Poor Robert's (Wine) Almanac

We live in a very different and crazy, uncertain world right now and for many of us it involved simply going home, working from home and doing the occasional jig-saw puzzle to break up the day.  We watched mainstreet businesses shutter for the first time in our lives and for some of us even saw friends get sick (some really sick) and even die. Our news sources suddenly became Covid-19 updates and little else.

I’ve been close to the craft wine world for a lot of years and latley kept in contact with many small, even  some very obscure winemakers to see how this new world order impacted them.  I, for one, found myself buying cases and cases of wine direct from wineries, where  before I might buy a couple of cases a year, just to support them in this strange and uncertain time.  Brick and Mortar Winery stands as one of my favorite and most regular sources of boutique Pinot Noir, Rose, Chardonnay, Nouveau (an American take on Nouveau Beaujelais) and Vin Claire (my all time favorite white blend) and represents just that sort of craft winery.  A few years ago I asked Matt Iaconis to write a guest blog for me on the modern style of Chardonnay and how it has evolved over the years as one of California’s signature wines.  Well today he seemed like the perfect person to ask to pen a blog post on what the new Covid-19 world means to the craft wine industry.  I am posting his unedited perspective so you can all share in what I have observed and followed this past few months.  Enjoy!

An Open Letter from Matt Iaconis 

I’ve had the pleasure in knowing Robert (Bob) Minto (a/k/a “Poor Robert” to many in the craft wine world) for nearly a decade. He has supported my wife Alexis and I since we first began producing wine for nakedwines.com. When we launched our own two wineries (brick & mortar and delta wines), he was amongst the first to sign up for our mailing list and has championed our wines since the beginning. So, when Bob mentioned the opportunity to share our story, as well as how this global pandemic is affecting us and the wine industry as a whole, it was a quick response: ‘Yes, absolutely.’

Our two small, family-run wineries have a wide spectrum of wines, and in turn, a wide audience. The first winery we launched back in 2011 was brick & mortar (www.brickandmortarwines.com), where we originally specialized in single vineyard Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Our newest winery, delta (www.winesforchange.com), specializes in your everyday drinker: high quality wines at an affordable price point of $15 per bottle. Plus, we donate a portion of all sales to two different local organizations here in California dedicated to helping fight for climate change.

Back at the beginning, we didn’t have grandiose goals or dreams of owning our vineyard or winery space; instead, we just wanted to produce wines that we loved to drink and share them with people we love. As we have evolved as a winery, we added different tiers of wines: some high-end, singular expresses of a given place and time, as with our single vineyard Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays; some more accessible, broader reaching wines like our Anderson Valley Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, which are blends of several different vineyards and come in at a price that is much more affordable for many more wine enthusiasts; some exciting and fun natural wines like Vin Pétillant and Nouveau, which create a ‘human’ aspect to our brand – just real wines, nothing pretentious; and cans – our single biggest risk we’ve ever taken as a winery, stepping outside our comfort zone only to find ourselves as an industry leader in quality wine in a can.

When we started brick & mortar, we knew this brand would be our foundation for everything we did in the wine industry, and with every great success, we needed a solid foundation – something made from brick and mortar. We’ve worked between six and seven days per week for the past nine years to build our winery into something that garners recognition not only here in California, which is no small feat battling for relevancy with over 10,000 other brands in Napa and Sonoma alone, but also throughout the United States and around the globe. That said, we’re still very small. My wife and I own and operate brick & mortar. We aren’t backed by a large bank. We boot strapped this entire endeavor from day one. We aren’t rich. We don’t come from money. We just work really hard to hopefully create something to hand to our kids and have them take the reins and make it their own.

In the first two months of 2020, we were laying the groundwork for our best sales year to date. We have noticed things really start picking up in the latter half of 2018, with increased recognition from wine writers, the sommelier community as a whole and as a result, increased sales; this trend only continued last year and through the first few months of this year.

When concerns of COVID-19 first started to surface in the US eight weeks ago, no one could have imagined the impact and devastation it has caused throughout the world. We’re so thankful to every doctor and nurse working tirelessly day in and day out right now to save our friends, our family and our colleagues. It almost feels tone deaf to write about how COVID-19 has impacted my life, as my wife, my three kids, and all of my family and friends are all healthy and have been spared.

Where I do feel this open letter (or whatever you want to call this) does have value is answering the question that we in the in the wine industry have been asked countless times in the past few weeks: “How are you doing in all of this chaos? How is all of this affecting you and your wineries?”

First off, it needs be mentioned that wineries are more fortunate than some in this situation and I think that should not be overlooked. We can still sell wine direct to customers, and have done so at a higher rate than we have ever done in the nine years of operation. Restaurants have been crippled due to the state mandated closures. While some have been able to operate take-out and as pseudo wine shops, I doubt this covers the operating costs, but rather mitigates the damage that a full closure would cause.

With the mass closure of restaurants, some wine shops, sport arenas, concert venues, the active outlets that have served our wines for the past nine years have vanished – and thus, so have the majority of our sales. With Alexis and I coming from the restaurant world – both of us worked at Michelin 3-Star The Restaurant at Meadowood in St. Helena, CA – brick & mortar, as well as delta, were build on the restaurant industry. We sell about 80-90% of our wine through restaurants and wine shops from here in California and New York to Norway and South Korea.

The lack of sales is only a tip of the iceberg, albeit it’s a large tip. The struggle all small businesses are facing now, including the wine industry, is the lack of clarity pertaining to how we access support by way of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) or the SBA’s Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL). We’ve applied for any and all assistance possible for a small business like ourselves but the absence of any real guidance has all but extinguished the hope instilled but the CARES Act passed a few weeks back. While all is not lost with assistance from the federal government, every day that passes is another day closer to small business like our closing their doors.

We were recently interviewed for an upcoming story that will run in a local magazine and regional paper in May, during which time we were asked how we see the wine industry coming out of this post COVID-19. Honestly, no one has a crystal ball here. As with all tragedies and disasters, it has created a sense of ‘survival instinct’ within us all. Frankly, we’ve been more creative in the past month with regards to new ways to sell wine, than we have been in our nine year of existence. From visual tastings on Zoom and Instagram Live features with wine influencers to sponsoring podcasts in order to get our name our there more and creating specials on our website to drive more traffic, we have pulled out all of the stops to stir up more business – and it has worked thus far! My hope is that this creative light and ingenuity doesn’t become a dull glow when we get back to our new normal. Furthermore, we hope all new direct sales customers that taste our wine for the first time become long lasting customers – directly from us or by way of visiting local restaurants and buying our wine of the list.

In life, I’ve always been one to look for the silver linings in situations in order to stay positive; this pandemic has been no different. I’m not going to say I’ve been 100% positive and optimistic during the past month (and my wife can attest to that…), but I’ve always been someone who looks to distill a situation down to positivities and other things I need, throwing the rest away.

The camaraderie by everyone in the our small town of Healdsburg has been so inspiring. The number of people reaching out to us to check in and then those people purchasing wine from us has been overwhelming. You never really know the impact your have on people until you’re in a vulnerable, distressed situation – just trying to figure out how to survive – and you look up only to see the calvary coming over the hill of everyone that you’ve supported yourself over the years; everyone who you’ve donated wine to their school event or their little league fundraiser; everyone you’ve shared a glass or a conversation with in passing.

There is no script of how we all get through today, tomorrow or the coming months. But, together, we will prevail. That I can promise.

I’ve been AWOL for a while as life has gotten in the way of my blogging, but I am slowly getting back in the swing of things and hope to do a lot more this spring and summer.

This offering will be a bit more editorial than information driven as opposed to my usual  posts.  While I’ve been off the air I have still been drink a fair number of new and different wines and in that process it has occured to me that the wine today is not what it was even five years ago. We see wine makers trying to compete in a much more dynamic beverage market We’ve seen brewpubs, botique distilleries, cider house and yes wineries popping up everywhere.  I think it fair to say that this phenomonon is part of the “New Economy” that has arisen over the past ten or so years.  Everybody is hawking something new; the other day when out with some friends I was offered a local distiller’s “Premium Bacon (as in cured pork) Vodka”.  I passed as, one I am not a big Vodka fan, and two I really prefer my bacon with eggs and hashbrowns.  The point though the trend is to  differentiate, no matter what you are offering.  Wine today is not all that different; as winemakers tune up their wines to sell to different buyers and less picky tastes.  Before you tune me out for this last comment, it is not meant as a jab but rather as an observation about expectations astime to market is now the driver.

I’ve been  drinking wine for nearly 50 years (legally this next April) and I’ve experienced  some really amazing wine and I’ve tasted some really awful ones as well. When I was younger I was more interested in the impact of a wine than I was the bouquet or the palate.  As I entered the world of business entertaining where i could write off the cost of a bottle of wine as a business expense and try to impress a client with my wine knowledge (older must be better).  Later in my career I started buying better wines and suddenly I noticed that some of the old and expensive wines were really interesting.  Yes on occasion I over paid for a bottle and the value was not there even with the business deduction. On occasion I found some not so expensive wines that were really remarkable and almost as interesting.  Along the way I learned a lot about wine and I actually got pretty good at predicting what would be a good buy and what would not.  Let’s face it in most restaraunts there are no inexpensive wines when looking at price as your value point.  so I learned to measure value not on cost but rather on the additive that the wine brought to the meal, the conversation and the company.  It has been an, indeed, interesting journey and one that I would not trade for anything.

What I observe about today’s wine — wine makers are working to produce a product that consumers will enjoy early in its life rather than producing really great big bold interesting wine that will stand the test of time and lay in a cellar for years waiting for their time in the sun. Who can blame them, finding a well aged wine in a wine shop  is getting tougher and very expensive, the holding costs kill their bottom line.  Wine makers want to move their inventory quickly as well as holding spece for them is at a premium and the marginal increase in value of aged wine doesn’t keep up with their operating costs.

Red wine has changed the most to meet the changing demographic.  Traditionally Men prefered the big bold reds and women gravitated toward the whites that tended toward fruitier and had more sipable characteristics. Today I see many more women drinking reds and the wine makers have driven  this by changed their vinting to porduce reds with more fruit in the nose and on the tip of the tongue.  These are younger wines that have not developed the subtle flavors of the older bolder wines which are definately not as fruit forward. In point of fact, these new Reds will not age the same way as the Reds of the past and  will deminish in character over time.  I have wine in my cellar that is Forty some years old and a lot that’s aged past ten, but I have to take a lot more care in today’s wine world selecting wines to age as many simply were not bred to age.

Is this trend a bad thing?  I think not.  I actually enjoy many of the new age reds with their fruit forward sense sweetness (not actually sweet it’s a slight of scense that makes it seem so). These are sippers and wines that I will drink with spicy foods, but not ones that I like with a big slab of red meat as, for me, those still require the leathery, herbal mustiness of a well aged wine.

So what does all this mean to the wine drinkers of the world?  Well we have more choices, it’s no-longer just reds or whites, it’s as much about the occasion in which we intend to drink the wine.  If I am serving wine at a cocktail party without food or just munchies, I’ll be pouring a nice Chenin Blanc, a Euro style Chardonnay or and an Aussie Sauvignon Blanc for my whites and not worrying about paying for age  On the Red side I’ll be pouring a late vintage Zinfandel, a Merlot with a bit more (two years) age, a Pinot Noir with two or three years of age,  and Cabernet Sauvignon that carries a good blend of (25% non Cab grapes) Merlot and Zin) with no more than three years of age. If I am serving it with a meal (again depending on the meal – seafood, pork, chicken or beef it will vary greatly) I am still going with my older wines with a little more niuance, a white Bordeaux, a Fume Blanc, a big Oaky Chardonnay for my whites and with reds it will be a classic Cabernet Sauvignon (less blended varietals), a minor Bordeaux (can’t afford the big ones), a nice Grenache, an older Spanish Rioja or an Oregon Pinot Noir all with at least five years of bottle aging.

Am I right in my choices? For me yes, for you maybe or maybe not. With so many new and interesting wines out there today we can all have just what we want.  the Key to that is trying a lot of different wines, keeping good notes on what you like and don’t and picking carefully at the wine shop.  Remember two things: (1) older and more expensive may or may not be a right choice for your taste or the occassion, and (2) unless you are unfortunate to get a bad bottle (it can happen) you will get to enjoy a nice wine and learn more about wine and wine and food pairing.  Bon Appitite.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted to Poor Robert’s, as they say; Life has sort of gotten in the way.  Well I now have a reason. I just tried a really fun and interesting wine that nobody, not even I can buy.  A friend of mine, an engineer from Chicago vinted it and sent me a bottle to try.  Sorry Jim my expectations were not that high when you told me you were send it to me to sample and rate.  First thought; how do I rate this wine honestly and not hurt Jim’s feelings?  Well, I owe Jim a huge apology for doubting his winemaking skills.  In fairness, I’ve tasted a lot of homemade wines and I had a strong basis for my concern going in.

The wine arrived at my house in as solid a wine package as I’ve ever seen; bottles individually wrapped, all wrapped together and then padded in the box (a Chewy.com box no less so the UPS Guy thinks my dog scored again). What a surprise, James has his own wine label and they look as professionally bottled as any you would find in a high-end wine shop.  So now I am beginning to wonder what I have in front of me.  I cellar them for a couple of days to let them recover from their travels and tonight I popped the cork (tightest cork I’ve ever seen, I practically broke my Rabbit getting it out) and poured a glass to let it breathe.   What a treat it was to look at, a goldenrod nectar of Viognier as appealing as any I’ve ever had.  The rest of the story is in the tasting notes found in Poor Robert’s Wine Review section.  I won’t spoil the review by rehashing it here.

James I profusely apologize for ever doubting your wine making abilities.  Your Viognier blew me away.  My friend you should quit your day job and take up winemaking as a profession; you and your wine are that good.

Jim Olsen, one of my all time favorite winemakers received a $100,000 grant to create a really unique wine of his choosing.  Boy did he ever! He started with the best California grown Barbara grapes  (deep Italian red grapes) raised in the classic Piedmont style. Right after picking he stripped them of their skin and set to work to make a white wine (classic straw color – not a hint of red or pink)  like nothing I’ve ever tasted. it has none of the big Barbera trappings and presents itself as a sweetish, fruity wine (think essence of pineapple, apricot and Royal Ann Cherry) with enough  nice acidity to balance it beautifully.  My complete tasting notes and comments are found in the Wine Reviews section of this site.  Sadly for those not in the US, it is only available through nakedwines.com and is going fast as it was a limited batch vinting. Enjoy.