There are wine tastings … and then there is the Premiere Napa Valley barrel tasting.

This annual event, held at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, Calif., finds about 200 wineries pouring seriously swell juice that is to be auctioned off that afternoon.  These are young wines, not yet in the bottle, and most of them are special lots available only at this event. For example, last year Pahlmeyer was pouring the cabernet that would go into its Proprietary Red Wine. Yum. 

The event also affords a lot of opportunities to chat up winery owners and winemakers. The legendary Warren Winiarski, for example, likes to place peacock feathers in imbibers’ shirt pockets (representing how his Stag’s Leap cabernets “spread out” in the mouth).

So I got to gossip with Terra Valentine’s Angus Wurtele about the Twin Cities art scene; sample single-vineyard offerings from Shafer, Chappellet and Lail as well as don’t-even-try-to-get-on-the-mailing-list wines as Bond; and watch winery owners literally grab the Wine Spectator’s James Laube to get him to sample their wines. 

The only problem with such an event, at least for me, is that the wines are so tasty that it seems just plain wrong to spit. So I sampled a score or so of wines I had targeted beforehand. My favorites: Lewis, Blackbird, Arietta, Shafer and Cornerstone cabs and an unusual blend from Tres Sabores. I also thoroughly enjoyed the wines with local ties: Ladera, Fantesca, Terra Valentine and O’Shaughnessy.

Thankfully, the indefatigable blogger Alder Yarrow worked the entire room and posted his take, and tasting notes, here.   

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 8:19 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.