Benizger Family Winery - keeping it green

by Maggie Bernat Smith

After the Green Music Fest that took place this past weekend right outside Noble Grape, we thought featuring a 'green' winery here would be appropriate today.

At Benziger, they are about 3 things: family, great wine and healthy vineyards. For more than thirty years they've searched Sonoma County for the most distinctive and expressive vineyard sites. Once found, they tended these properties using certified Biodynamic, organic and sustainable farming methods. The result is a portfolio of authentic and memorable wines.

Benziger Family Winery likes to think their wines have character and conscience. This means that they're not only great in the glass, they're grown in a way that's good for the environment, too. Every wine in their portfolio carries a third party certification of green farming practices. Whether the vineyard is certified sustainable, organic or Biodynamic, it's carefully tended with the most eco-responsible methods available. They don't just farm this way because they think caring for the land is the right thing to do, it also happens to be the best way to make distinctive, authentic wines.

All four of their estate vineyards are Demeter-certified Biodynamic. Biodynamics is the highest level of organic farming. Developed in the 1920's, Biodynamics views the vineyard as a single organism. With this approach, eliminating synthetic chemicals is just the beginning. Biodynamics goes further, encouraging biodiversity, a closed nutrient system, the use of homeopathic teas and a close personal connection to the land. They began transitioning their home ranch on Sonoma Mountain in the mid-nineties. Instead of bagged fertilizer, weed killer and pesticides they rely on composting, natural predator-prey relationships, cover crops, and the animals that live on thier estate, to keep their vineyard healthy and balanced. There are no silver bullets in Biodynamic winegrowing. When you eliminate all the artificial crutches, you learn to trust your instincts and to trust nature’s ability and capacity to make a great wine and it shows.

Noble Grape loves Benziger winery for not only their wines, but for their pioneering in organic and biodynamic farming and recycling methods. When The Noble Grape business plan was being drawn, 'green' was definitely in the plans. They used Colori paint, recycle, they use the green-ware cups which are made from corn and biodegrade easily, energy efficient lights, their 6 bottle tote are reusable bags are made from recyclable material. Noble Grape is proud to carry Benziger's wines including their Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon, all certified sustainable. Take a bottle home and see if you can taste the earth in the wine!

Que Syrah, Shiraz?

by Maggie Bernat Smith

Are you one of the many confused wine drinkers out there that doesn't understand why some wines are labeled Syrah and some are labeled Shiraz? Lets do some myth busting and work this out!

Syrah and Shiraz are the same grape just different styles. Syrah has been around for....lets just say forever; and then here comes this Shiraz character appearing sometime around the late eighties! It was a new, exciting, and cool-sounding grape type that burst onto the scene, and people have been talking about ever since.

Lets look at Syrah first. Syrah traditionally comes from the Rhone Valley France (due south of Burgundy). The Northern Rhone Valley is where Syrah has its spiritual home. You may not know it but when you pick up a bottle of Cotes-du-Rhone, that you are actually buying Syrah. Up the price point a bit and you'll see names of villages like Saint Joseph or Hermitage, these wines are still Syrah just from specific villages in the Rhone and are known for a more masculine type of Syrah. Just like most places in the old world (France, Italy, Germany, Spain), the Rhone Valley names their wines after the place that the grapes come from; the grape is not as important as the wines origin.

If you pick up a traditional bottle of Cotes-du-Rhone or Cotes-du-Rhone Villages, you can most likely expect a medium-bodied wine, red fruits such as cranberry, raspberry and cherry, some black pepper spice and undertones of sagebrush. It's a great every day drinking wine and pairs wonderfully with lamb dishes.

Now the Aussies! Sure they have been growing "Shiraz" since the early 1800's, but we never really saw any of their wines till the late eighties. There are a couple of myths on how this name came about. One is from the ancient city Shirazi in Persia where the famous Shirazi wine was produced; but Shiraz as we know it today cannot actually be traced to this. There are documents of other countries calling this grape "Shiraz", but it's the Aussies that made it famous.

Australia being a much hotter climate then the Northern Rhone and even the central coast of California (where they produce a Syrah similar to the Rhone style), creates a much different style of this grape. Australia Shiraz is a very different animal then what is described above. It's a much more jammy, rounder, plumper, blackberry-filled, chocolatey, oaky, but still peppery, type of wine. So when you are shopping around town, and hopefully at the Noble Grape, pay attention to the labeling; this is the winery giving you hints to what style of Syrah/Shiraz they are making.

Get over your screw cap phobias!

by Maggie Bernat Smith

For all of those who think the screw cap means "cheap wine", I am going give you some good reasons why wineries and wine enthusiasts love the screw cap. Sure I myself was skeptical when I started to see them flooding the market around the year 2000 (especially from Australia and New Zealand), however once I learned why the Stelvin Enclosure (official name of the screw cap) is the best thing for the wine, I gladly welcomed this into my life.

I'm not sure if you knew this or not, but when you order wine in a restaurant and the waiter or sommelier pours you a taste, it's not to let him know whether you like the wine or not, he's pouring it for you to detect cork taint or spoilage. Being in the wine industry and tasting wine constantly we come across "corked" wine all the time. There is a 5 - 7% chance that due to a bad cork your wine is ruined. Have you ever had a wine that smelled like your grandma's basement or wet cardboard or newspaper....that is from a contaminated cork (known as trichloroanisole or TCA for short) and that is what the waiter is asking you to detect. So if you you were a company that had a defect in almost 10% of your product, wouldn't you figure out a way to get rid of the wine killer?

I give the Kiwis and the Aussies credit for this major roll out of the screw cap. They took a huge chance with putting about 90% of their wines they produce under this stigmatized enclosure. They knew that the world was going to have an issue with it; sure, the screw cap has been around for about 40 years but these wines were usually bought at 7-11! The Aussies have always been innovators on the wine scene, they don't have the strict laws of the old world so they do a lot of experimenting with new technologies on the wine front. They have found that this is the best alternative to cork and does not affect the wine at all.

So whether you were holding a $500.00 bottle of Bordeaux for 30 years or whether you just picked up a bottle for your BYOB that night, and come to find out that your wine tastes and smells like wet cardboard.....think twice about at the new screw cap enclosures and preach the stelvin gospel!