A little while back I wrote a post about a delightful tasting of small-batch wines organized by In Fine Spirits. Events like this can be amazingly helpful; tasting numerous wines in rapid succession can really clarify what it is you like in a wine. Then the next time you go into a wine shop, you can more clearly explain what you’re looking for (assuming you used the spit bucket occasionally, so that you actually remember what you like).

The other major benefit of wine tastings is meeting really fun, interesting people. At the In Fine Spirits tasting, I quite enjoyed the wines Ian of Vinejoy presented, we had a great chat, and he put me on his dinner party list. His wine company hosts periodic pot luck dinners in various atmospheric locations, gathering together wine geeks, chefs, friends and various other assorted folk.

A few weeks later, crock pot in hand, I descended into the old basement of Gentile’s Wine Shop on Taylor Street, where a bricked-up tunnel hinted at the space’s bootlegging past. Platters of delicious-looking food covered multiple tables, illuminated by the glow of Christmas lights hanging from the pipes and ducts.

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Living in Chicago, far from any wine country of note, it can be hard to feel connected to the winemaking process, the most important parts of which happen in the vineyard. It was therefore especially fascinating to meet Bruce Curtis, the E-Commerce Manager of Artesa Vineyards and Winery, at this year’s Wine Blogger Conference. He works on the front lines of the American wine industry in Napa Valley.

Whether you prefer drinking Cabernet or Counoise, what happens in the northern California vineyards affects all of us wine consumers in the United States. I checked in with Bruce to see how this year’s harvest turned out:

2011 will go down as a winemaker’s year in Northern California, meaning each and every winemaker this side of the Golden Gate Bridge really had to earn his or her keep and be super-proactive throughout the entire season.  This was not one of those years where the winemaker could coast along on semi-auto pilot; it was a challenge the entire way, to say the least.

The season began cool and wet which lasted through most of the spring. The rain also came during the most sensitive time of year …pollination. This can lead to disaster if the vines get damaged, resulting in lighter crops. The summer was decent, and gave the vines a fighting chance to pull off a great finish to a slow beginning.  Alas, Mother Nature would not let us get away with it that easy, and she threw a massive curve ball of rain across Northern California in early fall that pretty much lasted until the end of the growing season.

Being in the Carneros region of the Napa Valley [at a relatively high elevation in the mountains], Artesa’s vineyards escaped a lot of the botrytis issues that most areas suffered heavily from, and they also managed to bring in most of their white varietals before the wet weather set in. For those growers and wineries that didn’t, the outcome was pretty tough with a lot of loss up and down the valley.

The silver lining that comes from such a hard year is that having less of a yield means the grapes picked were much more highly concentrated, bringing in super quality grapes for what we hope will be super quality wines, putting a cork on the end of a very tough, rough and tiring season!

I’ll drink to that.

It sounds like though it was a tough year, those wines that do come out of 2011 will be quite good. I’ll drink to that as well!

Thank you to Bruce Curtis for putting this report together. You can follow Artesa Vineyards on Facebook, and you can read my impressions of their tasty Pinot Noir here.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Dave of H2Vino with some Mallorcan Callet

Though I don’t do it as often as I’d like, it can be surprisingly easy to go to wine tastings. Many wine shops and liquor stores host them on weekends, and even grocery stores occasionally offer samples. Tastings are a great way to get to know new wines and try things you would never consider buying a whole bottle of. More important, when you try an array of different wines in rapid succession, it becomes much clearer what kinds of wines you most prefer.

My favorite wine shop, In Fine Spirits, offers wine tastings Saturday afternoons, but every once in a while they’ll put together a big wine tasting shebang. Recently, they hosted a wonderful “Rare Vines” event focusing on limited-production wines, an exciting opportunity to try a wide range of wines made in batches of less than 1000 cases (most were under 500).

For just $10 per person — less than the price of a glass of wine in many restaurants — we sampled more than 30 wines and took good advantage of the gourmet cheese tray. (We should have taken better advantage of the spit buckets, however.)

Here are the wines I found most exciting:

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Because of my recent travels, I hadn’t cooked a thing in at least three weeks. My sanity demanded that I return to the kitchen. I knew I wanted to use up the last of some bread my husband baked and the luscious dates I brought back from Dubai, so I cooked up some Pappa al Pomodoro (Tuscan tomato-bread soup) and Moroccan tagine with lamb and dates.

Deciding on the recipes was easier than choosing a wine — I had trouble figuring out what red would pair well with both of these dishes. A Bordeaux might have worked, but it’s hardly odd, so I opted for a 2009 Big House Red. This wine blends no fewer than 12 different varieties, and I figured something in there would surely pair well with each recipe.

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