Talk-A-Vino

It seems that the wine world is moving at an ever-increasing pace, with new wines and wine products continuing to surprise even the most adventurous wine lovers. Today, we want to cover some of the most interesting news and announcements.

Loic Pasquet is the winemaker at Liber Pater, the winery in Graves, producing some of the most expensive wines in the world. He is well known for his unique approach to winemaking, using pre-phylloxera vines and old grape varieties which are not used in winemaking in Bordeaux anymore, thus forcing his wines not even carry Graves appellation on the label. It appears that Loic is also an avid coffee lover. After tasting Kopi luwak, the coffee produced in Asia from the beans partially digested by the rodent, Loic decided to try to replicate the same in the winemaking, training presumably marmots (this work is done in full secrecy, so very little information is available) to eat grapes which they can’t fully digest. We hear that in the blind tasting, the wine made from partially digested grapes showed an immense promise, but I guess it will take it a few more years for those wines to become available to the wine lovers (you can imagine production quantities of a few cases a year, each bottle probably costing around $100K – but at the moment, we can only speculate about it).

Continuing the wine and coffee theme, it appears that Starbucks entered a partnership with E.&J. Gallo Winery to produce wine directly from the coffee berries. The coffee berries (or cherries, as they are properly called) are imported from Guatemala and Costa Rica at the moment. Coffee cherries are crushed and fermented at the E.&J. Gallo facility in Northern California, with some batches undergoing malolactic fermentation. Once fermentation is complete, the coffee wines are aged in ceramic eggs for 9–12 months and additional 6 months in the bottle. Few of the wine critics already had an opportunity to taste the wines and had been wildly raving about them. Starbucks and Gallo are currently in conversation with coffee farms in Kona, Hawaii, to add famous Kona coffee to its line of coffee wines. The new coffee wines, branded CoStarWin, should appear in Starbucks shops next year, first in San Francisco and Seattle, with more locations getting access to the much-desired beverage.

The unbound creativity of Coravin is widely known – the non-stop innovation coming from the maker of the famous wine preservation system is simply incredible. It was recently reported in the news that Coravin partnered with none other than Patek Philippe, a famous Swiss watchmaker, to create a new version of Coravin which allows to age wine for a precise number of years as the wine been poured into the glass. Let’s say you want to drink Opus One, and you only have the current vintage of the wine. Take your trusted Coravin, set the dial to 15 years, pour a glass, and enjoy delicious Opus One in its prime, tasting exactly as it would 15 years from now. The technology behind the new gadget had not been revealed, however, it is known that Coravin filed 16 patent applications with USPTO in conjunction with this new product. The new device, aptly named Coravin Patek WineTime, is supposed to be available in time for Christmas shopping this year and will retail for $1199.

I’m sure you will find the next news update quite surprising – Procter and Gamble is not readily associated with wine, but still. It was recently leaked to the press that Procter and Gamble, or P&G for short, is developing a new type of toilet paper using … yes, grape skins! – as the main source material. The project started out of a desire to find a new use for the abundantly available grape skins, and quickly developed into a major R&D undertaking. The first results are very encouraging, with users raving about the pleasure of using the colored toilet paper instead of just the boring white. It appears also that grape-skin-based toilet paper has excellent skin-soothing properties, so this product definitely has a bright future. It seems that Walmart got exclusive distribution rights for Charmin Grape Magic Ultra, so look for it starting in January 2022, and see how you will like it.

The last one for today is again, somewhat unexpected. Wine is usually associated with gourmet food, and Velveeta, the infamous cheese spread, is as far from gourmet food as it can be. Nevertheless, in an attempt to expand its customer base, Velveeta just announced a new line of cheese products called BoozyV. The BoozyV cheese spreads are made with the addition of the wine directly into the spread. As wine is added at the end of the mixing cycle and right before packaging, it doesn’t lose any alcohol content and offers the best of both worlds for the wine and cheese lovers – the product which instantly combines both together. Initially, the BoozyV line includes Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, and Zinfandel cheese spreads, with a nice buttery Chardonnay version hitting the stores at the beginning of the next year. As BoozyV products contain alcohol at full strength, they will be exclusively available at fine wine retailers nationwide.

That’s all I have for you for today, my friends. Cheers!