lgsjr – Page 2 – Power Tasting – The Wine Tasting Experience

Managing Wine Clubs

Over the course of years, we have been members of at least 20 wine clubs (not all at the same time). These clubs are effectively an agreement for the members to buy a case of wine each year from each sponsoring winery. In return for that commitment, you get a discount, normally 20%, and free tastings when you are at the winery. In addition, in many clubs there are events that members may attend, almost all of which entail plentiful servings of their wines. If you like the wines a particular winery makes, joining the club makes good sense.

Loading the truck. Photo courtesy of August Hill Winery.

However, when you join you quickly learn that there are matters that require management on your part, eating up time and detracting from the pleasure of having fine wines delivered to your home.

You like some of the wines, but not all. Some clubs allow you a degree of specificity, such as only red wines or only certain varietals. But many have a policy of sending you what they want to send (that you must pay for). If customization is permitted, that means that when you receive the notification of an upcoming shipment, you need to make decisions about which ones you want and don’t want, replacing them with other wines and communicating these choices to the club’s designated contact (often nowadays the “ambassador”. Thus are wine snobs made).
You won’t be home for a delivery. If you know at the time of ordering that you will be traveling, you can notify the club contact. Most are accommodating to your schedule. When you get a notice that a shipment is on the way, you usually get the tracking number from the shipping company so you can track your order. But then you (or someone) must arrange to be at home to receive the wines, which usually means the whole day.
You want to speak with someone at the club. Some wine clubs, alas not the majority, are eager to engage in person with their members. They’re available by phone, they reply to emails and know more about wine than order numbers and ship dates. In all too many instances, so we’ve found, the contacts disappear between shipments. It’s just frustrating and this type of difficulty has sometimes been the reason we’ve quit certain clubs.
You’ve become tired of their wines. With a few exceptions, we resign from our clubs after two or three years. No matter how much you liked the wines at the beginning of your membership, you may not like what they send you at the rate of a case a year. Especially if you’ve been buying age-worthy wines, they begin to accumulate in your cellar. The expense of club membership may deter you from drinking other wines you know and like. Yes, you can quit, but that means remembering to put it in writing and checking that your resignation didn’t get lost somewhere in the winery’s back office.

All this may make it sound like wine clubs aren’t worth the effort. With membership in five or six at a time, we are definitely advocates of joining clubs at wineries you love. Just remember that there’s work on your end, too.

Sarlat

In writing about Sarlat, we need to be rather specific. We’re talking about Sarlat-la-Canéda, located in the Dordogne region of France. Names can be a bit tricky in France; there are at least three other villages named Sarlat and the Dordogne is also known by its more ancient name, the Perigord. (We Americans shouldn’t sneer. There are 41 US cities and towns named Springfield.)

The Place de la Liberté in Sarlat. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

There are three reasons to visit Sarlat and its environs: architecture, gastronomy and history. The architecture of Sarlat is that of a well-maintained medieval village. Before the French Revolution, Sarlat was a large commercial center but later the trains passed it by, commerce died out and it fell into disrepair. André Malraux, the novelist and Minister of Culture in the 1960’s poured funding into Sarlat for its restoration. Today, visitors can wander narrow cobblestoned streets and view homes and businesses looking much as they did in the 15^th century. The focus of interest is the main square, the Place de la Liberté, which is ringed by shops selling things to the tourists, where markets are held on Saturday and Wednesday mornings.

A typical Sarlat foie gras shop. Photo courtesy of Sarlat Tourisme.

There are more than shops on the square and in the town. There is food, often with the most famous products of the region around Sarlat: truffles and foie gras. Dishes served perigourdine are flavored with those back gastronomic diamonds: truffes noires or black truffles. There are other locales in France where truffles are found, not grown. (See Power Tasting’s article about Carpentras.) Truffles go so well with foie gras, and foie gras is really what Sarlat is all about,. You can have it so many ways: sautéed, au torchon, mi-cuit, entier, pâté, terrine. And they’re all for sale in Sarlat’s shops, along with implements like silver knives that looks a bit like coping saws for slicing foie gras and silver spatulas for serving it.

If you travel just outside Sarlat, you can visit farms where they raise the ducks and geese that are used for foie gras. Yes, we know the arguments for the mistreatment of these birds, but from what we’ve seen, they look pretty well taken care of right up to the end. And a flock of geese running around and honking like mad is a natural comedy show.

And as long as you’re traveling outside Sarlat, take in a little of the history of the region. The most ancient on view is at the famous cave at Lascaux, full of prehistoric paintings. Actually, you can’t see the actual cave, because exposure was erasing the artwork. But they have built an exact replica nearby. More recent, there are the châteaux of Beynac and Castelnaud…only 900 years old. They face each other across a broad valley, and during wars of the Middle Ages, they fired back and forth at each other. At Castelnaud you can actually see replicas of the weapons they used in those days.

It isn’t easy to get to Sarlat. It’s almost a three-hour drive from the Bordeaux airport and 2½ hours by train. You can shave off an hour if you start from St. Emilion. However you get to Sarlat, it’s worth the trip.

Talking About Wine

Power Tasting has written before about the perils of wine snobbery. It’s an affront to politeness and often to the people in front of whom the snob is showing off. But conversing about wines with friends and acquaintances who are knowledgeable about wine is a pleasure that should not be avoided either. In fact, with a certain circle of our friends, we know that every get-together is going to include discussions about wine.

Photo courtesy of Skurnick Wines & Spirits.

No one is trying to one-up the other. Still, we can drop phrases like “a high degree of malo*” into conversation and know that we will be understood. It is fascinating to sit around a dinner table and hear others expressing their opinions about aromas and tastes, some of which each person agrees with and others that lead to statements like, “Are you sure we’re drinking the same wine?” We trust our own senses and have faith in those of our friends, so such a discussion is informative, not confrontational.

There are particular lessons to be learned when one person is particularly familiar with a specific wine or wines from lesser known grapes or regions. We, for instance, can speak knowledgeably about Quebecois dessert wines, since we spend a fair amount of time in the Quebec province. And if someone else can compare them with, say, ice wines from Ontario or Germany, so much the better.

A few problems can arise when the conversation drifts towards wines. If everyone in the room has a roughly equivalent degree of knowledge, that’s okay. But it does risk slipping into rather boring discussions after a while. This is even more the case if not everyone is at the same level or, even worse, some don’t really care about wine at all. By comparison, imagine being in a room full of Yankee fans and not only you don’t root for the Bombers, but you don’t know left field from first base. The line between knowledge and snobbery is a fine one and might differ depending on the observer.

The way to make a wine conversation more amenable for everyone is to avoid specialist terminology and talk about one’s own impressions. Many people are in the dark when someone says that a wine evokes, say, warm buttered toast. But when those same people are offered two wines from the same grape and asked to dig down a bit to differentiate them, their taste buds go to work.

If, for example, they are offered a California Chardonnay and a Chablis, they may be astonished to find out that they’re made from the same grape. When asked what makes one smell and taste different from the other, they may bring up words like butter, apples and oak. This puts everyone on the same plane. We’ve known beginners who have tasted something subtle that the experienced wine people, attuned to what is supposed to be in a type of wine, have overlooked.

* It means that the wine has undergone a lengthy second malolactic fermentation, which turns rather austere malic acid to buttery lactic acid.

Paumanok

Most American wineries that we are aware of have names that include words like Vineyards, Estate or Cellars. But Paumanok, on Long Island’s North Fork, doesn’t have one of those words; it’s just plain Paumanok. That’s okay, in part because the word is Algonquian for Long Island. It’s a no-nonsense name for a winery that’s basically about the wines they serve, without a lot of frills. If your purpose for visiting is also all about the wines, you’ll be happy there. If you’re looking for a party atmosphere, not so much.

The Paumanok winery, with its tasting porch.

It starts with the architecture of the winery. It’s a renovated old barn, simple and a little weather-beaten. Big barns do reflect the agricultural history of the North Fork, where potatoes and duckling were once the main crops, not grapes. Founded in 1983, Paumanok is a family-run enterprise. The interior is also plain and simple: a wooden bar and an expansive though rather empty wooden floor.

The Adirondack chairs, where you can sip and watch the workmen tend to the vines.

But if you are visiting on a pleasant day, you don’t want to be inside anyway. You want to be on the winery’s porch or near the vineyards, where Paumanok comes into its own. You can sit at a table or in a field of Adirondack chairs, facing the vines. You choose some wines to try, a server brings them to you and then you’re left alone to enjoy them. Again, plain and simple; if you want a buddy to converse with you, bring your own. The servers are informative but not chatty.

And to an extent, this straightforward approach is reflected in the wines as well. As is the case with almost all Long Island vineyards, they make wine from a wide variety of grapes, both red and white. Paumanok specializes in the Bordeaux grape varietals in their red wines. Power Tasting doesn’t review wines, but we can say that we were particularly impressed by their white wines. That’s quite a compliment coming from us, whose cellar is 90% made up of red wines. The Sauvignon Blanc and especially the Chenin Blanc were our favorites.

[Pardon us for a bit of a rant. Why do Long Island winemakers think they need to grow a dozen different grapes, when clearly the terroir there is supportive of only a few? Make what you’re good at and don’t try to please everybody with everything. And while we’re ranting, why don’t more vineyards grow Chenin Blanc?]

For those driving to the North Fork from the west, which is just about everyone, Paumanok is among the first you’ll encounter when you leave the Long Island Expressway, which makes it an excellent first stop (or last one on your way home). For people from New York City, visiting Paumanok is like letting out a long sigh: “Aaah, we’ve made it”. This good, solid winery with its good, solid wines sets a standard that the rest of the North Fork vineyards needs to live up to.

Carpentras

There is a town 13 km south of Vacqueyras and 22 km east of Châteauneuf-du-Pape in the south of France, which one might think it would be the center of the local wine trade. In fact there are some nearby wineries, but they’re only part of the generic Mont Ventoux appellation. The town is Carpentras and it is famous, but not for wine. It is the place to go for another French specialty: black truffles.

These delicacies are prized by chefs and home cooks for their exquisite aroma of…what? Some say onions, others cabbage or forest floor. They are earthy, mushroomy, wild and ultimately indescribable. Some people like them in everything from salads to sauces; others don’t like them at all. The people of Carpentras like them because they sell a lot of them, at rather high prices.

The Carpentras truffle market. Photo courtesy of See Provence.

If you are in Provence on a Friday between late November and early March, you can visit the truffle market and then dine at any of the nearby restaurants all of whom, so it seems, specialize in three course truffle menus.

There are other reasons to visit the town and its surrounding area the rest of the year. As noted, Carpentras is at the foot of Mont Ventoux (Mount Windy, in English, a name very well earned). If you ever drive to the top of Mont Ventoux, you will encounter a lot of goats on the road on your way up and on the top of the mountain you’ll see the regional weather station. One of the best known wines from this appellation is La Vielle Ferme, which has been internationally popular for over 40 years. From what we’ve tasted, there’s been a great improvement in recent years and Mont Ventoux wines are a good value for the money. Wine tasting here is very special, with this mammoth mountain hovering over you.

There are quite a few in-town attractions in Carpentras, but they are similar to many other spots in French Wine Country. There’s a Roman arch, a former hospital (Hôtel Dieu) turned library that has architectural interest. A cathedral. Boutiques. Interestingly, Carpentras was once a center of Jewish population and still hosts France’s oldest synagogue, in use since 1367.

Aside from the truffles, there are year-round markets featuring fruits and flowers. The town is also known for a hard candy called berlingots, striped hard confections that were once thought to have medicinal value. Anyplace that’s known for truffles, candy and wine has to be worth a visit!

A typical Carpentras Café. Photo courtesy of Booking.com.

What sets Carpentras apart, in our opinion, is the lifestyle. It is what you would expect a Provençal market town to be. The town seems dedicated to la belle vie, with seemingly innumerable cafes and restaurants. In good weather, which is most of the year, the terrasses are always full with people having a coffee, a glass of (local) wine, a lunch, a snack, an aperitif, a dinner, a digestif. In other words, whatever time of year that you are there, you’re welcome to take a seat and feel that you’ve arrived in the heart of Provence. Because you have.

Return or Not

One of the pleasures of wine tasting trips is discovering new wineries and the wines they make. At the same time, if there is a winery in the area that you are visiting that you know you love, it’s a pleasure to return and try their wines again. If you’re travelling to a sector of Wine Country where you’ve never been before, this distinction is lost; every winery is new to you. But if you’re already familiar with an area, say Napa Valley or Burgundy, you do have to make some decisions.

If you had an infinite amount of time, you wouldn’t have to choose. But most of us are visiting Wine Country for a limited period for each trip. So many wineries, so little time!

Photo courtesy of eto.

Here are a few tips for choosing whether to return to favorite wineries or not.

Set a theme for your wine tasting trip. If you want to seek out wineries you don’t know, then make reservations accordingly. The same applies if you just want to go to places where you know you have enjoyed their wines in the past. Another twist might be to focus on specific grapes, such as Chardonnays or Zinfandels. If you do, you may choose to return to one or more wineries where you know their Cabernet Sauvignons, but not their Chards or Zins, in order to learn how they do with other grapes.
Consider the time commitment. In many locales, the days of bellying up to the bar are over. If you want to sample a winery’s latest releases (even more so, their reserve and library wines) you will do so at a seated tasting. These are often accompanied by a tour. These take more time, usually an hour and a half. Thus, the number of wineries – new finds and old friends – is limited.
New wineries, or new to you? There aren’t many new wineries opening in Bordeaux, but there are plenty in other regions. For example, we have been tasting the wines of Long Island’s North Fork for more than 30 years. These days, whenever we take a tasting trip there, we find numerous recently established wineries or old ones that have changed hands. And there are some wineries that have been there for quite a while, but we never got to them. It’s easy to specialize in new experiences on Long Island.
Go back, you might fall in love again. That was the name of one of Power Tasting’s earliest articles, and the advice is worth reinforcing. Maybe there was a winery where once you didn’t enjoy their wines. It might prove worthwhile to give them another shot. Maybe that last time the winery just had a bad year, or your server didn’t know what he was doing, or you were simply in the wrong frame of mind. Particularly if the winery has a good reputation, it might be worth your while to give them a second chance.

“I Can’t Taste That”

The tasting notes for one of our favorite Pinot Noirs describe what’s in the bottle as:

“Subtle and nuanced, this wine unfolds with layers of perfumed red berries and sweet baking spice. Delicate hints of cinnamon, clove, and cedar, dance from the glass, a nod to the well-integrated oak. The flavors unfurl with juicy red cherry and pomegranate, alongside hints of orange pekoe tea, hibiscus flower, and pink peppercorn.”

Photo courtesy of the Wine & Spirit Education Trust.

We’ve drunk that wine many times, and to be honest, never once gave a thought to baking spice, pomegranate or pink peppercorns. In fact, we don’t believe we’ve ever thought of pink peppercorn after tasting any wine.

So we suggest that when you’re out winetasting and the server mentions road tar and alfalfa, take it with a bit of…well, salt would be bad idea, but don’t worry if you can’t recognize anything you were told. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t consider the aromas and tastes that come from your glass.

Remember, it’s your mouth. You can’t be wrong. Actually, you can if you’re tasting some of the flavors only found in red wines when you’re sipping a white, or vice-versa. So if you think you’re tasting, say, dark fruits or tobacco in a Sauvignon Blanc, you either have a cold or you’re really off base. But if you close your eyes and let smell and taste memories take over, you’ll be correct, on your own terms.
Listen to others. Of course, other people around you have their own memories. If you’re tasting cherries and someone else says raspberries, they’re both red fruit, so maybe you’ll get a hint of raspberries, too. But what if he says he can detect green peppers. That’s often a sign of underripe grapes and you may not have picked up on that taste, but immediately recognize it when it’s pointed out to you.
In addition, what you’re tasting is influenced by many factors besides the wine. You will taste different things when you’re pairing a wine with a meal than you do in a tasting room. Your mood will affect your tasting abilities. So will your health. Fatigue, time of day, and the perfume some thoughtless visitor is wearing at the next table all have an effect.
Not everyone can taste everything. It’s just a biological fact that some people have taste receptors for certain chemicals in specific wines and others don’t. It is often written that Syrah has a definite taste of white pepper. That may be so, but not for us. It seems that a chemical called rotundone is found in white pepper and in low concentrations in Syrah grapes. If you don’t have the capability to taste just a bit of rotundone, you won’t find it in your wine glass.
Don’t fake it. If the “official” description says a wine tastes of honeysuckle and you can’t find that, but do taste pineapple, stick by your guns. Maybe honeysuckle was dominant at the time the description was written but it has faded now, with pineapple coming out as the wine aged. There’s no sense convincing yourself that you taste something you don’t, just to get along by going along.

Odette Estate Winery

It’s not usually important to know who the owners of a winery are before tasting there. Odette is unusual in that regard, in that it is owned by Gavin Newsom (yes, that Gavin Newsom), Gordon Getty (yes, those Gettys) and John Conover, who actually manages the winery. If the names Newsom and Getty sound familiar to wine lovers, that’s because they also founded the Plumpjack and Cade wineries, up on Napa’s Howell Mountain.

All this is relevant, because if you like Plumpjack and Cade, you’ll most likely enjoy the wines from Odette as well. We can say this because we were offered a comparison tasting of Cabernet Sauvignons from the three vineyards, and Odette certainly held its own.

Photo courtesy of The Napa Wine Project.

Note that none of the owners are named Odette, nor to our knowledge are their wives. The name of the winery is sort of an inside joke. Plumpjack was a nickname in some of Shakespeare’s plays for John Falstaff, the bibulous, rotund rake who nearly leads Henry V to ruin. His girlfriend was named Odette. On top of that, Odette is the romantic heroine in the ballet Swan Lake. And Odette Kahn was one of the judges in the famous Judgement of Paris wine tasting that established California’s winemaking prowess. This triple meaning is reinforced by modernistic sculptures in their vineyards, which is reproduced on their labels.

The Odette winery. Photo courtesy of 7×7.

For the visitor to Odette, there is no grand palace on the premises, just a rather simple white structure with an attractive steeple on top. The interior won’t blow anyone away, either. The greatest attraction is the sight of the winery in the midst of a seemingly endless vineyard, nestled below the hills in the Stags Leap sector. It harkens back to another era in Napa Valley, where the lure was the wine and the scenery, not the massiveness of the architecture. Visitors are meant to taste wines on a covered patio in view of the vines.

The wines on offer are primarily Napa Valley’s most common varietals: Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. There’s also a less common Petite Sirah, which they market under the Adaptation label. These are all quite powerful wines, very much an expression of what Napa Valley is famous for. As mentioned, we were able to compare all three of their labels. In advance, we expected to prefer the wine made from mountain fruit, but Odette and Plumpjack, from the valley floor, proved to be our favorites.

Jewelry for sale at Odette.

We don’t often mention shopping in Power Tasting’s reviews, since most of what we find are either overpriced fashion items or the usual collection of refrigerator magnets and coasters, also overpriced. But Odette has a rather interesting display of handmade jewelry that is a notable exception to the rule and is worth mentioning. We’re sure that Falstaff’s girlfriend would be pleased to wear some of the pieces for sale.

We’re not certain that the wines from all three properties are offered all the time. Assuming that they are, a visit to Odette provides an interesting way to enjoy the wines of the Plumpjack group at one sitting.

Carcassonne

The Middle Ages always had an attraction for us when we were kids. Knights, damsels in distress, jousts and big feasts in castles halls just seemed so wondrous. Robin Hood, El Cid, and Joan of Arc were our heroes and the Sherriff of Nottingham was the evil villain. Later in life, Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt (both the Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branaugh versions) thrilled us yet again. If you were anything like us, you ought to take a trip to Carcassonne when you’re wine tasting in southwest France.

Carcassonne viewed from afar. Photo courtesy of European Waterways.

As you drive up to the town, you’ll see this magnificent walled city on a hilltop. There is a modern-day town surrounding the castle, but it’s of no particular interest. It’s the imagery of battles and courtly love that will rush back into your mind as soon as you see Carcassonne. And it’s real.

Well, almost real. There was a walled town there in the Middle Ages and it did figure in some significant battles, particularly in the Albigensian Crusade, that pitted the Papacy versus the Cathars. (The Pope won.) But by the early 1800’s, the town and its castle had fallen into disrepair and was going to be torn down.

Then along came Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. He was a French architect, a visionary and someone who must have had the same childhood fantasies we did. He set about restoring great medieval buildings, not least of which was the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. When he turned his attention to Carcassonne, he took what was still a military stronghold and turned it into a Middle Ages wonderland.

The lovingly restored Basilique de St-Nazaire. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

For today’s visitor, there’s no reason to concern yourself that Viollet-le-Duc wasn’t exactly archeologically correct in restoring Carcassonne. If what we see today isn’t exactly as it was, it is what it should have been. Soaring walls, towers with arrow slits for the archers, tessellated ramparts, inns (well, they’re really restaurants) where you can quaff your ale (or enjoy a glass of wine). They’re all there in Carcassonne.

Entry to the old town is free, but parking isn’t. And if you get there at any reasonable hour, you’ll find the nearest empty lots are quite a walk away. Of course, that gives you the chance to approach the great walls and turrets slowly and take them in at leisure. Once inside, you’ll find a whole town’s worth of genuine medieval buildings, buffed up and gleaming. Unfortunately, you’ll also find the usual run of shops selling knickknacks, tee shirts and junk. But you’ll also encounter bookstores with a considerable collection of material on the Middle Ages and the events that have occurred around Carcassonne. Many are in French, but enough are translated to keep you interested.

You can walk the walls of Carcassonne.

We recommend that you pay the fee to tour the walls around the city. It’s not too hard to imagine hordes of English troops approaching from afar and the sturdy Carcassonais defending their fortifications. By the way, those enemy troops might also have been French, because Carcassonne was part of Spain in medieval times. You should also see the Basilique de St- Nazaire, begun in the 11^th Century. It’s fine gothic architecture, suitably embellished by Viollet-le-Duc.

If you ever dreamed over Prince Valiant on a Sunday morning, you’ll love Carcassonne.

Enoteca Nibbi

Enotecas are a distinctly Italian combination of wine bar, wine store and snack bar. Like wine bars around the world, they’re places to relax, sip some wine, people watch and engage in a little conversation (much easier to talk with others, of course, if you speak Italian).

Some Italian enotecas are raffish and frequented primarily by locals. Others are in areas where they are sure to have tourists dropping by as well. Nibbi belongs in the latter category. It’s located just off the famed Via Veneto, the hillside roadway in Rome that has long been a byword for moneyed elegance. The area near Nibbi contains posh hotels, excellent restaurants and the American Embassy. So while the hoi polloi might find their way to Nibbi, you’re more likely to find a more refined crowd.

It’s not that you need to be rich to go there. There are about 20 wines to choose from, including reds and whites from around Italy, plus rosés and bubblies. Beer and aperitifs are also served. The pours are generous and the prices are amazingly inexpensive. Glasses of most of their wines run between six and nine euros. We’ve seen prices two to three times that cost back home.

The wines available by the glass are also available by the bottle, to be consumed on-site or taken home. The wines by the glass may not always be the greatest exemplars of their vintages, but they’re not plonk either. You can have a great tour of Italian vineyards without leaving your seat.

The food menu runs to potato chips, olives, salads, sandwiches and platters of slices salumi and cheeses. All seemed very appetizing as they were served to other parties. We always stopped at Nibbi for a pre-prandial glass or two before proceeding to the local restaurants, so we never tried their food.

The interior of the enoteca is quite nicely appointed, more like the American equivalent of a cocktail lounge than a bar.

But the place to sit is outside, especially in nice weather, which in Rome seems to have at least ten months a year. There’s always a crowd gathering in front of nearly all enotecas, but Nibbi also offers a glassed “shed” where there always seems something going on. We’ve seen large parties, with bottles and platters seeming to arrive every ten minutes. There was a fellow on his PC writing what must have been the Great Italian Novel, made up of equal parts of inspiration, wine and cigarettes. And there was a woman enjoying a glass of wine by herself without getting hassled (try that in New York!).

The complete name of this enoteca is Bar Enoteca Nibbi dal 1936, meaning that actual fascists and their followers must have drunk there back in the early days. As with almost everywhere in contemporary Europe, it’s hard – at least for visitors – to conceptualize the destruction and despair of war in these lovely sites. So, we recommend, don’t do more than give momentary thought to the past, drink up and live for today and tomorrow. Nibbi certainly provides a pleasant venue for such enjoyment.