Summer, who adopted us as a starving stray was killed this morning. Hit by a car we presume, and hopefully died instantly.

Rick dug a hole on the bank overlooking the bush, and buried her. I kept away, not dealing especially well with death.

In a way we were relieved - becos we've been debating for a number of months now whether we should have the gumption to make the call to have her put to sleep, becos she was an elderly lady with breathing problems, and we really didn't want her to suffer.

I'd go home at nite convinced that the next morning we would ring the vet and organise an appointment , and  then when we'd go back over to the restaurant  in the morning she would greet us in her normally bolshy manner, and seem just fine, so we would dither, and decide that we weren't quite ready to play God.

Early this morning however, Rick took a phone call from an agitated friend who'd driven past the restaurrant and seen the prone body on the side of the road, and knew who it was.  So, in some ways it was easier becos we didn't have to make any decisions - we were instead presented with a fait accompi.

She was only a kitten when she turned up on our doorstep, nearly 15 years ago - and she has stayed as the restaurant cat since. I was convinced fairly early on, that she was actually an old customer, who'd come back to us in a new life form, becos she seemed so knowing and in command. Hannah, who was only a toddler at the time, named her Summer  - which felt totally appropriate, and she stayed on, determined to rule the roost and eat as much duck as she could smooch out of customers.

Most people responded to her presence in the restaurant with affection - but there were always some who objected. Some very stridently. One lady announced a couple of weeks ago suddenly - 'either the cat goes or I go'. Good manners forbade me from saying what I really wanted to say...

For these last few months however, she's spend most nites curled up on the cushions in the bar, her back turned in disdain to the world, weary of the world and people.

May she rest in peace.

Have just come back over to the house from a cookschool, and am luxeriating in the warm glow that classes tend to impart. Lots of laughs in this class. A nice mix of some of my favourite long term attendees, together with a group of 6 women who have got into the habit of coming to classes en masse, and then at a later point producing the meal as a dinner party for each other and their husbands. Sounds like an excuse for much hilarity! Rick uses an icecream machine, a deep fryer and a mandolin in this class - none of which are mandatory, and we'd hate people to think they have to rush and buy all the equipment, but I think we have convinced most people that if they want to get a really good brulee on top of their creme brulees, then a blow torch ( in a small manageable version from a Camping and Outdoor type shop, or a Kitchen shop like Table Pride) is a worthwhile investment. I'd like to be a fly on the wall when these guys  start bruleeing however! Hopefully they won't have imbibed too much alcolholic beverages prior!!

So much of what Rick does in these classes can be prepped in advance, in true ' mise en place' style, that operates in every professional kitchen. All the prep is done in advance of customers arriving, becos people simply wouldn't want to wait for the time it would take to  prepare food from scratch. We have 4 staff over in the restaurant kitchen now, working thru the afternoon, prepping for dinner service tonite. And what I think the discussion in the cookschools helps people grasp, is that that concept can be transplanted to a home kitchen quite easily - and so much of the prep can be done in advance, meaning that when your friends and family are there, you don't have to be secreted away in the kitchen for the duration. Something I've become increasingly conscious of, becos I'm relatively selfish, and hate missing out on all the chat and the gossip.

However I digress! This blog is about the biography on the Mondavi family - the more famous wine producers from the Napa Valley. Its been a wild and woolly few days weather wise - so a book, comfy chair and peace and quiet has been my idea of heaven!

All I knew about the Mondavis prior to reading this book was that they were considered royalty amongst the American wine industry, having been at the fore front of that  industrys surgence into global awareness. I knew the company had grown from humble beginnings into a massive corporate empire, and that there had been some sort of corporate raid at the end, that had seen all family members removed from the board, but I wasn't aware of the personal detail.

Talk about epic! And after reading  and absorbing it all, I put it down feeling sad - sad that so much achievement , so much dreaming and striving can end up been cast into the dustbin in the face of hubris and the bitterness of inner family rivalry. We can do so much damage to our own - the scars of which cast a very long shadow over peoples lifes. Sad and profound.

It isn't really a book about wine - not perhaps in the sense I was expecting. It does however place American wine growth in context of the times,  and how the public palate moved from sweeter styles back in the '40s and '50s to a growing sophistication as the decades went past.

But more than anything the book described for me how family enmity can create wounds that never heal, and which damage in a way that money - no amount of money, will ever make right.

In the end ,this billion dollar business was the subject of a corporate raid by Constellation Brands Inc, a huge conglomeration focused on profit and not at all interested in fine wine. And somewhat perversely owned by 2 brothers, who seemed to have a far more workable relationship than those that existed between the Mondavi siblings.

So Robert Mondavi Wines Inc ends up subsumed into being only another brand in the lineup owned by a massive liquor distributor. Within 60 years it goes from simple beginnings, and a family feud between that set of brothers, to a split and the set up of another winery, to exponential growth thru the '70s and '80s, and feuds amongst the next generation of brothers. That in turn leads to bringing in outside experts ( including interestingly - and I can't help but wonder if it was typical of corporate America at the time - a lot of pyschologists) to run the company. That leads to an IPO which will allow family members to realise some of their wealth ( not that they were exactly living as paupers),  and then almost inevitably in the light of the family hubris and the need to preform to share value demands rather than treating the company as their personal fiefdom, a hostile takeover bid, that means no family is left on the Board. The legendary winery has gone.

And I can't help but wonder if they're happy...

So far, in my life's work of tasting and learning to understand wines, I have experienced very little of the wines from California - in fact most of my focus on that area revolves more around the hope that Rick and I will one day get the opportunity to eat at The French Laundry a restaurant that is regularly ranked at the top in the world.

I'm not too sure then, what induced me to order this book from Amazon - but I must have been following some thread at the time, especially since ' The House of Mondavi', a book describing the rise and fall of the family wine dynasty from California arrived today, also. But I haven't read that yet, so remains another story, and will be all the more so, since there were some fascinating references to the Mondavi's in 'The Judgement of Paris".

Essentially this book is about the growth in the California wine industry, from the late 1800s when grapes where first planted in the region, thru the changes wrought by fashion and calamatious intervention of 14 years of Prohibition, thru to the happy synergy that European emigres and the rising faith in science and an analytical approach to winemaking could bring to bear on land in the  New World that bore 'terroir'similarities with Burgundy and Bordeaux in France.

The French wine industry is centuries old, and laden with preconceptions of its pre-eminance in the world. A position that had always been seen as unassaliable - in no small part becos the French believed very firmly that the brillance of their Grande Cru wines came down to the very earth it was grown in - the 'terroir'so to speak-  and that is something that could never be transplanted to some upstart, other part of the world.

The French were smug, poised and totally confident in their superiority. So it was considered of no special interest when an Englishman who owned a wine shop in Paris decided to put together a blind wine tasting, in Paris, in 1976, to see how the up and coming California wines ( some from vineyards that had only produced 3 or 4 vintages at that stage), would compare with the best out of the 2 most heavily lauded french wine growing regions.

No-one anticipated the outcome - and what makes me smile is that some of the judges ( who were all French wine experts), to this day, 30 years later, refuse to discuss the tasting, so profound was the drama caused by the unintended discovery that these Californian wines actually tasted as good as the French, and in fact outclassed them by taking top place for both the Chardonnay and the Bordeau style red.

It created a huge furore - but my interest is not in seeing smugness and arrogance getting its comeuppance( although I do rather like it when that happens!), but rather in the significance that the discovery made to the growth of wine production throughout the rest of the world, including of course New Zealand.

Wine was been grown in other countries by the Seventies, but struggled to be taken seriously by the wine importing markets since top French wines held such a stranglehold on the publics perception of quality. What this tasting did - was to completely undermine that dominance and to create doubt thru which whole new markets opened up to careful, talented vintners, whether they lived in California, Australia, New Zealand, South America, Italy or Spain.

To a degree, the French have had to play catch up ever since. Their Grande Crus still command ridiculous amounts of money on the international market, becos there will always be the trophy buyers, portrayed rather too graphically for me sometimes in the American "Wine Spectator",  who need to be in ownership of the top Chateau, becos the magazine or Robert Parker has decreed it as the best.  But increasingly, those Chateau don't have to be centuries old buildings in Burgundy or around Saint Emilion - they may in fact be much more modern fixtures  in the Napa Valley, or the Barossa. Becos the wine purchasing public have understood, and accepted the idea that it doesn't have to be French to be the best.  That is a huge mindset change that has happened in a remarkably short time. And it was that simple myth that this tasting dispelled - with the reverberations been felt around the wine world still.

The book was a really interesting study of the type of people who get passionate about making wine - and having got to know a few wine makers over the years, I could identify easily with the personality types. I also found fascinating the description of how even in France the cachet that is attached to really good wine, always attracts the kind of people who want to 'enoblier' themselves by association. In other words use the money earned in some other occupation to buy into the instant credibility that owning a respected wine producer would give them. That concept has transformed the Napa Valley in the past 20 years - a feeling that is captured in Wine Spectator quite regularly.

That leads on to a discussion of the globilisation of wine brands, as bigger and bigger liquor companies start dominating the landscape, and producing increasingly generic wines, that are defined by the wine making process, rather than by the terroir that the French are so passionate about. But wine writers with the kind of clout of Robert Parker have created a market for that kind of wine, so its hard to be critical of people wanting to provide the market with what it wants to purchase. This book draws gentler conclusions about the issue than the movie 'Mondo vino' which I watched a couple of years back, which decried the growth in the clout of 'flying winemakers', who travel all over the world as consultants making the kind of wine that people want to drink, whether the grapes are grown in Argentina, Montalcino, or France.

All told, a really fascinating discussion of world wide trends in wine over the last 50 years.

28 October 2008

As an postcsript related directly to the NZ wine industry, a tasting has just been held at Scenic Cellars where top Gimblett Gravel style reds were tasted and compared to top Bordeaux chateaux. The results are in this article. It will be interesting to see how much attention the tasting gets over the next little while...