September 2009

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I’m sitting in a rather warm room at Washington State University’s ag extension research center in Prosser trying very, very hard not to nod off as Dr. James Harbertson shuffles through a PowerPoint presentation on phenolics. My breathing slows, my head empties, and slowly I enter that strange half-asleep, half-awake stage familiar to frequent fliers where you subconsciously hear someone say “What can I get you to drink?” while dreaming about being lost in a house, naked, inhabited by everyone you ever met in high school and college.

Except instead of hearing “What can I get you to drink?” I hear, “Oak barrel tannins are sort of a myth.”

Like a superhero rising from the ashes before being thrown off the roof of a skyscraper by Lex Luthor, I struggle mightily to rise from my semi-comatose state just in time to keep the drool from dripping onto my shirt. Forcing open my eyes, I mumble, “Wait…what? Oak barrel tannins are a myth?”

Exactly, says Dr. Harbertson.

Holy kryptonite!

Photo by David Lansing.

Photo by David Lansing.

See, we have come to the WSU ag station to sit around on a hot afternoon sipping/spitting barrel samples of various red wines to learn what role tannin plays in wine structure and how to control it. Now, I could give you the two hour PowerPoint presentation Dr. Harbertson has just given or I could give you the nickel version, your choice.

Okay. The nickel version: Tannins are what give red wines weight and structure. They’re what allows a good red wine, like Bordeaux, to sit in a bottle for 10 or 15 years and only get better while white wines (which have almost no tannin) age about as well as Keith Richards. So tannin is important. Too little and the wine falls apart. Too much and your mouth puckers and you want to spit.

So if you’re a winemaker, you need to know how much tannin is in the wine and where the tannin is coming from. Now I always knew that much of a wine’s tannin came from the skins and seeds, but I also thought, like a lot of people, that red wines also picked up tannin from the barrels they were aged in. Thus, a wine aged in oak barrels for three years would have significantly more tannin than wine aged in barrels for nine months, yes?

No.

“From a scientific viewpoint,” says the boyish Dr. Harbertson, “you get almost no tannin from oak barrels.”

I mean like nothing.

Wow. What you do get are aroma components. The nose is aware of the oak. But the mouth isn’t. The mouth is aware of the grape seed.

So the next time you taste an overly-astringent cabernet sauvignon and your friend wrinkles her nose and proclaims, “Spent too much time in the barrel,” smile and say, “Oak has nothing to do with it, Lois. It’s actually too much pumace during fermentation.”

And if she doesn’t believe you, tell her to contact Dr. Harbertson. Or Clark Kent.

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Eat a peach

It’s only 95 degrees out as we drive through the little berg of Sunnyside in the Yakima Valley but it feels much hotter. Nobody is outside (why would they be?) and about the only traffic down main street is a Barney Fife-wannabe weaving down the middle of the empty highway at 60 or 70 mph with his siren wailing and lights flashing.

“What’s Sunnyside known for?” I ask Co?

“Well….,” he says, and then there’s a long pause before he mentions that there’s a pretty good brew pub in town and he knows of a taco truck where you can get damn good carnitas. “Oh!” he says, remembering something else, “And you can buy the best damn peaches in the valley at that little produce stand we just passed.”

Peaches? Hell, let’s turn around.

The first thing you notice when you pull into the parking lot in front of Hutchinson Produce, beside the fact that the building looks like it used to be a gas station or an auto repair shop, is the sign advertising TOMATOES CANTS COTS APPLES MELONS.

Photos by David Lansing.

Photos by David Lansing.

Tomatoes, apples, melons—I get that. But what, I ask Co, are cants and cots?

“Cantaloupes and apricots.”

Why don’t they just say so? I ask him.

He shrugs. That’s just what they’re called out here.

Inside Hutchinson’s, an elderly lady is leaning against her walker while pressing her fleshy thumbs into the fuzzy skin of a softball-sized peach beneath a sign that says “Don’t Pinch Me I’m Tender.”

There are cribs of fresh sweet corn, bins of giant watermelon, and baskets of raspberries, blackberries, and huckleberries (a huckleberry, if you don’t know, looks almost exactly like a blueberry but has larger seeds which makes them more difficult to eat). But I’m here for the peaches whose sweet ripe scent wafts over the dry hot air like an alluring perfume.

There are piles of donut peaches and bushel baskets of fleshy Freestones and bins of both white and yellow peaches. The whole scene just makes me salivate. As I’m standing there, looking a little lost, the owner, Dolores, who disconcertingly sports the exact same hairdo as Aunt Bea from The Andy Griffith Show, a sort of wavy, gray-haired bouffant with the type of ringlets crowning the hive that was popular with prom girls back in the 60s, comes out from behind the counter to stand about a foot behind me with her arms crossed over her chest. Obviously she thinks I’m here to steal her peaches or, at the very least, squeeze them.

“Can I help you?” she says sternly.

Yep, I tell her. I’m here for peaches. “Maybe you’d be kind enough to personally pick a dozen or so of your finest stone fruit for me.”

She’s charmed, I think, and immediately gets a bag and slowly fills it with her magnificent fruit. The bag is so heavy I have to hold it from the bottom to keep it from splitting the seams yet the whole juicy bundle costs only four dollars and six cents. What a deal.

Back out in the parking lot, I hand out just-picked peaches to everyone and we stand there, like a bunch of stone-fruit addicts, the juice running freely down our chins and hands. We don’t peel the peaches or even wash them. No time for that. I eat one in about 20 seconds and then start on a second.

It’s too much for Dolores who comes rushing out of the produce stand with a roll of paper towels, giving each of us one to wipe away the mess. She hands me one and says, “Good?”

“You know what, Dolores? I believe this is the best damn peach I’ve ever had in my life.”

Dolores pats her Aunt Bea hairdo and smiles. “There’s a sink in the back if you need to wash up,” she says.

After running some cold water over my face, I head back to the parking lot.

“Come back anytime,” Dolores calls after me.

I will.

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A lemberger by any other name…

Ever heard of lemberger? Me neither. Until yesterday when Co Dinn poured me a glass at the Hogue Cellars tasting room.

Wait…poured me a glass? You thought I said limburger, didn’t you. As in stinky cheese.

Nope. I’m talking about lemberger. As in wine. But that’s the problem, right? Who’s going to go to a nice romantic restaurant and order a bottle of lemberger? Nobody. Which is why almost no one has heard of it. Despite the fact that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s rocks over merlot and even pinot noir.

Hogue Cellars lemberger wine. Photo by David Lansing.

Hogue Cellars lemberger wine. Photo by David Lansing.

A little history: Lemberger has been around forever. Some say it was growing in Austria, where it’s known as blaufränkisch—no improvement there—a thousand years ago. It’s still a fairly popular varietal in vineyards along the Danube River from Germany to Slovakia.

In 1941 a Hugarian musician escaping the war brought his French horn and some cuttings of lemberger to British Columbia. From here lemberger managed to hitchhike down to Washington where Walter Clore, known as the father of the Washington State wine industry, did a nice enough job growing it that it caught the interest of Julio Gallo who, in the ‘70s, thought about buying Washington lemberger grapes until he realized he just couldn’t get enough of them to make it worthwhile. Probably just as well. If Julio Gallo had bottled lemberger wine under his label back in the 70s it would have ended up being called Boone’s Farm Fuzzy Navel or something.

Since then, lemberger has just been this strange little grape from the Yakima Valley that growers like Hogue Cellars have played around with but have never seriously attempted to market. In fact, even if you go on the Hogue Cellars web site, you can’t buy lemberger. The only way to taste it is to go to the Hogue visitor’s center in Prosser, like I did, or join their wine club. Not because it’s not a great wine—it is—but because when people think of lemberger they think “stinky” not “yummy.”

And it is yummy. An incredibly beautiful ruby red wine with mouthfuls of ripe cherries, dark blackberries, plums, currants and even, I think, a hint of chocolate.

“I love this wine,” I told Co as he poured me a second glass.

“I know,” he said. “But people won’t buy it.”

They might, I told him, if you guys changed the stupid name.

“Well, we thought about calling it blaufränkisch,” he said.

Yeah, no, that isn’t going to work.

So having already renamed Washington’s Snipes Mountain AVA to Dinosaur Hills, I guess I’m going to have to come up with a new name for lemberger.

Any ideas? Fred? Sonia? Hardy?

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Getting rid of Snipes

I didn’t mention it yesterday but there was a reason why we stopped in Granger. It’s the gateway to Snipes Mountain.

I know, right? Snipes?

When Tia and Alicia told me they were taking me up Snipes Mountain to look at vineyards my first reaction was, Yeah, right.

A snipe, if you don’t know, is an odd little wading bird that is so difficult to hunt that it gives its name to the term “sniper.” And a snipe hunt is nothing more than a practical joke where you talk some dummy into going out into the woods with a gunny sack or something and have them run around in circles while making some ridiculous noise until they finally realize there are no snipes in the woods and they’re all alone.

So I was sure this is what Tia and Alicia were doing: Taking Dave on a snipe hunt and leaving me there. But I guess people around Granger haven’t heard of snipe hunts because there really is a Snipes Mountain. Although calling this modest-size hill (which tops out at 1,310 feet) a mountain is kind of ridiculous. I’ve seen bigger sand dunes.

Anyway, there are only two things of interest about Snipes Mountain. The first is its geology. The soil is littered with car-sized boulders of granite, which is interesting since there’s no granite in the Yakima Valley. Obviously the granite was delivered either by aliens in their space ships or from hitching a ride on melting glaciers (which is also probably how the bones of that wooly mammoth they found in the clay pit arrived) during the last ice age. I’m guessing it was the aliens that brought them.

Hogue Cellars winemaker Co Dinn sampling grapes on Snipes...er, Dinosaur Hill. Photo by David Lansing.

Hogue Cellars winemaker Co Dinn sampling grapes on Snipes...er, Dinosaur Hills. Photo by David Lansing.

The other thing of interest about Snipes Mountain is that in February of this year, it became an official Washington American Viticultural Area (AVA), the state’s 10th. This is interesting because there are only about 665 acres of vineyards planted on this hill. Which isn’t much. But Tia and Alicia wanted me to see it. So we drove up the dirt road, getting a nice view of the Yakima Valley, to the flat top where the Roskamp family lives in a wind-buffeted ranch house surrounded by the vineyards that grow grapes for Hogue Cellars.

I don’t know how anybody could live up there. It’s isolated and Tia says sometimes the wind blows so hard that it just rips out chunks of the house. Nice.

Now I’m telling you all this because I think it’s just crazy that there’s an AVA a few minutes outside of Granger named Snipes Mountain. It’s just wrong. And I want to help change that. So from now on, I’m going to do the logical thing and call it Dinosaur Hills and I want you to call it Dinosaur Hills as well. There may never have been any real dinosaurs in this area but there definitely weren’t any snipes either and at least people can go see big ol’ plastic dinosaurs when they pull off the highway on their way to Dinosaur Hills to taste a nice glass of merlot.

I mean ask yourself if you’d rather visit a winery on Snipes Mountain or Dinosaur Hills. Obviously Dinosaur Hills. And if Hogue Cellars was smart, they’d order a 20-foot wide pterodactyl and put it way up high, with its wings open, in the middle of the Roskamp vineyard. I’m guessing that would keep the birds away from the fruit.

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Dinosaurs in Granger

We never took a plane to go on family vacations when I was a kid. In fact, the first time I flew, I was 19 years old. What we used to do instead is what most American families did back then: road trips. My dad built special wooden cabinets to fit the back end of our Chevy station wagon and we’d all pile in and drive for days and days on end up the spine of California to Oregon.

This was back when the Interstate, I-5, was just being completed and small towns were being bypassed. This had a tragic effect on such iconic highway businesses as the Giant Orange stands that once dotted Highway 99 in towns like Chowchilla and Merced.

Some towns lost so much business that they resorted to circus-like promotions to get travelers to pull off the Interstate. Things like bottle houses and train rides through trees or giant statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox (I think when Mr. Bunyan was finally retired, his ax was replaced with a golf club and he ended up waving from the side of a driving range in L.A.)

One such oddity that always fascinated me was Thunderbeast Park near Crater Lake in Southern Oregon. We’d be driving down Hwy. 97 through some endless pine forest and all of a sudden you’d pass by this odd beast that looked like a cross between a giant sloth and a dairy cow standing alongside the road. A sign promised more pre-historic wonders inside the park. I was smitten by the possibilities. We only stopped once. But it was enough. I just remember it as being one of the strangest places I’d ever been. Sort of funny but also a little creepy.

The DinoJava in Granger, Washington. Photos by David Lansing.

The DinoJava in Granger, Washington. Photos by David Lansing.

RoadsideAmerica does a better job of describing it than I ever could so I’m just going to go ahead and quote them: “There’s no T-Rex, brontosaurus, triceratops, pterodactyl—none of the mainstream crowd pleasers. Instead, the creatures highlighted—from the uncelebrated ‘Eocene Epoch’—are low-to-the-ground puzzlers like the Glyptodont, the Dinohyus, and the Platybelodon.

“The oddly painted statues are cartoon-like—such as the Dodo Bird-ish ‘Diatryma’ a nutty flesh-eater—and resemble farm animals dressed for Halloween. The Uintatherium is a cow wearing a mask of Styrofoam coffee cups.”

Exactly.

I mention this because yesterday, as we drove east over the Cascades towards the Tri-Cities of Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco, through miles and miles of hot, dry, rolling landscape greened up only by the large tracts of farmland sustained by irrigation projects off the Columbia River, we stopped for a break in the little rural community of Granger. And in the parking lot of the gas station was a green dinosaur. And across the street was a wire mesh and steel sculpture of a spinosaurus sitting on a pedestal that said, Granger, “Where Dinosaurs Roam.”

There was a pterodactyl just up the street from the DinoJava coffee shop and a triceratops blazing across the Granger Travel Plaza. I immediately had flashbacks to my visit, decades ago, to Thunderbeast Park, although I have to admit the dinosaurs in Granger were more artistically rendered. Still, it was…odd.

There was a Granger public works employee getting coffee at the gas station’s food mart so when he lumbered back to his pickup truck (which had a tyrannosaurus stenciled on the door), I asked him what the hell was the deal with Granger and dinosaurs.

Well, he said, sipping on his coffee from a Styrofoam cup, it was kind of a long story. He said a hundred years ago, Granger was a hot little town, located as it was along the confluence of two rivers. Later, it had a clay mine that made bricks and tiles, but that closed up back in the ‘60s. “From then on, we just seemed to get smaller and smaller until folks worried we were just going to disappear.”

Back in the early ‘90s, the locals tried to figure out a way to get people traveling between Seattle and the Tri-Cities to do more than stop for gas in Granger. “Someone remembered that back when the clay mine was open they found the bones of a wooly mammoth in the pit and that got us to thinking.” A wooly mammoth, as you probably know, is, an elephant-looking animal perhaps best known as the pal to the stupid sloth, Sid, and acorn-loving squirrel, Scrat, in the movie Ice Age.

Now wooly mammoths roamed all over North America (they recently dug one up near the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles) and they’re not dinosaurs, having evolved thousands of years later, but what the hell. They’re not trying to sell the steak in Granger, they’re trying to sell the sizzle.

So in 1994, the first Granger brontosauraus showed up and they’ve been creating dinosaurs in and around the town ever since (there’s a pterosaurs in the middle of Granger’s manmade pond).

Has it increased tourism? The public works employee just shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. Don’t forget that we’ve also got the menudo festival this month,” he said, getting into his truck.

I hope Granger does better with the dinosaurs than the old woman who built Thunderbeast Park. But I think it’s wise that they’ve got the menudo festival as a back up plan.

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