Wine Keeps On Sipping into the Futures

Wine events don't often come with 57-page spiral bound programs, but perhaps more should. Or that would be the easy assumption after sampling at the 2014 Santa Barbara County Wine Futures Tasting this past weekend at Les Marchands Wine Bar & Merchant. This was the second year the instant hot spot in Santa Barbara's Funk Zone has hosted futures and they've quickly made it their own, especially when one of the stars of the tasting is a wine they helped create with Justin Willet: the Vallin 2013 Rosé (a 100% Syrah grape expression, beautiful pink going to gold with a lilting flavor to match).

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Wine Keeps On Sipping, Sipping, Sipping into the Futures

Generally speaking, artists don't want you to peek while they're working. Sure, sometimes playwrights offer workshop versions of what they're cooking up, but most writers would rather eat glass than share their early, what they believe are no doubt embarrassing, drafts. Painters don't mind sharing their sketches ... once they're famous and can sell them for a pretty penny.

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Days Of Wine Futures Past

And there was a gnashing of teeth and a rending of garments and the sickening silence of hundreds of corks going unscrewed, leaving wine lovers themselves screwed. For George Eats has discovered most terrible news, dear readers--there will be no Santa Barbara Wine Futures program this year. For 19 wonderful years and two ownerships the Futures program was the province of the Wine Cask, and as I wrote about the last one they ran in 2008, until Bernard Rosenson drove the Wine Cask into the ground:

Wine Futures is Christmas, Opening Day, and the world’s best President’s Day Sale wrapped up into one for lovers of the grape. When people line up outside the Wine Cask, waiting for the noon opening, you can sense the anticipation, the whiff of worry in the air that someone is drinking the last of the best before you’re even in the door. Wine is serious--at least when it’s Santa Barbara good, you’re getting one of the first shots at buying it, and it’s slightly cheaper than it will be upon release.

It truly was my favorite day of the year, a sign of spring and the endless hope each vintage would be lovely, that each winery would learn yet more, make yet better wines. Somehow it almost always seemed to happen. Then there was the joy of running into people who grew to be old, if just one-day-a-year friends: Gray Hartley happily pouring at the Hitching Post table or Sashi Moorman working for more and more labels yet never diluting his skill. And then each year there'd be a new surprise, a new favorite: Ampelos, tercero, Autonom. Life was full of grapey goodness.

In the time between Mitchell Sjerven and Doug Margerum rescuing the Wine Cask as a restaurant from Rosenson's failure with it, Bob Wesley of the Winehound bravely stepped into the breech and delivered two great years of futures at the SB Museum of Natural History and then the Fess Parker Doubletree.

But now it's all gone, for as Wesley says, "It involved a lot of work and advertising expense, as well as facilities and food costs, and it just didn't meet budgetary expectations."

God damn.

Wesley says that the Wine House in LA might do a program up here next year (they are doing one in LA, so that means the big city gets our futures and we don't, and that's a sad state o' affairs), so here's hoping Jim Knight can pull that off (in addition to making his own fine wines Jelly Roll and working on Holus Bolus). Until then, drink slowly, my friends....

UPDATE (4/11/11): An informant has let me know that the Wine House will be having a Central Coast futures at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History next year, most likely in April.