington is so far north of California that it would require cool-climate varieties to be viable.

These days, we all realize the folly of that thinking, with the Columbia Valley's general lack of rain along with the long, hot summer days.

Yet I still love a good Gewürztraminer, and Washington continues to make a fair amount. In 2007, it was the No. 4 white wine grape with 4,100 tons harvested.

We have put the Summer issue of Wine Press Northwest to bed, and I'd like to get into a little more detail on our Riesling judging. One of the remarkable trends to come out of our blind tasting of 116 Northwest Rieslings was that those wineries whose focus is on Riesling rose to the top.

I just completed my article on Northwest Riesling (ah, the thrill of deadline!). For a variety of reasons, I chose to use Google Docs to write it.

A cool little tool in Google Docs is a word counter that also includes reading levels. According to this, I've written to a seventh-grade level. That makes sense since newspaper journalists tend to target about seventh- or eighth-grade reading levels.

Last night, I put together a dish of curried chicken using some Thai red curry paste and coconut milk. I'm a sucker for spicy foods, but danged if I didn't put a bit too much red curry paste in the wok.

Friends of ours spent the long weekend at their family property near Shelton, Wash., on the Olympic Peninsula. As I've learned, this is good for me because they tend to bring back oysters.

Last night, we were invited over to imbibe. I was asked to supply the wines.

During our judging Saturday of 116 Pacific Northwest Rieslings, we had just one corked wine. In fact, the far bigger problem was oxidation.

One might see this as a good trend that we found just one wine infected with TCA, the compound that makes a wine smell like a wet dog sleeping on rotting cardboard in a musty basement.