Sips and tips

By Chris Sherman
Published June 27, 2007

Beer's silly season is here

It's summer and beer gets colder, lighter and fruitier. The Belgians started it with their lambics, alt-malts masqueraded as lemonade. Now mainstream breweries are heading for the produce section - or is it the New Age Kool-Aid stand?

From now through Labor Day, Anheuser-Busch infuses Michelob Ultra with pomegranate-raspberry, "Tuscan" orange-grapefruit and lime-cactus. A-B pitches them as food beers.

Your own barrel

Would-be winemakers can see their California dreams come true - and drink them - through micro-crushing, which blends hobbyist winemaking with top grapes, facilities and talents.

Several vintners, such as Judd's Hill in Napa and Crushpad in San Francisco, now invite wine lovers to make a custom barrel of wine, from the vineyard to the bottling. And you won't have to do the stomping.

The grapes are far better than in-house label fare because these are small operations that work with good growers. One new operation, Sonoma Grapemasters in northern Sonoma, offers a wide range of local grapes but specializes in Russian River pinot noir.

Micro-winemakers usually visit their grapes in the field or at crush, nine months later for the blending, and a year late for bottling. The cost runs from $5, 000 to $9, 000, which amounts to 24 to 25 cases of wine, or approximately $18 to $35 per bottle, depending on the variety and terroir of the grape.

Not inexpensive, but it is a very limited edition from Your Name Vineyards.

California Galicia

Albarino, the grape that makes the finest wines of northwest Spain, will get its first big planting in California. Tangent winery hopes to make Edna Valley in coastal California the Rias Baixas of America. Tangent skips chardonnay and focuses on less familiar white wines, from viognier to pinot blanc. This year Tangent added small plots of grenache blanc from southern France and gruner veltliner from Austria, and staked its biggest hopes and the most vineyards 55 acres on albarino. It will take a couple of years, but this gallego treat may soon come from the Pacific as well as the Atlantic coast.

Wine of the week

If you've had Greek wine, it probably came from Boutari, the country's biggest wine company. But if you've had only Retsina, you haven't had the best. And you've missed many of the other wines of Greece, modern or ancient . . . very ancient.

In the Greek revival of better wines, importers have brought the United States one of Boutari's more unusual - and popular - whites.

Packaging is fresh and contemporary, but the grape is an old one, moschofilero, which here makes a white wine that is bright, clean and light-bodied. The nose is very floral, and the body round and easy.

It can be made into a rose or a sparkler, and when made as a dry white by Boutari, it is still crisp spicy and fun.

Availability: wine and liquor stores, $12 to $15.

Chris Sherman can be reached at (727) 893-8585 or sherman@sptimes.com.

[Last modified June 25, 2007, 16:52:02]