The sudden cold snap in the country has caught everyone a bit by surprise and Eastern Washington has not escaped the artic weather. We are seeing some nights below 0F and obviously at that temperature we start to worry about winter injuries on our vines.

The cold can kill the buds that we need in order to grow a new canopy in the spring and it can damage the trunks by killing the phloem or the xylem that carry the sap (more on that later if you don’t know what I am talking about). So how low of a temperature can our vines take before we get injuries that would compromise our yields? Well, the Yakima Valley farm extension of Washington State University has a method forecasting the cold hardiness of buds and vascular system (phloem and xylem) of each grape varietal in Eastern Washington. At this point, it looks like our Riesling bud are safe until -7F but would be 90% destroyed if we get below -12. The concerning area right now is the phloem cold hardiness which is rated at 0F (the xylem is OK until -14F). So it looks like that we should expect some phloem damage but we should be fine with bud and xylem damage.

The Phloem is most important because it carries the sap in the middle of the trunk and does not renew every year unlike the xylem (the xylem makes those rings every year on the plant). If the phloem on our vines gets damaged we will have to cut them to the ground and grow the vines back from the roots (which is fine since we are on our own roots with no rootstocks). Usually, when we cut our vines down we expect a shorter crop. Stay tune for more information.

As 2008 comes to an end, I thought about all the great things that we have done as a wine company this year. I’ll remember 2008 as a year of transformation for Pacific Rim as well as a year of great successes.

This year saw many new wine births and one resurrection. We have started mid year with the launch of our 2007 Single Vineyard series for which we have received so many accolades. We are all humble by the overwhelming reception:

• Riesling Wallula Vineyard Biodynamic (certified Demeter): 93 WE, 90 WS, Top 100 wines of 2008 WE, Top 100 wines of 2008 SF Chronicle. A fantastic wine and our first Biodynamic effort in Washington
• Riesling Solstice Vineyard: 92 WE, 90 WS. A gem of a wine from a great Yakima Valley site
• Riesling Wallula Vineyard: 90 WE. A great wine at a great price expressing the classic Washington characteristics
• Riesling Vin De Glaciere:89 IWC. This is our best Vin De Glaciere to date, refreshing, lively, a pearl.
• Riesling Dauenhaur Vineyard: Great Kabinett style from the Willamette Valley produced in small quantities

We are finishing the year with a few other precious new wines from the 2008 harvest ready to market in 2009: A Riesling made from Organic grapes (sl off dry style), a sparkling Riesling from Selenium Vineyard and the famous Framboise (that would be the resurrection of the year). All of those great new wines should be coming out sometime during the first quarter of 2009. Congratulation to all our staff and partners for growing the grapes, making the wines, developing great packaging and of course providing a way to get it to our consumers. All those wines are stunning and will keep showing Pacific Rim’s commitment to quality.

2008 has also been a year where our position as a Riesling leader in the world has been reinforced greatly. We have received an incredible amount of fantastic third party recognition for our Sweet Riesling (89 WS and one of the top 20 wines under $40 for 2008 for the SF Chronicle) and our Dry Riesling (too many medals to mention). We also were invited to many event to talk about Riesling or just to represent the Riesling community at large. May be more important is the amazing success of our Riesling Rules book, our contribution to the Riesling world.

This year we also have welcomed a few more folks on our staff. A special thank you to them for joining our growing company: Steve, Debbie, Irene and Tom, all good looking folks, all in sales. Our company is so much stronger with you four on board.

Beyond making great wines, getting tons of press and welcoming some key staff in 2008, we also did some great work internally to make sure we can stay the innovative company the we are. We’ve been hit by many cost increases this year forcing us to look deeper at our costs and we have been able in many cases to mitigate inflation in some manners. We also have relied heavily on optimizing our information technology tools and we will keep pushing in this area in order to provide great service to everyone and keep our costs in line.

All in all a challenging but rewarding year for Pacific Rim. I am very bullish for 2009 even if the current economic environment is less so. We will keep making great Riesling and keep exploring new ways to make you all discover how great this varietal is.

Thank you for your support

December 5th 2008: Prohibition was abolished (thank you Utah for your decisive vote) 75 years ago today. There is still much restriction on the trade of alcohol today, but at least we can all get our favorite wines somehow. May be in 25 years we will have a totally free alcohol market like most European countries and prohibition will be truly over.

Tonight I’ll celebrate this great milestone with a nice Riesling of course.

Pacific Rim had the great honor to represent North American Riesling at the Riesling Fellowship event hosted at the German Embassy in London this week. We were the only North American winery to attend along with some of the greatest German Riesling producers (Georg Breuer, Wittmann, Rebholz, Loosen, Selbach-Oster, Egon Muller, JJ Prum, Robert Weil, Donnhoff) and along a few other producers from select countries (Rabl for Austria, Trimbach for Alsace, Pewsey Vale for Australia, Conor Sur for South America, Pegasus Bay for New Zealand). The attendance was very small (55 attendees) and quite impressive (head of wineries attending, press, sommelier, embassy guests…). The event was very organized (you are at the German embassy after all, what should you expect?) with a tasting, a talk about global warming and its impact on Riesling and a dinner.

The tasting was very interesting with 32 wines (we brought along our Wallula Vineyard and Wallula Vineyard Biodynamic). The wines that resonated the most to me that evening were:

• 2003 Cono Sur Vision Bio Bio Valley (Chile) - My first Chilean Riesling, and very very delicious
• 2007 Terra Montosa, Weingut Georg Breuer (Rheingau) - Very nice dryish style
• 2007 Auslese Zeltinger Schlossberg, Weingut Selbach Oster (Mosel) - Zingy and young
• 1997 Spatlese, Kiedrich Grafenberg, Weingut Robert Weil (Rheingau) - Sweet, acid, aged, one of the best wines that night
• 1997 Auslese. Erdener Treppchen, Weingut Dr Loosen (Mosel) - Sl Botrytis, aristocratic, nice
• 1997 Auslese Goldkapsel, Scharzerhof, Weingut Egon Muller (Mosel) - Stole the show, amazing wine

Our wines fared very very well in this company and I had several people come to me to congratulate us on our wines.

After the tasting, we went through a good presentation from Professor Schultz (University of Geisenheim). Seems like the Germans are quite happy about global warming as it is making their wines superb every year. Sounds also like we need to buy some land in Southern England and in Canada folks…

Dinner was very polite with a few speeches. I really loved the voice of the German Ambassador (Herr Boomgaarden, what a great name for an ambassador!) as it was contrasting perfectly with the delicate Riesling we had with dinner. Talking about dinner, can someone give me the recipe for this insane crepinette of veal with tarragon and mushroom? I could not stop eating that dish and had three servings (I stopped because I thought I was getting a bit overboard…). Best of all, the choice of beer or coffee after dinner - very very civilized (I took the beer of course).

Thank you Wines of Germany and the wine institute and of course Herr and Frau Boomgaarden for the evening. It was quite special.

I had time today to swing by the British Museum in London to pay respect to the famous print from Sensei Okusai and one of its most famous piece: “In The Hollow of a Wave off the Coast at Kanagawa“ , a part of his great “36 views of Mount FuJi (I guess he had somewhat of an obsession with the divine volcano). Below are the pictures I took from the piece:

Like many before us, this extraordinary work of art has always been an inspiration for our team and this is why we display our interpretation of it as a tribute on our Chenin Blanc label - Of course on the label Mount Fuji is erupting with a cloud of cherry blossom. We have also used the beautiful wave pattern to create a cameo on our single vineyard package to illustrate the power of the Missoula floods

If you want to know more about the art on our labels, I invite you to browse through our site. You can follow the link to look at the Chenin Blanc.

Leave a comment (No Comments)

If you happen to be looking for a great gastronomique stop in London, I invite you to go to the Ambassade de l’Ile in Kensington. The restaurant is the sister of l’Auberge de l’Ile in Lyon (hence the connection with me since this is where I was born). The place is very nice and the food was top notch for the price. Count on spending some money still (may be 100 pounds/person) but really the food is worth every penny of it.

Link to the web site of L’Ambassade de l’ile: http://www.aubergedelile.com/

Harvest 2008 will be remembered as probably one of the coolest season in Eastern Washington in a long time. Our grapes are coming at low sugar (a good thing for lower alcohol), good flavor and high acid (which is great for Riesling in general). We are about 40% through picking we need to make serious strides in the next two weeks as we are drawing near the end of harvest.

One unattended consequence of this long cool hang time is the slow development of good botrytis. Good and divine Botrytis (as opposed to bad and evil botrytis aka sour rot) occurs when the botrytis fungus grows inside the grape berry and literally dries up the berry by using the water within resulting in a concentrated grape berry. Wines made from partially or completely botrytized harvest are among the most complex and delicious in the world.

This year I figure that about 15% of our berries have been dehydrated with botrytis and that bodes well for the complexity of our wines. We might even try a little TBA (for Trocken Beren Auslese: 100% botrytized harvest) for fun…

About five weeks ago we have received the raspberries from Mount Vernon that will make our Framboise this year. We have brought this reicipe out of the closet because we got so many folks calling asking for it. Well, it is back and I must say it is a very very delicious batch! We are one of the rare winery to make this type of wine/liqueur from fresh raspberries. I think it is because it is such a pain in the neck to make this type of beverage from fresh fruit rather than from concentrate. The reward for using fresh fruit is theintense raspberry flavor we extract during the making. It must be one of the most deliciously raspberrishly insane drink out there. We are now done with the infusion part of the making where we put the berries in contact with alcohol to extract the flavors and we now are settling the finished Framboise before filtration. If all goes well, we should have the Framboise out by Christmas time.

This is a picture of Scott, our Enologist, after a Framboise bath - Nice job Scott, it tastes great!

Meet the fearless Pacific Rim Sales team as they gathered last week in Eastern Washington for our annual sales meeting. They are quite a bunch!

After a heat spell last week, we are back to cool weather this week (mid 70’s) with some really cold weather scheduled next Monday (we even might have a freeze that night). The acids are very high in all we have brought so far, though we only brought in 10% of our total production. We are working our way through our Sweet Riesling vineyards right now and all looks very good. I am a bit anxious about some cool sites, but I am sure I am not the only one out there.

Well, here we are. We will probably start picking on friday the first lots for our sweet Riesling and for a super secret project (can’t talk about it quite yet). Acids are very high overall and the flavors are nice and crisp. Should be a terrific vintage.

We have started our first pied de cuve (yeast starter) yesterday.

We are very proud to host the taste scale freshly released this morning by the International Riesling Foundation (IRF) on our website: http://rieslingrules.com/the_book/irf/international-riesling-foundation-announces-riesling-taste-profile/. Pacific Rim has been a very active founding member of the IRF and we have done our part to contribute to the devellopment of this scale among with some 30 other Riesling producers from all around the world (we have the list included on our website). I want to salute here Dan Berger for his work and patience; trying to get wineries from 4 continents to agree on something was somewhat of a challenge. Also, all this could not have been done without Jim Tresize of the New York Wine Foundation - Thank you Dan, Thank you Jim.

Pacific Rim plans to use the visual scale and description on all its bottlings starting with the upcoming 2008 harvest. We are discussing keeping or not the residual sugar on the label in conjunction to the visual scale. If anyone has a strong opinon, please leave a post.

I have had a few good conversation on WLTV forum (http://tv.winelibrary.com/) about winemakers that also review other people’s wine. It has always seemed a conflict of interest of some sort to me. That being said, one of the greatest German Producer, Armin Diel (of Schlossgut Diel: http://www.schlossgut-diel.com/) is also one of Gemany’s most admired wine critic. I still think there is somewhat of a conflict of interest for folks that do that. On my side, I’ll stick to making wine, talking about our wines and will keep my personal opinion for myself.

Yesterday we had the first samples for the 2008 harvest season. The results: 13.8 for the Riesling at Selenium (Yakima Valley) and 16.5 for the Chenin Blanc at Andrews (Horse Heaven Hills). It looks like we are a good two weeks behind which is great for Riesling and other aromatic whites.

Paul Grieco’s wine bar in New York City is wrapping up its Summer of Riesling program presenting a 100% Riesling wine list for the summer! Paul, thank you for the great support for our favorite grape varietal. I hope that more restaurants and wine bars accross the country will follow your steps as we need to keep the Riesling revolution alive and moving. About a 100% Riesling month from a great retailer.

To go to Paul’s site: http://www.wineisterroir.com/

Stir Crazy is a pretty cool restaurant chain in the North East mainly. Their food is great and very Riesling friendly. They have a cool video about asian food and wine pairing at http://www.stircrazy.com/company/news.aspx

I could not copy the video but it is the third video down “how to pair with Asian Food”.

Most often when I go to a small ethnic restaurant (I favor Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, North African and Mexican), I enjoy a bit of spice and sometimes brutal heat. It is always puzzling to find a good drink (with alcohol please) to go along with a good curry, a spicy couscous and other Pad Thais. Often the choice is between the house wine (no thank you, I do not want your white zin…), the beer (not another Kirin or Tsingtao please) or an uninspiring cocktail (likely with Tequila or Vodka that do not taste much of anything). I often retreat to water or, I must admit, a beer (light lagers or pilsners are a favorite if available).

I have found out that most of the smaller ethnic restaurants are likely run by foreign born staff with little wine knowledge. They usually see the wine list as important as the fortune cookies (I would not be surprised if they pay more attention to the cookies at times). The wine is usually provided by the beer salesman of very large wine and beer distributors (they are the only one that really have the time and incentive to visit those smaller accounts). The beer salesman is usually incentivized on beer and his wine book is often dismal. The combination of an uneducated buyer and a sales person that want to push beer is unfortunately an uninspiring wine selection in 99% of small ethnic food restaurant.

If anyone as a solution on how to change this sad state of affair, please leave a post!

PS: Did I say that Riesling (in many forms), can aikido most, if not all, of those ethnic foods…

Thank you to Jancis Robinson for featuring our beloved Riesling book on her blog (http://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/20080820_4). Hopefully this will bring all the blogosphere and friends to our site and they will enrich our great content evolving our website into the ultimate Riesling resource.

Remember that Riesling rules - Thank you Jancis

This week I was visiting a great restaurant in San Francisco called Sens (http://www.sens-sf.com/) with our local sales person (Jo M.). Jo and I were chatting about the cocktail trends in San Francisco and to demonstrate how good wine cocktail can be he asked the bartender to create a Chenin Blanc based cocktail. I am not sure if it has a name yet but it tasted just perfect with the food and the hot weather. Here is the recipe: 1 part Eldelflower liquor (Use St Germain liquor: http://www.stgermain.fr/), one part Pacific Rim Chenin Blanc and one part club soda - all of it in a tall glass on ice with a lemon twist on the rim. This might be the best wine cocktail I ever had.

One trend that I have been following lately is the use of wine in cocktails. I made a few discoveries during my last trip in San Francisco.

Luna Park’s (http://lunaparksf.com/) “Icebreaker” is one of the best Vin De Glaciere cocktail I have tried. It is one part Riesling Vin De Glaciere and one part chilled ciroq vodka with two frozen grapes in a martini glass. Very dangerous and delicious cocktail. Highly recommended.

Thank you Luna park for this inspirational use of our Vin De Glaciere!!

Thank you to Sharon Kapnick of the New Yourk Times (among others) for her great article about Riesling’s versatility with food: http://www.seniorwomen.com/hs/articles/kapnick/articlesKapnickRiesling.html

It is a very toughtful article with many references to the Riesling world. Riesling is really the greatest food wine.

Duane at WineFoot.com has reviewed our 2007 Wallula. Thank you Duane, you are one of the first one in the country to review the wine.

http://www.winefoot.com/index.php/2008/08/08/2007-pacific-rim-wallula-vineyard-riesling/

Yesterday I got a call asking me if our wines were vegan. Well, first I had to think about what that really meant (from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan Veganism is a diet and lifestyle that seeks to exclude the use of animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose. Vegans endeavor not to use or consume animal products of any kind) and then think back about our winemaking and our package. I can think of any animal product in our package at all (glass, aluminum, paper, plastic…) and in the winemaking either, except in the Dry Riesling since we use a microscopic amount of Isinglass (sturgeon bladder) at the end of our winemaking. There might be also some insects (do they count?) that might be picked with the grapes and a few fruit flies that fall in the tank during fermentation. So,can I claim that all our wines are Vegan ( with the exception of the Dry Riesling, though honestly we use about one pint of the Isinglass for the whole blend…)?