Wine Enthusiast Magazine
SubscribeHave you ever caught yourself doing something wrong, something you always say you don’t do? Worse yet, has someone else caught you doing something you’ve told them you don’t do? And just to add another layer of complexity, has that person catching you ever been from Bowling Green, Ohio?
The deed was done on a recent trip to Cleveland for a wedding. I was sitting at a sidewalk table outside a great Italian cafe called La Dolce Vita in the Little Italy section of the city with a few friends from my college era. The sky was blue, the temperature was a perfect 73, the humidity was low and I was choosing the wine because they had figured out that I make a living writing about it, while they manage hospitals, raise money for music schools, volunteer as EMTs, diagnose sultans with various infectious diseases at the Mayo Clinic, and so on.
I ordered the wine for our lunch, two bottles of Castello Banfi Chianti Classico. When the waitress pulled the first cork she offered me a taste and handed me the cork. I smelled the wine. It was good. I picked up the cork and squeezed it. It was not too hard, not too squishy. It was good, too.
“Aren’t you supposed to sniff it?” asked one of my old friends. “No, that doesn’t really tell you anything,” I said. “The cork always smells like a cork. It’s what the wine smells like that’s important.”
Flash forward to the wedding reception at the Shaker Heights Country Club. It was getting late in the evening. I had had a few glasses of wine, danced with a woman friend from college on whom I had had an unrequited crush, and had sucessfully given my toast without overtly crying in my Cabernet. Relieved, I went over to the bar for a victory glass. The bartender pulled a cork, put it down on the bar and started to pour.
Incredibly, I reached for the cork, raised it to my nose and sniffed it! Worse, the friend who had asked me about sniffing at the cafe saw me! “I thought you said there was no point in smelling the cork?!” she exclaimed and asked at the same time.
I was busted, righteously. I was an effete snob and a hypocrite. I did not feel good.
All I can say in my defense was that a few days later, I opened what was possibly the most corked wine of my life — a Ravenswood Lodi Zinfandel 2004. It was so bad that my wife could smell the mustiness from across the room. I smelled that cork to see if it smelled the same. It did. And I felt, well, good.
Filed under: Closures, Connoisseurship, Restaurants and Food
9 Comments
September 25th, 2007 at 5:22:35 PM
Friends don’t let friends smell corks.
September 25th, 2007 at 6:14:21 PM
In a similar hypocrisy, I backpedaled a bit weakly myself, saying only “I wanted to remind myself of a time in which I strolled the forests of Portugal.” Weak, indeed: I’ve never been to Portugal….
September 26th, 2007 at 4:14:41 PM
Beats being a dirty Cork Soaker…
September 26th, 2007 at 4:51:07 PM
Since we are clearly in Confessional mode, I own up to being caught swirling and sniffing a glass of milk. Guilty. No absloution sought.
September 26th, 2007 at 5:45:54 PM
Just because you don’t have to smell a cork (and as you say, Jim, you don’t) doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to!
September 27th, 2007 at 5:19:22 PM
Oenophilus, I have been known to swish water around my mouth and take in some air, as if, perhaps, I could detect hints of minerality or flouridation???
Old habits die hard.
October 1st, 2007 at 2:35:32 PM
Jim,
I say, Congratulations! You are a great wine teacher if your impromptu table-side lesson really sank in for your friend the novice wine lover and you also made her so comfortable with her new wine knowledge that she felt that she could question your wine-related behavior in a social situation. That’s what it’s all about.
Kathleen Lisson
October 25th, 2007 at 3:38:13 PM
I always thought you were to put the cork in your mouth and detect soil conditions for the tree????
December 1st, 2007 at 10:50:07 AM
Everyone I know from Cleveland would’t know which end of the cork to smell!