If wine really is bottled poetry, as Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, then San Francisco’s Fort Mason was worth a bazillion words during the 16th annual Zinfandel Advocates and Producers (ZAP) Festival which ran from January 24 to 27.
      
      

Photo: Wayde Carroll

For the great annual all-day tasting extravaganza on Saturday the 27th, the gates opened at 1 p.m., and throngs of thirsty wine tasters flooded forward into the Herbst and Festival Pavilions like eager souls into Heaven. Up to their necks in wine, they waded from table to table and winery to winery, swirling, sipping and swallowing until their tongues went numb and such back-of-the-bottle prose as “hinting at rose petals,” “aromas of vanilla and saffron,” and “the perfect match for braised pig loin” could have been hard truth or downright drivel. It was impossible to know. Everyone was intoxicated. The world was spinning.

My tasting mate and I went straight to the table of Sharp Cellars in the Festival Pavilion. This Sonoma winery, a favorite of mine, is owned by Vance Sharp the Third and produces just several thousand cases per year. The wine is not cheap, but the flavor of their 2001 Zin ($45 per bottle) is the spiciest, sweetest and most remarkable I have ever tasted. Strangely, the wine reminds one of really, really excellent vinegar. It sounds bad, but it’s great. It’s also certified organic.

I moved forward in search of more eco-friendly wine and soon felt as though I was some sort of assailant. The winemakers grew visibly nervous when I asked if their grapes were organic. Their bodies would stiffen and their faces grow a shade darker, as though I had accused them of poisoning the Earth, which I guess I had.

But Rod Snapp, owner of Javelina Leap Winery in Cornville, Arizona wasn’t phased by my interrogations.

“Of course my wine’s organic!” he barked merrily at me when I inquired. “You wouldn’t want fertilizers in your wine, would you?!”

His Zinfandel tasted good, by my standards. I observed in my first sip nuances of grapefruit and honey. A second sip, which I sloshed about in my mouth, revealed a broader texture, of rhubarb, olive oil and a whisper of whiskey, haunted by a distant mirage of, um, meringue and mistletoe. The wine would have gone well with grilled Chinook salmon, drizzled with butter, lemon and dill. I love salmon. I also would have enjoyed the wine with some handmade corn tortillas and fresh guacamole, a fresh cherimoya, or a dish of Thai tofu curry. It was a remarkably versatile wine.

At the table of Cartlidge and Browne Winery from American Canyon in southern Napa County I tasted a very respectable wine. I thought it was 100 percent Zinfandel, but I was mistaken: The fellow at the table smartly said that there was one percent – perhaps even less – of Cabernet Sauvignon in the bottle. I took another sip. Ah. Yes. I could now detect a faint whisper of strawberry or some other non-grape fruit, and I masterfully attributed this to the Cab.

To be frank, I gave up the hunt for organic wines shortly thereafter. They were just too few and far between among the 270 winetasting tables. I asked Daniel Donahoe of Teira Wines located in Healdsburg (Sonoma County) what the deal was.

“You have to think about what retailers want,” he explained. “Their customers aren’t usually looking for organic wines. What they want are good wines at a decent price. There’s just no market for organic wine.”

My tasting pal and I never completed the circuit of the two pavilions. My palate was spoiled after just 30 tastes. Everything now tasted like pepper and raspberry, which I guess is about right for a Zinfandel.

While ZAP is an annual celebration of wine, it is also a celebration of great and innovative food. On the evening of Thursday the 25th at Fort Mason, the ZAP Good Eats and Zinfandel Pairing event brought together over 50 wineries and restaurants from around the state to produce so many mouth-watering wine-food combos. The featured chefs – these mad and brilliant scientists of flavor – grilled up heaps and hills and mountains of meat, meat, meat, meat, meat! They didn’t waste their time with vegetables. Not them! There was pig! Cow! Sheep! Duck! Chicken! Bison! It was brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! And over this seared flesh they slathered Mediterranean delights like fig-pear chutney, pomegranate reduction, rosemary gravy, and secret barbecue sauces using – now get this! – Zinfandel! Grease dripped from our chins. Meat dangled from our teeth. We washed it down with delicate wines. Glutton. Gourmand. It made no difference. We were all in Heaven.

To make meat taste appealing, any home cook knows, is extremely challenging, and so I must hand it to our magnificent chefs of the wine country for their achievements at Fort Mason this year. Well, except for the humble chef from the restaurant Taste in Amador County who paired a local zinfandel with a meatless and rather pointless eggplant cannelloni, of basil, goat cheese and tomato sauce, or some such vegetarian nonsense.

ZAP 2007, with its hundreds of participating wineries, 600 or so Zins, its thousands of attendees and its abundance of rich food left me almost speechless for a day afterward. Robert Louis Stevenson probably could have written a charming poem about the wine-sopped week. Or just copied something from the back of a bottle. Nobody would have known.

Editor’s note: Links to the websites of nearly all of California wineries, be they Zin makers or otherwise, can be found in the Resource Directory of Taste California Travel. Also in that directory are links to thousands of lodging and dining opportunities, all organized in an easy-to-use geographic sorting.


Alastair Bland is a journalist in San Francisco. He frequently writes of travel, food, fishing and ecology and contributes regularly to several newspapers and magazines throughout the West. He may be reached at allybland@yahoo.com.