Monthly Archives: August 2025

The Wine & S’mores Challenge 2025

August 26, 2025 By in The Next Big Thing, wine, wine research 5 Comments

Sue and I don’t really need an excuse to make s’mores. What could be better, especially on a warm summer evening, than Hershey’s milk chocolate and a toasted marshmallow wedged between crispy graham crackers? So when August 10 rolled around (National S’mores Day, but you probably already knew that), we were all set.

What Could Be Better?

What could be better than s’mores? Well, how about wine and s’mores? It is not a ridiculous idea and we are always on the lookout for unexploited wine-tasting occasions. So I asked my AI intern to scour the internet for wine and s’mores pairings and it turns out there are lots of interesting ideas.

Even better, my intern explained that there is more than one kind of s’mores. Yes, the Hershey’s milk chocolate bar is the classic, but you can make variations on the classic using other kinds of chocolate bars. The internet even suggested different wine pairings for different chocolate s’mores variants.

And so we established the Wine & S’mores Challenge 2025. Each night we would pit classic s’mores against a challenger made with chocolate bars from Alter Eco foods, which has been promoting National S’mores Day. We’d see if we liked the classic or the challenger better and try out wine pairings, too. A bit complicated (did anyone say “rabbit hole”?) but a lot of fun, too. Here are some preliminary results.

First Challenge: Inconclusive

Our first challenge test was a mixed success. We set the classic s’mores against a challenger made with Alter Eco Classic Blackout, which is 85 percent cacao (!). The internet suggested pairing this with an old vine Zinfandel. We chose the Husch Mendocino Old Vines Zin from the cellar.

The s’mores comparison was interesting. Milk vs dark chocolate was an interesting contrast. Sue preferred the classic Hershey’s, but was not mad at the Classic Blackout. But the wine pairing didn’t work. The Husch Zin was great with dinner, but got wiped out by the s’mores. Maybe that 85 percent dark chocolate was just too bitter? Or maybe the internet recommendation was based on one of those sweetish jammy supermarket  Zinfandels. (The Husch Zin is dry and elegant).  In any case, the result was interesting enough to justify further experimentation.

Second Challenge: Plausible Success

The second challenge was classic s’mores versus dark chocolate and raspberry paired with a Cabernet Franc. Interesting! Our challenger s’mores was made with Alter Eco Raspberry Creme (70 percent cacao chocolate). Our wine choice was a Paradise Springs Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, Cabernet Franc (a Virginia Governor’s Cup award-winning wine).

The Paradise Springs Cab Franc was a great choice for this. It was delicious with dinner and held up to the s’mores. I think it even enhanced the chocolate-raspberry s’mores. But, as Sue noted, the raspberry got lost a bit surrounded as it was by chocolate, marshmallow, etc.  So this was not completely successful, but very interesting because the result was unexpected by us.

Freewheeling Experiments

We decided to break away from the internet’s s’mores pairing list and see if we could come up with something spontaneously. Here are the wines and chocolates we mixed and matched for our experiments. Which combinations do  you think worked best? Which were doomed from the start?

Alter Eco chocolates: dark chocolate with burnt caramel, dark chocolate with brown butter, dark chocolate with creme brulee, dark chocolate raspberry,  and classic blackout 85 percent.

The wines: Lions de Suduiraut Sauternes (a Costco purchase), Valdespino Contrabandista Amontillado sherry, Kopke Ruby Port.

We don’t have final results to report because there are so many permutations to test (don’t you just love homework like this?). We need to consider the original Hershey’s s’mores versus each challenger plus the various possible wine pairings. So we don’t have conclusions as much as tentative observations. Here is what we think so far.

The OG is the OG. Sue enjoyed the experiments and kept coming up with new pairings to try. But she never found anything she liked better than the OG original Hershey’s s’mores. A classic. That milk chocolate taste nicely balances the other ingredients. And Hershey’s squares melt a lot better than more “serious” chocolate, which is a plus.

Fun to Experiment. But it is really interesting to experiment. The brown butter and burnt caramel s’mores were delicious, for example, sort of like more intense versions of the original. The classic blackout s’mores was challenging, but memorable.

Sweet Meets Sweet. We liked the sweeter wines for pairing. The old rule of thumb in pairing is that the wine needs to be sweeter than the dessert for pairing. The Zinfandel we started with was overwhelmed by the sweetness of the marshmallow. The Cab Franc just about held its own. The Sauternes was a good match for the brown butter and burnt caramel s’mores, although Sue thought that the wine might have been better on its own or with a cheese course.

And the Winner Is … What’s the most popular wine pairing so far? I would have to say it was the OG Hershey’s s’mores and the Alter Eco Brown Butter s’mores paired with the Valdespino Amontillado. The sherry is so opulent and both goes with and stands up to the s’mores, which are sort of variations on a luscious theme. Great together, but each is excellent on its own, too.

Endless Possibilities. There is a lot more work to do on this project because the chocolates, s’mores combinations, and wine pairings are nearly endless. Many thanks to the people at Alter Eco for putting us on this interesting wine pairing path.

Rediscovering the Diversity of Tuscany’s Wines with San Felice

August 19, 2025 By in Italian wine, wine, wine tourism 1 Comment

Sometimes it takes a special event to nudge you to take another look at a familiar winery or wine region. That’s what recently happened to us with the wines of Tuscany in general and San Felice in particular.

A Tuscan Wine Giro

Our old friend Peter and new friend Gina are newlyweds planning their first visit to Italy. They’ve booked a house near Montalcino for a week. Did we have any tips? Yes, of course, we love talking about Italy and Italian wine, so we met over Sunday lunch on the patio. Brianna, Peter’s daughter, also joined us.

We decided to feature San Felice wines because they have wineries in several Tuscan zones (San Felice in Chianti Classico, Belle’Aja in Bolgheri, and Campogiovanni in Montalcino) and so can represent the diversity of the region’s wines very well. As a bonus, the Campogiovanni winery would be easy for Peter and Gina to visit during their stay.

The lunch and wine pairings were great. We began with In Avane Chardonnay Toscano IGT just to show that even a familiar international grape variety can have a distinctive Tuscan twist. Then we moved on to the Bell’Aja Bolgheri Bianco, which is a white blend built around Vermentino, a grape variety our friends hadn’t tasted before. Although many people equate Tuscany with red wines, the white options are there and delicious.

The Red and the White

Red wines? It was time to compare and contrast two interestingly different styles: the Borgo Chianti Classico (a blend of Sangiovese and Pugnitello) and the Campogiovanni Brunello di Montalcino (Sangiovese all the way). The wines were very different and showed just how much there was to explore within the San Felice range and, by extension, within Tuscany, too.

The lunch was a success and we can’t wait for Peter and Gina to get back from their trip and tell us all about their new discoveries. In the meantime, Sue and I have rediscovered another of the San Felice wines. Our garden is producing eggplant and tomatoes right now, so our variation on pasta alla Norma was on the menu a few days after the lunch. The wine we picked was the San Felice Pugnitello Toscana IGT and it was a perfect match. Pugnitello is an ancient Tuscan grape variety that San Felice has worked hard to revive as a varietal wine and as part of the Chianti Classico mix. We really loved the depth and bright acidity of the single-varietal wine, which was perfect to cut through the richness of the pasta sauce.

You know, these San Felice wines are all really excellent, Sue noted as we were finishing the last of the Pugnitello. Delicious, distinctive, not a single false note. I’m glad we had an excuse to rediscover them and share them with special friends.

Generational Thinking at San Felice

The rediscovery of San Felice’s wine gave me an excuse to look more deeply into San Felice, the wine company. Like the famous Antinori winery, San Felice can trace its origins back hundreds of years. Unlike Antinori, however, it is not family-owned. For more than 50 years Società Agricola San Felice S.p.A. has been part of the Allianz Group, a multinational insurance and financial services company headquartered in Germany.

Many people (including me) agree with Piero Antinori that the wine business is well-suited to family ownership because long-term generational thinking has advantages over quarterly-statement thinking in the wine world.  This is perhaps why a disproportionate number of winery firms, including many of the largest and most famous, are in family hands.

But family ownership is neither necessary nor sufficient for success in wine. Sue and I have visited many cooperatives, for example, that seem to think in terms of generations (the generations of their grower family members), some after suffering the disastrous consequences of short-term strategies.

And there are some financial firms, like Allianz, that have married the generation thinking of their businesses (products like pensions and life insurance, for example) to the generational requirements of the wine game. Allianz is not the only firm of its type in global wine. The financial giant AXA Millésimes, for example, owns chateaux in Bordeaux and wineries in Portugal, Hungary, and the United States. TIAA, the company that administers my university retirement fund, is one of the largest vineyard owners in Napa Valley. The long-term thinking required for pension investment is remarkably consistent with the generational thinking that  is one key to success in wine.

Looking more deeply, I am impressed with how Allianz has invested in and developed San Felice both in terms of the vineyards and wines that impressed us so much, but also now the development of tourism and hospitality programs such as Borgo San Felice Resort.

Cheers to Peter and Gina. I hope they enjoyed their Tuscan adventure. I know they will enjoy the wines they discover there. Thanks for helping us rediscover the wines, too.

Italian Wine Innovators: Three Case Studies

August 12, 2025 By in Italian wine, wine 1 Comment

It is useful to step back for a minute and appreciate some of the ways that the wine industry is evolving under the influence of innovative producers. Sometimes innovation is so obvious you can’t miss it. That was the case for us, for example, when Sue and I participated in the big SIMEI wine technology program in Milan. But innovation takes many forms. Herewith three interesting Italian case studies.

Product Innovation: Pasqua Wines

Pasqua Wines, which celebrates its 100th birthday in 2025, was the first Italian winery to receive the Wine Enthusiast Innovator of the Year award in 2023. The Pasqua family determined in 2014 to take bold steps, exploring with the possibilities of their wines while not losing hold of their roots in the Veneto. The results have garnered much attention, as the Wine Enthusiast recognition shows.

Sue and I had the opportunity to get a first-hand sense of the  innovation earlier this year by comparing the classic Famiglia Pasqua Amarone della Valpolicella with ther Mai Dire Mai Amarone della Valpolicella. The classic Amarone was just that, classic. Powerful (15 percent abv) but elegant. Exactly what you would hope for it a fine Amarone wine.

Mai Dire Mai means “never say never,” and the wine really pushed the limits in terms of power (16.5 percent abv), wood treatment, and intensity generally. It made us stop and think about what Amarone is and what it can be. And this is just one example of the sort of new thinking behind the Pasqua family’s innovation program. We can’t wait to be “lab rats” in other Pasqua wine experiments in the future!

Process Innovation: Ca’d’Gal Wines.

Ca’d’Gal winery has a claim to product innovation, too, but that’s not why it is on this list. Ca’d’Gal makes the traditional wines of its region, Mostaco d’Asti and Barbera d’Asti, and IGT varieties including Sauvignon and Chardonnay, too.

What is different about them, from our home tastings, is their restraint. If you are used to having Moscato right in your face (if you know what I mean), you might have to search a little bit to find it here. These are wine for a new generation who do not necessarily appreciate the obvious.

But I am interested in Ca’d’Gal more for its process innovations, the way it has changed the way it makes some of its best wines to give a new idea of the region’s wines. The inspiration was sort of a Back to the Future concept. Winery owners Alessandro Varagnolo learned of an old tradition where bottles of wine were buried in caves for many years and then dug up when mature. This reminds me a bit of the recent practice of storing wine bottles in the ocean to mimic, in a way, the effect of wines trapped in sunken ships. A difference was that the ship wrecks were accidents and the buried wine was intentional.

With this idea in mind, Ca’d’Gal has been covering boxes of special old vine Moncato d’Asti wines in sand and leaving them in the dark and humidity for literally dozens of months. We were given a bottle of Moscato Vite Vecchia 2016, a very limited production of wine aged in the sand for 60 months. I am not sure if it was the old vine juice or the sand box ageing, but the resulting wine was extremely complex. A very different idea of Moscato. Perhaps it will stimulate a small movement to rediscover other forgotten wine processes and revive them for a new age.

Identity Innovation: Manzone Wines

Economists typically focus on product and process innovation when studying the industrial change, but I think it is possible to add a third category, identity innovation, to the mix. Sometimes something happens to simply change the way that everyone thinks about a particular product or firm. That’s how I think about what’s going on at Giovanni Manzone winery.

Like Ca’d’Gal, Manzone is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2025. The family and its wine business has seen a lot of changes in those hundred years and have developed a deserved reputation as producer of fine Barolo wines. Sue and I have enjoyed their Langhe Nebbiolo and Barolo bottlings, but it is one particular wine that made us rethink everything.

The story of Manzone Barolo Reserva Cento Anni began in sixteen years ago 2009. There was something special about that vintage that inspired the Manzone family to give some of the best wines special attention. In order to develop the balance of power, intensity, and elegance, the wine was aged in neutral oak fior an incredible 84 months before going into concrete tanks for 60 months more.

Only about 3000 bottles of Barolo Cento Anni were made, so you are unlikely to randomly stumble across it at your local wine shop. Anyone lucky enough to taste it, however, will see both Barolo in general and the Manzone wines in particular in a different way. A bold innovation and fine tribute to one hundred years of a winemaking family.

If You Know, You Know: Discovering Virginia’s Wines One Case at a Time

August 5, 2025 By in wine, wine awards, Wine Competitions 2 Comments

If you know, you know. If you don’t, you probably don’t. That’s the way it is with the wines from Virginia.

Guess Again

How many wineries do you think there are in Virginia? Virginia is a more important wine-producing state than most people imagine. There are 386 wineries in Virginia, according to the Wine Business Monthly annual “Review of the Industry” issue. That places Virginia at #7 in the U.S. winery league table behind New York and Pennsylvania and ahead of Ohio and Missouri (two states with serious wine history). Virginia is a long way behind California (over 4700 wineries), but so is everyone else.

If you don’t live in Virginia or visit there frequently, like we do, Virginia probably never shows up on your wine radar screen. Indeed, there are Virginians who don’t appreciate the wines from their state. Most of the wineries are small, scaled to supply the amount of wine they can sell at the cellar door and through limited self-distribution channels.

Sometimes events and hospitality services take center stage from a business standpoint with the winery, vineyards, and the wine in a supporting role. There’s good money in hosting weddings, corporate retreats, and cooking classes, and good opportunities to sell wine. Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards and Early Mountain Vineyards are two very successful destination wineries that follow this model.

Sue and I don’t see many Virginia wines on restaurant lists or store shelves when we visit Virginia. The Wegmans upscale supermarket near Richmond that we often visit has an impressive global wine selection and the best Virginia aisle that we have seen, but I don’t think more than a dozen or so of the 386 wineries are represented. It just wouldn’t make economic sense for either the store or the wineries to do much more, given the thousands of bottles from around the world already on the shelves.

The Governor’s Cup Case

How do you draw attention to a wine region like Virginia in today’s crowded marketplace? Well, there is no single silver-bullet answer to this question and from what we have seen the Virginia industry is taking a multi-prong approach starting with individual winery self-promotion and extending up through regional and state-wide initiatives.

The Virginia Governor’s Cup competition is organized by the Virginia Wineries Association in partnership with the Virginia Wine Board and the Virginia Vineyards Association. The competition showcases the depth, diversity, and quality of Virginia wines.  This year the judges considered 620 wines, ciders, and meads from across the state and awarded 155 gold medals (90 to 100 points) from 87 wineries.

Each year the top 12 wines from the competition are designated for the Governor’s Cup Case. That’s a large enough sample of the top wines to be representative but small enough to be manageable. Sue and I were fortunate to receive a case in 2024 and again this year. We reported on the 2024 experience in this Wine Economist column. Here are the wines in this year’s case.

2025 Governor’s Cup Case Winners

What have we learned about the state of Virginia wine from our limited winners cup case experience? Herewith a few observations.

Always something there to surprise us. Virginia wine is definitely not a clone of any other state or region. You can find Petit Verdot and Petit Manseng in other regions but they seem to be particularly suited to Virginia’s climate. Winemakers are experimenting with different styles and blends. Lots of good surprises to reward the adventurous drinker. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, someone who is bored with Virginia wine is bored with life.

Virginia Classics. Cabernet Franc is the most-planted red grape in Virginia and the 2025 case shows why. The wines were interesting, different, and so well balanced! A classic grape for Virginia. There are also classic wineries. Barboursville Vineyards ignited the modern Virginia wine movement when it was founded (by Italy’s Zonin family) in 1976. The Barboursville Vermentino Reserve was the top wine in 2025 and the BDX blend Octagon was also featured. Barboursville planted the first Cabernet Franc vines in the state. We drink these wines whenever we find them. If you know, you know. King Family Vineyards and Michael Schaps, the Virginia Chardonnay master, are classics, too, and there are many more.

And Newcomers, Too. We’ve been impressed with the wines that newer and smaller wineries have contributed to the Governor’s Cup Case each year. We’ve been fortunate to sit in on virtual conversations with the winning winemakers moderated by the talented Frank Morgan, who organizes the competition each year. The winemakers and winery owners we have met via Zoom impress us as sophisticated in their technical knowledge and committed to the highest standards of quality.

The elephant in the room. You might have noticed that a Trump wine is included in the winner box and you might have wondered, because that’s the kind of world we live in, if this is some sort of political statement. It’s not. Trump wines have been featured in the winners box off and on for many years. The Trump family purchased the well-known Kluge Estate Winery in a foreclosure auction in 2011. The Kluge wines were well-regarded and the Trump wines, especially the sparklers, have a strong reputation. This wine made the winners case on merit. That said, I don’t know if consumers will choose to buy the wine (or visit the winery) because of the wines themselves or the Trump association (see this recent New York Times column by Eric Asimov).

Early Mountain update. This is a good opportunity to provide an update on Early Mountain Vineyards. Sue and I, along with her parents, visited Early Mountain back in 2013 and the project seemed like a work in progress. Jean and Steve Case had recently purchased the bankrupt Sweely Estate winery and were operating the renamed facility mainly as a hospitality and event venue (see above). They did not have any of their own wine to pour or sell in the tasting room! A winery without wine! That’s not quite true, however, because they served nice wines from some other Virginia wineries. Now the Early Mountain wine program is firing on all cylinders and we have enjoyed the opportunity to taste three of the wines: the Eluvium red blend (Merlot, Petit Verdot), Intention white blend (Petit Manseng and Sauvignon Blanc), and Quaker Run Chardonnay. It seemed like the 2020 Intention might have needed more aging to come together as intended, but taken together the wines tell the story of Virginia’s rapid rise very well.

If you know (about Virginia wine) you already know.