lgsjr – Page 42 – Power Tasting – The Wine Tasting Experience

Lousy Wineries

There are two good reasons to visit a particular winery on any particular trip to Wine Country: to taste good wine and to experience wonderful places. Unfortunately, there are some wineries that have neither attribute. (It is not Power Tasting’s policy to give derogatory reviews, so we’ll withhold names. But take it from us, they exist and they’re no fun.) So why go to one of these wineries?

The easy answer is, “Don’t go”. But that’s not always easy to do. For one thing, you don’t know you’re going to have a poor experience until you have it. And there may be reasons why you are at a particular winery that are beyond your control. Perhaps you’re with someone who doesn’t know anything about wine but likes the sound of the wine’s name. Maybe your client has an interest in a winery. Maybe it’s just there on the road, so why not. These have all happened to us, at one time or another.

It’s sort of like being at a dull party; you’re already there and maybe something will come up. How can you leave five minutes after arriving? At one of these sad wineries, you brace yourself and try your best to seem interested. You hold onto a glass for longer than usual, looking around, not actually tasting more than the barest sip and saying things like:

“I’ve never tasted anything quite like this before.”
“What a unique presentation of the varietal character”
And the always popular, “Hmmmm”.

Some of the grand palaces being erected by wineries these days at least offer the possibility of architectural interest. But what about wineries that are no more than a suburban house or, worse, an industrial shed? You can’t just jump to conclusions; great wineries come in modest homes. For years, Ridge’s Lytton Springs winery was in the barrel room. Iron Horse has a wooden, outdoor shed. Heitz Cellar is a modest stone building. If you can’t tell a book by its cover, you can’t tell a wine by its winery, either. But you can be forewarned. If it doesn’t look too good and there are no cars in the parking lot, maybe you should think twice about entering.

There is a variant on the Lousy Winery phenomenon. You’re hating everything about the place: the wine, the tasting room, the noisy people assembled at the bar. But everyone else, in particular your companions, is loving it. And it’s raining so you can’t just wait outside. This is the time to recognize the wisdom of Orr’s Law from Catch 22: If you’re bored, time goes more slowly and you live longer. Okay, it’s not a very good rationale but it may be the only rationale you have.

We have recently been travelling in some lesser known wine making areas in France and California and we have happened upon some of these unfortunate wineries. Sometimes we were the only ones there so we couldn’t leave without being rude. We sipped; we sighed; and we left. We recommend this strategy if you find yourself so entrapped. You never know, the next place down the road may be wonderful. Or not.

Dining and Drinking in Lyon

Let’s say you want to go wine tasting in France. That’s a good idea but France is an awfully big place. The question then is where in France? If you go to Bordeaux, you get to taste Bordeaux wines. In Burgundy, you get Burgundies. It makes sense, doesn’t it? But there is one place where you can have two totally different styles of wine to enjoy and that place is the city of Lyon. A half hour north is Beaujolais. The same distance south and you’re in the Rhône Valley (at least the northern end of the valley with appellations like Côte Rôtie, St. Joseph and Condrieu.

The primary grapes of the northern Rhone are Syrah and Viognier. Beaujolais makes wine from Gamay. The vineyards in the Rhone grow on terraced mountains that seem from even a short distance to be sheer cliffs. Beaujolais’ vineyards are on lovely rolling hills and valley. As we say, two totally different wine tasting experiences.

And right in the middle of it is France’s third largest city, its temple of gastronomy, the capital of the east: Lyon. Sure, go wine tasting all you want but leave time to explore this wonderful city. Of course, there are historic churches, grand plazas and elegant shopping. But if you are a wine lover, it’s a sure bet that you love food, too, and dining in Lyon is, simply put, great fun.

You can indulge yourself in the highest of high cuisine. Just twenty minutes’ drive from downtown is the Taj Mahal of French cookery, Paul Bocuse. It has had three Michelin stars for more than fifty years and will surely continue to do so as long Maître Bocuse is alive. He’s 90 now, so if you want to have a meal under his tutelage, go soon. It’s expensive. If you can afford it, it’s worth it. The wine list is also quite pricey but there are some bargains to be found if you search for them.

One step down are the bistros and brasseries in Lyon. Perhaps the best of them also have Monsieur Bocuse’s name on them. Several of his associates have opened top-end brasseries named (with a certain lack of imagination) Est, Ouest, Nord and Sud (East, West, North and South). They feature the classics of French cuisine. Onion soup, anyone?

You don’t need a fat wallet to enjoy Lyonnais dining. The city is full of little restaurants known as bouchons, French for corks. In these places you can choose among numerous regional specialties like salade Lyonnaise (salad with big chunks of bacon and a poached egg), cervelas briochée (a hot dog-like sausage baked in brioche, chicken fricassee with morels, quenelles de brochet (a poached fish cake in a rich crawfish flavored sauce) all finished off some creamy St. Marcellin cheese. Don’t even think about rushing your meal. You’re going to take your time to enjoy the food, the surroundings, the French families at the other tables and, not least, the chatter of your waiter. In the best places, he’ll speak English and if you speak French, so much the better. He’s explain the menu, the weather, the history of France and a little bit of life lessons as well. Enjoy the show.

The bouchon Les Lyonnais

And enjoy the wine. While some bouchons have broad lists, most focus on just the local wines. But when “local” means Beaujolais and the Rhône, that’s not too bad. Go ahead and order what you like, but the true glory of a bouchon is the house wines, each served in a 40 cl. bottle called a pot (pronounced poe). Pots are inexpensive, always good, never great and just not quite enough for a meal. So you order another – hey, why not, you’re having a great meal in a great city in a great country. And you know what, two isn’t quite enough either to have some to go with the cheese, so… Three hours later, you waddle out of the bouchon content and ready for bed.

There are hundreds of bouchons to choose from. Some are of relatively modern vintage, others are more than a century old. There is a web site of the organization that is trying to preserve the authenticity of these wonderful restaurants, www.lesbouchonslyonnais.org. Even though it’s in French it will give you lots of excellent recommendations. But don’t restrict yourself to this list. Explore a little and you’ll find that some are just as good. It’s really hard to have a bad meal in Lyon.

Testarossa Winery

California makes wine. California makes software. You just don’t expect those things to happen in the same place, but in silicon Valley’s Los Gatos you can find Testarossa, makers of fine Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs. (http://www.testarossa.com/) Even better for the visitor, the winery and its tasting room are in a building with genuine historical and architectural interest.

Testarossa is in the Santa Clara Valley, a part of California’s Wine Country we had never visited before…at least not for wine. Of course we knew the more famous places like Napa, Sonoma and Paso Robles, and to be honest we had low expectations of Santa Clara. To be even more honest, many of the wineries where we tasted fully lived up to our low expectations. But Testarossa was the happy exception.

You approach Testarossa up a steep and winding roadway leading to a large parking lot with a rather large and austere building on top. It was once a Jesuit seminary, dating from the 1880s, and was also the home of Novitiate Winery, which the brothers ran to fund the school. The wine making facilities are used by Testarossa today. Visitors enter the tasting room through a long, arched stone arcade, which opens up into a rather capacious facility with two long bars. On weekends they add tables to serve guests in other parts of the room. There is also a wine bar on the grounds.

Photo courtesy of Testarossa Winery

One factor that makes a visit to Testarossa particularly enjoyable – other than the wine itself, of course – is the fact that the servers are extremely knowledgeable and helpful. The winery provides ample training and all are at least level one sommeliers. It is not an exaggeration to call them wine educators. Not that they’re snobby and professorial. Quite the opposite. They set a tone that says, “Wine is fun; good wine is great fun”.

We must say that we enjoyed what we tasted and were particularly interested in their approach to wine making. Testarossa has no estate wines. That means that they do not grow grapes on their own property. The Jesuits did grow on the grounds, but after more than a century, the vines had given out. Today, Testarossa sources all its grapes from vineyards up and down the California coast, from Russian River and Sonoma Coast down to the Santa Rita Hills. To our tastes, their best wines come from the Santa Lucia Highlands, but then we’re very favorable towards wines made from grapes grown there.

A highlight of a visit is tasting the wide array of single vineyard wines that Testarossa makes. They’re picking up some fancy numbers from the rating magazines and we feel that they’re well justified. At the same time, we gravitated towards the blends, especially from the aforementioned Santa Lucia Highlands. The reserve tasting is definitely worth the extra expense (not that much, really, since at $20.00 it’s only $10.00 more than the regular one).

We recommend that, when visiting Testarossa, you take your time and ask a lot of questions. You’ll get knowledgeable answers and once you show your interest, your server is likely to open bottles that aren’t on the tasting list, even on a weekend. It would be worthwhile visiting this winery just for the history. In these days of vanity wineries, it’s a pleasure to see software folks who hit it big – it is Silicon Valley, after all – making the commitment to fine wine and a great tasting experience.

A Field Guide to Servers – Part 2 – The Hosts

This is a continuation of Power Tasting’s guide to the different sorts of Servers wine tasters may encounter in their expeditions into Wine Country. The previous edition introduced the Pourers, the lowest form of Server. In this section of the field guide, we present the Hosts.

What is a Host? A Host pours wine and delivers it to wine tasters. He or she knows nothing about wine in general or even the wine that is going into the taster’s glass. The Host’s objective is simply to make sure that everyone is having a good time. This is often an admirable trait and it can be quite pleasant to deal with a Host in his or her own habitat. Unfortunately, interacting with a Host can be quite frustrating if a taster is interested in knowing anything about the wine being consumed. It is unclear whether a Host can tell the difference between a Pinot Noir and a Petite Sirah, or a Chardonnay for that matter. But while in the company of a Host, it’s Party Time!

hostcat

How can you recognize a Host? A Host appears to be in perpetual motion, moving from taster to taster quickly enough to avoid questions. You will often hear the cry of the Host, “What’ll you have next?” If you are able to stop a Host long enough for a question, you will be promised an answer shortly, often giving the Host a chance to ask someone else behind the bar for help. Hosts can be recognized by

Big smiles, even when inappropriate
Fast talking
Eagerness to explain his or her life story, but not to say anything about wine
Two or more bottles in his or her hands

Hosts will keep refilling your glass, which is both a positive and a negative.

What can you expect from a Host? Wine. Lots of it, along with a smooth patter and a snappy joke. When being served by a Host, it’s often a good idea to just catch the spirit and go along with the party atmosphere. Wine is a social lubricant and there’s nothing wrong with having a good time. Who doesn’t like a good party? As would anyone throwing a shindig, the Host will introduce you to fellow tasters, get a conversation going and keep you involved. The risk, of course, of dealing with a Host is overindulgence, so know when to say you’ve had enough for a while.

How to get the greatest advantage from a Host? Let the Host run the party; you taste the wine. Have fun by all means but do it slowly. For one thing this keeps the party going longer. For another, you can actually get to appreciate the wine, often in the type of setting when you might be serving it back home.

Where are Hosts found? Oddly, Hosts may be found in really fine wineries as well as in sellers of plonk. You are most likely to meet one on a weekend when tasting rooms are the most crowded and the winery needs the most people to serve their visitors. Look around for a happy, giggly party in a corner of a tasting room. You’re likely to see a Host pouring the wine.

Signorello Estate

A visit to the Signorello Estate (http://signorelloestate.com/) winery can take on a few different personalities. Let’s focus on the easy one first, tasting their wines. We rather like them, especially their Cabernet Sauvignon and their Syrah. According to Signorello’s web site, their wines have been receiving considerable attention from the point-giving magazines. They are certainly a mouthful, with strong varietal flavors. Their top wines are now allocated, so if you’re not a member of Signorello’s wine club, the only way you’ll taste their top-rated wines is to visit the winery.

The tasting room is spacious and kept a little on the dark side, for a chateau-like atmosphere. In fact, as you drive up to the winery you may be reminded a bit of a slightly modern French chateau. And indeed although the owners bear an Italian surname, the wines are very much in a Napafied French style. There is a grandeur to the Signorello winery, combining the architecture and the landscape. You know you’re in Napa Valley. In fact, you’ll have just the sort of experience that many wine tasters came to Napa Valley for.

If you’re lucky, your server will be Nathalie Birebent, whose lilting French accent makes the wines taste a little less Californian and a little more French. (More about Mme. Birebent later.)

You may enjoy your tasting at the bar of the tasting room or outside on a sunlit terrace, and it is there on the terrace that the split personality of a Signorello visit kicks in. There is one of those infinity pools that seems to disappear over the edge, leading to a lovely view of Signorello’s vineyards and Napa Valley generally. It is hard to think of anything more attractive on a lazy summer afternoon.

But summer afternoons at Signorello are anything but lazy. Signorello has a working restaurant kitchen just opposite the bar and they do use it. The winery offers several different wine and food pairing tours and on the weekends there is often quite a party going on. So the calm of the interior belies the jangle of the terrace. If the latter is the scene you like, there are fewer places better than Signorello to enjoy it. If not, we recommend you visit Signorello on a weekday.

We have a special affinity for Signorello, beginning with the aforementioned Nathalie Birebent. Not only is she the spirit of the tasting room, but she’s also the wife of Pierre Birebent, the winemaker. So Mme. Birebent brings a special level of knowledge to her service which magnifies the wine tasting experience. Lucie is a native francophone (and Steve can get along in French) so our conversations over a few pours is always quite lively when we visit Signorello. On one occasion, Pierre gave us a private tour which was a pretty amazing way to visit a winery.

Overall, a visit to Signorello combines many of the elements that make wine tasting exciting: fine wine, knowledgeable servers, resonant architecture and (if you like) a party. There’s the little thrill that comes from discovering wines that you can’t find on the shelves of your local wine shop. We always leave Signorello with a smile on our faces.

A Field Guide to Servers – Part 1 – The Pourers

If we think of our passages through Wine Country as nature expeditions, then it’s important to recognize the flora and fauna we find there. The flora, of course, are grapes. It’s the various forms of wildlife we might see that get our attention here. We refer specifically to Servers. The four species of Servers are the Pourers, the Hosts, the Sellers and the Educators. Each has distinctive features and habitats and so Power Tasting is pleased to offer this field guide for those of you who will be encountering Servers in their native sites. In this issue, we introduce you to the Pourers and will continue with the other species in future issues.

What is a Pourer? A Pourer is a person whose sole activity is to remove wine from a bottle through the neck and place it in a glass. A Pourer knows nothing about wine, even the one he or she is serving. In most cases, the Pourer is an employee of the establishment where he or she is found but may in some cases be a son, daughter or close relative who has been dragooned into pouring duties instead of hanging out at a mall. Portions served by a Pourer are generally small, probably because he or she has been instructed to do so by the proprietor of the said establishment. The proprietors are cheap in serving wine because they are cheap in everything or they never would have hired a Pourer.

How can you recognize a Pourer? Pourers are generally encountered alone, often in periods of the day in which wineries attract few visitors. In fact, Pourers are often sited in tasting rooms that have relatively few visitors at all. Pourers can be recognized by the following characteristics:

Poor posture
Dull, lifeless expressions
A general unwillingness to communicate
The presence of a cell phone in the hand not serving
You immediately feel like you are disturbing him or her

Pourers don’t want to be wherever they are and don’t want to talk with anyone, especially you.

What can you expect from a Pourer? Not much. But you will get wine in your glass, so make the most of it. Take your time. Swirl your wine gently in your glass. Savor each sip. These actions are likely to make a Pourer rather nervous and may lead to a bit more attention to you than you might otherwise expect. (Sadly, the type of wineries that employ Pourers often have lousy wine, so taking your time may be a test of your endurance versus his or hers.)

How to get the greatest advantage from a Pourer? Since questions won’t result in meaningful (or even intelligible) answers, don’t waste your time. If you do want some more information and there is no one else around, ask if there is any literature available, such as descriptions of the wines on offer or tasting notes. If you really do care, ask for the web site address.

Where are Pourers found? While you might encounter a Pourer anywhere, it has been our experience that they tend to appear more frequently in the in-town tasting rooms of wineries you’ve never heard of but which have nice signs out front. They pop up on weekends although the general busy-ness of those days call for a Pourer to be accompanied by someone who knows what he or she is doing. You’re more likely to see a Pourer in the wild on a rainy weekday morning.

Here’s to the Wines of Yesteryear

In our youth, most people we knew who did drink didn’t drink wine. Oh, there would be an occasional bottle on a special occasion, but the alcoholic beverages of choice in those days were whisky and beer. Many of us were the first in our families who took wine seriously, both as an accompaniment to a meal and as a drink that would give unique pleasure on its own.

So what were we drinking back then? By our current standards, it wasn’t very good. For one thing, we were students and we didn’t have much money. Even if a Mouton Rothschild could be had for around ten dollars, that was a lot for a starving scholar then. Also, there weren’t as many wine stores such as we see today; there were liquor stores with a few bottles of red and a few bottles of white somewhere in the back. (It was a little better if you lived in an area with Italian, French or Spanish immigrants, but not a lot better.)

Photo courtesy of J. Crew

If you were anything like us, the first wine you actually went into a store and bought for yourself was one of these: Lancers, Mateus, Mouton-Cadet or Gallo Hearty Burgundy. All these wines are still available for purchase. (One of the reasons for buying Lancers was that it came in a nice clay bottle that you could use as a vase, so it maybe doesn’t count as a wine, but let’s include it.)

Lancers was and is a light bodied rosé from Portugal. Amazingly, it is produced by the great port house, Fonseca. It was created for American tastes and it succeeded quite well in that regard. Described as “moderately sweet” on the Fonseca web site, it tastes pretty sweet to us.

Its competitor for American attention was Mateus, which some of us pronounced mat-OOS and those affecting a European elegance said ma-TAY-us. We don’t think anyone knows to this day. It’s also Portuguese, sweet, comes in a pretty, mandolin-shaped bottle and was impressive to bring on a date. It showed you were too cool for Lancers, which after all had an English name.

But what could be better than a French name, and that of a French baron no less? Mouton Cadet was originally the name that the French branch of the renowned Rothschild family gave to wines it didn’t think were worthy of being called “real” Mouton. By the time we were buying it, Mouton Cadet had morphed into a thin, acidic, mass produced wine. But we liked it. Just perfect for anyone who knew nothing about wine…and that was us. By the way, these days it’s not bad for the price.

Finally, Gallo Hearty Burgundy was, as Gallo calls it today, their “original red blend” which of course had nothing to do with Pinot Noir from the east of France. But it tasted pretty good and showed your fraternity brothers that you were above (sneer) mere beer. You probably can’t do much better even today for six bucks.

Other than a nice walk down memory lane, what’s the relevance to today’s wine tasters of even moderately good taste? These wines are where we got our start. Even if they weren’t very serious wines, we took them seriously. If we’re honest with ourselves, we liked them back then although we couldn’t have said why. They brought a little glamor and sophistication into our lives and opened some horizons as to how people lived across the ocean or the continent.

In short, these wines of yesteryear were the first steps that led us to wineries in Napa Valley, Tuscany, Bordeaux and numerous other outposts in Wine Country. Sure, we can look down our oh, so elegant noses at those bottles we wouldn’t think of buying today. But consider: there’s probably some wine you like today that won’t be as appealing to you in a few years. Our tastes grow and change, and they had to start somewhere.

Lost Wineries

This is an unusual “Places to Visit” article, because you can’t visit the places described here. They’re gone, vanished into corporate policy, Napafication, wine economics or just the passage of time. We’re talking about wineries that we have loved in the past that are no longer there. These musings were occasioned by a recent visit to Joseph Phelps’ Freestone winery in Sonoma county. Phelps is one of the best known Napa Valley wineries and they added a tasting room way out towards the Sonoma Coast when they bought vineyards in the area in the late 1990’s. It has been open since 2007 and as of December 31, 2016 it will be closed.

phelps_freestone

Joseph Phelps’ Freestone Visitors Center

The tasting room had a gracious farmhouse feel to it and we hope that someone else decides to share their wines there. Even if someone does, it won’t be the same without those wonderful Phelps wines, which will still be available at their St. Helena winery. How sad that future wine lovers won’t be able to enjoy it the way that we did. (Actually, we’d love to buy it as a home but Phelps isn’t offering and we doubt that we could afford it.)

Not so many years ago, Michael Mondavi Family, owned by the son of the great Robert, had a winery in Carneros. It was similar to the Phelps Freestone winery in that it also gave visitors a sense that they were stopping by an old friend’s home. Sure, there was a bar and a server, but with a fireplace and some easy chairs, you felt that Mike would be dropping by any minute to offer you a glass and a welcome. Okay, this was all in the imagination but for one thing, wine tasting calls for some imagination and for another, that feeling is part of the experience.

[Today the Michael Mondavi tasting room has been replaced by that of a businessman who has turned the winery into a monument to ego and garish taste. No more need be said about the sense of loss.]

The former Michael Phelps Family tasting room

Perhaps the saddest loss was the Stag’s Leap tasting room built by the master winemaker, Warren Winiarski. Oh, you can still visit Stag’s Leap Vineyards and taste their famous wines. But Mr. Winiarski hasn’t had anything to do with them for some years now, since he sold his vineyards and winery to a conglomerate. Today, there’s a stunning stone and glass Visitors Center there, a truly modern Napa building. But there used to be a wooden building, a bit too crowded to be sure, with an inviting terrace and shady trees that told you that wine making is about farming and artistry, not just business.

The former terrace of the Stag’s Leap winery

There was that same sense in a lot of the wineries that have upgraded to meet the demands of tourism and trade. Perhaps it’s just wistfulness, but there was an immediacy to the experience when you stepped up to a plank stretched between two barrels and got a glass of wine from the fellow whose name was on the bottle. You can still experience that in Paso Robles and other out-of-the-way corners of Wine Country. But for Americans, it all started in Napa Valley and it is missed there.

There is more than simple nostalgia to these memories. Wine has a history; that’s why they give it vintage years. And wine tasting, as a voyage and as an experience, has a history as well. Our children won’t encounter a visit to Wine Country the way we did. It will be great fun for them too, but it won’t be the same fun. We have no yen to bring back the good ol’ days. They weren’t always that good; some poor wineries have been replaced by great wineries
in places that were only orchards back then. But it is important to keep the memory alive, if only to measure progress. As the economics of wine making and selling have changed the product, so it has changed the sensation one gets when going wine tasting. As wineries like Phelps Freestone and Michael Mondavi Family disappear, a bit of our lifetimes disappear with them.

Tasting at Harvest Time

September is a wonderful time of year to go wine tasting. Wine is necessarily grown in warm climates, and by September the heat has slackened a bit so it’s more comfortable to pass through the vineyards. And even better you’re there to watch the process of transforming agriculture into art: harvesting grapes, pressing them and turning them into wine. There’s something romantic about watching grapes being picked, placed in baskets and walked over to nearby trucks that will soon be piled high heading to the press pads.

Léon-Augustin L’Hermitte, the Grape Harvest, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

September is a terrible time to go wine tasting. There is a constant threat of rain. The roads that were never too easy to travel at the best of times are packed with trucks that are heading, full of grapes, to the wineries. Even worse, you get to be a witness to the transformation of art into industry, turning nature’s bounty into a factory product. If you get there on the right day, you might still be able to see vines with great clusters hanging from them. A day later and the vines are bare. And all you can see as you watch the grapes being harvested are ill-treated migrant farm workers.

The crush at Saintsbury winery

Okay, you must be asking, which is it? Is harvest time a good time to go to Wine Country or not. And the answer, of course, is both. (If you’re going wine tasting in Australia, Chile, Argentina or South Africa, harvest is likely to be in February or March, but let’s keep this simple.)

For personal and business reasons, we often travel in September and our voyages almost always include wine tasting. This works better in especially hot years; the 2014 harvest in Northern California began in July in some vineyards. Thank you, global warming. August is the usual time to pick grapes in much of Italy. So we have experienced all the positives and negatives of the vendange, as the French would put it.

The biggest question is how does the time of year affect the wine tasting experience. If you’re traveling in an area where the wineries you’d like to visit are large, well-funded and likely to derive significant revenue from vinotourism, your wine tasting experience should be only minimally affected. They have lots of bottles on hand and the tasting room employees are servers, unlikely to be in the fields filling baskets. But you may not find all the wines you’d like to taste because they have all been previously consumed. Worst of all, you may find that some wineries are closed, because they have sold out the previous year’s wines and haven’t made this year’s yet. We encountered this in California’s Central Coast at Linne Calodo and Booker wineries in 2011. So call before you go.

In areas where the wineries are all or mostly small family affairs, you are indeed more likely to find the doors locked while moms, dads, kids and cousins are out in the vineyards bringing in the crops. This recently occurred when we were out tasting in Beaujolais. “Desolé, monsieur” a somewhat grimy teenager would shrug. The only choice left to us was to taste the wines served in the local cooperatives. These are open in all seasons and you do get a good education about the grapes and winemaking practices of the area. Unfortunately, the wines most of them pour are good but hardly representative of the quality that attracted you to that region of Wine Country to begin with.

Should you go wine tasting at harvest time? Yes, you should, because you should experience all the seasons that pass through Wine Country. Each month has its attractions and drawbacks, so there’s no perfect time of year. All the same, if you are new to the fun of wine tasting, it might be better to hold off on being a “part” of the crush until you know better what you are likely to get.

Grapes You’ve Never Tasted

Let’s face it: in terms of the grapes we drink these days, we’ve all become pretty boring and pretty French. The majority of what we drink and the majority of what we sip when we go wine tasting are derived from four regions of France. There are the Bordeaux grapes, in particular Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Burgundy provides us Chardonnay and Pinot Noir; the Rhone Valley chips in Syrah and Grenache and the Loire Valley adds Sauvignon Blanc. Go wine tasting virtually anywhere in America or Australia and that’s what the wineries will pour for you.

Oh, yes, it’s quite different in Italy where you’ll get their grapes, in particular Sangiovese, Nebbiolo, and Nero d’Avola in the reds. There are hundreds of local varietals that rarely find their way into export crates. Spain, too, has its own specialties, Tempranillo being the best known. But sometimes in your travels, both in Europe and North America you’ll come across a varietal you’ve never tasted. Hell, you’ve never even heard of it. How do you know if you like it? How do you know if the wine made from those grapes is well made or just plonk?

Of course you can taste strange grapes in some out-of-the-way places on an overseas visit, but increasingly this is also a possibility in more familiar areas. For example, David Coffaro Vineyard and Winery sells all sorts of odd varietals, like 100% Aglianico. Grgich Hills offers some wines that Mike Grgich has been producing in Croatia, like Pošip and Plavac Mali. You’re more likely to enjoy the wines than pronounce them. Tablas Creek Vineyard in Paso Robles has a Tannat. Tannat anyone?

You should remember that even among the best known grapes, there was a time you hadn’t tasted them either. You were probably pretty young and your taste buds not very experienced, but still, how did you react? Steve well remembers the first time he tasted Shiraz, and alternative name for Syrah and very popular these days. But at that time, Shiraz was limited to Australian wines, primarily from the Barossa region. His first reaction was, “This wine has gone bad.” Then he realized that it wasn’t sour or distasteful and, in fact, it was quite good. So that’s the primary advice: Keep an open mind. And mouth, for that matter.

We recently traveled in Southwest France and discovered wines from the area between Albi and Gaillac, known by the name of the former town. The primary grapes in Gaillacs are Duras and Braucol. Never heard of them? Neither had we. (Braucol, according to Wikipedia, is a local name for Fer. That doesn’t help much, because we haven’t heard of Fer either.) So the first thing we did (and we recommend that you do) was to think about what the wine tasted like and smelled like. Gaillac, based on a sampling of six or so bottles, is relatively light bodied, fruity, with a similarity to a Cabernet Sauvignon from somewhere other than Medoc or Napa. Think a lesser area of Bordeaux, like Cote de Bourg. The idea is not to be a wine geek, but to orient your taste buds and relate what you’re tasting with what you’ve tasted before.

Albi

Now that you’ve thought about what a wine made from previously unknown grapes is like, give some thought to why the wine is different from what you’ve ever tasted before. This doesn’t have to be a deep exercise in oenology; wine snobbery is not required. Just trust your mouth. If you like this new wine or even if you don’t, try to articulate why, without reference to anything else you already know. Words like deep, round, acid, flat, fruity, flowery, and mellow should come to mind. In other words, you should be using a normal vocabulary. By putting your taste into words, you’ll have a much better understanding of what make a unique wine (to your experience) unique.

In the long run, you are most likely to continue to buy the wines made from grapes you’re already familiar with. There is, after all, a reason that they are the most popular in the world. But the core of wine tasting is discovery, so keep trying wines with funny names, made from grapes you never tasted before.