Celebrity Wine FAQs – Kunal Nayyar

 

 

 

Kunal Nayyar, courtesy CBS

 

A cool concatenation of circumstances are happening this week and next.  Anne is attending the Television Critics Association Press Tour, because Anne has another life as a TV critic (you can check out her TV blog at YourFamilyViewer.com).  So, in honor of the OddBallGrape Wine FAQ contest, she’s asking some of the actors she’s hanging around their Wine FAQ.

Up today is Kunal Nayyar – Raj on The Big Bang Theory on CBS.  (Anne did get a chance to interview Jim Parsons – aka Sheldon – but didn’t remember the Wine FAQ in time.)  But Kunal’s a really nice guy and was happy to share his question with us.

“What is a sweet red wine.  I love rieslings and gewürztraminer grapes from Germany.  So what is a sweet red wine that a white wine drinker would enjoy?”

Our answer:

Lambrusco wines from Italian producers have some sweetness and some fizz.  Okay, some re-treads from the 1960s – Riunite springs to mind – don’t have the fizz, so look for one that has the wire cage over the cork.

And there are red wines – Zinfandel comes to mind – where some of the fruitiness may be tied to residual sugar leftover from the winemaking process.  Ports are always an option as well.

One of the coolest part of this experiment is that even the folks who don’t drink had really great questions.  Which means some of you guys have great questions, as well.  So be sure and send us your entry.  The contest ends August 9.  Click here for more information and rules.

Schug Carneros Estate Winery

The Schug Winery Building, courtesy Schug Winery
The Schug Winery Building, courtesy Schug Winery

It’s hard to know where to begin when talking about Walter Schug.  This guy has been working in the California wine industry since 1966, when he was a grape buyer for Gallo.  He is still hip-deep in making some phenomenal pinot noirs and has been continuously since he started working for Joseph Phelps in 1973.  Our conversation ranged from the latest on this year’s harvest – “It went on a long time,” he noted – to the history of the California wine industry to the development of yeast in Germany.

We discovered the winery last spring as we were tooling around the Carneros region.  They do make other wines there, but the pinots are what got us excited.  These are lovely, gentle food wines – not the high-alcohol fruit bombs that, as Schug put it, were made to impress Robert Parker.  It may not be the done thing these days, but that doesn’t seem to bother Schug.

He started out making wine in the Rheingau region of Germany, following in the footsteps of his father, who oversaw pinot noir production in Assmannshausen (as in the yeast, for you wine geeks – it was developed in the winery his father oversaw for the German government).

“I was born and raised with pinot noir,” Schug said, pointing out that his father managed the only red wine facility in “an ocean of riesling.”

Schug, himself, got his enology degree in Germany in 1959 and eventually found his way to California, where, as noted above, he worked for Gallo, touring Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties to find the best grapes for the huge winemaker.  He went on to make wine for Joseph Phelps, in particular, pinot noir – the grape of his youth.  Unfortunately, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Americans were just getting the idea that varietal wines were more sophisticated than jug wines and there wasn’t much of a market for pinot noir.

“At the time, nobody really believed in it,” Schug said.  “But I believed in it.  We were only making 1500 cases out of 80,000 cases.”

Phelps decided to discontinue making pinot noir, and Schug was crushed.  He went to Phelps and talked the winery owner into letting Schug buy the grapes and make his own pinot noir that he would distribute under his own label, and thus Schug Winery was born.  By 1983, Schug had trained a successor and went off on his own.

“I was out there by myself,” he said, “my wife and I.”

Today the winery puts out about 55,000 cases.  His own vineyards only supply 22 percent of his grapes, with the rest coming from high-end producers, including San Giacamo.  They have several varieties available, including a brand new pinot noir rose that we didn’t get to taste because it wasn’t released when we were there.  You can visit their website here.