It was hard cramming in all the information I wanted in today’s column on riesling. I neglected to mention, for example, that one reason rieslings might be gaining in popularity is that they almost always are unoaked, adding to their purity of flavor and beckoning the ABC (Anything But Chardonnay) Brigade.

I also forgot to include a couple of dandy rieslings that I had sampled: Mirassou from California, McWilliams from Australia and a couple of German offerings, the sweet Leitz Dragonstone and the drier Jacoby-Mathy “Balance.”

But enough about me. I’m much more interested in what others (that means YOU) have experienced in the riesling world: interesting flavors, odd pairings that worked, funky-looking bottles, whatever. Thoughts?

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.   

Just when it seemed that American wine consumers were starting to grasp the meaning of terroir, proposed federal regulations might render the term meaningless.

The revisions would allow companies from other areas to use the names of renowned wine-growing regions such as Napa and Calistoga (the northernmost part of the Napa Valley). Imagine an Iowa fish farm calling itself Mille Lacs Walleye Co., and you get the idea.

At the forefront of the fight in Napa is a native Minnesotan, Pat Stotesbury, owner of the Ladera winery and president of the board of directors of Napa Valley Vintners.

“Somehow the TTB (Tax and Trade Bureau) has missed the boat on Science 101 here,” Stoesbury said Tuesday. “It’s certainly confusing for consumers when a winery is called Calistoga Cellars and they don’t grow the grapes or make the wine in Calistoga.”

Stotesbury, whose silver hair and blue eyes give him a rather strong resemblance to a slimmer Bud Grant, is generally a genial sort, but not when it comes to this issue. His organization has no idea who is pushing the new regulations — we have not been able to see anybody’s breath on the glass,” he said – and doesn’t find disclaimers a potential compromise solution.

“Even if the disclaimer law is enacted, it will never appear on a wine list, and is likely not to appear on Internet sales,” he said. “And there’s no telling where it would even appear on the actual bottle.”

The details of the current and proposed standards are, like most federal law, complicated, often arcane and even inscrutable. Ironically, Europeans are much more stringent about such matters: Belgian authorities recently destroyed more then 3,000 bottles of wine labeled Korbel Champagne Cellars because it violated European Unio accords protecting the domaine of the Champagne region.

There’s little doubt that Stotesbury and his fellow Napa vintners toasted that move.

It’s a good week for local folks with a penchant for the kind of  pinot noirs that combine California richness with Burgundian elegance:

Papapietro Perry and Siduri are here. A small but growing local distributor, Progeny, has secured a few of these wines that had been available only to us on the two wineries’ mailing lists.

While they last, the Papapietro Perry pinot from Anderson Valley is available at Byerly’s in Chanhassen and at the Wine Market stores in Mendota Heights and Woodbury, according to Progeny’s Jeanne Cummings.

France 44 is carrying Siduri pinots and some dandy wines by Siduri’s sister label, Novy, which specializes in syrahs and zins. Siduri pinots also can be found at both Wine Market locations and at Byerly’s in St. Louis Park and Ridgedale. The Novy wines, Cummings said, should be in all of Byerly’s wine stores and Lunds’ only one, in Plymouth.

I cannot vouch for the quality of Papapietro Perry’s zinfandels (2005 was the first vintage for these). But PP’s pinots and every Novy or Siduri wine I’ve tried have been lush and textured, with finishes that last for days.

These wines aren’t likely to last long, so it wouldn’t hurt to call ahead.

Less than a week after our profile of St. Paul native Kent Rosenblum ran in the Taste section, the announcement came: Rosenblum Cellars had been sold to booze-industry giant Diageo.

When I had interviewed Kent in late November, I asked him about the consolidation unfolding in the wine industry, with behemoths such as Constellation buying up wineries of all sizes. His response: “We have conversations every now and again with folks, kincking at the tires. But we’re kinda liking where we’re at.”

Perhaps his use of “kinda” instead of “very” should have been a tipoff that something was up, but (a) That’s the way the man talks, and (b) It would have been folly to expect him to reveal the process that almost certainly was unfolding at the time.

The key question, at least for consumers, is how this purchase will affect the quality of Rosenblum wines. There have been plenty of instances of corporate pressure to buy cheaper grapes from lesser sites, and the quality of the grapes is still the foremost factor in the quality of the wine.

But the guess here is that this won’t happen with Rosenblum, at least for now. Among the reasons:

*Kent Rosenblum is staying on as winemaker, and his name, and thus his reputaion, remain on the label.

*Most of Rosenblum’s wines come from single vineyards. That’s also unlikely to change; if we start seeing Harris Kratka and Eagle Point Vineyards disappearing from Rosenblum labels, replaced by more generic names, then it might be time to worry.
 
*In general, Diageo has a reputation for not interfering with the winemaking process at the properties it buys. (The same holds for the now-ginormous Jackson Family Wines, by the way.)

Anything can happen, of course, to affect a winery’s performance: the death of a major player, the departure of a gifted winemaker, a vineyard owner deciding to sell his grapes to another winery. Silver Oak cabs, in my view, fell off several notches a few years back when the winemaker/owner fell ill and sold the company. There’s no way of truly knowing until the juice hits the retail shelves.