Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Dry or Sweet? Dry? Sweeeeeeeet!
Oh, it's an ugly request. Heinous.
"Could you help me please?"
"Certainly, sir. What can I help you find?"
"Well, I want a wine that's not too sweet and not too dry. Can you help me find something like that?"
"Well, sir, to be blunt, no."
Today, a topic I've seen confound both customers and wine professionals. It's pretty simple, but people are unnecessarily perplexed by it. Wanna sort it out? just read the following statement:
Dry wine is less something rather than more something. In fact, dry wine is little or nothing.
Huh??
Sometimes people make things far more complicated than necessary, but it doesn't have to be this way. "Dry" wine couldn't be simpler. Here's the most complex thing you should think about dry wine:
Dry wine is NOT sweet.
That's it - two choices with wine - dry and sweet.
Now I can hear some of you skeptics out there jumping right in: "What about semi-sweet wines? What about off dry wines? What about semi dry wines?! What about those?"
Oh sure, you'll see these classifications on wine labels. And, yes, my dividing wines into two hard and fast categories is somewhat of a simplification. In most cases, though, put a semi-sweet wine in your mouth and you'll taste sugar. Off-dry wine? Sugar. Semi-dry wines? Sugar. Dry=no sugar. Sweet=sugar. Varying degrees of sugar, yes. But sugar nonetheless.
Another important thing to remember is that "dry" wine has nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with an actual dry feeling you get on your mouth, teeth and gums when you sip a red wine. I want you to keep this in mind when you read my next post, where I will deal with one of the scariest topics in wine - tannin.
Let's recap my little tirade, um....discourse, shall we? Wine can't be dry and sweet at the same time. It's just not possible.
More importantly, it isn't really desirable. Think about this - Plastic Glasses? Lite Beer? Liquid Smoke? Marijuana Initiative?
None of these things end well.
Mark
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Wine and the Hot, Blonde Cheerleader
I was selling wine Saturday morning, busy day, the day before Easter. A customer approached me and said:
"Do you have any Cakebread reds? No?." Sigh.
I've heard that sigh from people looking for Cakebread wines ten times a week for months. I'm getting tired of it.
Now, mind you, I'm not annoyed by the fact that the customer wanted Cakebread wines. The One Rule applies. In fact, Cakebread makes some damn good wines. If I'd had them, the customer would have gotten them, but Cakebread is between vintages. In this case, it wasn't the customer's preference that got to me - it was the sigh.
It's fundamental human nature to try and repeat pleasurable experiences. I get that. Boy, do I get that.
Problem is, people want the same thing they want from wine as they do from a spouse. They want wine to be faithful. They want wine to never change.
Big mistake. It'll never happen.
Wine is like any other agricultural product, be it wheat or sugar snap peas or zucchini. It's going to be different from location to location and year to year. Expecting wine to be consistent is just a false hope. Winemakers all over the world would love to provide you wine with the same flavor, same quality, same texture each and every vintage. It just can't be done.
Wine's not a faithful girl - it's just not in her nature.
OK, OK, you surrender. Expecting wine to deliver, year in, year out is asking for trouble.
What to do?
Don't treat wine like a spouse. Don't expect constancy. Think of wine as that senior cheerleader (or the captain of the swim team, as applicable) who was normally way outta your league. You know the one I'm talking about - that hot, blonde thang who you hoped would talk to you, hell, even glance at you.
You knew then that even if you did catch her eye, she wasn't going to stick around. She had at least five boyfriends, three of them in college. She couldn't be contained. She was a force of nature. She had bigger, better, more universal things to attend to. Hoping for more was a disaster and you knew it.
She understood her beauty was fleeting. She knew that tiny millisecond of eye contact was a gift and it would be irresponsible to give it to just one person. It was a once in a lifetime thrill and it wasn't meant to last.
That's my answer to the consistency problem. I try to live by it. Some people taste the world's greatest wines - Domaine de la Romanee Conti's, Chateau Margaux or Turley Zinfandel - and spend their entire lives (and wallets) chasing after that one, singular moment.
Not me. I've tasted some of those wines and sure, they're fabulous, but I'm not going to try to recover that instant of pleasure. Can't be done. I'll ponder that sip of enological joy only for as long as it lasts and then start looking for the next.
If you live by this philosophy, I think your wine life will be more passionate, fuller and sweeter.
But, whatever you do, keep trying to catch that cheerleader's eye - if you're lucky she might wink at ya.
Mark
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Wine and "The One Rule"
There's only one rule in wine.
Yup, one.
If you can follow this rule, you'll never be unhappy with your wine selections. Sounds like a pipe dream, I know, but it isn't. Like most things in wine, it's really simple.
Ready? Here's what I call "The One Rule."
Drink what tastes good; ignore ALL other advice.
Now you've heard part of this before. Everyone knows that drinking what you like is what's important. There's no reason to put wine that smells bad and tastes funny in your mouth. None. Ever.
Drinking what you like, however, isn't enough. There's a second clause I've added to make the rule my own - ignore all other advice.
Now I've been a wine columnist so I've done my share of giving wine advice. And in my first column, I told my readers that, some days, I'd be wrong. I'd recommend wines that they didn't like.
Why on earth would I tell my readers I'd be wrong? Doesn't that undermine my credibility as a wine reviewer? Why would I want to shoot myself in the foot like this? Don't people want to be able to rely on a wine guy's recommendations?
Maintaining my credibility was precisely why I told readers I'd occasionally lead them down the primrose path. Now, I always seek wines of quality (what the French call vin de garde), but sometimes you won't like what I pick. People perceive taste differently. Where some taste red fruit flavors, others taste black fruit. Some folks are sensitive to tannin, some to oak and some to acid. As a wine critic, I realized that I'd never make everyone happy. It wasn't my job. Even if it were my job, it's just not possible.
What is possible, though, and a million times more desirable, is for wine drinkers to be equipped to choose spoiled grape juice without any help. Sure, there are people like Robert Parker and publications like Wine Spectator and they can be useful. But too many, and I sometimes include myself in this category, rely on these outside opinions.
This can be a monumental mistake. I'll give you an example.
I know wine professionals who refuse to sell white Zinfandel to customers because they think it's awful wine. That's not only unprofitable, it's arrogant. If it's what a customer wants, give it to them. I try to steer them toward quality white Zinfandel, but you can't assume you know their tastes better than they do. If you like a certain kind of wine, then don't let a wine salesman bully you into buying a wine you don't like. To avoid this you have to know what you like.
Now to the serious part. When you live by a philosophy like The One Rule, there are always costs.
The bad news is that you'll have to drink more. Living by The One Rule requires you know what you like. Do you like your wines dry or sweet? Red or white? Lots of fruit or mostly earthy flavors? High acid? Low tannin? Prefer young wines or aged ones? The more you know about your preferences, the easier this gets. To drink what you like, you have to know what you like.
Drinking more has additional costs: spending time and money. In order to know what you like, you should taste everything you can get your hands on. This is no mean trick - Italy alone produces wine from about 1000 grapes. Granted, we generally see only 20 or so of them in the US, but you should try to taste them all. To make it even more complicated, there are probably multiple producers for each of these grapes. See what I mean about spending money?
To live by The One Rule, you'll also need to make notes. Lots and lots of notes. That takes time. I'll give you a better idea how to do that in future posts, but for now, just try and write down the name of the wine, the producer, the grapes, the region and if you liked it or not. Point is, this takes time.
Living by any philosophy is tough, but worth it. Just ask a Stoic living in challenging times; there are benefits. The One Rule is no different.
Ready for the good news?
To live by The One Rule, you'll have to drink more wine. This means more intimate encounters with friends and chances to meet future friends. It means more opportunities for fascinating, funny, sweet, troublemaking conversations. This means lots of simple, luxurious, tasty food to go with the wines.
In short, The One Rule is a harsh mistress, but one that may make your whole life better.
And who doesn't want that?
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Look out! Look out!
Well, This is it. Time to start yet another new wine blog. You might have noticed my title, "Accidental Wine." For my first trick, I'll explain it.
Pretty much all things wine related are accidental. Wine was probably accidentally discovered, rather than invented. It was made by trial and error for about 9,500 years (pretty good for guesswork, huh?). Not to mention, for a good vintage to happen, it takes several concurrent accidents of sunlight, drainage, water, fog, wind, soil and just plain luck.
And, last but not least, I came to wine by accident.
I spent 10 years earning a doctoral degree in political science from Texas A&M University. Political Science is an interesting field and it certainly changed the way I view the world, but I seem to be too practical for the theoretical world.
I know a lot about food, so I took a temporary job at a 70,000 square foot speciality grocery store. After six months of handling customer requests and researching new products, my boss simply said one day:
"Oh yeah - you're now in the wine department."
I basically knew three things about wine at this point - 1) it is made with grapes; 2) they put it in bottles; and 3) I didn't like the stuff.
So there I was, so NOT an oenophile. It's not like I didn't have any opportunities to learn about it. In 1988-89, I lived in Geneva, Switzerland, which is just a stone's throw from two of the world's best wine regions, Burgundy and the Rhone Valley. What did I drink in this vineyard paradise? Beer. Cheap, badly made, French beer.
In 1993-95, I lived in Los Gatos, California, where I was minutes from wineries in Santa Cruz, Monterey and just two hours from Napa and Sonoma counties. Did I avail myself of this grapey bounty? Nope. Kept drinking beer.
Five years later, I was forced to learn about wine. Even worse, I had to be able to sell it to people. I had to learn to sell people something I didn't like or I'd stop getting paid.
Here it is, four years since I started this little venture and I've not only been able to learn it, I'm getting pretty good at it. Just two years into my wine career, I was asked by one of the editors of Fort Worth Star-Telegram to submit a sample column. I did that for nine months. I also teach most of the wine classes where I work and have passed the first section of the Master Sommelier program.
Mind you, I don't know it all and never will. Anybody who says they know everything about wine is either a fool or an idiot. That's one of the things I like about wine - it's so varied and fascinating you should never be bored.
There you have it. That's why I titled this Accidental Wine.
As a closing note, one of the things I love most about wine is the conversations that often accompany it. I don't intend for this blog to be my pontifications about wine. I'm not interested in that. Sure, I'll have opinions and, well, I'm not afraid to voice them. What I'd really like this blog to be, though, is a conversation about wine.
Bring a glass - I have wine.
Mark
