Purple Prose and Vinous Literature

The amount of words put to paper, so to speak in this digital age, about wine is absolutely mind boggling. If one were to search the book section of Amazon for ‘wine’ there would be over 90,000 options from which to make a decision. That number doesn’t even take into consideration regular magazines, newsletters, columns or articles in newspapers, and the absurd amount of output (some well thought out, some not so) from the blogosphere.

I find it somewhat curious that a number of the books have a subtitle alluding to one upping your friends or gaming the sommelier. Apparently there is often a combative nature to wine know-how.

So how does one go about seeking knowledge on wine? One route I have found to successful wine literature is seeking out that which was read before me. If there are friends, co-workers, or superiors whose palates and opinion I respect I will often seek advice on what they have read. In the early stages of learning about wine the amount of information to take in can be overwhelming, but one thought to keep in mind that makes wine learning more manageable is the fact that you can’t possibly learn it all.

Accepting the fact that there is just simply too much to know, and every vintage in every region brings more to learn, takes a lot of pressure off.

The first thing to do would be to buy a map. If you’re reading about a winery or a region, knowing where it is and what surrounds it adds another layer of depth to the knowledge. Did the region gain prominence due to an advantageous location along a navigable river like Rheingau? Is a mountain range the reason to grape growing success like Alsace? Just a little extra geography goes a long way and the map I would recommend is The World Atlas of Wine by Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson; there’s a concise one too if you want to save a few bucks. This book geographically covers the wine world very well indeed, and both of the editors are well established and very knowledgeable.

If you happen to be of the analytic and historical mindset, Paul Lukacs’ book Inventing Wine: A History of One of the World’s Most Ancient Pleasures does a very good job of explaining the evolution of wine and it’s role in human culture for the last few thousand years.

If you prefer something a little more casual, then I would recommend Educating Peter by Lettie Teague, frequent columnist for the Wallstreet Journal. In this book Ms. Teague embarks on a goal to educate Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers on the world of wine. She challenges herself to create an expert out of a man whose favorite wine is ‘fatty chardonnay.’

And for the book that best put into words my fledgling philosophy of wine, I would refer you to Kermit Lynch’s Adventures on the Wine Route. Kermit Lynch is a wine importer who started importing natural wine before there was need for a phrase like “natural wine.” As his friend Alice Waters was to food with her restaurant Chez Panisse, he has been to wine for the last thirty plus years.  

The wine books that line my shelves seem to be taking up an ever increasing amount of space, so I could go on, but I think these books are a good place to start. And as a final piece of advice, I curiously find myself thirsty while reading these vinuous tomes, so have a glass of wine handy before you begin.

Wine takes a break.

Wine takes a hiatus on this blog entry as this weekend those in the know bid an enthusiastic good luck to one Vasya Vorotnikov. A friend and local climber, Vasya is competing in the Sport Climbing Series (SCS) national championships this weekend, defending his first place title from last year. So go forth, and crush, sir! And for the rest of us, here’s last year’s highlights to put everyone in a sending mood.

2012 SCS National Championships from USA Climbing on Vimeo.

1,356 grapes you've probably never heard of.

While flipping through a recently purchased book titled, “Wine Grapes” by Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding, & Jose Vouillamoz, my resolution to introduce consumers to new grapes and wine regions was strengthened. I would guess that the average American wine drinker is consuming wines made from one of ten, possibly twelve, grape varietals. This book covers 1,368 grape varietals produced on any sort of commercial level.

1,368 grape varietals.

It is staggering how many grapes are being used to make anything from common to extraordinary wines. To attempt drinking wine made from all of the grapes on this list would be an effort in pedantic check-listing. A fun bit of trivia maybe, but not necessary. That being said though, there is so much that the consumer misses by not branching out to available options.

The importance of tasting whatever one can, within reason, occurred to me while I was considering the role of wine professionals (writer’s, critics, judges, those in sales, etc.) and other people who rely on a subjective sensory input for their professional or personal betterment. Take the aspiring baker. If someone aspires to be a world class baker, but the only baked good they have tasted is Irish soda bread, to what extent would they be able to judge a well made croissant or a gateaux de bordeaux?

Of course they can tell you what they think is good or bad, but the reason professionals in their respective fields are professionals is due to (or at least should be) their wider range of flavor experience to draw from; I would consider the same argument applicable to the arts as well. But even if you are not one vying for a professional life judging beers or rating wines, drawing from a great range of experience and flavors makes each successive experience that much more enjoyable.

Because I do sell wine in one specific shop, I can’t say that impartiality, on my part, exists. What I will say though, is that if you can find a decent wine shop anywhere with a staff that is enthusiastic about seeking out new wines, you should be able to find a good deal on wines made from grapes you may never have heard of. But here’s a list of wines that I find to be of good values that are below $20, with the name of the grape in each underlined.

Whites

$12.99 - Ermita de Nieve Verdejo - Spain

$8.99 - Flavium Dona Blanca - Spain

$15.99 - Francois Cazin Cour Cheverny - Romorantin - France

$9.99 - Le Haut Vignot Anjou Blanc - Chenin Blanc - France

$12.99 - Strauss Samling 88 - Sheurebe - Austria

$15.99 - Cantina del Taburno - Falanghina - Italy

Red

$15.99 - Dio Fili Xinomavro - Greece

$10.99 - Red on Black Agiorgitiko - Greece

$9.99 - Flavium Crianza - Mencia - Spain

$11.99 - Librandi Rosso - Gaglioppo - Italy

$15.99 - Monte Schiavo - Lacrima di Morro d’Alba - Italy

$15.99 - Santa Lucia Vigna del Melograno - Uva di Troia - Italy

Not to detract from them, but there is so much more than cabernet, merlot, pinot grigio, and chardonnay. (Like chenin blanc! - note from editor Beth)

An Admission Most Egregious

 

I like sweet wine.

This may quickest way I have found to make a surprising number of wine shoppers run for the hills. Allow the word ‘sweet’ to enter the description of a wine (obviously excluding of course those who come in search of sweet wine) and before even being allowed to qualify such a statement, “I only like dry wine, ick, nothing sweet.” When conversations outside of work turn to wine, often casual drinkers will tell me they only like chardonnay, nothing sweet or perhaps a good dry red.

Just once I want someone to tell me they like bad dry reds.

I find this curious. In a land of disgusting soda container sizes, caramel macchiatos, and restaurants that have ‘Cheesecake’ in the title, why are so many people so averse to sweetness in wine? I think there are a few issues going on here. One would be the preconceived notions of a grape or wine making region, the second problem is the conflation of fruit flavors and sweetness, and finally the memory of the first sweet wine a drinker may have had (Boone’s Farm or Lancer’s any one?) and the ensuing hangover because it was probably an exceedingly cheap wine.

The third issue is easy enough to tackle. Many cheap sweet wines made to appeal to, not to be pejorative, non-serious wine drinkers are frequently lacking any notion of balance. If it is a 1.5L bottle of moscato for $7.99, it’s not going to be balanced or a fair example to, say, good riesling from the Mosel. Probably won’t taste very good either. But just like letting curious imbibers taste dry rose when they are under the perception that all rose is sweet, letting someone taste a balanced sweet wine can change a few minds. Side note for another time, not all rose is sweet.

The issues of confusing fruit flavors in wine and sweetness are intertwined with wine prejudice. Some drinkers will swear up and down that all German wines are sweet and all wines from Alsace are sweet. I could pour a completely dry German riesling and receive the response of, “That wine’s too sweet.” While people I often find looking for “dry” wines are seeking out, for example, Kendall-Jackson chardonnay. Prime example of a wine which is reputed to leave an unknown amount of residual sugar to make it more appealing to a wider range of consumers. I’m also casting a sideways glance at cheap high alcohol zinfandel. The perception is that chardonnay is dry, so that’s often how it will be perceived, no matter how it actually tastes.

The wine that appears above is Max Ferdinand Richter’s 2011 Brauneberger Juffer-Sonnenuhr Riesling Spatlese. To break all that business down, the wine is made from riesling grown in the town of Brauneberg along the middle Mosel in the reputedly superior Juffer-Sonnenuhr vineyard. Spatlese refers to a later harvest of riesling (later than kabinett, earlier than auslese) which has a high sugar content, but is balanced with higher acidity as well. Sometimes the acidity can grow to “bone-crunching” levels to quote Paul Grieco.

Riesling from good Mosel producers like Richter are perfect examples of how sweetness and acid can balance each other to create harmonious age worthy wines of exceptional beauty. The above wine was enjoyed with a salty ham, and it was fantastic. The wine itself was all flowers and peaches with an underlying minerality caused by perilously steep vineyards riddled with slate. Off-dry riesling and salty ham may be one of my favorite food pairings and should not be passed up just because one is afraid of looking like an amateur for liking wines with sweetness. The other useful quality to good riesling is that because the natural acidity and sugar is higher than your average white wine, they are some of the best aging wines in the world. Something to keep in mind if you’re considering any long term wine aging.

So next time someone proposes a wine that may perhaps be a little sweet, keep an open mind.

The Good Old Days of Drinking Wine

Recently I came across an article on food & wine concerning past predictions and their contemporary results as put forth by Bobby Parker some time ago. An interesting enough read, but one portion of the interview I thought was rather telling as to the direction of American wine culture compared to that established 30 years ago, was the amount Mr. Parker paid for 1st and 2nd growth Bordeaux in 1983.

“In 1983, I paid $110 for a case of the extraordinary 1982 Pichon Lalande and $550 for the 1982 Mouton.”

    Chateau Mouton Rothschild at the time was going for about $45.83 per bottle. Admittedly not cheap, but also not completely prohibitive. According to the Consumer Price Index inflation calculator, in the sense of today’s economy that would be worth about $105.65 a bottle for the Mouton while the Pichon would be just over $20. Care to hazard a guess as to what that wine actually costs today? A quick inquiry on wine-searcher.com lists the average price of the 2010 vintage of the Mouton at $1184.00 per bottle with the Pichon averaging $242 per bottle.

    World class wine that was once within reach of the everyman (after cracking open the piggy-bank or perhaps searching for change through a few dozen couches) is now so prohibitively expensive that even working within the wine industry I can’t say that I will ever taste any of the 1st growths. What caused this price inflation? In the ‘90’s it was a booming Japanese economy of a new wine drinking culture searching for trophy bottles, and now China is home to some of the biggest auctions in wine history. More wine drinkers means more enthusiasts vying for the classics.

Even presented with the opportunity to taste heralded vintages of first growths, the experience would be marred with suspicions of fraud due to recent cases of wine counterfeiting (I’m thinking of you Rudy Kurwinian.) After all the seed of an idea once planted is very difficult to uproot.

But what bearing does this really have? One implication came to mind when I was watching the trailer for the movie Somm. There was a point where an enthusiastic taster could buy the different crus of Barolo or a handful of left bank Bordeaux to learn the characteristics of each cru or commune. Saint-Estephe over Pauillac? To do that now could drive someone into bankruptcy. While taking* the level 2 test through the Court of Master Sommeliers there were questions about whether certain chateau were classified as 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th growth. That is to memorize a list of more than 50 chateau and their classifications.

In three years I have had one to two people looking for classed growth Bordeaux.

Aspects of the wine industry linger in a world no longer relevant to the average consumer, which is unfortunate. But don’t worry, I am building up to the advantage in being a wine enthusiast in this day and age. While most of us may not be able to thoroughly learn all the cru’s of Barolo, Barbaresco, Bordeaux, and Burgundy the use of modern technology and winemaking techniques have made more wine created from a greater array of varietals from farther corners of the world more available to everyone. And thanks to climate change (or, the conspiracy of climate change purported by liberals) weather conditions have made for much more consistent vintages from year to year and will continue to do so until we exist in some sort of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome sort of world. In 1983 I doubt that Robert Parker could have bought consistently good Assyrtiko from Santorini in Greece, dry Furmint from Hungary, or wines from the Canary Islands.    

My personal favorite advantage to the times? Technology, especially the internet, has made information about wine easily available to anybody seeking it, and this has helped raise the average level of knowledge of even casual wine consumers. More informed consumers and wine drinkers give further incentive for producers to create more unique wines of better quality; it’s also the driving force behind regional revivals in regions throughout the world that are shifting focus from quantity of grapes to quality. Even though it is easy to lament bygone days of drinking top class wines, I’ll be perfectly content with the abundant options for good wine sub-20$ a bottle. 

*Full disclosure: I took the sommelier certification test, and though I passed the written and blind tasting portions of the exam, I failed due to insufficient preparation and performance for the service portion of the exam.

An Instance in which I Post Other People's Blogs

In this week's episode I reference you to wine writers I follow on a regular basis who have recently written a few articles of interest.

For those who haven't heard, a few months ago one Robert Parker sold a controlling interest of the Wine Advocate to a group of Singapore investors. Mike Steinberger covered that issue at the end of December here as well as the issue of point inflation in the same magazine here.

With a more scientific bent, W. Blake Gray recently covered in two columns the role of brettanomyces, a yeast of much heated debate, in the flavors of wine. It seems UC Davis is finally conceding that brettanomyces may not be a flaw, or unwanted infection, in wine but a part of why some consistent flavors are found in wines of a particular region.

I follow both of these writers because their coverage of the wine world comes from quite a bit of experience and I respect both of them. So sit down and enjoy a cup of coffee with a few articles to enrich your wine know how and sometime soon I might even come up with something original!

Starting a Modest Wine Cellar

As a particular year of a particular wine sells out and the new vintage is released we end up with two wines from the same winery from two different years of production. Conveniently, this occurred with a two different wines right around the same time that a friend of mine expressed interest in perhaps starting a cellar. A perfect excuse for a tasting in the name of education.

Six of us got together to taste through four different bottles: the Yalumba Bushvine Grenache from 2007 and 2010 along with the 2005 and 2007 Cuvee Bastien from Domaine Fontaine, a malbec from Cahors. I wasn’t sure how all of the wines would show, but I at least knew that they would illustrate a point in what happens as a result of bottle age and different vintages. What ended up happening, to my surprise, was that the wine I had the least faith in, the Yalumba 2007 Bushvine Grenache, was agreed upon to be the crowd favorite. The 2010 of the same wine showed a certain brashness that would have been less noticeable if it had been tasted on its own. Second on the list of favorites was the 2005 Fontaine, due to its 2007 incarnation showed much more prominent tannin.

This was not the first time where I’ve seen modestly priced wines aging well and it helped reinforced the belief I have that one does not need a boatload of cash to be able to have a ‘wine cellar’ or age wine. The Yalumba, for example, has a shelf price of $17.99 and the Cuvee Bastien I have seen priced from $14.99 to $18.99. I used to think, and imagine many others currently do, that you would have to spend some serious coin to be able to age wine. This tasting was a great example of how well wines under $20 that were 5 and 7 years old, respectively, showed. The trick of course is finding wine capable of aging well as not just anything will.

What a wine needs to age is some sort of preserving element and the natural elements found in wine are tannin, acid, or sugar. These elements are needed in balance, so that means Barefoot Moscato is not gonna hang on. And I certainly don’t have a lot of faith in Yellow Tail Cabernet Sauvignon either. Mondavi’s Woodbridge Riesling? Hell no.

Step one: buy a bottle of wine.

Step two: have a glass, but just one.

Step three: put the cork back in the bottle and taste it again the next day.

Step four: repeat step three until you run out of wine or it starts tasting bad.

At the store we’ve tried $16 wines from the Canary Islands that were delicious as far as four days out. Domaine de la Pinte’s 2005 Savagnin peaked after four days. $35 a bottle, not cheap, but nowhere near Grand Cru Burgundy or 1st Growth Bordeaux. Now this isn’t going to give you a precise time of how long a wine can go, but it will give you an idea.

Do a little homework to find reputable producers and spend $12 to $25 dollars per bottle. With tannin from the grape skins, reds give you a plentiful supply of options. Italian wines like Chianti, aglianico, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, and Nebbiolo based wines from the north are all easy options. In France the pinot noir based reds of Burgundy, the wines of the Rhone, Bordeaux, and the reds of the south have varying degrees of potential. The list of possible grapes and regions is just too long to list.

Whites are not as often thought of, but good German, Austrian, or Alsatian riesling has real staying power. Chenin blanc from Loire labeled under Vouvray, Montlouis sur Loire, or Savennieres is some of the most fascinating wine you can find with some age on it. And if you’re going to do chardonnay, Chablis all the way.

The other problem I frequently hear is that people just don’t have the patience to age wine and it’s just too easy to drink. The solution: just don’t drink the wine! Set some wine aside for later consumption (put a don’t drink until date somewhere on the bottle) and some for near term consumption: cellar savers.

Since I’ve only started a cellar in the last two years, and have limited space and finances, this is what I have set aside right now.

• $15.99 / bottle - Chionetti 2006 Dolcetto di Dogliani (down to 3 bottles from my original case)
• $17.99 / bottle - Domaine de la Pepiere 2010 Muscadet (6 bottles)
• ~$16.99 / bottle - Russian River Brewing co. Supplication (10 bottles down from 12)
• ~$80 / bottle - Tenuta delle Terre Nere 2005 Calderara Sottana (1.5L)
• ~$54.99 / bottle - Marcel Lapierre 2011 Morgon (1.5L)
• ~$24.99 / bottle - Domaine Diochan 2008 Moulin a Vent (2 bottles down from... 10 maybe?)

The prices listed are full retail before whatever discounts your retailer may offer. And a few of these I bought on closeout, which means the price was much lower than what the average listed above retail price is. So there are clearly options, and you’ll notice with the third item on the list, even beer options! Explore the wines you already like, figure a budget, and start a modest cellar; you’ll be surprised at the number of years of drinking pleasure you’ll be able to derive from some smart shopping.