Welcome back to Wine Trivia Wednesday. I guess this has become a bit of a regular feature and each week I scramble a bit to come up with a question that is somewhat challenging, but not completely impossible. Last week , I was afraid that I had chosen the latter since few had responded until late in the game.

Before we get to this week’s question (which I still have not come up with), let’s review last week’s quiz. First, the question:

One of the best aspect of wine is the people who are involved in the business. I guess it makes sense that people who are involved in the production of wine tend to be outgoing, gregarious types.  Sure, this is not always the case, but in order to make a living at it, you need to make a good product and you need to convince people to buy it.  Perhaps I have just been duped, but I don’t think so.  Anyway, a little different type of quiz today that will certainly take some Googling and even some imagination.  Below is a list of four people that I have met over the years visiting wineries, going to tastings, etc.  It is by no means an exhaustive list, but that is not the point.  The point? All four of these people have something in common. So for today’s quiz, first tell me who these people are (i.e., what do they do in the wine world–I know that what you do does not define who you are so don’t go all existentialist on me) and then tell me what they share in common.  No, it is not that they drink wine or that they are in the wine business. It is something else. If you frequent this blog, it might come to you.

1. Dan Goldfield
2. Ron Penner-Ash
3. Mike Drash
4. Mollie Lewis

I was beginning to think that this was just way too hard or just to laborious to answer, but then the old reliable, Anatoli, came through. His answer:

The first three are winemakers, and the last one was wine distributor turned whiskey maker. First two are making Pinot Noir, your favorite wine, one in California, and one in Oregon, and Mike Drash now is behind Tallulah line which includes Syrah and Cab from California and Oregon. The first and the last on your list were born in Pennsylvania. I’m not sure where are you heading with this.

As I remember that you met Ron and Lynn Penner-Ash, the only idea I have have that you personally met all four people at various times or at least had some form of dialog with all four. Then may be all four of them are cyclists…

So once again, Talk-a-Vino hits it out of the park. He came up with a lot of information that I never knew and basically hit the nail on the head. Dan Goldfield is the winemaker at Dutton-Goldfield, a predominantly Pinot producer in the Russian River Valley. Ron Penner-Ash is the husband of Lynn Penner-Ash and works at their eponymous winery in Oregon, again making mostly Pinot.  Mike Drash is indeed the brains and talent behind Tallulah Wines and Mollie Lewis works for a distributor of mostly Italian wines (I had no idea about the whiskey thing).

It seems as though Anatoli threw this part at the end as an after thought: “Then may be all four of them are cyclists…” Indeed, that was where I was heading–they all enjoy cycling quite a bit! So the moral of the story? If you ever need a private investigator, I know one who might work for wine: Anatoli, aka Talk-a-Vino.

On to this week’s quiz.

This one is rather straight forward and should not be all that difficult. I was looking through Cellar Tracker the other day, and I realized that I had quite a few bottles of wine that I had ‘Clos’ in the name:

Clos Pepe, Clos de la Coulée de Serrant, Clos Vougeot, Clos Naudin, Clos du Bourg, Clos de l’Echo, Clos Mogador, and several others.

The question: what is a ‘Clos’?

Bonus question 1: Where are the above Clos located?

Bonus question 2: What is the picture at the beginning of the post?

Answer next week!