lgsjr – Page 3 – Power Tasting – The Wine Tasting Experience

How to Disagree About Wine

Let’s assume that you’re going wine tasting with another person, someone whose taste in wine you respect. You’re fond of that person, maybe that person is your partner in life. Most of the time you agree about the quality of the wine you drink, but on occasion in a winery’s tasting room, you disagree.

Now as friends and lovers, you probably don’t need advice from Power Tasting about how to disagree amiably. But there are some aspects of disagreements that are unique to wine tasting. Disagreements can be learning experiences for all those involved.

Is the wine bad? We’re not talking about the relative quality of the wine the two of you might be tasting. We’re suggesting that a wine may have turned or is corked. Corked wine, in particular, is a common problem, more so than is generally recognized, although it seems it occurs in fewer bottles in recent years. One may recognize the problem and the other not, so that might be the first question to consider if one of you is immediately turned off by a sip of wine because you feel that wine is corked.
What if one of you likes a wine, and the other doesn’t. This is where respect for the other’s taste comes into play. It may simply be a stylistic difference. One likes oaky, buttery California Chardonnays. The other prefers classic French Chablis, made from the same grape but tasting very different. The best idea is to recognize the underlying difference in a particular wine, while recognizing that there are some unoaked Chardonnays from California and some very fruity Chablis from Burgundy.
What does it taste like? You both lift a glass of, say, Zinfandel. One tastes cherries when sipping it. The other is sure that the dominant flavor is dark chocolate. It’s amazing how suggestions alter perceptions. All of a sudden, when they mention their impressions, the cherries come through to one and the chocolate to the other. You both realize that what you smell is chocolate-covered cherries. Now, that’s a bit of an exaggeration but the point is valid. Consider what the other is smelling and tasting and your senses may begin to respond in the same way.
What does the winemaker say? One of the niceties of wine is that you can often read the winemaker’s opinion about aromas and tastes on the back of a bottle. (You can also find other people’s opinions on some restaurants’ lists and in critics’ commentary. But we’re talking about what you can do in a tasting room.) To be honest, we often find some of those comments to be ridiculous. Every time we read about road tar or pencil shavings, we grimace. But if one of you tastes plums and the other doesn’t, the winemaker can be a tie-breaker.
De gustibus non disputandem est. The ancient Romans had it right: There’s no arguing taste. And it may be that one person is actually incapable of tasting what the other does. For example, the smell of white pepper is a known characteristic of Syrah. But according to Decanter magazine, more than 20% of the population don’t have the taste receptors to detect the chemical that imparts that peppery taste.

As we have said before, disagreements about wine tasting are often a learning experience which we should take advantage of.

Tastings at the Wine Shop

It’s almost commonplace these days: We walk into a wine shop and there’s someone standing behind a little podium with a few open bottles of wine and a rack of glasses or more often small plastic cups. “Hi. Would you like to taste a little wine from <fill in the name of a wine region>?” The wine might come from anywhere, from California to Georgia (in Eastern Europe, not the American South). Our answer is generally, “Sure, why not?”

To be honest, the great majority of the time the wine on offer isn’t very good. We rarely say, “Wow! Let’s buy some.” Although there have been a few occasions when we have done that.

There are also some tastings held in wine shops that are a great deal more sophisticated. A representative of a winery arrives with bottles – sometimes cases – of various wines from their vineyards and sets up behind a makeshift bar. In these instances, shoppers sip one wine after the other, just as if they were in a tasting room somewhere in Wine Country, except that there is no charge for the tasting.

*Annie Shull, proprietor of Raptor Ridge Winery, serving at a wine tasting.*

We were recently in St. Paul, Minnesota and stopped by a shop called Solo Vino. The proprietor is Chuck Kanski, a friend of long standing. We always go to Solo Vino when we’re in town, to say hello and buy a few bottles. That day, he was hosting a wine maker from Raptor Ridge Winery in Oregon. She had brought a selection of six whites of various styles. We can sincerely say that we gained a pretty thorough understanding what her winery produces.

So far, we’ve been talking about free tastings. Then there are some stores that really dig into their inventories and offer a serious comparison tasting. We well remember an event at New York City’s Morrell wine store tasting of Châteauneuf-du-Pape; it was truly an education. There’s a store a short walk from our home called Le Dû. They just had a tasting of Iberian wines from all over the peninsula. We don’t remember the price for that CdP tasting, but the one at Le Dû cost $60.

There are many wine shops that have those gas-filled cases that pour a few ounces at the touch of a tap. We’ve enjoyed them at Union Square in New York and some SAQ stores in Québec. The selections are generally not extensive but often have high-quality wines on offer. There’s usually a fee for each pull of the tap and for the amount that pours out.

Finally, travelling in European corners of Wine Country, we have often encountered dégustations (or degustaziones) in towns like Béziers in France or Montalcino, Italy. Enterprising owners of local wine shops select a few bottles and open them as a sales pitch to get visitors to buy some more. The wines are all representative of the famous wines made there, but the quality is hit-or-miss. It all depends on the integrity of the proprietor. We’ve found that if we are truly interested, there’s something special just under the bar.

The overall point is to take advantage of wine tastings where you can find them. We often find them where we’re going to shop anyway.

“Value” Tastings

Over the years that we have been involved in wine tasting, there’s one thing we can say for sure: It has gotten a lot more expensive. On our earliest trips, tastings were free and you got to take the glass home with you. These days, the fees for the opportunity to sip top-tier wines can run into the hundreds of dollars per person.

There are several reasons why this is reprehensible, even if it is necessary for the financial health of the wineries. For one thing, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between the cost of the wines being served and the fees charged to taste them. If a bottle of “elite” wine costs, for instance, $100 then why does a chance to try four or five small pours – equivalent to about a glass – cost $125? We think it’s more a snob effect: Charge a lot and keep out the riff-raff. But they are also keeping out visitors eager to learn about fine wine as well as people with educated taste but more meager pocketbooks.

For those unwilling to pay the big bucks, there are alternatives that provide plenty of interesting wine tasting but don’t require a second mortgage to indulge in them. We term these “value” tastings.

Take the least expensive option offered in the tasting room. They say you should buy the worst house in the best neighborhood you can afford. The same may apply to wine tasting. For example, Beringer, a winery that we have enjoyed greatly over the years, charges $150 to sample the best of their current and library wines. But they also have tours and tastings that range from as low as $35. You won’t sip the best on the less expensive tastings, but you won’t get plonk either.
Or try the opposite approach. There are occasions where the best house in a lesser neighborhood works just fine. And there are wineries that don’t have the same cachet as the biggest names in the valley but are capable of making some better quality wines. Many of these are only available at the tasting room, so you can take advantage of them while you are there.
Manage your expectations. If you enter the tasting room looking forward to an exceptional wine adventure at a low price, you’re likely to be disappointed. But if you anticipate some good wine served in a pleasant environment by knowledgeable people, you will likely have a good time.
Ask a lot of questions. If you are a newbie to wine tasting, the questions will probably be rather elementary, which is just fine. A decent server will use the opportunity to explain some basics about wine making, different varietals and how to get the most pleasure out of a glass of wine. On the other hand, if you have some experience and are interested in gaining knowledge, the server may just discover a little bit of some better wines that just happen to be open and give you some little extras.

Twomey

When we talk about Twomey, we need to be very precise. For one thing, it’s just Twomey, not Twomey Cellars or Twomey Vineyards. There used to be two Twomey wine tasting experiences to be enjoyed, one in Calistoga in Napa Valley and the other in Sonoma county, on Westside Road in Healdsburg. Today, only the Russian River site remains.

Then there’s the issue of heritage. Twomey is owned by Silver Oak, renowned for their Cabernet Sauvignons. Our first encounter with Twomey was when they focused on Merlot, but somewhere along the line they switched to producing Pinot Noirs, which does make more sense for a winery located in Russian River. So, they took over a tasting room from a boutique winery called Stonegate, and that’s where they offer tastings to this day.

A tasting at Twomey begins with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. It seems that every winery in the area that specializes in red wines offers a little bit of white, just to show that they can. (Maybe it’s a California law.) The rest of a tasting focuses on Pinot Noir. More than that, each of the wines offered is from a single vineyard, which is a hallmark of Twomey’s wines. That said, we found a distinct style to Twomey’s various offerings. It’s not that they all taste the same, but there is a similarity. Since they grow or source from Oregon to the Central Coast, we infer that the hand of the winemaker is more dominant in their wines than is the terroir.

Many Sonoma County wineries buy their grapes from commercial vineyards and vinify the grapes themselves. It was once said that in Sonoma County, the farmer is king. That is still true to an extent, but there are also many wines that are made from estate grapes. Twomey’s wines fall into both categories. Their Sauvignon Blanc and the Pinot Noirs from Prince Hill Vineyard in Oregon and Monument Tree Vineyard in Anderson Valley are made from their own grapes. That doesn’t necessarily make them better. We preferred the wine sourced from Gary’s Vineyard in Santa Lucia Highlands, but then we are generally very fond of SLH wines.

*The Twomey tasting room in Russian River.*

The tasting room is a modern building of steel, wood and glass. The panoramic windows give onto a wide terrace, where tastings may be had in good weather. And beyond that is an expansive view of the northern end of the Russian River region. It would be easy to say “Forget the wine; come for the view” but the wine is worth a visit as well.

Maybe it’s because of the look and feel of the tasting room, but we found a tasting at Twomey to be a little cold and distant. The servers were professional and prompt, but not overly talkative. Now, there are some tasting rooms where we have wished that the server would just be quiet and let us enjoy our wine. But maybe Twomey’s staff have over-corrected in the other direction.

And, wonder of wonders, they still give you the glass with your tasting, and handsome glass it is!

Barcelona vs. Madrid

North American sports fans are used to regional rivalries: the Yankees vs. the Red Sox, the Canadiens against the Maple Leafs, Army vs. Navy. But there is probably none so famed, so deep in the fiber of the fans than FC Barcelona playing against Real Madrid in football (or futbol as they call it or soccer as we do). There is even a name for this annual game, El Clasico, the Classic.

In the spirit of this contest, coming up on May 10 this year, we offer a comparison of the two cities for wine tasters who’d like to include urban stops along with visits to vineyards.

Attractions – Any trip to Madrid must include a stop in the Plaza Mayor, the main public square dating back to the 16th century. Barcelona offers the Sagrada Familia, the monumental church designed in the 19^th century by Antonio Gaudi, nearly complete today. (One point for Barcelona.)
Art – In Barcelona you can visit museums dedicated to Picasso and Miro, which are wonderful. But Madrid has the world-renowned Prado for art of Spain’s imperial past and the Reina Sofia Museum for 20^th century art, plus the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. (One point to Madrid.)
Architecture – As we have written in a previous issue, much of Barcelona was created at the beginning of the 20^th century by Modernist architects, not the least of which was the aforementioned Gaudi. There are some interesting buildings in Madrid, but nothing to compare. (One point to Barcelona.)

*The Sherry Bar at the Plaza San Miguel in Madrid.*

Food markets – Madrid has the Mercato San Miguel. Barcelona has the Boqueria. The former is more of a food court with lots of stalls where you can try local Spanish food and wine, plus an extensive selection of Sherry to taste. The same is true at the Boqueria, but it is still just as much of a place to buy fruit, vegetables, fish and meat. (Slight edge to Barcelona, half a point.)
Restaurants – Both cities have great restaurants and both have places for tapas wherever one goes. We preferred the ones we went to in Barcelona but that’s simply a matter of taste. (A draw, no points awarded.)

*A performance at the Tablao Flamenco Cordobes in Barcelona.*

Flamenco – We happen to be aficionados of this quintessentially Spanish dance form. We have seen performances in tablaos (the petite theaters where flamenco is danced) in both cities. Every time we see the most talented Spaniards dancing in their own cities, we leave saying, “That was the best we’ve ever seen!”. (Another draw, no points awarded.)
Language – Surprise, surprise: They speak Spanish in Spain. But in Barcelona they also speak Catalan, which is a somewhat close language but not the same. In general, visitors can get around in English, but if you learned Spanish in school, this can make Barcelona confusing. (Slight edge to Madrid, half a point.)
Proximity to wine tasting – The most famous Spanish wine regions are the Douro and Ribera de Douro. Neither of them is close to either city. However, Catalunya is nearby Barcelona, especially the Penedes and Priorat sub-regions. There’s nothing comparable in easy driving distance of Madrid. (One point to Barcelona.)

So, if anyone has been keeping score, the edge goes to Barcelona. That’s our appreciation, but we urge you to visit both cities and decide for yourselves.

Barcelona: The Modernist Architecture

Barcelona is a wonderful, cosmopolitan city, sitting on the coast nestled among Spanish wine regions. Penedes, where sparkling Cava is made, is to the southwest and Priorat with its Garnacha wines, is just beyond. In fact if people make a trip anywhere in Spain for wine tasting, they would do well to make a stop in Barcelona, because of its many attractions.

In fact there are so many points of interest in Barcelona that it would take more than one article to talk about them all. So we will start with its architecture. The range of the city’s architecture is wide, with Gothic structures such as its cathedral to contemporary buildings such as the Torre Glóries. But the school of architecture known as Modernism was dominant in Barcelona in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and one man was dominant among the Modernist architects: Antonio Gaudi.

The as-yet unfinished Sagrada Familia basilica.

It is virtually impossible to visit Barcelona and not see Gaudi’s masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia basilica. It towers above rest of the city and is now the tallest church in the world. We say “now” because it is still under construction. Gaudi began work on it in 1883 and it was only a quarter finished at his death in 1926. Its spectacular soaring towers and fanciful decoration make it instantly recognizable. Tickets are needed to enter the basilica, but it’s free to walk around it in wonderment.

If that were all that Gaudi had designed, he would be a noted architect. But there are Gaudi creations all around Barcelona. Among the most famous are the Parque Güell, an urban park full of whimsical creatures covered in bright tiles that has delighted children (and former children) for more than a century. Another is the Casa Batlló, with its colorful tiled front and its curved balconies. Crowds assemble in front of every Gaudi building just to gawk.

Gaudi is the most renowned Modernist architect but he was hardly the only one. One of the best ways to take it all in is a stroll along the Passeig de Gràcia, Barcelona’s central thoroughfare. There you will indeed find work by Gaudi, the aforementioned Casa Batlló. For instance, immediately next door is the Casa Amatller by Josep Puig. It is as angular and neo-Gothic as Gaudi’s work is free and curvilinear. The contrast is both eye-catching and representative of the diversity of Modernism.

There are classical colonnades, very Spanish grillwork and massive office buildings one beside the other as you walk along the Passeig. Some of them are occupied and functioning as intended, others are essentially museums because of their beauty. Sometimes, it’s enough just to sit on a bench and soak it all in, from the entirety of this fabulous street to ornate details that transform a building front into a work of art. And Barcelona’s almost perpetual blue skies make it all sparkle.

Using Artificial Intelligence for Wine Tasting

Artificial Intelligence seems to be everywhere these days, so why not for wine tasting? The one thing AI doesn’t have and never will is taste, in both senses of the word. Chatbots can’t taste wine and even if they could, they don’t have the good taste to tell the difference between fine wine and plonk. They can only provide information from what has been written about wine, not the beverage itself.

Photo courtesy of Wine Industry Sales Education.

Nonetheless, it can be a helpful tool if someone is planning or is actually on a wine tasting trip. Here are some tips that we have taken advantage of in our wine tasting adventures.

AI can suggest places to visit. This is particularly helpful if you are planning on tasting in a region of Wine Country where you’ve never been before or, even more so, if you know little or nothing about the wines made there. There’s no reason to let ChatGPT or Gemini determine where you should go, but they can shorten the time to get started in selecting wineries to visit.
Be careful what you ask. It all depends on the prompts you enter. If you ask, “What are the best wineries in Bordeaux?” you’ll be directed to the Premier Crus and their equivalents. That’s good advice, as long as you don’t mind the expense of only visiting the top wineries. If you ask “What are the best wineries for wine tasting in Bordeaux?” you’ll get a different list, still very fine wines to try, but less exclusive. And if you enter the prompt “What are the best values for money in wineries for wine tasting in Bordeaux?” you’ll be offered still another list of châteaux. All in all, it pays to think about what you want to do and be specific in your requests.
Don’t trust the answers you get. Or at least, don’t trust them blindly. AI chatbots have the nasty habit of just making things up. If the reply that you get mentions a winery you’re familiar with, all well and good. But if it’s a name you never heard of, that may be because it doesn’t exist. So go from the chatbot to the web sites of the recommended wineries and both verify the accuracy of the AI response and learn more about a potential visit.
Don’t rely on just one AI tool. Each one has a different algorithm and data model, so you’ll get different answers from Claude than from CoPilot than from Grok… It isn’t that one is more dependable than the others; it’s just that they’re different. It’s just like asking two friends for recommendations. They’re unlikely to be exactly the same. But note the recommended wineries that come up on multiple chatbots. That’s indicative that a particular winery will be a good destination.
And you can ask it about lunch after the tasting. If you don’t know about wines in a given area, you probably don’t know about restaurants, either. All the tips above apply. If you choose one, AI can give you driving instructions from a tasting room to a café.

Ramey Wine Cellars

Winemaking is part farming, part manufacturing and part art. A visit to Ramey Wine Cellars (https://www.rameywine.com) is very much involved with the latter two, but visitors don’t get to see anything about the farming aspect except a map of where they grow and source their grapes. Ramey’s winery is in an area with homes and office buildings, and Ramey looks from the outside like one of those offices. You won’t see lush vineyards and their location in Healdsburg isn’t even in the middle of the attractive area of town around the plaza.

Located where they are, Ramey doesn’t get any visitors who just happen to be walking by and tastings are truly by appointment only. The result is those who do make reservations are greeted and treated personally. We were met and escorted by Sam Tesconi, the Director of Marketing and Guest Relations. We were the only visitors at that time.

On entering their facility, one sees a large, open room with gleaming steel tanks and a variety of other equipment. There is also a ceramic aging tank that they’re very proud of. The barrel room, like the entire facility, is spotless. For educational purposes, there’s one barrel with a glass head, to allow visitors to see their Chardonnay resting on the lies, which they periodically shake up to maximize the contact with the wine.

Then it’s off to a tasting – a rather generous one – in one of the six private rooms reserved for that purpose. We were seated at a long wooden table where places were set with six glasses of wine, two whites and two reds. We sat down and Mr. Tesconi explained the makeup of each wine and the vineyards from which they came. Ramey makes wine from both estate and sourced grapes, mostly from Sonoma County but also in Napa Valley and Central Coast.

Ramey aspires to wine greatness and, while Power Tasting doesn’t review wines, we can say that we enjoyed what we tasted very much. They are best known for their Chardonnays, two of which were served. There was a notable difference between the wines from Sonoma Coast and Russian River. The reds were a Pinot Noir, a Syrah and two Cabernet Sauvignons. Each one had a distinctive character with some stylistic similarity. It would be hard to pick out one that we would call a clear favorite.

Most tastings feature recent releases with a few years from harvest. Rarely do we get to taste a winery’s top wines. In this case, while the white wines and the Pinot Noir were from the 2022 harvest, the reds all had at least seven years of aging and one, the Cabernet Sauvignon from Pedregal Vineyard in Oakville, was from 2014. We really felt as though we had been introduced to what Ramey wines were all about.

When we visited Ramey, we got a very informative, personable tasting of some rather good wines. It really didn’t matter that we had to forego the scenery.

Mass Producers

Sometimes in Power Tasting we have used the term “mass producers” with a bit of a sneer. That’s unfortunate, both because it’s a bit snobby and because it’s not fair. There’s no definition as to what constitutes “mass”. Sure, a vineyard that grows enough for 5,000 cases or less is small (or perhaps the winemakers would prefer the term “petite”). But does mass start with 10,000 cases? 100,000? A million?

*The Gallo factory in Fresno, California. Photo courtesy of the Fresno Bee.*

Yes, Gallo turns out 70 million or more cases of wine a year and they certainly are America’s largest producers. Most of the wines they make are intended for people who are not sophisticated wine drinkers. But Gallo also owns numerous labels and some of them make wine of a pretty high quality. One of these is J, producer of some pretty good sparkling wine that we have enjoyed. To be fair, these days we don’t buy wine under the Gallo label. But we sure did when we were younger.

But we do buy Moët & Chandon Champagne. They make 2.5 million cases annually and that’s still pretty massive. And that doesn’t include their Chandon bottlings from California and Argentina, which probably add up to the same number of cases. Of course, the best price we have seen for Moët & Chandon is around $45; there are Gallo wines that sell for less than five dollars.

The point is that quantity is not necessarily relevant to quality in judging wines. And for those of us who enjoy wine tasting, we should not avoid visiting the tasting rooms of the larger producers just as a matter of principle. There are several reasons for this.

One is that makers of lower priced wines often have higher-end lines as well. Perhaps there is no better example of this than Guigal in the Northern Rhône, that makes a Côtes du Rhône that sells for under twenty dollars and top-ends such as La Mouline, La Landonne, La Turque, and La Reynard that are among the most coveted wines in the world. In the US, Louis M. Martini (a Gallo label, by the way) sells a lot of their low-price Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon but are now making some quite respectable higher-end wines. And for that matter, the Sonoma Cab is a quite respectable wine for picnics and barbecues or Tuesdays.

Another reason to visit some of the bigger wineries is that even though they primarily sell inexpensive, lower quality wine, the owners often give their winemakers some latitude to choose the best grapes and make a more crafted wine that is sold only at the tasting room. We have had that experience once at Clos du Val in Napa Valley, which at that time was making 90,000 cases, surely enough to be called mass producers.

Finally, it might make sense to visit a tasting room of a mass producers because there are times that we might be looking for what we call “Tuesday wine”. Alas, we don’t open Mouton or Lafitte every night at our house; sometimes a simple red is just fine. And it helps to try them before we buy them.

To Buy or Not to Buy

As mentioned elsewhere in this issue, we often buy wine to take home when we go wine tasting. It seems like a simple proposition: We try it; we like it; we buy it. But in fact, there’s more that goes into the decision. If you, like us, are looking to purchase some wine on your trips, here are a few things to consider.

*Photo courtesy of Highway 29 Creative.*

Can you find it in wine shops near your home? There’s no point in lugging bottles around on a vacation or paying to ship them if you can just walk around the corner and buy the same wines. It’s more likely that lower-priced, mass-production wines will be available locally than top-end wines, even from the same producer. If you’re not sure, look up the web site of your favorite store or call them. You can also use an application such as winesearcher.com to find out if that wine is sold near you.
Are you a member of the winery’s club? One of the advantages of joining a wine club is that you get free tastings at the winery. Since we know we’ll enjoy the wines they serve (or we never would have joined in the first place) we generally take them up on the offer. But why buy wines that you know will be shipped to us a few months hence? That’s particularly true of wines that are restricted for sale only to members.
Is the wine only available in the tasting room? We have found that some producers that sell their wines widely also give their winemakers the chance to make a low-production wine from the best grapes reserved each year for that purpose. The amount made is so low that they can’t even send it to all their members and only make it available to visitors. So if you like it, you may want to take advantage of being there at the right time for a special deal.
Do you enjoy the wine as it is? This seems like a silly question, but wine changes over time. For example, we prefer to age fine wine from Bordeaux for at least eight years from the vintage. If we’re tasting in that region, we know the wines offered to us will be young and nowhere near the peak quality that gives the label it’s reputation. So we buy on the wines’ potential. We use the clef du vin to get an idea of what it’s going to be.
Do you have the patience (and the place) to age your purchases? If not, hesitate to buy wines that demand time. You might forego Cabernet Sauvignons in favor of Zinfandels that are often at their best a few years from the time the grapes were picked. As a general rule, white wines need less cellaring than reds, so for example if you find a Chenin Blanc that really appeals to you, buy that instead the same winery’s Syrah.