Women Wine Critics Board

Red, White and Drunk All Over

This week we are joined by award-winning wine writer Natalie MacLean, who has just published her first book, Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass. Natalie joins us below for a Q&A session about her book, and if you have any questions for Natalie, please post them here!

From the book cover:

Natalie tastes sensuous pinot noir in the ancient cellars of Burgundy while discovering the mysterious tenets of biodynamic viticulture from such colorful characters as the tiny, ferocious Lalou Bize-Leroy, part-owner of France's acclaimed Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. She pulls on sturdy boots to help with the grape harvest at California’s Bonny Doon Vineyards—and gets to the root of the anti-establishment philosophy of winemaker Randall Grahm, notorious for his experimental wine techniques, love for unfashionable grapes, and fondness for naming his wines "Cardinal Zin," "Heart Has its Rieslings," and "Big House Red" (whose grapes are grown just down the road from one of California’s state prisons).

Natalie takes a job as undercover sommelier at a five-star French restaurant, spends a day helping customers in a high-end New York wine shop, wades into a famous feud between Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson, two of the world’s best-known critics and, back home, invites friends over for a casual wine tasting. Along the way she teaches us—painlessly and often hilariously—how to face a telephone directory-sized wine list without fear, what questions to ask to get exactly the wine you are looking, what those scores out of 100 really mean, and how properly to expectorate (it’s best to start out in the shower!)

At the 2003 World Food Media Awards in Australia, Natalie was named the World's Best Drink Writer. The competition received more than 1,000 entries. Natalie has also won four James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards for her writing, including the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, in memory of one of America's greatest food writers. Natalie has also won an unprecedented five Bert Greene Awards for excellence in food journalism, presented by the International Association of Culinary Professionals, four awards from the American Association of Food Journalists, four from the North American Travel Writers Association and three honorable mentions at the National Magazine Awards. Natalie’s e-newsletter is read by 50,000 wine lovers in 36 countries and was twice named one of the three best food and wine newsletters at the James Beard awards.

Don't Call It "Pink"

Contributed by Daniel Rogov, wine writer

If there is a single wine that has come to be firmly associated with women that wine is the one thought of by may people as "Pink Champagne". It is probable that this association started somewhere during the heyday of the flappers, those young women who considered themselves so bold and daring during the 1920's, when the rage at Charleston and Black Bottom dance parties became something called Pink Champagne. Nothing could have given Champagne a worse name, for the probability is that the terrible half-sweet half coarse stuff that the flappers and their equally bold and daring dates were drinking had nothing whatever to do with France. If it did, it certainly had nothing in common with the great wine we know as Champagne, and was probably nothing more than a rose d'Anjou or far worse, a California bootleg "Burgundy" (remember, Prohibition lasted in the United States from 1920 - 1933, so the sale of wine was illegal) to which bubbles had been added by pumping in ample amounts of carbon dioxide.

Responding to all of this, producers in the vicinity of Reims and Epernay began to realize that there might be money to be made in giving the world, men and women alike, a true Champagne that was actually pink. If the truth be told, the first rose Champagnes (call it pink Champagne in France and you will probably be deported within hours and without ceremony) were not very good, made largely by adding cheap Pinot Noir to standard Champagnes in order to give them their pink-orange color. Starting only in the 1960s did rose Champagne attain its legitimate place in the repertoire of winemakers, and today some of the very best Champagnes are brut roses.