Wine, Whiskey, Women and Beer

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During the last few weeks, I’ve been reading two recently published books that provide interesting insights into wine tasting, even though they aren’t about wine tasting.  The first is Canadian Whisky, by Davin de Kergommeaux (Mc Clelland & Stewart; 2012). The second is Janet Fletcher’s Cheese and Beer (Andrews, McMeel Publishing LLC; 2013).

I’ve read many books on wine tasting, of course, and a few on whisky tasting as well, of which de Kergommeaux’s book is the most sensible and approachable of all. He begins his discussion of whisky tasting by tackling the conventional imagery head on, telling the wince and gasp crowd “A little bit of flavor will linger on your tongue, but your mouth will be anesthetized, your eyes watering and you will have missed 95 percent of what you could be enjoying…It’s called sipping whiskey for good reason.”

The book is divided into three basic parts. The first focuses on the how, describing the components that go into the blend and the processes by which Canadian whiskeys are made. Its a good preparation for the second block, which concentrates on tasting—the why. Once he’s got you hooked, de Kergommeaux moves on to the longest part of the book, which goes into the colorful history of the Canadian spirits industry. We needn’t go into that here, but the stories are highly entertaining, as well as informative from a historical perspective, so I recommend it for your consideration.

Tasting Whiskey

The tasting process that de Kergommeaux describes for whisky is very similar to the process wine tasters use. Not as much attention is paid to evaluating the color of the whisky as one might with wine, although the differences in color can provide hints into the type of wood and the length of time the whisky was stored in it, as well as the components of the whisky.  With wine, however, color can provide clues into the level of alcohol and also the degree of breakdown in the acids.  With the substantially higher level of alcohol in whisky, however, a jump of even 5% (which would be enormous for wine) can be hard to detect.

Interestingly, de Kergomeaux recommends adding a little water to the whisky to bring out the flavors, in essence making it more like wine. His tasting notes (which are spread throughout the book as interesting inserts rather than being clumped together as if only for reference), show an extraordinary range of different tastes that are reminiscent of various higher alcohol wines, such as sherry, port and Madeira, including candied fruit, toffee, coffee, spices and nuts.

As the ”Whisky Advocate”, de Kergommeaux seems to be consciously emulating with whisky the approach Robert Parker has taken with wine. His tasting notes use a format similar to Parker’s wine tasting notes and show the same kind of rigorous approach.  He speaks approvingly of the practice of Canadian distillers (and indeed beverage makers worldwide) of using a tasting panel, rather than a single individual to evaluate their product, noting that this recognizes the fact that individual palates vary greatly and tend to be idiosyncratic. But he is not afraid to evaluate whiskies on his own and share his singular appraisals with the world.

A Different Approach

It’s interesting to note the differences between de Kergommeaux’s approach and Fletcher’s, which are in many ways what you would expect from a male in a country with limited wine production and a woman living in the heart of wine country. His tasting notes are authoritative; boldly delivered to a presumed male audience accustomed to vigorous exchanges of assertions and counter-assertions. By contrast, Fletcher (who often writes with co-authors) avoids such assertive micro-analysis, reports on a more generalized consensus, often citing from other sources. While she provides a wealth of information about the taste of different styles of craft beers, she is careful to note that her comments are only generalizations that may not apply to everyone and her focus is directed at how the tastes of the beers interact with food, in this case various cheeses, rather than on how they taste on their own.

Fletcher’s book shows us how much one can learn by concentrating on the differences resulting from the style choices of the brewer as well as the rewards that can be gained by paying attention to food pairing issues.  Wine and cheese are often erroneously thought of as natural companions.  In fact, only a limited number of the myriad possible wine and cheese combinations make great pairings.  These are simply such outstanding exceptions to the rule that they obscure the fact that, in general, the vibrant flavors and creamy consistency of most cheeses interfere with the ability to taste the subtle flavors in a great wine.  (They can also mask the flaws in lesser wines, which can make them useful in another way.) Beer and cheese, on the other hand, are more natural companions because the carbonation in the beer helps to refresh a palate by scrubbing away the creamy residue of the cheese and prepare it for the next bite.

Beer and Cheese Matching

Craft beers, with their distinctive flavors, provide more opportunities for outstanding matches than their blander mass market counterparts.  But there is also more risk of a jarring mismatch, so it’s helpful to understand the factors that make some combinations work and others fail. Fletcher, who is the cheese columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and a prolific author and coauthor of many books on food, wine and sustainable living (including  a companion book on pairing cheeses with wine), is an ideal guide. In this lively and eminently readable book, she gives us the tools to make good everyday pairings as well as find the surprising and extraordinary matches that make a bit of experimentation worthwhile.

Although Fletcher describes many proven pairings, her objective is not simply to catalog these consensus match-ups.  Rather, as she states in the introduction, it is to “equip you to continue the journey on your own” so that everyday brings the possibility of a new discovery. The benefit of this is underscored by sound advice she passes on from Adam Dulye, the proprietor of several popular San Fransisco gastropubs: “Do not miss your own taste experience by trying to find someone else’s…what you taste, smell and feel is unique to you.”

In making the effort to help her readers learn how to discover great tastes for themselves, Fletcher moves beyond the typical pairing guides that simply consist of a list of recommendations by the author or from other experts that the author has reached out to. To enable her readers to make their own pairings, she makes a special effort to familiarize them with the characteristic tastes of various styles of beer, so that (to the extent possible in a dynamic and creative environment) they will be able to predict what they’ll taste like. As a preliminary step, she identifies seven taste characteristics common to beers and provides four “guidelines” for beer and cheese pairings, described as “suggestions, not rules”.  She acknowledges that there are many happy marriages that defy expectations, but understands that her readers will be more likely to discover these happy marriages if they are looking in the right places and understand the dynamics at play than if they simply try combinations at random. In essence, she follows the same approach with craft beers that I recommend my readers take with single varietal wines in The Persistent Observer’s Guide to wine.

She also recognizes that it’s important to understand how to store and serve cheeses and beers, so a perfectly good match isn’t ruined by an easily avoided mistake. In this regard, she is not obsessive. Her advice is pragmatic and succinct and her suggestions explained with the kind of good sense that makes them easy to remember.

Fletcher follows this brief introduction with detailed descriptions of sixteen styles of ales and five styles of lagers.  Together with the lavish photographs that fill the pages, her evocative descriptions make it difficult to sit still long enough to read them.  It’s definitely a good idea to plan ahead and stock some examples of the beers and cheeses you’ll be reading about  so that you’ll have them on hand.

At the end of the book she provides a handy two page summary chart that gives specific suggestions for cheese and wine pairings according to the style of cheeses.  Copying these two pages will save you the trouble of carrying the book with you as you begin your forays into cheese and beer pairings, but as you become more and more familiar with the experience of making good matches, the need for this will disappear and Fletcher will have achieved her primary goal in writing the book, giving you the tools to think before you drink, so you can enjoy it better.

Complimentary differences

Ultimately, the differences between Fletcher and de Kergommeaux are in focus. While de Kergommeaux shows how diverse Canadian Whiskies can be, he is ultimately drilling down, providing more and more layers of information about a narrow topic. Fletcher, on the other hand, is trying to convey the essential pieces of information you need to know in order to explore a wildly diverse and exciting world on your own. It’s interesting to see how much we can learn from each of the very different perspectives that de Kergemmeaux’s and Fletcher’s books represent and how much more we can learn by comparing them. Vive la difference!

Irish Wine?

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A friend of mine recently asked me to recommend an “Irish Wine” for a St. Patrick’s Day celebration. Knowing she was planning a traditional Irish meal, I’d sent her a link to a column in the Argus Leader (Two Women on Wine) in which Heather Taylor Boysen suggests several red and wine wines that are up to the tricky task of simultaneously standing up to the saltiness of corned beef and the herbaceousness of cabbage.

One of the things I’d liked about Heather’s column was that it didn’t just suggest a single specific wine as the perfect match for the meal, but gave a range of wines that could be used, so readers would be able find something readily available to them and have more room to adjust for personal preferences. This narrowed the choices and would help prevent a distressing mismatch, but it didn’t create any particular connection between the wine and that special feeling of Irishness that so many people enjoy on St. Patrick’s Day.

But my friend wasn’t satisfied and made it clear that she expected more from the Persistent Observer. Wasn’t I the one who preached about how a wine needed to match the occasion and the people as much as the food that would be served? Didn’t I know that she’d rather center her meal around the wine than pick wines to go with the food? And if I didn’t, why didn’t I talk to her about it?

All valid points and all the more embarrassing because they reminded me how easy it is for me to make the same mistakes I warn others against.  Here I was, blithely forwarding the judgment of an expert without taking the time to talk to my friend and see what her own circumstances really required.

In Search of Truly Irish Wine

In an effort to create a special connection between her wine and Ireland, my friend had already done an Internet search on the term “Irish Wine”.  On Snooth, she was disappointed to find listings for Irish wines that she didn’t consider wines at all: Potcheen, a heady, unaged pot still potato wiskey (aka moonshine) produced by Bunratty; Irish Cream, a blend of whiskey, heavy cream and flavorings, such as coffee, vanilla and chocolate and Irish Mist: a blend of whiskey, honey and spices.

While it might be surprising to find these listed as “wines”, it is true that Ireland isn’t normally thought of as a wine producing country (even though it was recently classified as such by the EU). Like England, Scotland and Wales, the climate in Ireland has been more favorable to the production of beer and spirits than it has been to wine. Yet there is a tradition of wine in Ireland that clearly dates back to the time of St. Patrick and a few wines being produced in Ireland today.

Miurchu’s Life of St. Patrick, describes St. Patrick coming to the palace of Temoria “as they were eating and drinking wine.” When the king’s magician tries to entrap Patrick by dropping some doctored wine in his cup, Patrick blessed the cup so that his own wine would freeze and the drop added by the magician could be poured out.  The king converted to Catholicism shortly after this miracle, so it can truly be said that St. Patrick used wine to help him convert the Irish. Indeed, his whirlwind conversion efforts would have created a logistical nightmare in procuring wine for communion if it weren’t already commonplace in Ireland.

Today wine consumption is still alive and well in Ireland, even if it doesn’t produce much of its own. According to the Irish Wine Association, sales of table wine leapt from 1.5 million cases in 1990 to over 9 million cases in 2011, while beer consumption fell off. Of course, almost all this consumption is of imported wines, with Australian wines accounting for nearly one-quarter.

Indigenous Wines in Ireland

While most of wines consumed in Ireland are imported, there are producers who make wine for local consumption. Seeking to recreate traditional medieval wines, Bunratty Winery on the grounds of the Bunratty Castle produces mead, a drink made from honey, fermented grape juice, water, matured spirits, and herbs. A mead made from fermented honey is likely to have been the wine being served at Temoria when St. Patrick visited. Historically, like most wines made in Roman times and during the middle ages, mead was reserved for the upper classes, while slaves and serfs were given spirits made by cooking and distilling the residue of the wine making process. Bunratty also has one of only two distilleries officially licensed to brew potcheen  (which was banned in 1661 and only made legal again in 1997.) Most of the winery’s products are made for the castle’s own medieval-style banquets, but visitors to the working winery are permitted to watch the production in progress and taste the brew.

A more conventional modern winemaking operation is conducted by David Llewellyn at his orchards in Lusk, near Dublin. On favored sites in the orchard, he’s experimenting with Dunkelfelder, Schoenburger, Rondo, Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, using high polyethylene tunnels to protect the vines from the cold. The resulting wines are sold locally under the Lusca label.

In Mallow, also close to Cork, The Blackwater Valley Vineyard also has five acres of vines that produce wines for local consumption. Even smaller is the vineyard of Longueville House,  a small luxury hotel and restaurant, also in Mallow, that features seasonal, locally sourced foods. The estate has a 1.1 acre vineyard, incluing Muller Thurgau and Reichensteiner, used to make wine exclusively for events at the hotel.  Michael O’Callaghan of Vin de Longueville also is responsible for the five acres Thomas Walk Vineyard in Kinsale, where he makes an intriguing wine, named Amurensis Walk, from the Vitis Amurensis grape – a cool climate grape variety, bred from a variety that grows in the foothills of the Himalayas, on the bank of the Amur River. Although these producers are small, they have proved that it is possible to make a truly Irish red or white wine.

Recently, Curious Wines reported on a promotional event by the large wine brand McGuigans, which involved setting up an urban vineyard in Dublin, complete with 60 year old vines, tractors, barrels and winemakers…and, of course, an adjoining wine bar. This may have only been a temporary affair, but as global warming continues, I wouldn’t be surprised to find Southern Ireland, like Southern England, being taken more and more seriously as a location for vineyard sites.

Irish Wines from the Diaspora

Many who celebrate St. Patrick’s Day are outside of Ireland, however, and as they celebrate their ties to the homeland, they also celebrate the ability of the Irish people to thrive in a wide variety of different lands, adapting well to the local culture without losing their pride in their Irish roots.  Many of those forced to leave Ireland during periods of civil discord or famine became successful wine and spirits entrepreneurs. Their remarkable history has been chronicled by Ted Murphy, in the (now sadly out of print) book A Kingdom of Wine (OnStream, 2004).

Among these have been members of my own family, whose role in developing the wine and spirits trade in South Africa has been chronicled by A. P. Buirski in the thesis submitted for his masters Degree at the University of Stellenbosch in December of 1952. In 2004, I attended a family reunion dinner in the cellar of the Joseph Barry brandy distillery with hundreds of Joseph Barry’s direct descendants. Among the family members present were winemakers from Australia and France.

The Irish in mid 18th century were estimated to import more than four times the Bordeaux that England did, drinking more claret than the rest of the British Isles put together and Irish wine entrepreneurs have played a significant role in developing the wine trade of many countries.  There are, for example, fourteen chateaux Bordeaux with Irish roots.  Many of these were founded by “Wild Geese”, Irish citizens who left Ireland after the Battle of the Boyne and settled in France, often serving in the French armed forces.

Irish Wine and Spirits Producers in France

The Wild Geese included many families that took leading roles in the French wine trade. These include the Lynches of Galloway, whose French born relative founded Château Lynch-Bages, Mark Kirwan of Galway, who established Château Kirwan and Bernard Phelan of Tipperary, who founded Phelan-Segur. Richard Hennessey, a pioneer in the Cognac business, was from Cork while Thomas Barton, established a firm in 1725 that is now the largest French exporter of wine and includes the châteaux of Langoa-Barton and Léoville-Barton among its holdings.

Similarly, there are notable Irish wine producers throughout the world many of whom belong to an association of wine entrepreneurs with Gaelic roots named the Order of the Wine Geese.

United States Wine Producers with Irish Roots 

The Wine Geese have played an important role in the development of wine in the United States as well as France. In California, Château Montelena was purchased by Jim Barret in 1972. this was the year before it produced the wine that helped California earn worldwide respect for its wines by scoring highest among the white wines in the 1976 bi-centennial tasting, as chronicled in George Taber’s book Judgment of Paris. Barret, who held an Irish passport until his death earlier this year, played an active role in the development of the California wine trade as President of the Napa Valley Vintners in 1986 and as a director of the Family Winemakers of California and was also active in the Order of the Wine Geese.

Other seminal figures in the California wine trade with Irish roots were Gary Farrell, who established the Gary Farrell Vineyard and Winery in the Russian River area 1982, James Concannon, who established Concannon Vineyard in Livermore Valley in 1883 and Jim Murphy, who was one of the founders of Murphy-Goode in Sonoma county.

Today, producers with Irish roots continue in the forefront of developing emerging wine regions in the United States. Matt Garretson founded the Garretson Wine Company in Paso Robles and used Gaelic terms on his labels like “Soathar” (good work), and The Craice (good times), while Russell and Joan Irish of Irish Family Vineyards in Vallecito use labels like Blarney Red or Pog Mo Thoin.

Irish wine producers have also been active in the Pacific Northwest. Dick and Diedre Shea established Shea Wine Cellars in Newberg, Oregon in 1996 and now produce over 5,000 cases of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Wine Maker David O’Reilley from Belfast now makes wine in Oregon under his own name and the “Owen Roe” label in honor of 17th Century Irish patriot Owen Roe O’neill. In Washington State, the Glen Fiona (Gaelic for “Valley of the Vine”) Winery was established in Woodinville, in the Walla Walla Valley, just north of Seattle, in 1994 and was Walla Walla Valley’s first producer of premium Syrah and Rhone-style   wines.

Irish producers have also been active in the Hudson River Valley in New York: In 1957, the Miller family purchased a vineyard located in Marlborough N. Y. along the banks of the Hudson River north of Newburg.  Established in 1827 its claim to be the oldest continuously producing vineyard in the United States is buttressed by the fact that it has NY winery license Number 1. The Millers renamed the winery Benmarl Winery, using the Gaelic name to describe the site’s slate marl soil.

Irish Wine Producers in Australia

In addition to South Africa, members of the Irish branch of my family have played a role in the development of the wine industry in Australia. Jim Barry Wines produces wines from estates in Clare Valley and Coonawarra, including Armagh Shiraz. In 1849, Irish settlers named the hill where the grapes for this wine are grown Armagh, after their homeland.

Other notable estates in Australia have ties to the Wine Geese as well.  Leeuwin Estate, perhaps one of the world’s most remote wineries, was founded by Denis Horgan, whose great-grandfather fled County Cork after the potato famine and went on to become the first premier of Western Australia in the 1880s. The Clonakilla winery, forty kilometers North of Canberra in New South Wales, was established by John Kirk in 1971. He named his wines Clonakilla, which  means “church meadow”  after his grandfather’s farm in County Clare. In addition, Patrick O’Sullivan produces over 2000 cases of wine in a winery near Adelaide Hills proudly named the Wild Geese Winery.

St. Patrick and the Wine Geese

To me nothing could be more appropriate for a St. Patrick’s Day celebration than to use wines that honor the tradition of the Wine Geese.  Whether you are having corned beef and cabbage or just soda bread, the variety of wines created by the Wine Geese will give you ample opportunities for a good match, likely without having to look too far afield. (I’m sure there are many more Wine Geese wineries than I’ve described here –let me know if you are familiar with them.)

The wines made by the Wine Geese also embody the spirit of St. Patrick, who like the them was a foreigner who thrived in a new land, put down roots and dedicated himself to the creation of peace and harmony. Originally brought to Ireland as a slave, he endured hardships there before escaping and forging a new career as a priest and missionary.  But he loved the Irish people and felt the call to give back to them and return to the land of his former captivity and conquer it by sharing that love.

A wine that represents the best of Irish traditions–what better to bring to the St. Patrick’s Day feast?

A Valentine’s Day Challenge: Pairing Wine & Chocolate

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Easy to love, hard to understand, wine can make a perfect match for your Valentine. In my earlier piece on Gifts of Wine, I mentioned some of the perennial issues people face when they give and receive wine. When the exchange is between lovers the problems are alleviated in some ways, but they are compounded in others by the expectations and traditions that we associate with this most universal of occasions.

One of the things I love about Valentine’s Day is the contradictions implicit  in it. We celebrate those contradictions by honoring both the persistent bonds of affection that bind true lovers together and the impulsive instincts that add spontaneity and romance to our relationships. Those brought together by impulse often find Valentine’s Day an occasion for deepening their bonds, while the long committed look forward to it as an occasion to reawaken the deliciously impulsive sentiments of romance. Paradoxically, it’s often a within the context of a disciplined structure that our creative juices become most fruitful. Valentine’s Day reminds us that ritual and romance are compatible.

It’s useful then, as we search for ways to add a resonant flare to our Valentine celebrations, to examine the classic images we associate with the occasion. To successfully vary the theme, we’ll need to understand its essential elements.

Valentine Gift Essentials

In a classic portrayal of a Valentine’s Day celebration, one partner arrives at the door with flowers and a box of chocolates, while the other provides a romantic candlelight dinner. What’s common about all the ingredients in this scenario is their broad appeal.  Almost everyone loves the intimacy of a candle-lit dinner, the scent of fresh-cut flowers and the salty, bittersweet taste of chocolate as it warms in the mouth. Yet in each of these universally appreciated experiences there is something spontaneous and unpredictable: the flicker of the candle flame, the unique patterns within of each blossom and the implicit promise that within the box of chocolates there is an assortment of small confections with different flavor profiles—some old favorites, others refreshing new discoveries.

But where is the wine? Hidden under the flowers or the chocolates or mellowing in a decanter set beside the table? Certainly, a meal without wine suggests an evening without romance.  Moreover, as I persistently enjoy pointing out, the magic of wine universal appeal lies in its stunning diversity. But the ability to enjoy wine is often undermined by the notion that it is incompatible with some of the other traditions associated with St. Valentine’s Day, particularly the ubiquitous use of chocolate as a Valentine gift or a featured ingredient in romantic meal.

Chocolate and Wine

In The Persistent Observer’s Guide to Wine, I mentioned chocolate as among the “fussy foods” that are difficult to pair with wine. Of course, it isn’t easy to avoid chocolate on Valentine’s Day, nor is it day when you’d want to avoid wine. This makes it an opportune time to rise to the challenge of a more difficult pairing and deepen your general understanding of pairings in the process. Among the “fussy foods”, chocolate is the one you’re likely to encounter most often. What makes it such a popular Valentine offering is that the lust for it is so widely shared. 

In fact, it’s hard to find a more ideal subject to use to demonstrate some of the finer points of food and wine pairing than chocolate. In many ways, the same elements lie behind the popularity of both: a contrasting mix of sweet with sour or bitter tastes that enhances many different flavors. Each can be made in many different ways and appeal to a variety of palates.  What distinguishes the two is that chocolate relies mostly on bitterness to make its sugary aftertaste more complex and seductive, while most wines rely on sour acidity as a counterpoint to the cloying aftertaste of their residual sugars. Milk chocolate also relies on fat to provide a persistent buttery coating to the tongue, while those few wines that feature a syrupy texture rely on glycerin and similar compounds derived from sugar itself.

It’s important to understand these basic similarities and differences both because they’re useful in making good pairings and because they’re rarely mentioned when you hear experts talk about pairing wine and chocolate, since they’re the kind of thing they assume everyone knows.  What’s particularly confusing for consumers is that chocolate and wine purveyors each seek the widest market for their products. Those pushing chocolate tend to downplay the difficulty of pairing it with chocolate, while those pushing a chocolate-friendly wine tend to suggest that it will pair well with all chocolates, rather than just the specific kind of chocolate that gave it a reputation as being chocolate friendly.

In fact, just as there many different types and styles of wines, the are many different types and styles of chocolates. Understanding the dynamics that make certain wines better matches for certain types of chocolate can help you avoid two common, but fatal mistakes: either assuming that all chocolates will go equally well with all wines or that a particular wine will go well with all chocolates.

The Source of the Confusion: Wine Bytes and Chocolate Bits

As with many other subjects related to wine, much of the confusion over wine and chocolate comes from the glancing treatment given to the subject in the media.  One can hardly forgive the purveyors of chocolate from advertising their wares on Valentine’s Day, it’s undoubtedly a banner day for them. Since so many people have difficulty pairing chocolates with wine, we might also expect them to avoid or downplay the subject as they clamor for our attention.  

Typical of the kind of unintentional confusion that arises from the brief (and therefore incomplete) forays into this subject by the media is an article by Karen Hochman in The Nibble. The article is about Woodhouse Chocolates, a fixture for chocolate lovers in St. Helena, California, run by Tracy and John Woodhouse, who also have several decades of winemaking experience in their resume. Who better to explain the subtleties of wine and chocolate pairing than a couple of wine and chocolate makers?

Yet the pairing advice skips over the basics and goes right to the subtleties. John is reported as saying: “Champagnes are a no. Usually the redder the better. Fortified wines are the best. Actually, one of the best matches is bourbon.” The last comment can be forgiven both for being true and because John’s current job is to sell chocolate, not wine, but the rest of his advice is typically confusing. His statement that “Champage is a no” seems somewhat undercut by the recommendation “the redder the better”. Clearly, he isn’t serious about the admonition.

Sparkling wines (John doesn’t seem to be distinguishing between champagne and sparkling wine) often go quite well with chocolate, as the numerous romantic scenes that feature champagne and chocolate covered strawberries attest to. Indeed, the redder the champagne the better, since the darker flavors in rosé champagnes and even some the darker whites made with Pinot Noir complement the chocolate more readily. But with the added sweetness from a ripe strawberry, even a fairly dry sparkler can be an exiting match with chocolate.  Other sparkling white wines can have a touch of sweetness that gives them the ability to pair well with chocolate,  such as Vouvrays made from Chenin Blanc or Moscatos made from the Muscat grape. The secret is partly in the variety of grape, but mostly in the bubbles, which counteract palate smothering tendencies of chocolate.

Some sweeter sparkling red wines are also well known for being chocolate friendly, although it is better to pair them with darker chocolates than lighter ones.  These include wines from the Bugey Cerdon region of France, which are made from the Gamay, Poulsard and sometimes Pinot Noir, grape varieties.  In California, many of the sweeter non-sparkling Zinfandels, such as those made by Ridge, Rancho Zabaco or Ancient Peaks wineries, make excellent pairings with dark chocolates and sometimes will also make magical contrasting pairings with white chocolate as well.  Many later-harvested Syrahs (Shirazes), Malbecs and even Cabernet Sauvignons have chocolate overtones and will pair well with dark chocolates.  These include the “Chocolate Box” wines from Rocland Winery and the Layer Cake wines from the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale regions of Australia and the “Chocolate Block” wines from Boekenhoutskloof, in Franschhoek, South Africa.

As John Anderson’s comment on Bourbon suggests, dark, spicy chocolates can pair beautifully with the spicy heat of a fortified wine like Madeira, Port or or the magical wines from the Banyuls region of France (demonstrating the full-bodied alcoholic potential of  the Muscat, Tempranillo and Garnacha varieties).

How to Make Successful Pairings of Chocolate and Wine

The secret to successful pairing of chocolates with wine is to recognize that all chocolates are not the same and that some varietals are more friendly to chocolate than others.  Lighter chocolates will pair better with lighter wines, while darker chocolates pair with more full-bodied wines. In the progression a full range of grape varieties are represented, including Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, Muscat, Sémillon, Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, Syrah  and Zinfandel. For those few who actually eschew chocolates, these wines can also be a wonderful compliment to other sweet dishes.

As a gift between intimates, wine has many advantages.  It’s something best shared, and when two partners exchange gifts of each other’s favorite wine it certainly augurs well for a long romantic evening. The right wine also has the ability to captivate us, to create a lasting impression that won’t fade easily or maybe even ever. Don’t worry about competing with it, if you were the one who gave it and shared it, the memories will be indelibly intertwined.

 

Thomas Jefferson’s Vision of Wine in America

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In a letter sent to a French friend in December of 1858, Thomas Jefferson expressed his support for a reduction in the import duties on French wine as a moral issue.  This might seem a bit surprising to readers today, but Jefferson was, of course, both moral and logical.  His argument in favor of reducing duties on wine was based on his belief that those duties had the effect making wine prohibitively expensive for “the middling class of our citizens”, making them dependent on whisky “which is desolating their houses.” Jefferson lamented that  “our merchants know nothing of the infinite variety of cheap and good wines to be had in Europe” and made clear his view that, in an era when water wasn’t usually safe to drink, wine was a necessary part of a civilized society:

“No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whisky.”

Jefferson Investigates European Wine

As the United States ambassador to France in the late 1780’s, Jefferson travelled widely in the wine regions of France, Italy and Germany and took detailed notes, which can be found in John Hailman’s excellent book, Thomas Jefferson on Wine (University Press of Mississippi). These notes indicate a serious interest in how the grapes are grown and the wines made, noting such details as the characteristics of the soil, water and climate in the various regions, the conditions under which the vines are susceptible to disease, how the grapes are harvested and handled in the wine-making process, how the wines are stored and shipped and the prices they receive at every stage in the process of being brought to table.  His reports are not those of a wine tourist, but more those of an industrial espionage agent.  Should it surprise us that Thomas Jefferson in person served as the first United States intelligence agency?

Despite his assiduous notes and his efforts to bring the most highly regarded vines and vineyard managers back to his estate in Monticello, however, Jefferson did not succeed in producing his own wine or in seeing the culture of wine spread throughout the United States during his lifetime.  As a modern day champion of lower taxes on wine, Steven Malanga, noted in his review of Hailman’s book, Jefferson died without seeing his vision of an American winemaking industry take root.

American Wine Struggles Against Natural and Political Challenges

In fact it is not until recently that American’s have had access to wines in the way that Jefferson imagined.  Successful strategies to address the natural challenges of vine degeneration and disease that frustrated his early attempts to establish vineyards in Virginia were not developed until later in the 19th century and took decades to be implemented on a large scale basis.  The development of a sustainable wine industry requires not only a considerable investmenna\t in land and winemaking equipment, but years of training for vineyard managers and winemakers.  It was particularly unfortunate that, shortly after wines from Missouri and New York began to win prizes in international competitions, the United States adopted Prohibition and federal agents were sent out into the vineyards to rip out all the wine grape varieties.

With the country in the midst of the Great Depression when Prohibition was repealed, and capital and human resources drawn away to sustain costly foreign wars after that, it has taken decades for the wine industry to become re-established in the United States.  So it is only relatively recently that ordinary Americans have had access to the variety of “cheap and good wines” that Jefferson dreamed of.  The result of this is that Americans have relied for many years on more costly imports, both in terms of the wines we drink and, to some extent, the voices we turn to for advice.  While there have been a few wine writers, like Sarah Jane English, who have been influential in getting the wines produced in their local area better known, British wine writers are highly regarded by American wine readers because of their knowledge of European wines and most American wine writers get the attention of those same readers by writing about European wines.  Even Robert Parker, the American wine writer Europeans jealously criticize for Americanizing the global taste for wines, got his start by reviewing the most prestigious wines of France and now seems to be “coming home” to them as he backs off from the impossible task of covering every wine growing region in the world.

American Wine Regions Continue to Evolve

Today there are nearly as many promising wine growing areas in the North America as in any other continent, and perhaps as many in California alone than in the average European country.  In addition to Ms. English’s guides to Texas wines and a number of useful guides and histories for wine regions in California and the Pacific Northwest, American writers are beginning to provide histories and guidebooks about the wines in Missouri, Ohio, New Mexico, New York, and, of course, Virginia, which would no doubt have pleased Thomas Jefferson. Particularly fascinating has been Tod Kliman’s book The Wild Wine.

As I work to fill out my listings in my Guide to Wine Books, I’ll try to feature some of these books on North American wines.  Let me know if you there are any that you think I should be concentrating on.  It has taken 200 years, but, as with many other things, it seems that we are finally reaching the stage where the full breadth and beauty of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of wine in the United States are becoming apparent.

 

The Only Wine Guide You’ll Ever Need?

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During the last few weeks,  The Persistent Observer’s Guide to Wine became available from most on-line retailers as well as some bookshops worldwide.  I’ll keep this site updated with links to the various sources as they come on stream and I hope … Continue reading →

Gifts of Wine

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Wine is one of nature’s great gifts to mankind and it’s natural to think of giving it to people we love. I wrote The Persistent Observer’s Guide to Wine to help people connect with the excitement of receiving the gift of wine on a daily basis, but I didn’t deal directly with the subject of giving wine as a gift to someone else.  As often happens with wine, this turns out to be somewhat more complicated than it seems at first glance.

The subject has of course been on my mind recently. ‘Tis the season to be jolly and wine is certainly a part of that. But I’ve been reluctant to address the subject of wine gifts during the mad rush before Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year, because I hate to add to the clamor. It’s a time when many people search for recommendations from others because they aren’t sure they know enough about wine to make a good choice for someone else who loves it.  But since the love of wine is a very personal relationship, it’s hard to believe that they will be lucky enough to get it right by listening to someone other than the recipient.

Of course, there are always plenty of recommendations out there during the pre-holiday madness.  We see them in the shop windows, in newspapers and magazines and advertisements that pop up on our computer screens.  The sheer quantity of recommendations and the insistent promise that this new wine or a gadget is just the thing every wine lover will enjoy reinforces the notion that wine gifts are likely to be appreciated. If there are so many ways to please a wine lover, why not just take the first or the last recommendation you see? There’s at least a chance that it will be a bit better than something you choose randomly.

But I think wine lovers are disappointed with most of the wine gifts they receive and part of that disappointment is rooted in the fact that the giver paid so much attention to what someone else said about wine. It can get in the way of considering the most important ingredients of a gift: the things the person receiving the gift really needs and the things that person enjoys sharing most with you.  Most people know more about wine than they realize and can use that, and what they know about the people they are buying gifts for, to make better gift choices than they can make by just following someone else’s recommendation.

So now that the hoopla has died down, I’ve been thinking about those issues and I’ve tried to use this opportune moment as a time to think a bit more deeply about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to giving and receiving. I’m sure there are ways we can use what we  know about our wine loving friends that can help us express our feelings more tangibly and make our gifts to them a bit more personal and than we can when we’re only relying what someone else knows. As always, I’ll start by concentrating on the mistakes.

The Problem with Highly Recommended Wines as Gifts

I’m always leery of gifts I receive from others with a note that someone else recommended it highly. If the gift doesn’t really hit the mark (and gifts that haven’t been personally field tested often don’t), I’m likely to be disappointed not just with the gift, but with the giver.  It’s as if the invocation of a higher authority is a signal that the giver isn’t sure I’m going to like it that much, so they are warning me that someone more important than me says I shouldn’t be disappointed. This is especially true when it comes to expensive wines, because I pride myself in being able to make good strategic decisions about wine and it pains me when someone goes to great expense and only succeeds in giving me an expensive wine, rather than a good one.

Since I like to share the wines I receive as gifts with the friends who gave them to me, I’d much rather have a gift certificate to a nice wine shop.Then I can pick out some nice wines and show my appreciation by serving them some wines I think we’ll both enjoy, rather than having to serve them something I’m not enthusiastic about and beat around the bush when we discuss it. I enjoy sorting through interesting, but not overly expensive wines with people who aren’t afraid to talk about them. Talking about the wine is a big part of the enjoyment for me, and it costs the giver nothing, but the more expensive the wine (and generous the donor), the harder it is to be uncomplimentary about it. And it’s also hard to be complimentary if it’s insincere.

I usually find that gifts that reprise some shared experience or promise a future shared experience are those I value most. With wine, that translates into wines I’ve previously shared with the giver and we’ve enjoyed together, whether they are expensive or not.That kind of gift tells me that the bond we shared when we tried the wine previously meant something to the giver and they appreciate that it meant something to me as well. If it’s something expensive that we shared and loved, I can appreciate that the giver stretched a bit to make sure that it would be a wine he or she knew I would really enjoy. If it’s inexpensive, I appreciate that the giver knows me well enough to understand that I’d be more touched by the shared memory than by another expensive bootle of wine.

That’s not to say that I haven’t appreciated gifts of wine that I haven’t had before. But in that case, the gift of a single expensive bottle is risky, especially if the giver hasn’t tried it or has some other reason to think I would like it. It would be safer to look for a few modestly priced wines and ask me to try them and share my opinion of them, because the chances are that I’d like at least one of them, and of course I’d be flattered that someone else was interested in my opinion about wine. The ultimate gift for any wine lover is a gift that strengthens their connection to the wines they drink. Imagine how thrilled any wine lover would be with a note that said: “I recently had the chance to drink this wine with the winemaker and told her that you were the one who had first introduced me to this wine. She asked me bring this to you with her compliments and hoped that you would have an opportunity to visit the winery soon. Here are her contact details, so you can thank her personally.” That would be a pretty outstanding wine gift, and it really wouldn’t cost much at all.

Big Bottles as Gifts

I have a similar problem with big bottles of wine as gifts and it’s nothing I have against big bottles.  Magnums, Jeroboams and other large format bottles certainly look stunning and make for an impressive presentation of your gift. While they can be difficult to handle, most people (including me) think that wines age better in larger format bottles than they do in smaller ones, so the gift of a large bottle immediately signals the potential of the wine you are giving to provide great pleasure.  But wines made to age are inherently more expensive to produce than others, for all the reasons I laid out in The Persistent Observer’s Guide to Wine. So the bottle will be more expensive not only because it holds more wine, but because of the type of wine that’s in it.  Since it costs money to store a wine until it’s ready to drink as well as to make a wine that’s worthy of storing, the large format bottles that are promoted as stunning holiday gifts are usually many years ahead of their drinking windows.

Sparkling wine tends to be an exception to the rule that most wines sold in large formats aren’t ready to drink. I do think most people underestimate the ability of a good sparkling wine to improve with age, but I’ve never heard anyone complain that a Champagne or other sparkling wine wasn’t ready to drink yet. As at a New Year’s toast, the bubbles just seem to eliminate regrets about what might have been. Sparkling wines also fit in with a festive atmosphere, and so seem particularly well suited as gifts. This would tend to offset my reservations about bottles of wine as gifts.

There are also people who get great satisfaction simply from having a prestigious bottle of wine in the cellar, so for them a large format bottle of wine can be a great gift.  Just make sure that they’ll still be around to enjoy it when it comes time to drink it as well.  I’m still an impulsive kid when it comes to presents and like to be able to enjoy them right away, so big bottles usually aren’t such a thrill for me when I receive them as gifts. I know that isn’t right.  I buy myself magnums to put in my cellar, so why shouldn’t I appreciate it when someone buys one for me?  I guess I just like to open my presents and, while the cork stays in, a bottle of wine just doesn’t feel really opened.

The Gift of Cellaring

If you’re fortunate enough to have a cellar, it’s useful to factor in the possibility of giving wines from your cellar as gifts when you’re planning the acquisitions. You might buy a few extra bottles of any age worthy wine you put away, so you’ll be able to sample it and have a bottle or two to give as a gift when you feel it’s reaching its peak. If you’re giving a bottle of wine as a gift, it’s nice to be able to give something that’s ready to drink, rather than something that has to be put away for years, when the recipient might not even remember who gave it to them. But if you haven’t had the foresight to store them away previously, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to find well aged bottles available for sale at prices that aren’t rather prohibitive.

When you give someone the gift of a wine that you’ve cellared yourself, it’s not just a gift of the wine you purchased, but also of your own patient effort in cellaring and sampling the wine to ensure that it’s really going to provide what the recipient wants. That makes the gift more considerate, and if the person you’re giving the wine to has a cellar of their own, they’ll also appreciate how hard it is to take a bottle that you’ve nursed along from infancy to adolescence and give it away just as it’s beginning to reward all the effort.

Wine Travel Gifts

If you’ve had the opportunity to travel in the world’s various wine regions, don’t forget that the experiences you’ve had can be very valuable to others.  Sharing notes with friends about these experiences is one of the aspects of wine that I enjoy most.  It’s a particular thrill to share those experiences with close friends and relatives, so that the  informal network of relationships I formed when I traveled are expanded, as each person in the network reports back, refreshing memories, renewing contacts and bringing me up to date on what’s going on. Here, the information I’ve shared is both valuable to those I give it to, but also returns a gift to me.

For some occasions  such as  graduations and honeymoons, travel experiences and contacts can be a vehicle for a more tangible gift: a vineyard tour, lunch or dinner at a restaurant that features the local foods and has a good wine list that compliments them, a night at a favorite hotel or even an entire trip to a wine region.  If someone is planning a trip to a wine region, you may be able to enhance the experience by giving them a book that features events or character that help them connect with the wine culture in the area.  These need not be (and in fact are more likely to be appreciated if they are not) guides to the region.  I always feel that reading a book like Patrick Moore’s Virgile’s Vineyard (John Murray, 2003), which tells the stories of the people in the area, does a better job of giving me feel for a wine region than a regional wine guide does.

Everyday Wine Gifts

Occasionally, you may find yourself in a situation where you are giving a gift to someone you don’t know very well.  You may have heard that the person loves wine, but have no idea what wine he or she will appreciate.  In these situations, there are many wine related gifts that might be appreciated more than a randomly selected wine.  These include decanters,  which come in many different shapes, sizes and price points, as well as wine books, maps of wine regions, coasters designed with wine themes, wine carriers, wine storage units of various sizes and a wide variety of wine bottle openers.  Personally, I’m always pleased to receive wine glasses.  Since I like to share wines with friends, it always helps to have more glasses, because extra glasses are only redundant some of the time, while extra bottle openers tend to be redundant all of the time.

Next time it occurs to you to buy a gift for a wine lover, stop and think about what you already know.  Knowing which wines people like and how they might use them can help you make better choices of wines for them, but can also make you aware of the many wine related gifts available to you that might be appreciated even more, or at least longer than, a gift of wine.

Why So Many Thanksgiving Wines are Turkeys

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Want my recommendation for Thanksgiving wine?  Just “harvest” some of your favorite everyday wines and drink them the right way.

What? Nothing more specific? No recommendation for a wine that goes perfectly with stuffing (believe me it’s out there) or list of top American wines, ”traditional holiday favorites”  or ten best bets to pair with pumpkin pie? No Chateau Nirvana is the perfect wine for Thanksgiving because of its “structure and fruitiness” or some other more elusive quality?

Nope. You couldn’t pay me enough to recommend specific wines for Thanksgiving. It just doesn’t make sense or take best advantage of the opportunity that Thanksgiving presents.

I think suggesting specific wines for Thanksgiving dinner is out to lunch because over the course of the year you should have harvested a few wines you feel special about. It’s in keeping with the spirit of the feast to share some of them.

The Most Frequently Asked Wine Pairing Question

Every year at Thanksgiving I get more requests for advice about which wines to serve than I get on the other holidays combined.  I’ve often wondered why people suddenly become so sensitive to food and wine pairings at Thanksgiving and the answers I’ve come up with have changed over the years.  Initially, I just assumed that people felt under pressure having to choose wine for a large group, particularly if it includes a few critical in-laws.  But large family gatherings are just as likely to occur on Christmas, Passover or 4th of July.  So what makes Thanksgiving such a special challenge?

My next theory was that the Thanksgiving feast was different from other holiday meals because it was longer and more varied and the focus on the food was more intense.  In The Persistent Observers Guide to Wine, I point out that most wines are friendly to food, but most foods are unfriendly to wine, and list a few foods that are downright hostile. It seems inevitable that somewhere in the course of a Thanksgiving feast one will run into brussels sprouts, turnips, vinegary dressings, chocolate or another of these persistent troublemakers.  Then there are all the unusual touches added to each dish to make it special for the occasion. Indeed, the variety of the Thanksgiving feast is the main reason I can’t recommend any specific wines to go with it.

But when I remind people that almost any wine will struggle to take center stage at such  a multifaceted feast, I also point out that pairings for Thanksgiving should be fairly easy, because turkey is what I call a “universal donor”: a food that’s almost as friendly to wine as most wines are to food.  The main reason for this is that turkey is a medium bodied food without a strong flavor profile and many of the most readily available wines are medium bodied wines designed to complement, rather than compete with, food for attention.  The secret to making better food pairings with turkey is to pay particular attention to how it’s prepared and orient the wine toward the textures and flavor elements in the overall dish, rather than just the turkey.

But turkey can be prepared in many different ways, which is why it works as the focal point for a large feast.  People can have dark meat or white, or a combination.  They can smother it with gravy, or not.  They can have it with a spicy stuffing or a mild one; a crunchy, tart cranberry sauce or a sugary, gelatinous, cranberry-flavored smear.   One size, the biggest you can stuff in the oven or grill, fits all.

But why then do so many wine writers recommend wines for Thanksgiving?

Well, actually, most of them don’t.  You just get that impression. And that, I think, is the real reason that people ask me for recommendations on Thanksgiving.  They’ve been burned before.

Turkey Wines

In the retail wine and spirits world, Thanksgiving opens the most active selling season of the year.  With folks stocking up for holiday parties, gifts and those cold days and nights that keep us all housebound (or at least looking for a warming drink), it’s a time when everyone in the industry competes for the consumer’s attention.  Promotional activities move into high gear, and the occasional come-on is part of the drill.  What better way to get someone in the door than to flog a wine that’s “Perfect for Your Thanksgiving  Feast”  While they are picking it up, you can remind them to stock up for the entire season.

Many of the pitches for Thanksgiving wines are artfully constructed to take a wine writer’s recommendation for a wine and spin it as a recommendation for a Thanksgiving wine.  To make matters even more confusing, there are of course some budding wine writers who figure out that a Thanksgiving recommendation will get them attention. So they use it try to get in on the act.

My first insight into the dynamic was when I sent an email to a friend who was asking me to recommend a Thanksgiving wine.  I of course told him that it depended on what he was having with the turkey and suggested various wines to go with various dishes I though he might be having.  He then took the email down to his local wine shop to see if they had one of the wines I recommended to go with the dishes they were in fact having.  The store manager looked at the message, asked if he could copy it, and then posted it in the shop.  It just so happened that he had a good supply of most of the wines I had mentioned in the message. He knew some of the customers that come in only during the holidays didn’t know him that well and wouldn’t trust his recommendations.  But they might trust a recommendation made to another customer by a friend in another state.

Wines that are sold as pairing perfectly with a Thanksgiving dinner, however, have nowhere to go but down.  It’s the expectations that people bring with their Thanksgiving wines that turns them into turkeys. Once again, people are drinking the right wines the wrong way.

The Wrong Way to Share Wine at Thanksgiving

To understand the right way to share wine at Thanksgiving, it helps to learn to recognize the wrong way to do it.  Let’s look at a typical example, something that might even have happened to you:

Let’s say you’ve been invited to spend Thanksgiving with Uncle Joe and Aunt Em.  Uncle Joe was a cook in the Navy and loves to roast up a good turkey with all the trimmings.  Every year his cuisine reaches new heights and he loves to cook for a crowd, although he’d prefer it if your Mom didn’t bring those marshmallow sweet potatoes and your cousin forgot the carrot Jell-O mold he usually contributes “for the kids”.  Aunt Em stays out of the kitchen on these occasions, but she’s a wonderful raconteur and keeps everyone entertained with funny stories about what’s going on in the old neighborhood while Joe is making the final preparations.

Being a wine lover, you keep up with the latest articles about wine in magazines and newspapers and you recently read about a wonderful wine.  The reviewer wrote about it so compellingly that you wanted to run right out and buy it, but it cost $160 a bottle, and you couldn’t get away with buying it just for yourself.  So you decided to bring it for Thanksgiving and made a note of what the reviewer had said about the wine so you could pass it on to the others and make sure they appreciated what a special wine it was.  It was still a bit of a reach to bring such an expensive wine, but you’d be busy on a project at work all that week, so you wouldn’t be able to bring much else.  Besides, even though Uncle Joe wasn’t much of a connoisseur, he liked wine and knew you did too, so he’d expect you to bring something nice and be able to appreciate it.

So you arrive bearing your precious offering, looking forward to Uncle Joe’s feast, a spectacular wine and the chance to share them both with others who might appreciate them.  Uncle Joe greets you as you come in the kitchen door, knowing that everyone would be congregating there as the feast was being prepared.  He sees your wine and makes a fuss over it, giving you a good opportunity to mention that Mr. Famous Winewriter gave it a gazillion point rating and that the wine is full bodied, with layer upon layer of jammy fruit, spicy accents, smoke and tobacco notes and a huge, persistent aftertaste—just the thing for his wonderful barbecued turkey.  Unfortunately though, just as you’re launching into your description, the kids start running around, someone asks for your coat and Aunt Em resumes the story she was telling in a rather loud voice.  You can’t blame her.  After all, you interrupted her, and she’s already on to her third scotch-and-soda.

Uncle Joe got the message, however, and he has taken your wine into the dining room and put it in a place of honor on the sideboard, right in front of the four bottles of Chateau Bow-wow that he procured for the occasion.  Of course, your $160 wine will compare most favorably to Chateau Bow-wow, but there won’t be enough of your expensive wine to sustain everyone throughout the entire two-hour meal, so Uncle Joe’s wine will come in handy at some point.

Sure enough, once everyone is seated, Uncle Joe makes a fuss over your wine and asks you to describe it all over again.  (You cut the description short though after a gentle nudge from your spouse.) Then he proceeds to pour a large glass for Grandma, whose glass is empty because she doesn’t drink much, another large glass for Aunt Em, who doesn’t need it at that point, and smaller and smaller glasses for the others at the table as he realizes that there wouldn’t be any left for himself if he keeps pouring so liberally.  Fortunately, quite a few of the guests have already filled their glasses with Chateau Bow-wow, so there is enough left for you and Uncle Joe to toast the wine with half-a-glass each.

Uncle Joe pronounces the wine quite good, but for you it doesn’t quite measure up to what you had hoped.  Perhaps it’s the mouthful of creamed onions you just had or the heavy gravy on the mashed potatoes.  Meanwhile, Junior’s wife Mary, who also likes wine, seems impressed, but she won’t say much for fear that Joe Jr. will think she’s being a wine snob again and insulting his father’s choice of wine.  And, of course, there’s always someone in every large group who feels so intimidated by expensive wine that they say something inane about how it really isn’t worth the price.  Best not to argue over it.  Besides, you’re trying to figure out how you can discreetly pour some of the wine from Grandma’s glass into yours, so you can taste it once you’ve cleared your palate of the creamed onions.

In the end you’re disappointed, not so much by your $160 bottle of wine, or Uncle Joe’s $6 wines, but with the whole experience.  It was a great wine, but you shared it at the wrong time and place.  Your terrific selection became a turkey.

Share Your Favorite Wines With Friends and Reap the Harvest

What could have been done to give our sad tale a happy ending?  Much.  Let’s try to apply some of the lessons from The Persistent Observer’s Guide to Wine to see if we can produce a better outcome.  First, remember the importance of occasion and setting.   That wasn’t the first consideration in our story, was it? Instead, the first consideration was the wine, a classic example of how the topsy-turvy world of wine pairing works.  Start with the wine and the wine will come out last.

A Thanksgiving feast is a special occasion for family and friends. It’s typical to invite many people and variety, unpredictability and spontaneity will be the order of the day.  There won’t be a perfect wine. But several wines will be perfect. That’s because they’ll provide variety and something everyone can share.

If you’re a wine lover, you’ve been exploring different wines all year long.  You’ve probably found a few inexpensive ones you enjoy and purchased a case or a few extra bottles so you can get to know them better.  These are the wines you should bring to a Thanksgiving feast.  They’re the harvest you’ve selected as you’ve made you way through the vineyards over the course of the year.  Unlike a new wine you buy on someone else’s recommendation, you’ll be able to talk about these wines without having to taste them, because you already know them and they’ve become good friends.  You’ll be comfortable introducing them to your family and you won’t have to memorize anything that someone else said about them.

Moreover, by sharing these wines you can engage others in the fun you have enjoying wine.  No matter how busy you are at work, you should have time to shoot Mary and some of the other guests a message saying that you’re going to bring some fun, inexpensive wines you’ve been drinking recently and hope they’ll do the same.  You can then call Uncle Joe and tell him not to bother buying Chateau Bow-wow because you and Mary and some others are going to be bringing wines to share and there will be plenty for everyone.

Then, when you sit down to dinner, you can talk about the wines without feeling awkward.  Instead of looking pretentious asking people for comments about the expensive wine you brought, you can find nice things to say about the wines they brought and, because they’re inexpensive and you already know you why you love them, you won’t be offended when someone mentions something they don’t like about one of the wines you brought.  You can accept it and suggest they try a different wine, or perhaps just try the wine with a different dish.

All you need to do to make a perfect pairing for Thanksgiving is remember to think about the people and the place, as well as the food and the wine.  Concentrate on the overall experience and you’re sure to have one you can be thankful for.

And I will give you one little suggestion.  Try serving a sparkling rosé (aka rosé champagne) before the meal.  It’s a lot less alcoholic than scotch or bourbon, so it’s less likely to leave you loopy when the meal comes around. But the carbonation in the sparkling wine delivers its lift more efficiently, so it still puts everyone in a good mood, and its flavorful acidity will help get those digestive juices flowing just as those wonderful smells begin to emanate from the kitchen.  By the time you’re all ready to sit down, you’ll have an appetite worthy of all the work that went into preparing the meal.

Enjoy the holidays and keep enjoying your wine.  Life is too short to do otherwise!

A Short Training Course for Wine Tasters

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The October issue of Food & Wine introduced the first of three planned articles on “How to be a Better Wine Taster,” by Megan Krigbaum.  Krigbaum is Food and Wine’s At Home Sommelier. She encourages people to think for themselves about wine and incorporate food and wine pairings into their daily routine, so I like following her articles.  Quite often, she shares tips from top sommeliers about practical things, like dealing with a crumbling cork or refreshing the palate for dinner after tasting your way through the wine country all day.

In The Persistent Observers’ Guide to Wine, I warned against trying to learn about wine from the media, given its need to sustain the interest of a sophisticated core audience by featuring articles about the famous and the freaks of the wine world.  Indeed, Food and Wine’s current articles feature “America’s Best” places to drink wine and “top” beer gardens and a piece on five lesser know wine varietals. But I also noted that periodicals like Food and Wine, Decanter and The Wine Spectator do make an effort to provide useful information for the average reader as well. Food and Wine is currently featuring an article on wines for under $15 and Krigbaum’s column is another part of this effort. She’s shown a talent for getting down to the basics, so I was interested in what she’d say about wine tasting to a general audience.

Let’s start with what I like about the article: First, it uses an athletic theme that plays on the idea of training the palate with a series of exercises or “workouts” and opens with a cleverly conceived graphic.  Four drawings show a young man dressed like a personal trainer as he alternately lifts and twirls a glass of wine while looking at it, nosing it and tasting it.  It’s a nice way to introduce a younger, more active and adventuresome group of readers to the idea that you can train yourself to be a better taster by doing a series of simple exercises.

Keys to Better Tasting

The article focuses on six key things that wine pros focus on and provides a tasting exercise, or  “workout” for each one. To develop the workouts, Krigbaum worked with a “trio of experts”.  While I’m leery of encouraging beginners to try to act like experts, I’m in general agreement with the six items Krigbaum and her team selected.  They pick up on most of the items I’ve found it helpful for people to concentrate on as they start to learn about the taste of wine.  It’s in the specifics that we begin to diverge.

For example, I like beginners to concentrate first on the interplay between sweet and sour tastes, which I think of as the basic dynamic that gives wine its special appeal. On Krigbaum’s list, sour and sweet are identified as items four and five and, of course, she follows the usual convention of the trade in referring to sour as “acidity”.  If you’ve read The Persistent Observer’s Guide to Wine, you know that this is among my top contenders for words wine professionals use that confuse ordinary folks. But let’s remember that this is Food & Wine (surely their regular readers have some familiarity with the relationship between acidity and sour taste) ands take things in the order in which she presents them.

The Beauty of Body

The first thing Krigbaum concentrates on is body.  Like sweet and sour, body is something you can judge for yourself without having any special training, which makes it a logical thing to concentrate on when you’re first learning to taste wine. Unfortunately, however, judging for oneself doesn’t fit in to the structure of Kirgbaum’s piece. She knows her readers will want to hear from the experts, because they won’t trust themselves. There just isn’t time to build up that trust in their own ability in a short article.  She’s also committed to the theme she’s using to get the attention of her readers, so she feels obliged to give them some workouts the experts have devised for their training program—whether they need them or not.

Kirgbaum’s expert on body is Andrea Robinson (formerly Immer), one of two Master Sommeliers on her panel. Andrea explains that body is a sense of “richness or heaviness” and “even a feeling of viscosity.” As I’ve pointed out before, it’s difficult to find consistent definitions for terms like body among wine writers. Since her marriage, Andrea shares a last name with a well-known British wine writer, but the two of them don’t share the same definition of body. In How to Taste, Jancis Robinson describes body as follows:  “A measure of a wine’s weight that is determined chiefly by its alcoholic strength, but also by its extract.”

While Jancis Robinson goes into the relationship between alcohol content and weight in a bit more length in her book, Krigbaum only notes that “the more alcohol in the wine, the more body it will have.” She doesn’t have space to give even a cursory explanation of how alcohol content affects body, even though it’s fundamental.  It’s also interesting to see how Andrea Robinson concentrates more on soluble substances, such as sugar and glycerin, while Jancis Robinson emphasizes “extract”, which consists of the solid particles of residual fruit in a wine that contribute much of its color an flavor.  This shows the different perspectives that European and American wine writers can exhibit based on the prevailing tastes in their native land.  Americans prefer their wines a bit sweeter than Europeans.

To me, body is a function of both the alcohol content in a wine and what balances it out.  As the alcohol level in a wine rises, it produces a hotter and hotter feeling in your mouth, which can be downright irritating if it isn’t accompanied by elements that add richness and bolder flavors.  The elements that contribute to this can include residual sugar, extract and the flavors provided by various acids and other components .  It’s clear that no simple definition can do the term justice, but as Jancis Robinson points out, defining it isn’t important, because anyone can just feel it.

Meanwhile, Kirgbaum and Andrea Robinson suggest a rather strange “workout” that’s supposed to help in judging body in wine. This involves drinking skim milk, 2% milk, whole milk and cream.  This does demonstrate that your sense of taste is sensitive enough to tell the difference between skim and 2% milk in a side-by-side comparison. But I’m not sure exactly how helpful this is in teaching you to judge the amount of body in wine, because the differences between these different types of milk are due to fat content, something that isn’t much of a factor in wine.

Jancis Robinson suggests that the more a wine tastes like water, the lighter bodied it is.  I don’t find too many people who have difficulty telling a light-bodied wine from a medium or full-bodied one in a side by side comparison, but when people do have trouble judging body in a wine, that image is the one that’s usually most helpful to them.  It’s not a workout, but it works.

What’s Tough about the Texture of Wine?

The second focus of Krigbaum’s training regime is tannins. This is also something that’s easy to recognize.   It’s gives the wine texture, a rougher feeling in the mouth.  This is caused by unique agents that make the mouth feel as though it’s being scraped clean as we drink a tannic wine.  Along with other acids, the tannins in wine reawaken our sense of taste when we’re eating rich foods that would otherwise coat the tongue and satiate the palate.

Krigbaum’s expert on tannins is Joshua Wesson, who she only identifies as a “wine pro”.  (Joshua actually has won a number of awards as a sommelier, but as a co-founder of Best Cellars and now director of A&P’s wine, beer and spirits division, perhaps his current job seems a bit too down market for Food & Wine to want to feature.) The exercise that Wesson recommends for learning about the taste of tannins is simple. Tannins are a major component of tea, so he and Kirgbaum suggest taking three tea bags (presumably of the same tea) and making three cups with different levels of tannin by pulling the tea bag out of the first a good bit earlier and the last a good bit later than the one in the middle. This is a bit curious because, although tasting all three will definitely give you a sense of what tannins taste like, so will tasting any of them alone.

The fascinating thing about tannins is that they progressively enervate the taste buds.  So while the second and third cup will be stronger than the first, just taking a second sip of the first cup will increase the sense of tannins in your mouth.  This has a lot to do with why tannic wines are so effective at prolonging the enjoyment of rich dishes, so it’s well worth knowing.

Another aspect of tannins that’s worth keeping in mind is that they’re a part of wine’s complex mix of acids, even though, for good reasons, wine experts generally treat them as something separate.  What’s key to remember here is that over time tannins break down more slowly than the acids that give fresh, fruity flavors to wines, but more quickly than tartaric acid, which gives wine the sour taste that’s basic to it’s fundamental structure. This is worth knowing because it helps you know what to expect in the taste of wines as they age.

The Sweetness of Sour

The texture that tannins give to a wine is a tactile sensation like the weightiness involved in body.  This is what makes them unique among wine acids and is why I prefer to deal with them only after discussing wine’s basic sweet and sour structure and the differences in body that various wines can have.  I like to focus on the interplay of sweet and sour as a single concept, but Krigbaum treats sweet and sour as separate components and deals with sour, or acidity first.  As she correctly points out, the acidity in wine varies greatly, but she doesn’t have the space to get into much detail about all the differences in the various acids.

This is troublesome because she says “overly acidic wines will cause almost a stinging sensation or taste sour.” In fact, all wines have a sour component to their taste, not just those that are overly acidic.  What I think she meant to say is that one way a wine can be unbalanced is to have too much acidity, which can make the sour taste too dominant, or even give a bit of sting to the wine.  Again, may be she didn’t have enough space to explain all of this, but then maybe it would have been better not to mention acidity at all.

I can understand why acidity is so important to sommeliers, because it has so many implications for food and wine pairing . But it can cause them to over-complicate matters for people in the early stages of learning how to taste wine.   Perhaps that’s why the section on acidity is the only one in which Krigbaum doesn’t refer to one of her experts.  They may have considered it too complex a subject to deal with in a few short sentences.

The primary acid in wine isn’t that complicated to deal with, however.  It’s tartaric acid and in most wines it’s more prevalent by far than any other acid.  Tartaric acid simply tastes sour, so when a person is first trying to learn about taste, it makes sense to simply talk about sweet and sour and save the other acids for the more advanced training sessions.

In fact, I think Krigbaum’s piece confirms that even sommeliers think of sweet and sour together. When her next expert comments on sweetness, he calls it “super easy” to understand and for a workout on sweetness suggests just making lemonade. This expert, Shayn Bjornholm, is a Master Sommelier, but he’s also the Education Director of the Washington Wine Commission.  In case you haven’t noticed, the State of Washington has been producing more and more world class wines of late, so he must be doing something right. To me, his suggestion of using lemonade for the sweetness workout is an indication that he’s thinking of it as part of the overall sweet-and-sour taste of wine.  At any rate, lemonade is certainly a good introduction to the interplay between sweet and sour tastes.

Meanwhile, Krigbaum’s exercise on acidity involves squeezing oranges, grapefruits, lemons and limes into various water glasses and tasting them.  The problem with this is that the differences in these tastes are among citric acids, so the focus isn’t on the underlying sour taste that tartaric acid gives to all wines.  Moreover,  citric tastes aren’t present in all wines.  In many, the green apple taste of malic acid, the Vitamin C taste of ascorbic acid or tropical flavors of other acids will be more evident.  Tthe complexity of acidity certainly deserves due consideration in any serious introduction to wine tasting, but in a short introductory piece like this, I think it would have been safer just not to mention acidity, and concentrate on the basic sweet and sour taste in all wines.

Aromas and Flavors and Oak in Wine

The best part of Krigbaum’s piece is the fifth item on aromas and flavors.  This is the longest of her six sections and, while I’m not sure aromas and flavors are a single thing, she does a good job of describing where aromas and flavors come from and explaining the usefulness of having a flavor vocabulary to use when talking to sommeliers and wine salesmen.  The idea of lining up a diverse group of foods and then smelling them with a blindfold on may seem a bit daunting at first, but I think it can be useful.  She and Bjornholm have done a good job of selecting a range of aromas here.  Taking the time to sniff through the list with a blindfold on should be sufficient training for people to carry the skill over to things they smell with their eyes open, and being more aware of how they experience various aromas can help them begin to build a vocabulary for various flavors and begin to recognize them in various wines.  This to me is the most useful part of the article, but it’s also the most difficult of the workouts.

The last key thing the article focuses on is oak.  I tend to think of oak as a way to enhance the tannins in wine, but this part of the article reminds me that it’s more than that, and that oak imparts easily identifiable tastes that are found in many wines.  Joshua Weston points out that the toasty, wheaty smell of crushed cheerios is quite reminiscent of the smell that oak imparts to white wines.  He also points out that oaked wines will often have a flavor reminiscent of burnt marshmallow.  As you might expect, when Krigbaum and her panel of experts get beyond the real basics, the value of their considerable experience really starts to come through.

Producers and Vintages?

If you’re inclined to try some of the wines Krigbaum suggests as examples in the article, I must add a final note.  For the most part, recommendations that experts make in situations like this are unrealistically specific. Wine experts are very well aware of the significant variations in taste that winemaking style, climate and other factors can impart to a wine. It also seems to be a requirement for the job that they have a prodigious memory for the wines they’ve tasted, right down to the exact vintage.  They also have cellars and other sources of supply handy to procure whatever they need or make substitutions that seem obvious to them.  So for them it seems right suggest not only the type of wine they are thinking of, but a specific producer and vintage.

You’ll see this reflected in the recommendations that Krigbaum and her team of experts make in the article.  What they often don’t realize is how difficult it is for their readers and listeners to procure exactly the bottle of wine they have in mind.  For example, it might be hard for a reader to find a bottle of 2011 Tami Frappato to try as an example of an un-oaked red wine.  While it might not make as perfect a comparison with the other wines she suggests, any un-oaked red wine should do the trick.  This is true of the 2009 Rocco delle Macìe, although to a lesser extent.  Most Chiantis are oaked lightly unless they are labeled as riservas, although you may need to watch out for one that’s completely un-oaked.

For the most part you should be able to make substitutions for the recommended wines, particularly if all you’re doing is using a different vintage.  The inevitable exception is the list under aromas and flavors.  Here it’s best to stick as closely as possible to the exact wines.  Since there are ten of them, and you can benefit from trying just two or three, substitutions aren’t recommended.

I hope I’ve been able to give you a bit more insight into the challenges that experts face when they try to write short, readable pieces that help people develop basic wine tasting skills.  I also hope I haven’t discouraged you from making the effort to learn these skills.  To me, the most important thing is to start tasting and thinking about wines so you can develop your own set of experiences as reference points as you move along.

The beauty of a publication like Food & Wine is that they know how to attract readers and stimulate them.  A forum like this can allow someone like me to move the process forward a bit more by giving you some broader explanations and further insights and someone like you a chance to add to the conversation with some insights of your own.

Footnote

I had the privilege of attending a wine tasting with Andrea Robinson many years ago and I’ve appreciated her efforts to educate a broad audience of consumers about taste over the years.  She hosts a popular TV show on the Food Network and has written several books. The titles of her two principal books have annoyed me, however.  The first, Great Wines Made Simple, simply makes no sense.  Why would anyone want to make great wine simple?  Wouldn’t that make it ordinary? She followed this with a book called Great Tastes Made Simple, which contained recipes for a number of dishes and interesting discourses on how the dishes might match the taste of various wines.  This is a nice wine book for people who like to cook.   But it’s not exactly simple to have to put down the book and start cooking every few pages.   There are easier ways to learn the basics of food and wine matching. And if you already know the basics, why would you want to buy a book that promises to be simplistic? I keep reminding myself that the title of a book is a marketing choice.  Just can’t believe Andrea was the one who chose those titles.

How to Build a Wine Cellar

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One of the most frequent requests I get from my readers is for information about building a wine cellar.  The Persistent Observers’ Guide to Wine describes the pleasures of drinking well-aged wines and gives some tips on cellar management. If they don’t already have a cellar, however, they’re disappointed that I don’t give any advice about building one.

Of course, the subject of building a wine cellar could fill a whole book by itself, and there are several of them out there.  The one I used when I refurbished my own cellar about fifteen years ago is called How and Why to Build a Wine Cellar, by Richard M. Gold, Ph. D.   I used the second edition, which included a rather exhaustive narrative describing the author’s efforts to build his own cellar. He also discusses in detail many of the options that he didn’t use and includes useful charts, detailed construction drawings and very helpful lists of suppliers and other resources.  I was using the 2nd edition, from 1985, which looks like it was produced by photographing the author’s hand typed manuscript.  But I see that now the book is in its 4th Edition and is being published by the Wine Appreciation Guild, so it clearly has legs and is now in a more readable format.

I’m sure there are many who would rather not get so immersed in the nitty-gritty details of construction themselves. They’ll prefer to concentrate more on the overall look and feel of the cellar and leave the construction details to a designer or builder.   There are a number of glossy, coffee-table style books that include photographs of beautifully designed cellars, but have little advice about on practical necessities of building them.  Something of a compromise between a builder’s manual and a fashion show is Cellaring Wine, by Jeff Cox.  Jeff is a former writer for Organic Gardening magazine and the author of From Vines to Wines, itself an interesting book on grape growing and wine making.

Planning Construction of Your Wine Cellar

As both Gold and Cox make abundantly clear, there are two equally important things to consider about building a wine cellar.  One is proper planning by anticipating your needs before you construct the cellar, which can make a tremendous difference in its usefulness.  The other is that you’ll have to devote some time to managing the cellar once it’s built. I’m going to hit some of the high points in each of these areas, but I’m hoping some of you will weigh in with your own experiences,  particularly on cellar management, where there’s a real need for more helpful information for those who want to really get into it.

Although you’ll inevitably have constraints on the space and other resources you can dedicate to your cellar, it’s useful to imagine what you’d want to have under ideal conditions, so you can make whatever compromises are necessary with a better idea of what the trade-offs are.

The Importance of Temperature in the Wine Cellar

The most basic requirement you’ll need to think about is temperature, because there’s simply no point in storing wine unless you can keep it under 11°C (about 55°F).  As I indicated in The Persistent Observer’s Guide to Wine, this is the generally accepted temperature for storing wine. It’s not necessarily the ideal temperature (which may be significantly lower), but it has the advantage that wines stored at this temperature will mature within the lifespan of the average middle-aged wine consumer.  Its disadvantage is that it’s near the upper limit of where a wine can be stored safely, so being able to protect against variations in temperature is also important.

Don’t assume that the recommended temperature is an average.  Wines can easily spoil in a short time if they’re above the upper limit, which is only a few degrees higher than the recommended temperature.  Variations in temperature aren’t as much of a problem as long as the maximum is kept below the limit, so if the temperature in your cellar varies, but stays quite cool, you’ll be ok, you’ll just have to wait a bit  longer for your wine to mature.

If you have the option, you’ll obviously want to put your wine cellar in a place where the natural temperature is relatively cool.  Of course its ideal if you don’t need to air-condition it.  But if you do have to air-condition the cellar, putting it in a cooler venue will reduce the amount of energy consumed in order to keep it from getting too warm. Remember that the natural temperature of the location you use for your cellar may change depending on the seasons.  A basement space that’s quite cool in the summer, may get quite warm in the winter when the boiler is going.  You’ll also need to remember, that wherever you use an air conditioning unit, you’ll have to have a proper power source available.

Some air-conditioning units also provide dehumidification, since moisture drops out of the air as it cools.  Even the limited amount of air that comes into a relatively airtight cellar as you go in and out can cause significant moisture to build up on the bottles and the surfaces in the cellar. Purist cringe a bit when you suggest humidifying a cellar, but the amount of water that collects can be significant and ruin expensive wood finishing. Also, all that picturesque mold could pose a health problem for those who  suffer from allergies.  In my experience, if the bottles are properly stored so the cork remains moist, dehumidification isn’t a big problem.   If you do use a dehumidifier, you’ll need an outflow for the water it draws out of the air.

Even if you aren’t terribly concerned about the power needed to cool your cellar, you still need to consider the possibility of a power failure or a breakdown in your air conditioning unit just when it’s most needed.  So you’ll want to consider the most efficient means of insulating your cellar to protect it from rapid changes in temperature.  The amount of space needed for proper insulation  can affect your space requirements more than the size of an air-conditioning unit.

Planning for Your Everyday Wine Needs

The other major consideration concerning space is how much you’ll need for your wine.  To estimate this, begin by thinking of the people in the household who drink wine regularly. Determine how much wine they typically consume on a weekly basis, independent of holidays and entertaining.  Deduct the number of weeks you’re normally away on vacation and you’ll be able to make a rough calculation of what your regular requirements are.  When you make this calculations, it’s probably a good idea to assume that you’ll increase your wine consumption once you have a cellar full of good wine handy on any given day.  It just seems inevitable that if you give yourself more and better options, you’ll drink more wine.

Most of the wine you drink on a regular basis won’t be the kind of wine you need to put away for years, so you needn’t plan to have space for all this wine to be stored in your cellar at one time.  The amount of space required will depend on your inclination to buy in quantity to take advantage of discounts or reduce repeated trips to the wine shop. Depending on how much space you have, you might want to make space for at least a two to four month supply, however.

Requirements for Aging Wines

The space requirements become more demanding, when you begin to calculate the space you’ll need for wines that are being put down to age. Here you’ll want to be particularly careful to factor in, not only what you expect to drink regularly, but what you expect to need for entertaining and the holidays. It will also be necessary to consider the drinking window (or average aging period) of the wines you and the others in the household like best.

In general, white wines aren’t made to age, although there are some Chenin Blancs that age spectacularly well.  Many of the sweeter Rieslings and Semillons will also benefit from ten to twenty years in the bottle.   Chardonnays can improve with age, whether as still or sparkling wine.  But this isn’t typical and generally is limited to  a six to twelve year range.  Unfortunately, the great white Burgundies made from Chardonnay are becoming more and more legendary.  A friend of mine recently brought over 1983 Puligny-Montrachet that was spectacularly fresh and delicious, but the vintages since 1995 have been suffering from a mysterious malady that causes them to oxidize excessively after a few years. Repeated assurances that the Burgundians have put this behind them have not yet proven reliable.

For red wines, there is much more variability in the ideal drinking windows.  Because of their higher tannins and the ability of red wines to tolerate a higher level of oxidation than whites, almost any red wine can be kept for three to five years and most will improve for it.  The drinking window for a wine will also be affected by the amount of time that it’s stored in wood casks.  This is part of what accounts for the steep increase in price between various levels of “reserve” wines and ordinary red wines.  The level of acidity and alcohol in the wine will also be a factor influencing the drinking window, which can depend on both the grape variety and the way the wine is made. In general, the windows for Pinot Noir will be two to seven years, while wines made with Cabernet Sauvignon can need fifteen years or more to reach their peak.  Other red wines fall somewhere in the middle, so you will have to do a bit of research on the wines you like best in order to plan perfectly.

Since what I like changes all the time, but tends to skew toward older wines, I just assume that my red wines will need to age for an average of ten years.  To meet my needs for the hundred bottles or so of aged wines I use for entertaining, holidays and the occasional weekday treat, I’ll need to have space for a thousand bottles in order to have a hundred in the cue and ready to drink each year after the first ten years.  Of course, your requirements will vary depending on the various drinking windows of the wines you prefer to drink and how much of each of these wines the household will consume in a given year.

Size Variations in Wine Bottles

There’s another reason to pay attention to the specific kinds of wine you like to drink when planning a cellar.  Various wine regions use bottles of different sizes.  What will be an efficient configuration for one type of bottle won’t work as well for a wine from a different region or source that uses a bottle of a different shape.  You’ll also want to allow for bottles in different formats, such as half bottles, magnums, etc.  In particular you’ll want to avoid having to store bottles standing straight up, since that lack of contact with wine allows the cork to dry out more quickly.   Some authorities also recommend storing the bottles slightly tilted, so that the cork isn’t completely covered by the wine, in order to promote a modest exchange of air.  Planning out the space requirements for the different shaped bottles you’re most likely to use can go a long way toward maximizing the use of your space, making your cellar look attractive and helping you easily arrange and remove bottles.

Managing your cellar

If you’ve done the homework to properly plan your cellar, managing it becomes a bit easier.  But it’s still a challenge to keep the right mix of wines in stock.  Keeping good records of what you’ve put away and what you consume is extremely valuable, but will only be really useful if you take the time to evaluate it.  With all the computerized devices we use today, better technologies that make it easier to manage your cellar should exist.  It’s a sign that few people have the benefit of a cellar that they don’t.  At this point, there are some promising database applications that make it easier to record your purchases. One I’ve used is called Cellar Tracker.  It not only allows you to keep a record of the wines in your cellar,  but  to track professional reviews and even the tasting notes of other users who have had the same wine.  There’s still more that could be done.   A major challenge for any database system is being able to conveniently track inflow and outflow, providing tools to analyze the data and a robust system of reports, so I’m hoping there will be more developments in the area.

I’ve already warned you to anticipate changes in your wine consumption once you make the commitment to building a wine cellar.  This will affect the way you manage your wine acquisitions and your consumption as well as the design of the cellar.  If you’re like me, you’ll learn a lot about how wine ages during the first few years you have a cellar because you’ll have a hard time resisting the temptation to drink your wines too early.  Just as with tasting, there’s no substitute for personal experience. Learning to manage your wine cellar also involves learning to manage yourself.

Dealing with Temptation

I’ve described some of the problems I had to overcome in The Persistent Observer’s Guide to Wine. I struggled against the temptation to drink the wines I had put away before they were ready and learned only from bitter experience how important it was to keep the temperature under control.  Having a cellar gave me the chance to buy larger quantities and have wines shipped to me, making it more important research the wines thoroughly before I bought them. It also allowed me to be more opportunistic in taking advantage of special prices and a wider range of suppliers.  Ultimately, the development of my skills at cellar management were influenced by my evolution as a wine drinker as well as my own peculiar preferences.

As an introductory book, The Persistent Observer’s Guide to Wine could only address what I thought were the most important issues in cellar management for a broad audience.  This may be a forum where these issues can be addressed in the context of individual preferences.  I’m also hoping we can tap into the perspectives of others with their own valuable insights.  Let’s all  help more people enjoy the wonders of well aged wines.  Building more wine cellars and managing them better seems like a good place to start.

Welcome to The Persistent Observer

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The mind is a curious thing: elusive, maybe non-existent.  The French have no word for it.  In French you have a brain, and what steps outside to observe it is your spirit or soul. The different views reflect our struggle with a metaphysical question:  How can we observe ourselves when the process of observation changes us?

Yet we do observe ourselves. And we do it while observing others. So our sense of self is inextricably intertwined with our sense of being connected to them. We feel most connected when we sense that others understand things the same way we do.

But how often do we find that our assumptions about what others understand are wrong?  Is it just our desire to feel connected that causes us to overlook our differences or is it fear of the loss of self? Perhaps we have a persistent reluctance to see things as others see them because it means entering a world where much of what we take for granted is wrong.

My antidote to this fear is a process I call persistent observation.  It’s a process that involves looking carefully at the lapses between what we all think we observe in our everyday lives and what’s actually happening.  I can’t do alone because it involves seeing more than the differences between how I perceive things and the way others perceive them. That’s why I need others to share their perspectives with me, so I can find out why we all  think we’re seeing things the same way when we aren’t. Ultimately, I’m looking for the hidden consensus that enables us to share a common ground even when we’re all walking in different directions.

I like to try to understand why people laugh at things that don’t seem funny when they stop to think about them, why a word changes meaning over time, or why some fashions endure while others fade. The answers to these questions tell us something about ourselves in the collective sense and are thus  both more satisfying and more worth sharing because they deal with that elusive feeling of context that holds us together as fellow human beings and gives us a sense of who we are as individuals.  They are answers we get right away: the things that make us say “Aha!” and “of course!” but they come from questions that persist.

Join me as I explore various subjects through this lens and help me look for the right questions as well as the right answers.  Since I’ve just written a book about it, my first subject will be wine.  It’s one that I’ve discussed with hundreds of people and kept notes on long before social media made it possible to reach out to a broad audience.  It fascinates me because it is a commodity that’s widely misunderstood even though it’s been around for millennia and studied and written about endlessly.  It also fascinates me because of the passions it incites and the way it makes everyone feel relaxed and so many people fell awkward. It’s a common commodity that has a unique ability to deliver merriment and cause pain.

In The Persistent Observer’s Guide to Wine, I share insights about the real reasons that people feel awkward about wine, so readers can avoid the pain and concentrate on the merriment.  Here, I’d like to continue the dialog I began in that book and carry it further into other subjects.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I’ll enjoy hearing from you.