Category: Wine Tasting Tips

It’s not news that 2011 was a terrible year for California wines. Don’t just take our word for it; Wine Spectator said that “the 2011 growing season was simply nasty for many California winegrowers.”   It was cold. It rained when it shouldn’t have and didn’t rain when it should have. This should be a warning to those who would like to visit Northern California’s Wine Country over the next year or so.

It’s not that you’ll only be served “lousy” wine. For one thing, it has long been said that there’s bad wine in good years and good wine in bad ones. We’ve tasted some pretty good wine from that troubled vintage. Turnbull’s Fortuna Vineyard wines and Caymus Special Selection are good examples. When we tasted the Caymus, it had just been released. It was pretty good and generally this wine improves with aging.

Some wineries decided not to make their top wines that year, so there is no 2011 Etude Heirloom Pinot Noir or Conn Creek Anthology available for tasting. Other vineyards tried to tough it out and, in our opinion, made wines that don’t live up to their heritages, although they still cost the same as in better years.

Visitors should approach each winery with informed caution. By all means, taste the 2011s if that’s what’s on offer. If you like them, so much the better. If you don’t, that’s a part of the educational experience as well. It’s as valuable to know what you don’t like as what you do like.

If you’re not happy with what you’re tasting, or you’re not sure, say so and ask if they have an earlier vintage to try, for comparison’s sake. Most wineries have older bottles and would rather open one than let you leave dissatisfied. We call our blog Power Tasting because we believe the visitor has a right to question and compare. In most tasting rooms, you pay a substantial amount to taste the better wines. You ought to get your money’s worth.

When you do compare two vintages of the same wine, ask for two glasses and taste them side by side. While it’s true that extra time in the bottle will improve many wines, you’ll still get a good idea how two different vintages are alike and how they vary.   Since they’re from the same vineyard and crafted by the same winemaker, the difference has to be in the conditions that come from the weather. The knowledge that comes from learning to distinguish these differences in your own mouth is one of the things that makes wine tasting so exciting.

Standing at a bar in a tasting room with children around?   Is it any different than standing at your favorite local bar having a glass of wine with children around?

Children and bars are not a good fit.  However, there are some wineries that are kid-friendly and this will be the subject of another blog post.   But let’s put it this way: here you are in Wine Country standing at a bar listening to the winery employee describing the wine that is being served.  Just as you’re going to taste you suddenly hear children screaming or crying.  Believe us, we have experienced this exact scenario and it’s very unpleasant.  It ruins the experience of going wine tasting.  Wine tasting is for adults, period.

We had a particularly unpleasant experience at Artesa Vineyards and Winery in Carneros.  We had been there a few times before and we loved the place, particularly the view of the valley and the architecture of the winery, both of which are spectacular. Artesa has redesigned the tasting room, which is very large, and put some little tables and chairs (though it now looks more like a bar than a tasting room).  The day we went it was crowded, extremely noisy and we were trying to make our way to the bar to get some wine to taste.  Besides having a problem getting the attention of the staff to taste some wine, there were little kids crawling on the floor around us.  Others were running around while their parents were drinking, not paying attention to the children.  We actually had to ask one mother to stop her toddler from crawling between our legs!    The winery personnel were not managing the crowd; those at the bar were so busy pouring wine that they had no time to talk about the wine they were pouring.  So between the kids and the servers, it ended up as two bad experiences. It spoiled the entire visit for us.

Here’s another example.  Once we were in Paso Robles in Central Coast and we are driving in front of Grey Wolf Cellars. It looks more like a private house than a winery. Just from curiosity we stopped to see what they had to offer.  The tiny tasting room was full of beautiful antiques.  Then a couple with their two children came in.  The kids began to touch everything they could reach and trying to play with a guitar that was displayed there.  The woman who was pouring wine was paying more attention to the kids than the customers in front of her.  She stepped out of the bar to stop the children touching the antiques.  It wasn’t surprising that the parents did not see it, because they were busy tasting wine and not paying attention to what their children were doing.  Tasting rooms are for adults, not for children.

All wineries have gift shops. Many sell fragile merchandise such as glasses or chinaware. So imagine kids playing around while their parents are tasting wine.  Many times we’ve experienced children running around in the tasting rooms and gift shops like it was a Toys ‘R’ Us.

So please, if you absolutely want to take your kids in Wine Country, make a few phone calls beforehand to make sure that the winery you want to visit is kid-friendly.  Or read our upcoming post on the subject!

Lucie is writing this blog post.  Steve can smell all the aromas in a glass of wine but can’t smell perfume!

We are both very strong on the following advice: please everyone, guys and gals, do not travel with your bottle of perfume, cologne or after-shave when you go wine tasting.   Leave it at home when you go to Wine Country.  Perfume detracts from your tasting experience as well as that of those around you.

The idea of going wine tasting is to taste and smell the wines.  Perfume blocks all the wonderful aromas of what has been poured in your glass.  And since most of what we humans taste comes from our sense of smell, you don’t get the true flavor of the wine either.

Recently, we were at Joseph Phelps Vineyards in St. Helena.  While they are undergoing renovations at the winery, they were offering tastings under a marquee, outside besides the vineyard, below the winery.  Phelps is one of our favorite wineries in Napa Valley   When we reserved for our wine tasting, we were not told that the tasting room and patio where we had been many times before was being renovated. It was a surprise but not a good one.

Worst of all, there was a woman standing beside us at the bar wearing such a powdery perfume, I had to move away from her.  Unfortunately the scent of her perfume was all around, even if we were outside; imagine what it would have been like indoors.   Some smaller wineries have very small tasting rooms; her perfume would have been totally overwhelming.

Smelling that perfume made our tasting experience so unpleasant that it completely ruined Lucie’s visit, unable to get the bouquet and the taste of the wines being served… because of that perfume!

We insist that it is not only women we’re talking about, but men also.    Leave the Old Spice at home, guys.  When you taste wine, what you smell is as important as what you have in your mouth, so let’s all enjoy it to the maximum.

Cheers!

You are standing at a bar in a beautiful tasting room and a nice person pours you a glass of wine. You taste it, maybe you like it…and then you get rid of it!!??!! Yes, that is exactly what you should do, for a number of reasons. Maybe you didn’t like it. Maybe you were more interested in the reds than the whites. Most important if you want to taste a variety of wines at several vineyards, you can’t drink all the wine that will be served because you’ll get drunk. Every taster should know his or her limitations and getting to the bottom of every glass is going to hurry you along to your limit more quickly than you probably want.

For that reason, wineries leave buckets on the counter. Known unglamorously as spit buckets, their purpose is for discarding unwanted wine. If the wineries didn’t think they would be used, they wouldn’t put them there. Or looking at it the other way around, they put spit buckets there just so that you will use them. You don’t want to be drunk, and the wineries even more so don’t want you getting drunk on their premises.

People who taste wine for a living, such as wine makers and shop owners, taste a lot of wine at one time and have little choice but to discard most of it. They drink some wine, slosh it around their mouths and spit it into the bucket. We’ve seen it; we’ve done it once or twice; and believe us, it’s not an edifying spectacle. Try to imagine if everyone…on second thought, don’t try to imagine it.

In most cases, we share a tasting. So one of us breathes in the aroma, takes a sip and passes it to the other. The second one does the same thing and asks the first, “Would you like a little more?” If the answer is no, that one unobtrusively pours the remainder into the waiting bucket. Even if the glass was generously filled, we get rid of it, feeling no obligation to drink it all.

And the wineries don’t care. Don’t be embarrassed or feel that you’re insulting either the server or the winemaker by pouring away perfectly good wine. They want you to taste their wine, and once you’ve tasted it, it’s okay if you don’t taste it all.

Sometimes we just don’t like the wine they poured. So we pour it away, without ceremony or commentary, exactly as we would do if we really liked it. We pace ourselves for the one or two wines that we do want to drink all of. We sometimes ask servers not to pour us too much, precisely because we know we will use the bucket. Almost invariably, the server will say, “Oh, don’t worry about it”. They want us to get the full effect of their products, the look, the aroma, the aeration we achieve by swirling it in our glass. That’s not really possible with three millimeters at the bottom.

A healthy pour doesn’t have to be a healthy swig. That’s what the bucket is for. So use it.