The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture Read online

  TASTING NOTES

  This may be stating the obvious, but the key to becoming a smarter, more perceptive taster is practice. In his best-selling book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell claimed that to become an expert in any given field requires a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice. I suspect that if a person spent 10,000 hours drinking wine, the result would be a badly pickled brain. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the best way to become truly knowledgeable about wine and to get to a point where you really know what you are talking about is to sample as many wines as possible. That means drinking a wide array of wines at home and attending as many tastings as you can; wine classes can help, too.

  Book knowledge matters greatly in wine as well, and you can learn a lot from reading good books about wine. Five must-have books for the budding wine enthusiast are:

  • Adventures on the Wine Route Famed importer Kermit Lynch’s classic travelogue about viticultural France, full of brilliant insights into French wine culture and the ways and whys of wine.

  • Tasting Pleasures British wine writer Jancis Robinson’s charming, informative memoir about her life as a globetrotting wine scribe. A book that leaves you excited about wine.

  • Wine for Dummies Mary Ewing-Mulligan and her husband, Ed McCarthy, did an outstanding job with this book, and it is a great source of basic but indispensable wine knowledge.

  • Bordeaux Robert Parker’s comprehensive guide to the wines of Bordeaux. Packed with useful information, but the real value of the book is in showing how to think analytically about what’s in the glass. Even if you don’t share Parker’s taste, you can learn from him.

  • Matt Kramer on Wine Kramer is arguably America’s finest wine commentator, and this greatest-hits collection of his columns is delicious food for thought about all aspects of wine and wine culture.

  The ultimate learning tool is tasting, but it is not enough just to taste wines; you also need to take notes on them. Tasting notes are a controversial topic in the wine world. The argument against them is that in addition to all the outlandish descriptors—sweaty saddle, beef blood, pencil shavings, cat piss, wet dog—they offer a cramped, reductive vision of what wine is all about. They also portray wine as a static, unchanging product, when in fact the best wines often evolve dramatically in the bottle and the glass.

  How to put wine into words is a subject that tortures wine writers like no other. True, wine tasting is not the only gustatory experience that is difficult to convey linguistically; it is certainly not easy to describe how a steak tastes or to capture the flavor of an oyster in a few pithy comments. But for restaurant critics, at least, the descriptive imperatives are generally less onerous: they are not obligated to describe each dish in exquisite, multisentence detail, and they can pad their reviews with lots of scene-setting. Not so wine critics: they are expected to talk only about what’s in the bottle and to construct what amounts to a three-dimensional view of a Cabernet or Chardonnay—and words rarely seem adequate to the task.

  In 1978, Robert Parker began publishing The Wine Advocate, and although Parker uses his share of slippery adjectives (hedonistic, sexy, intellectual), his tasting notes have always stood out for their no-nonsense, just-the-flavors-ma’am approach. Here’s Parker, for instance, on the 1996 vintage of Château d’Yquem, the great sweet wine of Bordeaux: “Light gold with a tight but promising nose of roasted hazelnuts intermixed with crème brûlée, vanilla beans, honey, orange marmalade, and peach.”

  Thanks to Parker’s influence, this kind of tasting note has become the industry standard over the past quarter century or so; most critics nowadays make a point of listing the aromas, flavors, and tactile sensations they perceive in a wine. These grab bags of descriptors can breed a certain awe and deference among many wine enthusiasts (Gee, this guy must really be talented if he can smell kaffir lime and poached Anjou pear in this wine—I should take his advice!), which is undoubtedly part of the reason wine writers like to use them. But as you would imagine, the cherry-and-berry metaphors, not to mention more offbeat comparisons, have also drawn a lot of criticism and ridicule. When it comes to tasting notes, the line between incisive and overwrought can be a fine one. The British wine expert Michael Broadbent once likened a wine’s bouquet to the smell of schoolgirls’ uniforms (no, he wasn’t arrested). And the late Auberon (son of Evelyn) Waugh, in his wine column for Britain’s Tatler, described one wine as smelling of “a dead chrysanthemum on the grave of a stillborn West Indian baby” (no, he wasn’t fired, but he and his editor, Tina Brown, were taken before the Press Council to answer charges of insensitivity).

  Who can blame people for yukking it up? “Professional” tasting notes are filled with lots of comically obscure references and ridiculous metaphors like these. (I put “professional” in quotation marks because the use of that word could be taken to suggest that wine critics are pros who possess superior tasting skills. But while some critics are indeed good tasters, others are not, and because wine writing is a self-selecting field with few barriers to entry, I am not a fan of using the word professional to describe wine writers. Forgive the digression.) But many of the aromas and flavors often cited in tasting notes actually do have a chemical basis—we’re not entirely bluffing. Some of the most commonly observed aromas in wines—toast, butter, vanilla, citrus, apples, cherries, pears, honey, herbs—are there because of volatile organic compounds that either were in the grapes themselves or seeped into the finished juice. For instance, the buttery note often found in Chardonnays is an aroma compound called diacetyl, which is a by-product of malolactic fermentation (a secondary fermentation that softens the acidity in wines). I see no reason that wine writers or wine enthusiasts should shy away from noting these aromas if they detect them, and when it comes to flaws such as volatile acidity (which smells like vinegar or nail polish remover) and brettanomyces (which gives wines a barnyard aroma), they absolutely should call them out.

  I think the biggest problem with contemporary tasting notes is that the effort to sniff out all sorts of aromas seems to have become an end in itself for many oenophiles. The point of a tasting note is to tell the story of a wine with brevity, clarity, and, hopefully, a little brio, and to give it a thumbs-up or -down. I’m a lot less interested in learning the exact species of cherry that someone detects in a red Burgundy than in finding out whether the wine is good or bad, what’s good or bad about it, and when might be the best time to drink it. Also, because wines evolve both in the glass and in the bottle, the aromatics can change quickly; the nose is just taking a snapshot, which is another reason not to get too carried away with the descriptors.

  All that said, as part of the self-education process, I think it is worth taking tasting notes. The act of jotting down your impressions of wines necessarily concentrates the mind—it obliges you to be a more attentive taster, and a more attentive taster is usually a better taster and derives more satisfaction from wines. You may not need 10,000 hours of practice to become a more knowledgeable and perceptive judge of wines, but you do need to bring a certain rigor to the effort, and writing tasting notes serves that function; it makes you think more analytically than might otherwise be the case.

  So what exactly should you be writing down in your tasting notes? To begin with, I think it is worth noting the color of a wine: How deep a shade of red or yellow is it? Does it look young or old? Obviously you need to smell the wine; what aromas do you detect? Don’t drive yourself nuts trying to determine whether it’s raspberries or strawberries that you smell; it is enough just to say red berries, or even just red fruits. How does the wine taste—is the fruit crisp and fresh, or is it kind of jammy? What is the texture like? As you run the wine around your mouth, do you pick up the acidity? Does the wine seem balanced, harmonious, or does it taste a little disjointed? After you swallow, do the flavors linger for a long time, or does the aftertaste quickly fade? And what about the tannins, which cause that astringent feeling after you swallow a red wine—do they seem like they are nicely integrated, or d
o they stick out a bit? These are the things you want to note while recording your overall feelings about the wine. And don’t be afraid to compare your impressions with those of professional critics. This, too, is part of the learning process. However flawed “professional” tasting notes might be, useful information can be gleaned from them regarding the particulars of individual wines and in terms of how to think about wine more generally.

  A word of warning: writing tasting notes in the company of non–wine geeks may invite some ridicule. Be strong and ignore it. A word of advice: write your notes electronically, or if you plan to do it by hand (so last century), be sure to get a dedicated notebook. Don’t make the mistake of writing down your notes on random scraps of paper (and here I also speak from experience); it’s too easy to lose those scraps, and even if you don’t lose them, they’ll end up as a disorganized pile of paper, which won’t do you much good.

  THE EVOLUTION OF A WINE GEEK

  We all have to start somewhere, and for most American wine enthusiasts, that somewhere is California. The United States is the home market for California wines, and it stands to reason that these tend to be the gateway wines for American drinkers. Lots of people never move beyond California; they are perfectly content drinking only Napa Cabernets and Sonoma Chardonnays. Simplicity has its virtues, and there’s no shame in sticking with what you like. But the wine world is a big, fabulously diverse place, and arguably the greatest pleasure that oenophilia offers is the pleasure of discovery—of finding new grapes, regions, and wines. Brillat-Savarin said that “the discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.” The same can be said of discovering new wines—it not only excites the palate, it serves to reaffirm one’s passion for fermented grape juice.

  In terms of changing tastes and expanded horizons, it is interesting to note that the traffic all seems to flow in one direction: New World to Old. Rarely, if ever, do you see Burgundy fans or Bordeaux diehards shifting their allegiances to the New World. By contrast, it is commonplace for oenophiles reared on New World wines to experience Damascene conversions, suddenly swearing off California or Australian wines with the same fervor that they once embraced them and filling up their cellars with Barolos and Bandols. Why the one-way flow of traffic? Speaking very broadly, I think that as people get deeper into wine, they place greater value on subtlety and complexity, and in general, Old World wines deliver more of both. I suspect another factor is romance. To be blunt, there is just not a lot of it in New World wine regions, whereas European viticulture is dominated by small, artisanal producers. Napa is beautiful, but it simply doesn’t exude the kind of charm you find in, say, the Loire or Alsace. And romance is unquestionably a big selling point for wines, for wineries, and for wine regions.

  So how does wine’s evolutionary process unfold? For American wine enthusiasts, it usually goes something like this: They start out drinking Napa Cabernets, perhaps with some Australian reds thrown in. Then they find some Old World wine that wows them—maybe a Bordeaux or a Châteauneuf-du-Pape (Americans, reared on big California reds, seem to have a particular fondness for Châteauneuf-du-Papes, the ultimate Big French Reds). Having thus crossed the Atlantic, metaphorically speaking, they make new discoveries—Côte-Rôties, Chiantis, Riojas. Maybe they lose all interest in New World wines; maybe they start buying Old and New World wines. We Burgundy fans like to say that all roads lead to Burgundy, and it is true that many oenophiles do eventually succumb to Burgundy’s siren lure. A lot of wine drinkers are finding their way to Burgundy faster than ever these days. For one thing, Burgundy is very fashionable right now with sommeliers and writers, which is naturally sparking heightened consumer interest in the wines. Also, Pinot Noir has become hugely popular in the past decade, and while a lot of people start out drinking California, Oregon, or New Zealand Pinots, curiosity or serendipity eventually leads them to Pinot’s heartland, Burgundy.

  You often hear wine buffs say, “I’ve got an Old World palate” or “I’ve got a New World palate.” What they are saying is that their preferences lean heavily in one direction or the other. One has to be careful about generalizing when it comes to wine—there are always significant exceptions to the rule—and the dividing line between Old World and New World has been blurring over the past fifteen years. Climate change and stylistic shifts have been bumping up the alcohol levels in Europe; in the 2009 vintage, for instance, some Bordeaux weighed in at well over 14 percent alcohol. Meanwhile, a growing number of New World winemakers, especially in California, are moving away from the fruit-forward, high-alcohol style; they are seeking out cooler sites that can produce leaner, earthier wines. All that said, the New World/Old World dichotomy is still a valid one. Most New World wines continue to show a very different flavor profile from that of European wines. They tend to be more exuberantly fruity, with higher alcohol contents (14 or 15 percent is normal in California) and rounder, softer textures. People accustomed to this style, when first experiencing a leaner, more acidic Burgundy or Barolo, might well find themselves offering a variation on that old W. C. Fields line: Who took the wine out of my wine? But again, judging by the traffic flow, the Old World style has no difficulty winning new fans.

  If you are not sure which side of the divide you belong on, or if you want to put your declared preferences to the test, here’s a suggestion: gather up a bunch of Old World and New World wines, put the bottles in paper bags, and taste them blind with some family or friends. They should be similar wines—say, New Zealand Pinot Noirs versus red Burgundies, or white Burgundies versus California Chardonnays. It is fun and can be very revealing.

  WINE TOOLS

  Like most hobbies, wine offers lots of accessories that are meant to enhance your drinking pleasure. Wine storage units, grape-specific glasses, splashy decanters, fancy corkscrews—without much effort, an oenophile can blow a fortune on wine gear, and plenty of merchants are more than happy to help you do so. But how many wine gizmos do you really need, and how much should you spend on them? The answer depends in part on how seriously you take the wine thing. If you are buying reasonably expensive bottles, you do need a good place to store them. If you have a basement that’s dark, relatively humid, and consistently cool—say, 55 to 60 degrees—you can park all your collectible wines there and they will mature beautifully. If you don’t have a space that meets these requirements, a temperature-controlled wine cabinet would be a wise investment. Good storage matters a lot.

  Good stemware matters, too, a point that the irrepressible Riedel family has driven home with remarkable success over the years. An Austrian glassmaking dynasty, the Riedels have made themselves virtually synonymous with high-quality wine stemware, and they produce a dizzying array of glasses (decanters, too). There is a Chianti glass, a Montrachet glass, a Grüner Veltliner glass—there’s a specific Riedel glass for every major grape variety (and some not-so-major) and virtually every major wine region. The Riedels contend that their glasses are designed to show each particular wine in the most flattering light, and I’m sure that’s true. But do you really need an Oregon Pinot Noir glass or a Brunello di Montalcino stem? With all due respect to the Riedels, I’d say no. When it comes to the question of stemware, I’ve become a fanatical minimalist. In fact, I’ve whittled myself down to just two types of glasses, Bordeaux stems and Burgundy stems. The latter I use exclusively for red Burgundies and other Pinot Noirs, and everything else goes in a Bordeaux glass, including white wines and sparkling wines. (Champagne flutes are nice to look at and hold, but a wider glass does a better job of bringing out the aromatics; I’ve noticed that Champagne producers almost never use Champagne flutes during tastings.) I also don’t use Riedel glasses, because they can shatter easily and are really expensive. Instead I use Spiegelau glasses; it is a line of stemware that is owned by the Riedels, and it offers excellent glasses that are quite inexpensive—$7 or $8 per stem, which is cheap enough to break.

  With regard to that other indispensable tool, the corkscre
w, my advice is similar: the $3 variety available at your local package store is all you really need. Yes, there are much more elaborate corkscrews on the market, but unless you are regularly opening eighty-year-old wines, why bother? The simple waiter’s corkscrew, as it is known, will do just fine. Unless money is no object, don’t go crazy with wine accessories. Buy only what you really need, keep it inexpensive, and spend any extra money on wine.

  YOU’RE THE WINE GUY—YOU PICK THE WINE

  It is normally the case that when a group that includes a wine enthusiast goes out to a restaurant, the wine guy will be asked to order the wines—and in truth most oenophiles want and expect to be handed the wine list (though it’s best if they are polite and refrain from just grabbing it). But once the list is in hand, it can be a real burden, and not just because it might weigh a lot. If the wine guy isn’t picking up the tab for the table, choosing the wines can be tricky. It’s especially challenging if the oenophile is a guest. The desire to drink something compelling must be weighed against budgetary considerations and the need to be tactful. Sadly, being given the wine list does not usually give you carte blanche to order whatever you wish, and there is nothing that can spoil a good evening quite like an unexpected $1,500 wine bill. So how to negotiate this delicate matter? Matt Kramer of the Wine Spectator has what I think is a smart solution: he looks for inexpensive off-beat wines, pleasant obscurities that the rest of the table will probably be unfamiliar with, that might win a convert or two, and that won’t cause any fainting spells when the check arrives.