Far east diplomacy with a Chinese Cuvée(1)
Plus, Shafer Vineyards hosts Train's new video, cellar surprises unearthed in Champagne, Ecco Domani's young designers toast
• Last week we told you about Iron Horse Vineyards CEO Joy Sterling presenting a bottle of the newly minted Year of the Dragon Chinese Cuvée to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee. Lee was impressed with the vintage 2007 sparkler, but the occasion was just a warm-up for Sterling: She celebrated Valentine's Day at the White House, where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden hosted a lunch for Chinese Vice President Xi
Jinping in the Benjamin Franklin Dining Room; chef Ming Tsai provided the Chinese-American fusion cuisine and Sterling provided the Iron Horse Year of the Dragon Chinese Cuvée. This is by no means Iron Horse's first foray into the world of international
diplomacy. Iron Horse has been served at the White House during the past five administrations, beginning with the historic Reagan-Gorbachev Summit Meetings. Let's hear it for Iron Horse sparkling wine—bringing together Communists and the Free World since 1985!
• The rock band Train has appeared in these webpages before, when we chatted with guitarist Jimmy Stafford about his travels through wine and when the band released their own "Drops of Jupiter" Petite Sirah with Concannon Vineyards, named for the band's 2001 hit. There's a "Calling All Angels" Chardonnay too, and now the band has quite literally taken the show to the vines: If you recognize the setting of their latest music video for the single "Drive By," it's because much of it was shot at Napa's Shafer Vineyards. In the video, lead singer Patrick Monahan seduces a comely brunette Napa winery tour guidestress. They do a little jig on the crushpad and mirthfully fall down in the grapes (curiously surrounded by a crowd of clapping people), followed by some glass
-clinking among the barrels, followed by a retreat to a more private off-premise location for a pour of slyly recognizable Drops of Jupiter Petite Sirah, followed by an even hastier retreat from bed the following morning by Mr. Monahan while our poor cellar doe still slumbers—the ol' "drive-by." Ugh, men.
(Unfiltered remains firmly partisan to the "Slow Ride" school of transit-metaphor relations.) But! Our hero assures us that his ungentlemanly behavior was actually not a "drive-by" but a symptom of scary, overwhelming feelings. To woo the gal back, Monahan and
bandmates triumphantly drive by Shafer in late-'60s model roadsters to pick her up. The clip, most of which was filmed in one 18-hour marathon day, ends with Monahan and paramour driving off in what to Unfiltered's untrained eye looks to be a blue 1968
Pontiac Firebird convertible. In our reckoning, this could be the biggest "sort of about a beverage but actually more about love" video in soft rock since Savage Garden's "Cherry Cola."
