Welcome to Pinotland!
Who is this guy?
My name is Brett and I work for a wine distributor in New Hampshire. My love of wine brought me to this industry three years ago when I went to work for a small distributor of boutique wines. While with that good company I met people like David Ramey, Jon Engelskirger and Gary Farrell and enjoyed ample time to “talk-shop” with other great winemakers as we drove down the road between sales calls. Today I work for a much larger wine and spirits distributor managing a few wine suppliers and selling wine when I can get out of the office; the corporate wine world is a very big beast! Years past found me brewing beer professionally at Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland, Ohio and eventually at Martha’s Exchange, a family-owned brewpub in Nashua, NH. The technical training I received at Siebel Institute of Technology, a brewing trade school in Chicago, and six years experience brewing craft-beer are a great benefit to me in the wine business.
I’ve helped with harvest at two different wineries. In October of 2003 I worked for Julie Johnson at Tres Sabores, a boutique Zinfandel producer in Rutherford, California, feeding freshly picked clusters of Zin to a destemmer. Two weeks later found me pressing this wine and racking to barrel, inoculating for ML and tucking barrels into a cave for maturation. During harvest of 2004 I worked for Rob Stuart in the Willamette Valley helping with punchdowns, pumpovers and other crushpad tasks at his eponymous R. Stuart & Co., a boutique pinot gris and pinot noir winery in McMinnville, Oregon. These were two outstanding experiences that greatly deepened my understanding of wine production. In short, I learned two very important lessons: working crush will quickly sober one’s romantic notions of the vine and in addition to fermented bliss there’s a lot of sweat, hope and worry in a wine bottle.
What’s this blog all about?
What began as a simple idea to fuse a serious interest in pinot noir with writing and the internet spawned this weblog in March of 2005. My goal for Pinotland is to entertain and inform, and if I happen to introduce readers to pinot noir they find exciting then all the better. Pinotland was partly created in response to what I so much abhor in the wine business: numerical ratings. How good thinking people get taken by ratings assigned by critics never ceases to amaze me. I’ve found a lot of highly rated wine to be very disappointing with food while I’ve enjoyed some really great wine that hasn’t scored well with so-called experts. As well, many wineries never submit samples to the wine press for review because they don’t care to play the ratings game. My experience tells me that people forgo a lot of great pinot noir when they listen only to Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast and The Wine Advocate. So I think Pinotland is an alternative voice to the dominating (debilitating?) influence of the Wine Press Establishment. But of course, that’s what blogging’s all about.
Methodology:
I go to a lot of wine tastings throughout the year. Occasionally insightful (more often chaotic), these events are a great way to taste a lot of wine in one location. They are not, however, a good forum for drinking, evaluating or enjoying wine. I don’t think two ounce samples in a loud and hectic setting is the best way to get your head around wine. For me, good wine is best enjoyed leisurely: with jazz on the Hi-Fi, a proper wine glass in hand and delicious food at table. That’s how I prefer my pinot and how ALL wine is reviewed herein.
In the end, Pinotland is for fun. As I derive no income whatsoever from my reviews, FedEx has yet to deliver any unsolicited pinot noir to my doorstep. Yet, if you should ever desire to ship me something small from say Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, just ask for my mailing address. I’ll gladly accept.
Thanks for reading and enjoy,
Brett Marcy
New Hampshire Seacoast
March 2006