| Melvin: | We
started? |
| Paul: | Yes,
run it. |
| Melvin: | How
are you doing? |
| Paul: | It's
great to be here with Melvin Masters. |
| Melvin: | That's
right. |
| Paul: | This
is our continuing wine makers' series at Wine of the Month Club.
And we were tasting some wines, and I said, you know, we've got
to get you on camera. |
| Melvin: | It's
great to be here. |
| Paul: | It's
been how many years that you've been coming around here? |
| Melvin: | Well,
you know, I'm almost sure that I met your dad back in the '70s.
But I've been seeing Paul here from the beginning, since the '90s. |
| Paul: | I
think since when I took it over in '89, and we moved to Arcadia,
and you came to me old little cubby hole of a place. |
| Melvin: | That's
right. It was just little, it is, just one little office and you
were almost doing the boxes yourself. |
| Paul: | That's
right, practically. And what were we tasting? |
| Melvin: | Probably
in those days, I was involved with Georges Duboeuf |
| Paul: | That's
right. |
| Melvin: | I
think that was it. And there's a bottle of Tiamo. |
| Paul: | Oh,
there's the Tiamo. We're gonna taste that too. |
| Melvin: | This
is my wine in incidentally. This is a little wine that I produce
from Italy from the Veneto region. It's 100% organically farmed
grapes. And the thing about organic, as you know there's a lot of
nonsense talked about organic, and people don't understand quite
what it is. This is not an organic wine; it is a wine that is made
from organic grapes. So it's sort of like if you go and buy a 'tomato',
or a 'tomarto', depending on where you come from, and you're making
a sauce with it, you buy good quality tomato and you're going to
make a better sauce. So the same theory holds with grapes; if you
grow them organically, the fruits going to be better, and better
fruit makes better wine. |
| Paul: | The
difference with organically, and I've seen this many times, and
I know- does it say here? |
| Melvin: | It
is, right here on the label. Do you see? Right here. |
| Paul: | Oh,
there it is. Right. We tasted this last night with the staff and
we loved it, want to talk about tasting now, but that means the
farming of the grape it organic. |
| Melvin: | Correct. |
| Paul: | It
doesn't mean that the winery facility has been certified organic.
It could be operating that way. |
Melvin: |
It
could be, yes. It's basically more about the vineyard than anything
else. It's like, you know, sustainably farmed is the same sort of
thing. So I think some of the organic wines can be tricky, because
they are talking about like no sulfur, lots of stuff, and things
can go wrong in the winery, |
| Paul: | All
kinds of things. |
| Melvin: | Secondary
fermentation, and all that kind of stuff which can be exciting but
not what you want. |
| Paul: | We're
doing a video here soon where I'm going to go to the market with
a list of foods that have more than ten parts per million of sulfur,
which this wine is labeled as. |
| Melvin: | Very
good, because people have this misconception. |
| Paul: | Totally. |
| Melvin: | And
they say "Does the wine have sulfites?" Every wine, 99.9%
of wines have sulfites. The reason people say "I get a headache
from sulfates," is simply because they're probably buying a wine
that actually has sugar added to it. That's what's giving
them the headache. |
| Paul: | That's
the headache. Let's taste this; that's your glass over there. |
| Melvin: | And
the other problem is, you know, you're sitting on the beach in Saint
Tropez, and you're drinking this beautiful wine in July and it tastes
delicious, and then you have that same wine back in New York, it's
February, and, hey, it doesn't taste the same. |
| Paul: | That's
exactly right, they go "I had this wine, it tastes different to
me," you were relaxed and you weren't doing anything. But you know
what I like about this, we get a lot of Pinot Grigios in here, and
I think that Veneto is the best place for Pinot Grigio, I think
it should be bright, crisp, fruity, and fun to drink; I don't think
it should be like Santa Maria which is oaked and expensive. |
| Melvin: | But
you said the most important word to me, which is fruity, and I think
a lot of Pinot Grigio are very one dimensional, it can be a very
boring, boring white wine. Some of it is a little like good battery
acid, but I think that Pinot Grigio needs fruit, and this has fruit.
Tiamo means "I love you," |
| Paul: | That's
right; I see it on the back, too. Italian lesson for the day. But
I thought this was a beautiful package, I think the wine was a great
indication of what Veneto Pinot Grigio should taste like. |
| Melvin: | That's
really good. |
| Paul: | And
it's organic too, which is really fun to have. |
| Melvin: | Breakfast
of champions. We were just saying that the wine tree today is a
little different from when Paul and I first met, isn't it? |
| Paul: | Totally.
You were at Georges Dubeouf and we were talking about that earlier,
which is a beautiful brand of Beaujolais and things, but you also
started a brand back then which was very successful for a while.
Les Jamelles |
| Melvin: | Les
Jamelles, it was Janie and Mel, it was the first- |
| Paul: | Ah,
we figured it out. |
| Melvin: | That's
right. And actually, it was in the old days, back in 1990 from France,
all the wines that were sold were mostly from the name of the appellation,
like Minervois, and corbieres, and so forth. And we decided
to do a line of wines that had the varietal name on the label, and
that was one of the first brands that did that. And then we sold
it, and a few years later we started a thing called Tortoise Creek,
which this is, and that was named actually after our house in Provence,
which was actually- we had all these little tortoises running around,
swimming in the stream, my wife would go and feed them, and they
became known as the Liter family, with Hector Liter and Millie Liter
and the little Centi Liters, so the house was called Le Riseau de
Tortue, and this is my little wine. We actually buy the finished
wine and do the blends, and this comes from a wonderful little wine
maker- two little wine makers down in the Languedoc region, and
what I love about this Paul is that you see that it doesn't have
any oak, it's fresh, it's bright, it's such a pretty wine. |
| Paul: | I
remember you bringing this, and I can't remember what facility I
was in when you brought the original to our screen with a different
label, but it's at least ten years. |
| Melvin: | Oh
yeah, ten years, twelve. Yeah, absolutely. |
| Paul: | Wow,
and that's great staying power in this business. It really is. The
quality of the wines is good. The quality, that's what you get.
You get good value. |
| Melvin: | That's
right, staying power. Mind you, I think drinking lots of wine gives
us staying power. |
| Paul: | That's
true. This is Viognier, and we talked off camera that what I liked
about it is it's not that- the viscosity of a Viognier can be very
thick, |
| Melvin: | Yes,
that's right, and I think a lot of peoples idea of Viognier is that
it's very floral, very perfumed, a little bit heavy, oily, and the
thing that's beautiful about this is that it has that lovely perfume
of apricots a little bit, but it's bright, it's fresh, it's crisp- |
| Paul: | It's
a wonderful character, and it's not overdone, and you can have it
with food, you can have it as an aperitif, and there's no RS in
it I don't think, right? |
| Melvin: | No,
no, I've never seen any at all. No, it's completely dry. Lovely
little wine. Le Verge is the name of the vineyard it comes
from, which means the orchards which has the old apricot trees all
around the property. And then, lastly, this is something that we
didn't make many cases of but I just love this little wine. It's
like if you found yourself in a little bistro in the middle of nowhere
in Provence or the Languedoc, and you went into this wonderful restaurant
and you asked for a carafe of their best local wine, this is sort
of kind of what it would taste like. |
| Paul: | Clearly
from the nose, having gone through that experience, that's what
you get. But the wine is better than those typically, those carafe
wines. |
| Melvin: | No, it
is. It is better. The vines that this comes from are sixty years
old. So, I always say, you know, it's like, to me, vines are
like people. And you know, the older we get- |
| Paul: | Can't
wait to hear this. |
| Melvin: | The better
we get. |
| Paul: | OK,
good. |
| Melvin: | So, that's my pitch,
I'm sticking with it. |
| Paul: | It's
interesting, because you say that they're old vines, because usually
you're going to make this big voluptuous old vine wine that's thick
and dark, but here you've made some carbonic maceration out of it,
which means it's whole berry fermentation, which tends to lighten
things a little bit, but in this case I sense it but it's not overbearing. |
| Melvin: | No, it just brings out
the fruit a little bit. It brings out the brightness and the freshness
in it, but it still has that lovely old vine taste, it's got a little
tiny bit of rusticality about it, I think it's just a great little
wine. |
| Paul: | I'm going
to ask you an industry question real fast before we get off here,
and that is: In 1986 I was on my way to San Francisco, I ran into
a friend of mine's father who as taking this idea to Napa, he worked
for Reynolds Aluminum- which was putting a bag inside a box and
selling wine, and now of course you see them around three-liters.
A couple of years after that, at a family party I was talking to
my wife's uncle who is a plastics engineer, and he had helped Coca-Cola
develop a synthetic cork that they attached to a bar cap and they
put it in their Taylor seller's wines. And that's '85 they were
doing this. And now thirty years later now we see synthetic corks. |
| Melvin: | Yes. |
| Paul: | And now, the
other day, South African wines came here in these things. |
| Melvin: | Plastic bottles. Yep. |
| Paul: | And I understand somebody
in Beaujolais bottled this, and had a difficult time selling it.
Do you think this has got any- what do you think? And this
is a 750 ML bottle. |
| Melvin: | You know, I've got to tell you- this is plastic,
right? |
| Paul: | Yes. PEZ |
| Melvin: | You know, I think there are sort of some negative
feelings about plastic. |
| Paul: | Of course. |
| Melvin: | Whether there's water that's in it, or whether
there's wine in it. So I think there's that negativity about it.
We were one of the pioneers with screw caps at Tortoise Creek. In
fact, we went back, bizarre as it may seem, with the reds we went
back to synthetic cork. |
| Paul: | Yeah,
I see that. |
| Melvin: | Because
the consumer, I think, still kind of thinks sometimes that a red
wine adds a little bit of the romanticism to have a cork in it. |
| Paul: | I
agree. |
| Melvin: | With
white, I think it's OK with a screw cap. But I'm not sure-
I think from an environmental point of view, you know, of the lightness
of shipping, that's wonderful. That's terrific. |
| Paul: | I
think thirty-six of these weigh the same as twelve glass bottles. |
| Melvin: | Well,
the perfect way to do it is just to buy, you know, a barrel; keep
it at home, have a straw, and just drink out of the barrel. |
| Paul: | That's
it. Pleasure having you, |
| Melvin: | Paul,
always great to see you old friend. |
| Paul: | See
you guys next time. |
