Pacific Rim had the great honor to represent North American Riesling at the Riesling Fellowship event hosted at the German Embassy in London this week. We were the only North American winery to attend along with some of the greatest German Riesling producers (Georg Breuer, Wittmann, Rebholz, Loosen, Selbach-Oster, Egon Muller, JJ Prum, Robert Weil, Donnhoff) and along a few other producers from select countries (Rabl for Austria, Trimbach for Alsace, Pewsey Vale for Australia, Conor Sur for South America, Pegasus Bay for New Zealand). The attendance was very small (55 attendees) and quite impressive (head of wineries attending, press, sommelier, embassy guests…). The event was very organized (you are at the German embassy after all, what should you expect?) with a tasting, a talk about global warming and its impact on Riesling and a dinner.

The tasting was very interesting with 32 wines (we brought along our Wallula Vineyard and Wallula Vineyard Biodynamic). The wines that resonated the most to me that evening were:

• 2003 Cono Sur Vision Bio Bio Valley (Chile) - My first Chilean Riesling, and very very delicious
• 2007 Terra Montosa, Weingut Georg Breuer (Rheingau) - Very nice dryish style
• 2007 Auslese Zeltinger Schlossberg, Weingut Selbach Oster (Mosel) - Zingy and young
• 1997 Spatlese, Kiedrich Grafenberg, Weingut Robert Weil (Rheingau) - Sweet, acid, aged, one of the best wines that night
• 1997 Auslese. Erdener Treppchen, Weingut Dr Loosen (Mosel) - Sl Botrytis, aristocratic, nice
• 1997 Auslese Goldkapsel, Scharzerhof, Weingut Egon Muller (Mosel) - Stole the show, amazing wine

Our wines fared very very well in this company and I had several people come to me to congratulate us on our wines.

After the tasting, we went through a good presentation from Professor Schultz (University of Geisenheim). Seems like the Germans are quite happy about global warming as it is making their wines superb every year. Sounds also like we need to buy some land in Southern England and in Canada folks…

Dinner was very polite with a few speeches. I really loved the voice of the German Ambassador (Herr Boomgaarden, what a great name for an ambassador!) as it was contrasting perfectly with the delicate Riesling we had with dinner. Talking about dinner, can someone give me the recipe for this insane crepinette of veal with tarragon and mushroom? I could not stop eating that dish and had three servings (I stopped because I thought I was getting a bit overboard…). Best of all, the choice of beer or coffee after dinner - very very civilized (I took the beer of course).

Thank you Wines of Germany and the wine institute and of course Herr and Frau Boomgaarden for the evening. It was quite special.

I had time today to swing by the British Museum in London to pay respect to the famous print from Sensei Okusai and one of its most famous piece: “In The Hollow of a Wave off the Coast at Kanagawa“ , a part of his great “36 views of Mount FuJi (I guess he had somewhat of an obsession with the divine volcano). Below are the pictures I took from the piece:

Like many before us, this extraordinary work of art has always been an inspiration for our team and this is why we display our interpretation of it as a tribute on our Chenin Blanc label - Of course on the label Mount Fuji is erupting with a cloud of cherry blossom. We have also used the beautiful wave pattern to create a cameo on our single vineyard package to illustrate the power of the Missoula floods

If you want to know more about the art on our labels, I invite you to browse through our site. You can follow the link to look at the Chenin Blanc.

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Meet the fearless Pacific Rim Sales team as they gathered last week in Eastern Washington for our annual sales meeting. They are quite a bunch!

I have had a few good conversation on WLTV forum (http://tv.winelibrary.com/) about winemakers that also review other people’s wine. It has always seemed a conflict of interest of some sort to me. That being said, one of the greatest German Producer, Armin Diel (of Schlossgut Diel: http://www.schlossgut-diel.com/) is also one of Gemany’s most admired wine critic. I still think there is somewhat of a conflict of interest for folks that do that. On my side, I’ll stick to making wine, talking about our wines and will keep my personal opinion for myself.

Thank you to Jancis Robinson for featuring our beloved Riesling book on her blog (http://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/20080820_4). Hopefully this will bring all the blogosphere and friends to our site and they will enrich our great content evolving our website into the ultimate Riesling resource.

Remember that Riesling rules - Thank you Jancis

Thank you to Sharon Kapnick of the New Yourk Times (among others) for her great article about Riesling’s versatility with food: http://www.seniorwomen.com/hs/articles/kapnick/articlesKapnickRiesling.html

It is a very toughtful article with many references to the Riesling world. Riesling is really the greatest food wine.

If you have 30 minutes and want to learn more about us and me, you can go to the winefoot website and lesson to an interview I gave yesterday:

http://www.winefoot.com/index.php/2008/07/16/winemaker-interview-nicholas-quille-pacific-rim/

It always feels weird to listen to your own voice online…

I was just reading a post on Dr Vino’s blog (http://www.drvino.com/2008/07/10/alcohol-can-it-be-too-low/) about low alcohol wines. Why people love 15% overextracted wines puzzles me! When we (at Pacific RIm) make wines above 13% ethanol I get very uncomfortable as a prefer 11.5% and below. The Sweet Riesling and the Vin de Glaciere at 8-9% are great choice for low alcohol wines in our Riesling world if you want to test lower alcohol content wines. Why can’t folks make 12% light reds in this country is a mystery.

Now we have our new web site up and running I can get back on the blog. One improvement over the version 1.0 is the ability to get feedback from readers and for them to leave comments. Please feel free to drop me a note. Notes are private until I review them and post them. It feels good to be back on line.

This week end I was reading my favorite newspaper and came upon an article about a certain wine producer in California that, due to the insane domestic demand for Pinot Noir, had decided to supplement his sourcing of Pinot from France and Italy. The multiple and consecutive blends have somewhat different origins and probably different flavor profile. I find this practice very disturbing and potentially damaging to our industry mainly because the winery is not disclosing fully (ie clearly on the package) that the blend is changing during the year due to different sourcing hitting the bottling line at different time. Talking about taking wines down the commoditization path…

I’ve spent the latter part of last week touring our vineyards with Shawn (our Marketing Guru) and Ron (our good friend photographer from Seattle). Our purpose was to photograph each one of our vineyards for the website and other propagandas. The pinnacle moment of the trip was when Shawn insisted on taking a few pictures of a basalt cliff because basalt is such a preeminent feature of Eastern Washington’s geology. I took the team to a nice cliff just 100 yards off the road near the Yakima River. The 100 yards separating the cliff from the road were covered with dry bushes and large basalt boulders that we had to navigate to get near the cliff. 15 minutes into the shooting session, an old pickup truck stopped on the side of the road. Thinking it was one of those great eastern Washington souls checking on a few bozos stopped on the side of the road, I waived my hand and gave the driver a thumb up to indicate that we were doing just great. The truck driver left apparently content. About 5 minutes later, the same pickup truck came down our way through the dry bushes, windows down, apparently wanting to talk to us. “Really, we are fine” I thought to myself. The orange pickup belonged to the county and the grumpy driver was looking at us like we were aliens: “Do you guys know this is a Rattlesnake breeding ground here? I am just asking, because this is the time they shed their skins and they are easy to upset at this time of the year”. “Really? We had no clue, we are just taking a few pictures and we are out” “Well, make sure you are careful and don’t move if you hear the rattle, they’re really quick. By the way they don’t like noises so make plenty of it so they don’t come out &mdash “Thank you much, we’ll be careful”.
So now, picture this. Ron is taking pictures and Shawn and I are clapping our hands around him (we found that the intro of “car wash” made for the best clapping). We really look quite silly and are laughing our heads off worrying about where the first snake would come out from. This is the point where my genial self thinks about putting a good joke. First I dream that I could hide something in Ron’s bag that would scare the Jesus out of him, but I cannot think of anything. So I grab a dead branch and while Shawn is clapping away I move the branch between Ron’s leg at the same time he is intensely focusing on one of his great shot. So much for staying still, Ron jumps a good foot in the air with a loud shout. He turns around to see Shawn and me laughing harder than ever and since Ron is good sport (and probably very relieved it was just a poor joke) he bursts in laughers with us.
We did not hear one rattle that day but boy we had a good time.

This week we had a company gathering at our offices in Portland. I had a speech ready for the occasion but did not find the right time (the courage) to give it. Below is a copy of the speech I never gave:

Dear friends,

Thank you for coming today.

We have many key partners in this room today, growers, attorneys, suppliers, designers, landlords. Please go around and introduce yourself to the broader pacific rim family.

A year ago, we had the idea of creating a new wine brand anchored on the successful Pacific Rim Dry Riesling from Bonny Doon in California. We wanted to use this opportunity to create the first Riesling based winery in the US and claim this varietal as our own. At that time, we only had a product made mainly from Washington, California and German grapes, we had no real identity, no company, no staff, no winery, just 6 individuals that believed in this vision and an owner, Randall Grahm, that believed in us and in our concept.

During the first few months of our project we had to live a double life, fulfilling our obligations at Bonny Doon while laying the foundation for Pacific Rim. The foundation work involved identifying a place in the Northwest to move our offices, finding partners to build a winery somewhere in Eastern WA, creating a corporate entity, revamping our package to bring a focused identity to the new brand and making a lot of wine in the forgotten city of King City, California. By the end of December 06, we had successfully replaced ourselves at Bonny Doon, found our office space in Portland, we had entered an agreement with the Den Hoed brothers to build and manage our winery in West Richland, we had created a new package and a brand identity, we had incorporated our new company in the state of WA and we had moved the corporate team from Santa Cruz to Portland.

Now that was the easy part. In January and February 06, our concept and our team were really tested hard. No one in the market place understood what we were doing and as a result we were not achieving our sales plans. Also the team lacked cohesion as we were all working from home (we used my basement as our meeting room) and we were still learning how to work with an owner 1,000 miles away. It was a very stressful time where all of us wondered if this would really fly. But we did not give up, we’ve just put our boxing gloves and started to punch away. And we’ve got results, We’ve moved into our offices in May, we got the word out and got national press coverage recognizing our efforts, we went on the road and met our distributors and sales partners, one at a time, feeding them the vision, we got the winery off the ground and secured grape contracts, and we were finally spun off Bonny Doon in June and worked since then on establishing licenses to sell our wines in every state.

Today, we are on our way to achieve our plans. The winery is almost completed, we have recruited a top notch staff in Eastern WA, our grape supply is secured and of high quality, we have turned around our sales and we are turning a profit, the media and the public are interested in our story and our wines and most rewarding of all, our competition is looking at us with worried faces.

We are not done though. We have great challenges ahead. We have to align our sales with the production tool that we have put in place, we have to achieve our desired goal of making Pacific Rim the Riesling reference in the country, we have to refine our company culture and we have much work to do to achieve our sustainability goals.

I had no clue that this enterprise would be so tough and so demanding. I also have never experienced such a feeling of pride and humility. I am proud of what we have done and I am so humble and grateful because this adventure could not have been successful without the team here and without your support.

Thank you for believing in Pacific Rim,

Riesling rules.