August 2025 – Power Tasting – The Wine Tasting Experience

Old and New Wines

A new car is the pride and joy of your driveway. There’s a special feeling when you put on a new suit. But tasting new wines doesn’t always bring the same enjoyment. There’s such a thing as a wine that’s too new. We once had the experience of a private visit to a fine winery in Bordeaux, in September. The grapes had just been pressed and the juice had been fermented only a few days before. Our host, with a subtle smile, gave us a little taste. Ugh! It was awful, although we knew that in the years to come it would become wonderful.

That’s an extreme case of a truism: Wine improves over time. Like so many truisms, this one comes with lots of exceptions. Some wines improve over time. At a certain point they stop improving. Beyond that point, many of them become worse. And then a lot worse.

The cellar at Volpaia in Tuscany.

For the most part, wineries offer the latest releases for their wine tastings. There is an implied commitment that once the wine is put up for sale, it’s drinkable. Fair enough, but that doesn’t mean it’s at its peak. Many wineries offer tastings of so-called library wines, of older vintages that are supposed to show what the potential these wines have for improvement over time.

Here are a few tips for balancing the new and the old wines you might have the opportunity to sip when you visit a winery.

Use your imagination. As you taste a recently released wine – or even better, if you are offered a barrel tasting – mentally trick your nose and tongue into recognizing what a wine could be, beyond what it is. Wine critics and importers do this all the time. Oh, you’re not a critic or an importer? Do your best or consider some of these other tips.
“Age” the wine artificially. As we have written previously, we bring a clef du vin (or wine key) with us. This handy little tool simulates the aging process, giving an idea of what a wine might become. There’s no way to know if it creates the exact tastes and aromas that will be there five years hence, but it gives you an idea.
Compare a library wine to the current bottling. The 2023 Cabernet Sauvignon may be delightful, but the 2010 of the same grape is profound. Or not. Some people prefer the youthful exuberance of newly bottled wines to old, tired stuff. Then there are those who won’t open a bottle for the first decade after the grapes were picked. There’s nothing like a side-by-side comparison to calibrate your palate.
Don’t be afraid to voice your opinion. Just because you paid extra to sip a vintage from yesteryear doesn’t force you to prefer it. And if you liked the older wine at one vineyard more than another, that’s okay too. It’s okay to speak your mind, but do so quietly if you’re not a fan of the library wine you’re tasting. Of course, if you do think the older wine is fantastic, say so openly and with gusto.

The Ferry Building

For many Americans (and visitors from abroad as well, for that matter), wine tasting in the US means a trip to Napa Valley and maybe Sonoma County if they’re adventurous. There are other vineyard areas dotted around California, but these are surely the Big Two. If visitors do not reside in Northern California, they probably arrive by air, usually at San Francisco International Airport (SFO). Then, as we often do, they drive north to either the Golden Gate or the Bay Bridge, barely passing through San Franciso itself.

Photo courtesy of the Ferry Building Marketplace.

That’s a shame, because San Francisco is a beautiful city with many attractions. It’s worth taking a day or so away from wine tasting and stop at the City on the Bay. (Actually, there are two; Oakland is on the same bay. But as Gertrude Stein said of the second city, there’s no there there.) We’d like to present one of our favorite stops in Frisco (a San Francisco term the locals hate): the Ferry Building.

It is a handsome building with a clock tower that once was a highlight of the San Francisco skyline. All the tall buildings obscure it now, but it still is a central part of the harbor. Its original use, as the name implies, was to provide an entry point to the city for ferry boats arriving and departing from all points of the bay. At the height of its usage, thousands of passengers passed through every day and the grand hall of the building, known as the Nave, was used for baggage and freight handling.

When the two bridges were erected, ferry traffic abated and the Ferry Building fell into disrepair. Then in the early 2000s, the building was lovingly repaired, restored and reopened as a marketplace, while still acting as the terminus for ferry traffic, which has once more picked up in popularity.

Photo courtesy of Project for Public Spaces.

Today, the Ferry Building is a foodie’s wonderland. There are a few bakeries (think sourdough), a charcuterie, a fromagerie (cheese shop) that sells all the Cowgirl Creamery cheeses and a shop that sells just mushrooms. Don’t overlook the chocolatery, the patisserie, the empanada maker, the Japanese deli, and, and, and…Oh, yes, and the wine shop.

The Farmers Market is open year-round on Saturdays and hosts more than 100 stalls featuring the produce that Northern California is famous for. (Yes, they grow fruits and vegetables there, other than grapes.) One nice little feature of the Saturday market is what they call the Veggie Valet, where you can temporarily drop off your purchases, while you dine or tour around. There are also smaller markets on Tuesday and Thursday markets. The city estimates that 25,000 people shop at the Farmers Market every week.

There are a number of restaurants in the Ferry building that we have enjoyed, although each visit seem to offer a different roster. One of them is the same Gott’s Roadside that we enjoy in St. Helena in Napa Valley. We miss the Slanted Door, our favorite Vietnamese restaurant anywhere, that didn’t make it through the pandemic. We understand that there are plans to reopen it soon.

Sure, we understand the urge to get right out to the vineyards. But give your heart a chance to be left in San Francisco as well.

Brick Barn Wine Estate

There’s a wide variety of wine tasting experiences that one can experience. They include from quiet, almost meditational tastings in ancient facilities. Others are like a night out or a visit to a family home. And some just seem dedicated to fun, however one defines that word. Brick Barn, in our opinion, fits into that latter category.

One of the patios at Brick Barn, showing the Spanish influence on the architecture.

The winery sits in Buellton, nestled in the Santa Rita Hills. It is a new operation, founded in 2018. The winery itself is a handsome, Spanish mission-inspired building, with a very large capacity for tasting visitors. That size, and the variety of venues at Brick Barn define the wine tasting experience there.

The bar area at Brick Barn.

Let us describe several different experiences to be had at Brick Barn. The first is a rather traditional. There’s a tasting room with a bar, where you can enjoy a selection of their recent bottlings. The selection of wines is quite varied, about which more later. The tasting room itself is beautiful, with a large bar decorated in tiles reflecting both Spanish and Native American heritage. The chandeliers and the assortment of interesting shopping add to the pleasure of the room.

The lounge area.

Visitors can have their wines served in another large room, decorated to resemble a private club. It invites consideration of what’s in the glass and low-voiced conversation about it. We have reason to believe that there is no rule of silence, however.

Tasting, picnicking, trees and views.

Then there are the three patios outside. Here you can sit under umbrellas and spreading trees, admiring the views of Brick Barn’s vineyards and the Santa Ynez mountains beyond them. (The parking lot in between doesn’t spoil the pleasure. After all, the cars have to go somewhere.) Visitors are invited to bring picnics, enjoy their tastings of a buy a bottle, and simply relax. If that’s your idea of fun (and it is ours) Brick Barn is the place for it.

Finally, there’s party time. Brick Barn is open most days from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. In other words, it is the place to go for tourists and locals alike at the end of the day. Happy hour can be very happy there and the tasting facilities can become a bit crowded. There’s live music on weekdays and we’re told that the joint rocks until closing time. It’s not our thing, but if it is yours, party hardy.

Brick Barn makes an enormous variety of wines: ten whites, two rosés, four sparkling wines and eight reds, plus four that they consider their top-tier wines, which they call Fatalist. (In our opinion, that’s not the most alluring name for a wine.) This variety is both a strength and a weakness. It pretty much assures that any visitor will find a type of wine that they enjoy. But, as we have said before about other areas of Wine Country, making too many types of wine often undercuts the ability to make anything particularly well.

We fear that that’s the case at Brick Barn. Their wines aren’t to our taste, but that’s unimportant. We write about the tasting experience, which is excellent there. We’re not wine critics and evidently many people like the wines there. So, if you’re in the Santa Rita Hills, you can have fun at Brick Barn.

Dégustation, Degustazione or Whatever

Often as we travel in Europe, we visit towns that are central (or at least near) to the area’s winemaking. The one thing they all have in common is that they are heavily visited by tourists. These have included Taormina in Sicily, Beaune in France and Dubrovnik in Croatia. Often, as we walk around the towns, we see signs that say, “Dégustation” or the equivalent in the local language. Degustation is an English word that means “tasting”, so the shops that the signs are in front of could be bakeries or delis, but they’re always in front of wine shops.

A scene from the film, La Dégustation.

There are always bars that we could go to – and have gone to – where we could sample the local wines. We well remember such a bar in Épernay, France with four glasses of Champagne lined up on our table. But that’s not what a Dégustation is. Nor is it a bistro with a good list of wines by the glass. It’s a store, where people can go in and buy bottles.

When talking about wine, a Dégustation is, as the word implies, a wine tasting. It’s not at a winery and in fact it usually consists of a selection of wines from the vendor’s stock. They are meant to show off the best, or at least typical, wines of the region where the shop is located. A good one really does highlight top wines. Others are more likely to feature bottles that the shop is trying to get rid of. (You can almost hear the shop owner saying, “Heck, they’re only tourists. They won’t know the difference and I’ll never see them again.”)

We’ve run into both types. How can we tell the difference? In most instances, we’ve never been to that town before and are unlikely to go there again. And we don’t know the wines on offer. So all we could do is try our luck, winning sometimes and not in other cases.

As said, Dégustations are not bars. Customers pay a flat fee for four or five tastes. In this way they differ from Italian enotecas, where we could also buy wines by the bottle, for consumption on-site or back home. But in enotecas, we could buy wines by the glass.

One virtue of Dégustations is that the vendor often acts not only as a seller of his own wines but as an educator on the wines of the region. For example, there are plenty of Degustaziones in Montalcino. We know in advance that the shop will be serving Brunellos, because that’s what they make in that Tuscan village and its environs. Ah, but which ones? We are familiar with a few and we enjoy a good Brunello, but we’re hardly expert enough to know which are the best and which are just ordinary. So we listen as the shopkeeper explains the climate and soil conditions around the village and how they affect the aromas and tastes of each wine. If we show a little interest – even better, buy a bottle or two – the server is likely to open some extra wines, to tempt us further.

Dégustations are not better than visiting wineries, but if we are on a trip where we don’t have wheels, they’re a great opportunity to become acquainted with the wines made where we happen to be.