Archive for the 'Connoisseurship' Category

Have 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.

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It’s easy to lapse into an all-Cabernet diet here in Napa Valley, so it’s refreshing to try something different whenever possible. I had a great time drinking three out-of-the-box bottles recently.

A thirst-quenching and slightly off-beat white is a Semillon from the new Fortitude brand of Etude Wines, based in Napa. You could spend a lot of time in wine shops and not encounter any varietal Semillon from this state.

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It’s fun to hear Fred Franzia — maker of Two-Buck Chuck and many other California wine brands – speak. I just listened to a discussion on public radio that was supposed to pit Franzia against a wine writer and a wine business journalist to get some lively discussion about wine snobbism.

Franzia did his part, declaring that if anyone uses any more words than “it’s good” or “I like it” to describe a wine then they’re a snob. He is really down-to-earth and says what he thinks, so it’s refreshing to listen to him talk, but he’s also smart and cleverly made several points that made him and his Bronco Wine Co. look good.

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Jane Wyman and Luciano Pavarotti died in the last week. Both had connections to Napa Valley wine from the 1980s. I know. I was there.

Wyman, who had a great career in movies including an Oscar for best actress, was the star of TV’s “Falcon Crest” in the early 1980s. I was a newspaper reporter and photographer and got to visit the sets in Napa Valley where the show’s locations were taped, including Spring Mountain Vineyard, whose graceful white Victorian mansion was the home of Wyman’s character, Angela Channing.

Pavarotti made at least one visit, too, to make a forgettable movie whose name I can’t, er, remember. I got a press pass to attend the filming one day at the Charles Shaw winery, where Pavarotti and a beautiful actress were going up in a balloon. Yes, that Charles Shaw, now famous as Two-Buck Chuck.

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I believe that the best way to decide how good a wine is, is to taste it without knowing what it is. To taste it blind.

Because that’s the main point of drinking wine: the flavor impressions you get purely from the wine. But often other factors affect your enjoyment,too. As a critic, I was trained to ignore these factors (and honest blind tasting ensures that) but as somebody who simply loves to smell, taste and swallow wine, I’ve got to acknowledge the other factors that come with the wine.

Sometimes this is knowing exactly where the wine came from, walking down the vine rows with the owner and getting a feel for the wine’s terroir.

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