Web Accidental Wine

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Start! Stop! Go!

OK, time for a rant. If I were divine, imperial, absolute monarch of the wine world, I'd make the following decrees. There will be more of these, for sure. Don't like it? Argue with me.

Stop thinking ratings are the only way to buy wine.
Start living by "The One Rule" - drink what tastes good; ignore all other advice.

Stop drinking huge production wines that are no longer the family wineries they started out as.
Start hunting down small production (fewer than 1000 cases), family owned wineries. If all you make is wine and not much of it, it'd better be the best juice you can put in the bottle.

Stop asking if wines are dry. Ninety-five percent of all the wines you drink now are dry.
Start asking how tannic a wine is. Tannins determine how much the wine dries out your mouth, not dryness. Both sweet and dry wines can be tannic. If you're confused by this, go here.

Stop buying wines using the hair-on-fire-fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants method.
Start doing a little homework before you purchase a wine. What's the difference between a great wine and a golf ball? A man will spend all day looking for a golf ball.

Stop worrying so much about matching wine and food. Sometimes accidents are happy.
Start drinking sparkling wines with anything on your table. I mean anything. It always works.

Stop buying all your usual standbys - I'm tired of hearing requests for Silver Oak, Liberty School, La Crema, Santa Margherita and Yellow Tail.
Start looking for new, reliable wines. How do you think you discovered those old standbys in the first place? You tried something new.

Stop buying the same old low quality Rieslings you usually drink. Just because it's in a blue bottle, doesn't mean it's good.
Start drinking high quality German Rieslings. Good quality Rieslings are arguably the most underrated wines in the world.

Stop drinking cheap Pinot Grigio. As the most imported wine into the US, many producers are buying whatever grapes they can get.
Start drinking other inexpensive whites. Verdelho, Vermentino, and Colombard, for example.

Stop being a control freak. The wine world is waaaay bigger than you are.
Start occasionally asking your favorite wine professional to pick a wine for you, no questions asked. Let them do their job - they know what they're doing.



Mark

Labels: buying wine, enjoying wine, rant, rules for enjoying wine, tirade, what the hell are you thinking?