In the United States, we drink a lot of wine produced domestically, more from California than from the other states. For the most part the wines we drink are made from grapes brought over from France. The Bordeaux and Burgundy grapes are the most popular, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. But the borders of Wine Country are far more extensive, even within Europe.
The Georgians age their wines in amphorae, just as the ancient Greeks and Romans did. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.
In recent years, Americans have been eager to try wines from new places. Of course, Italy and Spain have always been a part of American wine drinking, but German Riesling and Austrian Grüner Veltliner have increasingly been appearing on wine lists and on store shelves. But what about Saperavi from Georgia in the Caucasus? Or Feteasca Neagra (or the “Dark Maiden”) from Romania? Hungarian Kékfrankos, anyone?
We recently had the opportunity to taste a lot of wines from countries where we didn’t know that wine was made, from grapes we never heard of, including those just mentioned. It forced us to think about how to deal with such unique tastings.
- Start with an open mind. Just because we hadn’t heard of these wines shouldn’t have made us presuppose anything about them. The producers of many of them were eager to inform us that wine had been produced in their country for thousands of years, so if it was good enough for the Romans, why not us, too? And indeed many had distinctive aromas and tastes that weren’t quite like anything we’d tasted before.
- Consider the history. Yes, there was wine in these parts of Wine Country a millennium ago, but what about recently? In a number of cases we were told that after World War II, their entire export market was to Russia, where wine drinkers prefer sweetness in their glasses. Accordingly, most native vines – not all – were pulled up and replaced with more familiar grapes that were left to over-ripen. Post Cold War, the local grapes were replanted, so that what is now available on the market is made from relatively young vines.
- Judge the wines on their own merits. Not everything was great; a few were awful; and most were interesting but not on a par, to our tastes, with better Californian and Western European wines. But so what? Okay, we’d never tasted Saperavi, so these were the best we ever had. And they were quite pleasant, something we’d like to try again with, say, stuffed peppers such as distant Romanian relatives once made for us.
- Quietly compare these grapes with what you know. We found a great deal of similarity of some of these wines with those from grapes we were more familiar with, especially Syrah. Syrah is a very adaptable grape, producing very different tastes depending on the terroir, so maybe that connection was only in our minds. Or was it some deep-seated ancestry? We certainly don’t know, but this reference did enable us to think of the kinds of food that each strange grape would go well with, i.e., the same ones we would choose to go with Syrah.