lgsjr – Page 40 – Power Tasting – The Wine Tasting Experience

Wine Tasting vs. Tasting Wine

This occurred at a recent college reunion in New York, but it could have happened at any large gathering in any location. There was an event advertised as a wine tasting. About 500 people showed up at an outdoor plaza, under a tent on a hot summer day. The organizers had chosen fifteen or so wines, half red and half white (with one rosé thrown in for balance) from California, France, Italy, Australia and Spain. The wines were served at various stations, reds and whites intermixed, laid out in flimsy plastic cups for the taking. The white wines were on ice but someone had heard that red wines were to be served at room temperature. Well, the “room” in this case was a tent under the sun, so the reds were roughly 90^o.

This may have been an opportunity to taste a lot of wine, but it wasn’t a wine tasting.

Photo courtesy of C. E. Lovejoy’s Market

A wine tasting has form. That is not to say that wine tasting must be formal. In fact, some of the best are very informal, spent with friends over a dinner or a barbecue. But there must be some reason for drinking certain wines that gives the event some continuity and a reason for comparing the various ones being served. They may all be from a single producer, as happens in tasting rooms on a wine tasting trip. Or the same grapes from multiple producers in the same region. Or from different regions around the world. Or just different approaches to accompanying the meal being served. But a wine tasting is not: “Here are five different wines. Try them and say which one you like.”
A wine tasting has structure. Generally, that structure is from lightest to heaviest, topped off with a dessert wine. But it could also be from cheapest to most expensive (best done in a blind tasting). It might be fun to match up hillside wines against those from the valley-floor, of the same grapes. There has to be some reason to say, “Drink this one first, then this one, then this…”
A wine tasting has content. It might be fun to line up Petrus, Screaming Eagle and Grange next to each other. We’ve never been invited to a wine tasting like that and truly never expect to be. But in every tasting there ought to be some wines that are worth the attention for savoring and contemplation. What’s the point of a selection of plonk from around the world? That’s not to say that an unknown wine can’t shine among the big names; we’ve often been delightfully surprised by the Davids taking down the Goliaths. Still, the wines involved in a tasting should be carefully selected with some thoughtfulness about their quality.
A wine tasting has class. Oh, make that glass. While it is true that we’ll be happy to take some Chateau Margaux in a Dixie Cup, for the most part we want to enjoy wine in a well-made glass, not a plastic beaker better used for biological specimens. That shows respect both for the wines and for those invited to taste them.

At the event in New York, once it was clear that a real wine tasting wasn’t on offer that day, we poured three samples of a cold white wine into a single cup and cooled off under that hot sun.

I Don’t Like It

When you go into an American winery’s tasting room, in Long Island, California or elsewhere, you are likely to be offered tastes of a significant number of wines. Some will be on a less expensive list of the winery’s most popular wines and others may be on the “reserve” list, which they consider to be their best wines.

A few visitors may have such a broad appreciation for wine (or maybe a lack of appreciation) that they like everything they try. Most other people will like some wines and not others. And unfortunately, there may be some tasting rooms where some people don’t like anything. We’re sorry to say that in the past there were some wineries in Long Island that fell into the latter category, but in recent tastings we have found at least a few praiseworthy wines at all the wineries we visited. Still, there were none where we liked everything. With scant exception, the same can be said of almost every winery we have ever visited in the United States.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. No winemaker can please everyone and, we suspect, few even try. They aim to please themselves and we, the consumers, can either go along with them or buy someone else’s wine. When we are standing at the bar in a tasting room, we ought to use wines we don’t like as learning experiences.

Be polite. Remember what your mother told you and if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all. Pour out your wine and maybe ask the person you’re with what they thought. Move on.
Is the wine okay? Maybe the wine has just gone bad. On more than one occasion, we’ve been served corked wine in a tasting room, especially on busy days when the server may have been too rushed to check the bottle. The wineries are grateful if you point out that one of their purveyors is selling them tainted corks.
Ask yourself why you don’t like it. Maybe the wine is just not made in a style you like. For instance, we prefer deeper, rich Pinot Noir’s than the thin, acid ones that are popular in some regions. That doesn’t make us right, but it does validate the consistency of our taste. The point is to identify what it is about a wine you don’t like, so you can avoid wines like it in the future. It can be even more instructive if one person likes a wine and the other doesn’t. That enables both to pinpoint the offending (or positive) characteristics of the wine.
Try to remember other wines from that winery. They might just have had a bad year. For example, there is a world-renowned winemaker in Napa Valley whose 2011 offerings just didn’t make it in our opinion. It was a tough harvest across the region, so this winery wasn’t able to overcome the reduced quality of their grapes. They still make great wine in other years.
And if you don’t like anything…Not everyone who grows or buys grapes knows what to do with them. Because you are a wise and discerning wine taster, this winery must simply be sub-par. Oh, wait, there’s somebody down the bar buying a case. Well, there’s no accounting for taste, yours or theirs.

At the very least, figuring out what you don’t like will save you time and money in a wine store when you get home. Unfortunately, it may also cut you off from some good wines that might come with another harvest. Still, one of the reasons to go wine tasting is to figure out what you like…and what you don’t.

Macari Vineyards

Once you leave New York’s Long Island Expressway on your voyage to Long Island’s Wine Country in the North Fork area, among the first wineries you will come to is Macari Vineyards (www.macariwines.com). It offers a warm welcome and some of the better wines we have tasted in the region.

Macari’s vineyards were once a potato farm, as is true of much of the North Fork. It is still family-owned and run and it is, in a sense, still a farm since they raise a herd of cattle as well as growing grapes. They are exponents of biodynamic wine making,(which we don’t really understand, but we must say that biodynamic vineyards often produce excellent wines).

Macari has two tasting rooms: the original one in Mattituck and another in Cutchogue. The latter is only open in the summer tourist high season; Mattituck is open year-round. It is this one that is the basis for our comments, although the wines are the same in both locations.

The tasting room is quite large, with a high-vaulted ceiling that can absorb noise when things get busy on summer weekends. Yet despite the massive stone fireplace and all the exposed wood there’s somehow a sense of intimacy to the place. Displays of bottles of wine on boards stretched between barrels reinforce the rusticity of the setting.

The wines available for tasting shows Macari to its best effect. The reserve list includes a very creditable Sauvignon Blanc, a Syrah and the stars of the show: Macari’s Cabernet Franc and their Bordeaux blend, Bergen Road. These last two have depth and power that show how far Long Island wine making has come in recent years. Interestingly, although the blend of the Bergen Road differs from year to year, in the 2014 available now they have four of the five Bordeaux grapes, except Cabernet Franc. Also, for those like Lucie who enjoy a glass of Rosé, make sure to taste theirs. She loved it and find that it tastes like a rosé from Provence, which is quite a compliment.

They are well aware that Cabernet Franc is their flagship grape. Over the course of the summer, Macari hosts several events highlighting their twenty years of Cabernet Franc. This is the same grape that is used in the majority of the wines made in Pomerol, and unfair comparison to be sure, but an indication that Macari is aiming high with the wines that have garnered them their highest praise.

Macari’s porch and the pizza truck

Macari makes it easy to spend an extended time at their winery. As you enter their tasting room, there is a refrigerated cabinet with cheeses and charcuterie, which you can eat on their spacious and well appointed porch. If that’s not enough, the winery has arranged for a pizza-making truck to pull up alongside the building. And of course, you enjoy it with a bottle of Macari wine! We don’t think we’d make a special trip from Manhattan just for a pizza and a bottle of wine, but if we had a vacation home on the North Fork or the Hamptons, it would be a very tempting way to while away a baking hot summer afternoon in the shade of Macari’s porch.

Macari is one of the Long Island wineries that gives evidence to the potential of what the North Fork can produce. Macari Vineyards is offering a fine wine tasting experience today and the future of this winery is yet to discover.

Think Globally, Drink Locally

Some years ago, Steve was visiting his friend Adrian at his vacation home in Southold, in the middle of Long Island’s North Fork. One late afternoon, sitting on the veranda and sipping a local wine, the two fellows engaged in a hearty discussion about the value of Long Island’s experiments with wine production, still novel at that time.

Steve stated that the wines produced on the North Fork were nowhere near the quality of similarly priced wines from California, France or Australia. So what was the point of paying top dollar for poorer wines?

Adrian’s response was that it was worth supporting the local industry precisely so that the wine makers would have the opportunity to improve over time. At that point, many of the vineyards – and thus the vines – were ten years old or less. If no one bought their wines in their youth, the vineyards would never have the opportunity to reach maturity and potentially great wines would never be made.

Bedell Cellars

As we say elsewhere in this issue, we are finding that North Fork wines are beginning to meet the test of time, albeit more so at some wineries than at others. But the question at the heart of Adrian and Steve’s conversation remains: if there are better wines at similar prices from the world’s great wine growing appellations, is there any purpose for drinking wines from “lesser” regions? What in fact makes one particular section of Wine Country better or worse? Is it not just a matter of what we’re used to?

The original subject was Long Island’s wines but the same can be asked of, say, Santa Clara vs. Napa, Puglia vs. Tuscany or Languedoc vs. Bordeaux. Why not limit yourself to the best? In particular, for those of us who enjoy traveling for the purpose of wine tasting, is there any reason to make a trip to any but the “best” regions. We have come to the opinion that yes, it does make sense, with some reservations.

As a general statement, these regions are lesser known, rather than simply of poorer quality. In any given year, there are some great wines made in vineyards that are unlikely to show up in the pages of Wine Spectator, or if they do they’ll be in the voluminous lists in the back not the news articles up front.

In our recent voyages, we have discovered wines from regions we had previously either not known of or had disliked, such as Minervois, eastern Sicily and California’s Central Coast. In most cases, there will be a greater concentration of top-quality wines in better-known regions, so with a little homework in advance you can raise your odds of trying the better wines and skipping the underachievers. But if you don’t go, you won’t know.

Moreover, who’s to say what’s better and what’s worse? Tastes, especially in wine, change over time. It’s not that long ago that no one cared about Pinot Noirs from the Santa Rita Hills, Ripassos from Valpolicella or Shirazes from the Barossa. Now these are highly prized wines, attracting buyers and visitors from everywhere fine wine is appreciated. If nothing else, taking a wine tasting trip to a little known corner of Wine Country gives you bragging rights when and if that area gets recognition.

“Ah, yes, I remember when the growers were virtually giving away the wine and it was just small producers serving wine in their barns”. That’s us, talking about Napa Valley a few decades ago. Who knew then what a big deal it would be today?

Where Once Potatoes Grew

For many years, Long Island was famous for certain agricultural products, specifically ducklings and potatoes. Then, 45 years ago Alex and Louisa Hargrave thought that the soil and climate of the North Fork of eastern Long Island would provide the right terroir for wine grapes. Today, there are 38 wineries in the North Fork AVA. The fact that they exist is a testimonial to the Hargraves’ vision, but from the perspective of a wine tasting enthusiast, it is only recently worth the trip to try the wines.

We have been visiting the North Fork Wine Country for roughly 25 years and for most of that time, we would have had to say that wine tasting in this region amounted to a pleasant day in the country. It was not an expedition for the purpose of serious wine tasting. The wineries were ambitious and the wines showed promise but they were, in our opinion, mostly poorly made and overpriced. Growers were and still are planting too many varietals, most of which are not supported by the terroir. Based on some recent tastings, we are pleased to say that the quality has improved sufficiently that a visit to the North Fork can be rewarding in terms of the wines themselves, while still offering attractive surroundings and attractions other than wine alone.

The tasting room at Bedell Cellars

While there are still too many varietals at almost every winery, a consensus seems to have been reached as to what the North Fork does well: Sauvignon Blanc in the whites and Cabernet Franc in the reds. We guess that there is a market for Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, since they are still being produced, but they do not measure up to the quality we have sampled of the two varietals we mentioned. It would seem that there has been more investment in wine making technology as well.

We certainly didn’t like everything we tasted, but we could say the same thing about Napa Valley, Bordeaux or Tuscany. Not that Long Island’s wineries are at the level of those exalted regions, but it is fair to say that tastes differ and that the North Fork has established itself as an area with some well-made wines. There are also charming villages that take advantage of Long Island’s agricultural and maritime traditions that can round out a visit, beyond wine tasting.

There are still some negatives that should be mentioned. It is a long trip from Manhattan to the North Fork, at least two hours each way. We have decided that in the future we will not go there for day trips but will stay over at a hotel or an inn. That will give us the opportunity to try some of the restaurants that are open only in the evenings or for lunch only on weekends when this sector of Wine Country can be quite crowded. Many wineries feature live music and picnicking in the summer, placing more emphasis on tourism than on the wines for their own sakes.

Is the North Fork AVA a destination for wine tasting adventurers? We would say “yes”, especially if they have other reasons to be on the island, outside New York City. (It takes an hour to leave the city.) A degree of open-mindedness is still called for but a visit there can provide some rewarding new tastes.

Dry Creek General Store

Sonoma County has several rather distinct wine growing regions, each of which specializes in certain grapes that flourish in their respective terroirs. There’s Russian River for Pinot Noir, Alexander Valley for Cabernet Sauvignon and Dry Creek for Zinfandel. Every place grows Chardonnay. For wine tasters, one of the problems with the broad spread of Sonoma County is that wherever you go to taste wine, you’re pretty far from a place to buy lunch.

Photo courtesy of The Press Democrat

In the Dry Creek sector, you really have only one choice: the Dry Creek General Store. This emporium on Dry Creek Road comes complete with a lot of history. It’s an attraction in itself, beyond the food. It has been open since 1881, serving gold miners, bootleggers, travelers and locals for decades. In its day, it has sold all sorts of provisions, as evidenced by an ancient photo on the store’s web site (http://www.drycreekgeneralstore1881.com) proudly stating that hardware and dry goods are for sale.

Today’s Dry Creek General Store is a combination delicatessen and gift shop. The deli side of the store makes sandwiches from a wide variety of meats and cheeses on artisanal breads, together with salads. The other sells cutesy things that nobody needs but that are pretty little gifts. But it wasn’t always this way. In recent memory, the meats were ham and roast beef, the breads commercial white and whole wheat. The rest of the store wasn’t a gift shop. They sold nails and pots and towels and, and, and – the stuff of a true rural general store. Yuppie sandwiches and merchandise make the store more accessible to many travelers, at the expense of authenticity.

And then there’s the bar adjacent to the store. As of this writing, it’s closed, because some patrons thought it was okay to take their drinks away with them, a violation of local licensing laws. The owners are fighting to get their permit back and so the bar will surely be open soon. Then you will be able to see a crazy collection of general store memorabilia hanging from the ceiling and you can down your beer while sitting on a horse saddle. And you’ll be able to share that beer with a few locals who look like they stepped out of a time warp or from central casting.

Photo courtesy of Dry Creek General Store

If you’re lucky, you’ll arrive on a day when there’s a barbeque going in front of the store. Depending on the day, you’ll be able to buy brisket or sausages or even crabs. While there’s no documented evidence of such cookouts in the old days, it feels like a throwback to a communal past that may never have existed, but ought to have.

And that’s the reason to make sure you visit the Dry Creek General Store in your wine tasting travels. It’s a real part of the past, now adapted to the needs of the present day. The people of the area don’t need a general store when there’s a Walmart just down the highway. In our times, there’s money to be made in wine tourism, so the store serves this generation of customers. Come and feel a part of the past as you munch on a sandwich out on the porch.

This Side of the Bar

Part of Power Tasting’s manifesto, as we say on our Welcome page, states: “We want to empower the visitor to get the maximum advantage out of each visit, not to be intimidated by wine snobs on either side of the bar”. In most wineries, the servers are friendly and in be best of cases, educational. Some are wine snobs, but fortunately, they are rare.

Photo courtesy of touringandtasting.com

However, the other people tasting wine with you are much more of a mixed bag. The majority are just folks out for a pleasant day, going about their own business. However, there are certain types we have encountered who offer both challenges and opportunities. As a general statement, we see more of them while we are tasting in Napa Valley, because there are so many wineries and it is so well known. Here we offer some tips on how to deal with the various sorts that you might meet in your wine tasting travels.

The Party-ers: If you are in Napa Valley on a weekend, especially at wineries that offer a food menu and tables, you are then likely to run into a loud group who would rather drink than taste. If they are not your kind of crowd, maybe you ought to skip tasting on weekends. But if Saturday and Sunday are your only chance to go, try to get away from them. The servers are alert to this type and try to isolate them, but it’s hard to avoid them. So if they are inside, take your glass to the terrace. If you can’t get away completely, try to find a quiet corner.
Bachelorette Parties: A special case of the party-ers is a group of young women who pull up in a limo, previously over-served, celebrating one of their group’s impending nuptials. (Of course that sounds sexist, but we’ve never seen a bachelor party doing the same thing. At bars, for sure, but not wineries.) Our best advice is to give up and go somewhere else, but if that’s not practical then by all means have nothing to do with this group. They can only detract from your experience and you can’t add to theirs.
People You Saw Earlier: It is inevitable that you’ll run into some the same people as you go from winery to winery. After all, they’re doing what you’re doing, in the same part of the world. And since they’re going to the same tasting rooms as you are, they are likely to have similar tastes. It might be interesting to recognize them, ask for recommendations of other wineries you might enjoy and give them some in return.
The Dreaded Wine Snobs: Some people like to share information; others want to lecture. In a tasting room, a little alcohol loosens the latter sort’s inhibitions as well as their tongues. The moment you hear something like, “This is good but the tannins don’t measure up to the 1996”, find a reason to do something more important, like examining the t-shirts and coasters. If you engage these people in conversation, you’ll be stuck for a half an hour listening to someone, no matter how knowledgeable he or she might be, who is more interested in an audience than a conversation.

Wine drinking and tasting are by nature social experiences and for the most part, the people you’ll run into in wineries will be convivial and in some instances informative. A little conversation can be interesting; too much can spoil your wine tasting experience.

Au Bon Climat

Santa Barbara has two areas for wine tasting. The so-called Funk Zone is right along the seaside and while there are good wines to be tasted there, the overall ambiance is a little, well, funky. It’s more a place to party on a lovely warm day than to get serious about tasting fine wines. A few miles uptown is quite a different story. There you will find better known wineries’ tasting rooms, more plush in their furnishings, surrounded by ritzier restaurants and shops. Among the best of them is the tasting room of Au Bon Climat (http://www.aubonclimat.com), also known familiarly as ABC.

The winery is the life’s work of a fellow named Jim Clendenen and everything about Au Bon Climat is a reflection of his philosophy of wine and, to a certain extent, of life. He has long been portrayed, by himself and by others, as Wine’s Wild Boy, including a very public spat with (of all people) Robert Parker. He even makes a wine called Wild Boy, with his shaggy face right there on the label.

But what’s in the bottle belies Clendenen’s outlandish reputation. Au Bon Climat makes California style Burgundian wines, with great respect for the terroir of California’s Central Coast. Best known for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, they also make Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc under the Au Bon Climat label as well as several others that Clendenen has developed.

One of the attractions of tasting at ABC is the rather huge selection of wines available for tasting. Moreover, the atmosphere of the winery makes you want to stay awhile and taste them all. The room is well lit, with a large window looking out onto the street. It has a clubby feel, albeit a club with a lot of wine bottles stacked up on the walls.

Au Bon Climat’s Tasting Room. Photo courtesy of the winery.

It’s a good idea to let your server figure out what kinds of wine you like and then lead you through them. There really are too many to attempt to taste them all and the range of stylistic differences argues against trying. We gravitated towards deeply flavored Pinot Noirs, so we were treated to a sort of tour of vineyards where Au Bon Climat grows and sources grapes. Their own Le Bon Climat vineyard was not our favorite; Bien Nacido was. ABC is hardly the only grower in Santa Maria County’s Bien Nacido vineyard, but we were informed that they farm the largest swath with the best sunshine aspect.

Sanford & Benedict is another vineyard where they source their grapes. It’s an interesting experience to walk a few blocks to Sanford’s own tasting room and see how two different winemakers treat grapes from the same (or a least similar) terroir. Surprisingly and rather interestingly are the wines sold under the Barham Mendelson label because they are from Russian River in Sonoma County and not Central Coast at all.

Yet another factor making a visit to Au Bon Climat different is that it has the best positioning in what is effectively a beautiful wine tasting shopping mall called El Paseo. There are six tasting rooms there, so you can spend a day tasting wines in Santa Barbara and not walk more than 100 yards.

Tired Taste Buds…or Not

A few years ago, we were on an extended wine tasting trip to Paso Robles. We had been to most of the wineries we knew we wanted to visit, including Tablas Creek, Justin and Adelaida. We had made some nice discoveries, such as Ecluse and Caliza. We were fairly intent and the tasting was intense, because the hot growing conditions in the Paso Robles area lead to some very high alcohol content in the wines produced there. In fact, one winery’s wines were topping out at 16.5 percent. Lucie was constantly complaining about the high level of alcohol in Central Coast wines.

On the last day of our visit, we were just driving along Route 46 stopping rather randomly at wineries along the way. We had never heard of any of them, so the best that could happen was a new discovery and the worst was learning what to avoid in the future. But that afternoon just seemed to go from worse to worst.

Now, Power Tasting’s philosophy is not to speak ill of wineries but rather to praise the ones that we believe deserve it, and we’re about the experience, not the wines themselves. That day, we finally arrived at a winery where the experience was mixed. The tasting room was tastefully decorated with antiques and the bar was almost unobtrusive in a space that felt like a visit to Grandma’s. Unfortunately we entered just behind a family with two little boys who, as little boys will, wanted to touch everything. The servers were in a tizzy, trying to pour wine while preventing destruction of the knick-knacks. So we have to admit that conditions weren’t optimal for enjoying what was in our glasses. That said, the wine was simply awful. We paid our respects and left quickly, hoping not to hear anything break as we departed.

In the parking lot, we looked at each other and said “Maybe we ought to stop. Our taste buds might just be worn out.” Perhaps all we had sipped in the past few days had caught up to us and we simply couldn’t differentiate good wine from bad any longer. There was, however, one winery that we had deliberately left for last because we knew their wines well and liked them very much. This winery was Turley Wine Cellars (http://www.turleywinecellars.com), famous for their Zinfandels. We gave ourselves one last try.

Turley’s tasting room in Templeton, near Paso Robles. Photo courtesy of pairingswineandfood.com

We entered in Turley’s cool, woody tasting room and sipped some Zins. Hosannah! They were delicious. Our taste buds hadn’t died after all.

There are a few lessons to be learned from this experience. First of all, trust your taste. Your tongue won’t actually shrivel up and die. If you like a wine you’re tasting, it’s good wine…at least for you. And if you don’t like it, it’s not good. (Of course, if you’re sipping Lafitte Rothschild and you don’t like it, either it’s corked or you need to re-calibrate your taste buds.)

Another lesson is about the purpose of wine tasting. It’s a joy to taste a famously great wine and maybe even more so to find a wine you’ve never heard of that blows you away. But it’s also important to find out what you don’t like, to educate your mouth.

And finally, within the bounds of reason and safety, don’t give up. If you don’t like the wine you’re tasting now, the next one may be the one that makes your whole wine tasting trip worthwhile.

Reader’s Comment: It’s All about the Taste

The following comment was submitted by Paul de (J. P.) Bary, author of The Persistent Observer’s Guide to Wine: How to Enjoy the Best and Skip the Rest. Paul was a college classmate of Steve’s.

Kudos for your focus on what matters most – taste!

I love Steve’s simple rules*. Most people have an intuition about them, but are misled by all the hype.

Learning to know what you like is all about feeling comfortable with your own sense of taste. You can connect that with the hype once you get comfortable with your own instincts.

Most people get confused about Rule #2, thinking that you have to memorize labels. With all the wines in the world, that’s obviously a daunting proposition…and there’s no guarantee that any specific wine will be available when you want it or that it will be the best choice under the circumstances.

What’s easier to remember is the grape variety (or blend of grapes), the region and the style of the wines you drink and how they fit with the food or occasion.

These are the types of things that are easy to bring home from a visit to a winery and your tips make that experience easier and more rewarding.

Keep up the good work!

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* 1. Know what you like. 2. Remember what it’s called.