Picture yourself wandering up and down the aisles of your local liquor store, having been sent there to "pick out a nice bottle for dinner." Maybe you know everything about wine and you know EXACTLY what to pair with the chicken pot pie.
Not everyone has that skill, however, and most people are relegated to choosing their wines based on three factors - price, varietal and label. While it's often easiest to go for the prettiest bottle on the shelf, we've found an interesting article at Wine X magazine that says that might not net you the best of wines. In fact, they even offer the following motto: "choose ugly- drink lovely and if more has been spent on design than wine, decline."
It is a sad fact and a perplexing paradox. The look of a bottle is of no importance but also the utmost. It has no bearing on the taste but is the main reason for purchasing. Visual appeal is one way a wine drinker can be tricked into buying something that is not as good as it should be. Consequently it is incumbent on an enthusiast to hone their senses of taste and smell and totally ignore their sense of style. It's crucial, especially for the fiscally challenged. Some of Australia's best wines and best bargains lurk under some of the most god awful labels. Boutique wine labels are like people's houses - there's plenty that's quirky and gaudy but for plain ugly bargains the big companies rule.
Witness The Trainwreck of an Online Wine Community
If you want to read a rant about how bad forums can get when people get pissed off about bad wine or bad wine customer service read on. We love Vinography and we think they're right. Chill out and kick back with something a little more mellow than rants and just drink some wine.
I don't know a lot of things, but during my short time on this earth, I have observed what I believe to be some predictable tendencies of the particular animal we call human beings. The males of the species are arrogant and proud, yet they have the most tender of egos. They swell with self importance, and rage when insulted. Both males and females are born defensive and only become less so through careful conditioning. When they collect in the groups we know as communities they have a tendency to squabble, opine, piss off, and otherwise make fools of themselves with occasional utter abandon.
So we're due for a wine tasting....either this weekend or next. My job at the moment is to figure out what we should taste. So far, we've tried some French wines (mostly red), some Syrah and eight or so bottles of pretty lovely Cabernet Sauivignon as a group. (I've tasted many more, of course!) I am thinking we may need to go Italian this time. Maybe include some Super Tuscans, which you can read a little about here in GQ 's wine guide. This article talks a wee bit about Super Tuscans and here's an excerpt:
Super Tuscans are outlaw wines (I love this!) first created in the early 1970s by a few producers who began using grapes that were not traditionally permitted in the Chianti region. Typically, they are a blend of Sangiovese (the primary grape used to make Chianti) and Cabernet Sauvignon. If you like Bourdeaux and California Cabernets, chances are you'll like Super Tuscans.
Here's another article from Forbes that recommends 20 Great Reds under $20 and mentions Super Tuscans. I don't have a lot of tolerance for the heavy use of gratuitous click-generating slideshows on the site, but there are some interesting recommendations. But hmmmm. I am still waiting for an Italian recommendation, since the two listed in the GQ article cost $21 and $100. BIngo!
Here's one: Sedara Nero d'Avola from Morgante Italy ($16.99). Here's a link to WineLibrary, a website that lets you search by place or type of wine. I immediately found a bunch of interesting Italian wines here, including prices. More tomorrow on when and what we'll be tasting.
My friend, Kim, an editor for Southern Living magazine who lives in Alabama, recently told me about this winery in Tennessee that's famous for its muscadine. Muscadine? Never heard of it. She quickly filled me in. Muscadine is a sweet wine. The muscadine grape, also known as a scuppernong, is native to Florida. Southerners often prefer their wine sweet to dry, according to Kim, which explains why there's a run on muscadine.
Highland Manor Winery, 14 miles north of Nashville, can't make enough cases of this white wine to satisfy the masses. It costs $9.99 (cheap, so it's up our alley), but it's a limited reserve. The winery won two gold medals for this wine in Madrid, though it doesn't say which medals on the website. I will try to get my hands on a bottle to review it, though it might be easier to get NBA playoff tickets than a bottle of this stuff, even if you do live in Tennessee.
An article that ran in yesterday's business section of the NY Times trumpets the success of cheap Australian Yellow Tail brand wine (You know, those wines with the label that features a leaping wallaby, which many mistake for a kangaroo). Yellow Tail gets yet more ink in a separate Times magazine article, too, which discusses the trend toward using cute animals (so-called "critter labels") to pimp more wine. While the wallaby label might be eye-grabbing and the use of its likeness savvy marketing on the maker's part, the Yellow Tail shiraz, in my humble opinion, has more in common with Dr. Pepper than it does with a good, solid bottle of red wine. Yeah, it's $6 a bottle and for that price you can buy it by the case at Costco and load up the ole Suburban. Its fans (This wine has many; Its shiraz is the best-selling red in the country and the company made $77 million off its largely U.S.-based sales last fiscal year) say it tastes better than most $8 or even $10 bottles of American wines. Um, I beg to differ. If we are talking bigger producers, give me a bottle of J. Lohr or Ravenswood (I whine about this wine, too, but it IS better) any day and dump the Wallaby off the Golden Gate!
Americans are drinking more wine than ever, which we are annoyingly reminded of in every article about wine these days. I question whether this has anything to do with the enjoyment of wine. Maybe it's all the talk about the wine/heart health connection and the whole French paradox. (Drink red wine. Eat steak with butter. Sit on your ass. Get skinny) My inkling is that it might have everything to do with the sugar fix increasingly required by our increasingly diabetic nation. Beer, of course, gets you hammered. But it isn't sweet. And it gives you gas. In the Times article, Jon Fredrikson, a California wine industry consultant, is on to something when he calls Yellow Tail "the perfect wine for a public grown up on soft drinks." In other words: sugar junkies.
But Dr. Pepper, at under $1 for a 12-ounce can, doesn't come with quite the kick of a glass of Yellow Tail. But the kick shouldn't be the only thing that matters, as New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik eloquently argues here. Wine is about more than the buzz. It's about the ritual, the wine's story, its label, the lore.
That said, I found this article, which describes how so-called wine experts couldn't taste the difference between white wine dabbled with food coloring and red wine both hysterical (and humbling even though I'd never consider myself an expert). Maybe at our next blind wine tasting party I will hide a bottle of Yellow Tail among a bunch of other wines and see if I can tell the difference. Not sure I could.
Here's an interesting rant against sauvignon blanc posted today by Slate wine columnist Mike Steinberger. Here, Steinberger, whose writing is as crisp as any good Sancerre, argues that there aren't any great sauvignon blancs.... "the grape is a dud," he says. "producing chirpy little wines wholly devoid of complexity and depth, the very qualities that make wine interesting and worth savoring. For years, this offensively inoffensive grape has escaped criticism while chardonnay and merlot have been scorned. The free ride ends here.
Then Steinberger goes on to offer alternatives to crappy boring bottles of sauvignon blanc. Here they are, many of them under $20 a bottle (for our purposes, cheers!)
(quote) So what, you might ask, would be preferable to drinking sauvignon blanc, particularly if you are on a budget? With most New Zealand, South African, and Californian sauvignon blancs selling for around $15 a bottle, and with most Sancerres and Pouilly-Fumés now fetching at least $20, there are scores of worthy alternatives. Take, for instance, the chardonnays from the Macon region of France (they aren't called chardonnays, of course, but instead go by names like Vire-Clesse, St.-Véran, Pouilly Fuissé, etc.). The wines of Daniel Barraud, André Bonhomme, Olivier Merlin, and Domaine Delaye all tend to run in the $15-$25 range and have substantially more depth and brio than most comparably priced sauvignon blancs. Ditto Domaine des Terres Dorées' Beaujolais blanc, which, at $10 a bottle, is truly a gift from Bacchus.
Loire Valley chenin blanc yields a number of elixirs: The Vouvrays of Domaine Huet are legendary; Huet's dry Vouvrays (called sec) sell for around $25-$35 a bottle and will encourage much more swilling and sniffing than any sauvignon blanc. (Sauvignon blanc is, at best, a lubricant to conversation; a good Vouvray is a conversation-stopper.) The basic Vouvrays from Domaines Pinon and Champalou can be had for $10-$15 and are usually delicious in their own right. South African chenins are also beginning to make some noise: De Trafford and Rudera are two names of note and go for around $15-$20 per bottle. (end long Steinberger quote!!!)
Here are my thoughts. I must admit that I've never drank sauvignon blanc for its complexity so it boggles my mind that anyone would expect as much from this wine. I simply find a good bottle refreshing on a warm day. I like its tickle on the tongue. I like the way it smells because I like the way grass and melon smell. I like it extra cold on hot days. I do like it for some of the same reasons I like ginger ale. It's light and refreshing. It IS unoffensive. (It's chardonnay light....like Miller Lite or Bud Lite, says my friend Christine, who is a fan) And that's ok, damn it! Besides, it's more fun to make fun of merlot, that largely wimpy tasteless red (with exceptions). Nonetheless, it can't hurt to print out this guy's recommendations for my next trip to Trader Joe's. Maybe then I won't stand like a dufus in front of the French wines for a good 15 minutes blocking the cash register line as I try to translate the labels.
Here's an interesting article about pairing wine and cheese from Wine Spectator that comes from my PIT (Partner in Tasting) by way of a friend of a friend. I am embarrassed to say that I know about as much about pairing as I do about the fine sport of cricket. This is perhaps because the PIT can't eat cheese, an unfortunate circumstance that causes me to sneak the stuff so as to not upset him. He takes my cheese eating personally.
Nonetheless, this article really boils it down to an easy science. Young and soft goat cheeses, which are my favorite, pair well with Sauvignon Blanc-based wines. (The PIT liked a $16 Mauritson's Sauvignon Blanc that we tried recently) Hard cheeses are good with leftover red from the main course. They also pair more easily with both whites and reds. Hmmm. A blue cheese should be eaten with a sweeter wine. These are only fundamentals. For the more complicated questions I've consulted my little book of cheese, which often only makes me more confused because I've not heard of half the cheeses the book covers and only have so much energy in a day, where I typically wash more sippies than I do wine glasses. (Thus the photo: Still life: Shiraz with a sippy.)
Tracking Wine is Easy....If You Have Enough To Track
Here is a cool gadget, though I don't own enough wine to justify buying it :) It's a $200 barcode scanner that picks up a wine's name, varietal, winery, country, type, color, and region. After the scan, the wine details can be loaded on your computer via wine management software. This way, very lucky people can track all of the wines nestled in their cellars, determining peak times to imbibe, etc. This does not apply to us. The Partner in Tasting (PIT) and I have FOUR, count em', four bottles of wine in a rack in our dining room that we will have to drink soon because it gets too hot in the front of our apartment, encouraging unfortunate spoilage. Aside from that we own a bottle of Knudsen's fizzy cider (non-alcoholic) and our newest addition, an $8.99 bottle of Big Yellow Cabernet Sauvignon from Mendocino on my kitchen table that I bought at Trader Joe's yesterday because I liked the label and because a local parent recommended it. Big Yellow Cab is a new brand from the Mendocino Wine Co., the same people who make Parducci wines and I will review it soon. We also have the Baron's dessert wine kicking around somewhere that we've yet to touch. We are waiting for the right moment.
Maybe we just drink our new bottles of wine too fast to start a wine cellar. But we're also not big on huge wine inventory at the moment since we have to pay for preschool soon. But we do get excited about wine. Maybe someday we will inherit one of these scanners from a rich aunt or buy an old one for $5 at a local garage sale. Or maybe not. I probably wouldn't be able to get it to work anyway.
OK, so French wine is a completely different world, about as foreign to many Americans as the idea of their five- week-a-year vacation. (Bless those socialists!) But I hereby declare that I am open to mastering these crazy French wine labels that bear the names of dead Barons and other rich folk who own multiple castles that I will probably not visit someday. I bring up the Baron in my subject line because some friends gave us a bottle of sweet white dessert wine with his name on it. The Baron, who is pictured on the label, looks like a cross between Abe Licoln and Alexander Hamilton. I have no idea what to drink his wine with (Frog legs? Stilton cheese?) or how much this bottle costs.
PIT's (Partner in Tasting's) look when I mention the word quaffable.
OK. There's something about this word quaffable (meaning easy and pleasant to drink a lot of, as it applies to wine. For example, "This Bogle is intensively quaffable!") The expression really wigs me out. I just don't like it. For starters, it doesn't roll off the tongue. It kind of sits back there with the molars, forming an awkward O in the place where you'd normally choke on an olive. Second, it sounds vaguely obscene. (Or just snotty, as my friend Stefanie said when I mentioned the word to her) Thirdly, I see it used in reference to wine and know that it's one of those words that everyone in the wine can use with confidence and with a very straight face except me because I am not really part of the wine world. That said, I do plan to take a few more introductory tasting classes soon in which I might attempt to use the word without choking. (I've had a few taste coachings, for the record, so I am not completely clueless, and keep tripping on corks from nice bottles all over my house to prove it) Again, this site is for people who are learning, so don't spam me telling me I am an idiot.
Anyhow, in my research I found a really fun well-written blog called Quaffability.com, which is why I bring up the word in the first place. This guy writes about wine, largely bottles that cost $12 or under, from Trader Joes. He's worked in the restaurant industry and seems quite knowledgable so he describes wines a lot better than I do. I find myself going back to his website often because he's a lovely writer and has some great new recommendations, like a recent bit on Dehlinger, a small wine producer in Sebastopol, CA. He recommends their wines but the only way to get a bottle is to get on their mailing list. (They don't do tastings and they sell in very few places)
I'm sending a request in today.
Yes, I am heading to Sonoma with the husband for a night in a week or so. I've not planned the vineyards we are going to hit yet, but I will most certainly come back with a slew of reviews for the blog. We'll probably stop by Unti, a cool little place run by a dad and his son out of a small shed in Sonoma. We also love Ridge, Quivira, Dry Creek, Raymond Burr, Ferrari-Carano (AAHHHHH those tulips are lovely in spring!) and Hanna wineries. (What am I missing???) Maybe we'll even hit J and do some sparkling white tastings and I hope to maybe swing by Buena Vista in out of the way Sonoma because I love their wine, particularly this fantastic Zinfandel I tasted there last year. (The only problem with Buena Vista is that they only sell their reserve wines at the winery and through their wine club) Although I typically thumb my nose at a lot of Zin, (my tongue! It's evolving!!) Buena Vista crafted this lovely one that we bought and I drank by myself accidentally mistaking it for a cheap Trader Joe's bottle one night while giving my daughter a bath and booking dinner at the same time. OOPS. "This is a great bottle for just $6.99," I said to myself as I took another gulp. I didn't realize I'd been drinking an expensive bottle that I was saving for a nice occassion (It cost about $38) until I looked at the label the next day. DuH! S.O. wasn't happy.
Don't Judge a Wine by its Label?
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