Archive for the 'Connoisseurship' Category

How are wine drinkers supposed to understand the language that wine writers use to convey the tastes of wines they like when some of it comes from way out in left field?

Even winemakers themselves compare their creations to things as extremely unpalatable as cat pee and insecticide. What do you think when you read a tasting note for a Sauvignon Blanc that alludes to “cat pee,” for instance?

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My post defending California Pinot Noir on Monday stirred up quite a bit of discussion. Good comments about Burgundy vs. US wines got me thinking about aging. It’s accepted that well-balanced wines, not blockbusters, are the wines that are supposed to age well.

So how does this apply to Pinot Noir?

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On Christmas Eve we had bubbly with our Dungeness crab salad and Cabernet with our malfatti in red sauce. They were good matches, and the bubbly especially was excellent, but it could have been a more sublime experience if I had been alert enough to serve it just right.

It reminded me of a few tricks to make the most of a good bottle of Champagne or other sparkling wine. I used to cover the wines of the Champagne region regularly and had the good fortune to travel there on several occasions and soak up not only a lot of great bubbly but also to learn how the natives enjoy their product.

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An article about Hugh Johnson’s current view on the importance of vintages has stirred a good discussion on Decanter.com. The article by David Higgins is a tease for a Decanter print article due in the January issue.

So if the story, second-hand from an interview with Johnson in the U.K. broadsheet, The Times, is accurate, the erudite author Johnson believes there’s no such thing as a bad vintage anymore. We’ll have to wait for the Decanter article or a look at Johnson’s 2008 Pocket Guide to get his exact point of view.

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Being in or near the wine business it’s easy to forget how little a lot of people know about some of the things that the industry takes for granted. Sometimes I cringe when I hear a winemaker talking to a consumer group, and throwing in jargon like “appellation” and “AVA” and “TTB” when they’re talking about something as simple as what’s on their wine label.

One of the things that people should pay more attention to on a label is the appellation. That’s the place name. It’s not the place in small print saying where the wine was cellared, bottled, or “vinted” whatever that means, but the bigger print usually on the front that says Bordeaux Superieur or Rioja or Sonoma County. For US wines, AVA is another way of saying appellation. It means an official American Viticultural Area recognized by the TTB (Tax and Trade Bureau) of the Treasury Department.

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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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