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

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.

Clos de Vougeot

One of the pleasures of going to Wine country and visiting wineries is the chance it gives you to think to yourself, “Imagine if I owned this joint!” A lesser pleasure among all those of wine tasting, but a pleasure nonetheless. Nowhere in the world are such imaginings so fertile as in France and nowhere in France are they better than at the Clos de Vougeot in the Côte de Nuit of Burgundy. Pronounce that Kloh de VOO-zhoh.

A clos is an enclosed field, or in this case and enclosed vineyard. Yes, there’s a wall around it but the vineyard is enormous, the second largest of the grand cru vineyards in the Côte d’Or. (Corton is larger.) There is a hierarchy of vineyards and thus wines in Burgundy and grand cru is the highest level. As beautiful as it may be, the reason to visit is not the vineyard but the building sitting in the middle of it.

Photo courtesy of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin

The chateau of Clos de Vougeot has a history, in fact quite a lot of it. It was erected in the 12^th century by Cistercian monks. The name originates from the nearby abbey of Citeaux, which is the mother house of the Cistercian order (known as Trappists in the United States and elsewhere). It was one of the most influential monasteries in medieval Christendom. It was eventually abandoned, restored in the 19^th century, damaged in World War II and once again restored after the war. That latter task was carried out by the members of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, a definitely snobby club of rich and famous Frenchmen. Today the Confrérie has, according to its web site, 12,000 members. It’s still rich and snobby but no longer exclusively French.

You can visit the chateau and pretend you’re one of the 12,000. It’s worth doing on its own merits, just to see a 12^th century castle in the heart of a great vineyard. You can do a self-guided tour and watch a film or you can be shown around by one of their guides. Based on our experience, the guided tour is worthwhile. The cellars and the formal rooms bring on that imaginary ownership mentioned above.

Perhaps the most exciting part of a visit is knowing that you are at the epicenter of Burgundy winemaking. Sadly, the one thing you can’t do at Clos de Vougeot is taste wine. That is, you can’t taste wine. But every year in spring and fall they hold a “tastevinage”, a grand wine tasting with a jury of 250 of the finest connoisseurs that can be assembled. They’re famous wine-growers, great merchants, heads of viticultural unions, wine-brokers, oenologists, government officials from the government’s wine office, restaurant owners, enlightened amateurs. Maybe you’re one of them, otherwise you’re not going. Out of the tastevinage comes a seal of approval, the emblem of the Confrérie des Chevaliers des Tastevin that the selected winery can put on its bottles.

By the way, what is a tastevin? It’s a wide, flat cup that sommeliers use to slurp a little bit of well-aerated wine before serving it to you. Or at least sommeliers used to do that (maybe some still do) in restaurants that had sommeliers. If you take the guided tour, they give you one.

Photo courtesy of Amazon.com

Artesa Winery

The first time we ever tasted wines at Artesa (http://www.artesawinery.com), it was a rather exclusive visit. We needed a reservation and as we approached the property, we had to enter a code that they had given us. A large gate opened slowly and then we drove up a long road to a mountain top. Okay, maybe a hilltop, but it was pretty high up.

Today, the gate is left open during business hours. The road and hilltop are still there but it is hardly exclusive. In fact, in recent years the tasting room is quite busy, seemingly every day of the week and twice on weekends. Aside from the wine, of which more later, the reason for Artesa’s popularity is the architecture of the winery and its view out over Carneros. Oh, it’s a Napa palace all right and those aren’t always to our taste. (See Not for Everyone.) But in the case of Artesa, the winery itself make a visit worthwhile.

As you walk towards it from the parking lot, you’ll pass lovely terraced fountains but you won’t see the winery, just the hilltop. Oh, wait, there’s something black jutting out of the hill over there. And there’s a portal entering the hill. You’ve arrived.

The modern interior is airy and spacious and has a lot more than a bar and a gift shop. There are side rooms and reflecting pools, with paintings and sculpture everywhere.

The utter joy of visiting Artesa is the view, as you can see in the photo below. The term “sweeping vista” hardly does it justice. That little dot in the distance is Domaine Carneros, the champagne (oh, excuse me, sparkling wine) house and its impressive chateau. At the horizon is the north end of San Francisco Bay. And in front of it all are vines, lots of vines.

The actual wine tasting experience is a bit dodgier. The tasting room space is quite large but it also can be quite crowded. Because of the aforementioned beauty of the place, Artesa has become a tourist attraction as much as a wine lover’s destination. So you may well be there with large groups or families with children. We well remember one visit in which a baby was literally crawling between our legs as we sipped our wine near the child’s parents. We do love little kids, but there are times and there are places. (See Taking or not taking your kids to wine tasting.)

Before our first visit, we were familiar with some of Artesa’s wines, especially the Sauvignon Blanc. A wine store had recommended this wine as an accompaniment for asparagus, which worked quite well. We have also enjoyed their Merlot in the past. To be honest, we weren’t as impressed in recent visits as we have been in the past. That’s the beauty of wine tasting, though; maybe next time we’ll fall in love with Artesa’s wines again.

L’Ecluse

Let’s suppose that you are in Paris, perhaps on business. You have no time to leave the city, so even though you’re in France, you will have no opportunity to go wine tasting. You have that old “so near but so far feeling”. Fear not, redemption is at hand.

We’d like to point out to you a chain of restaurants called L’Ecluse (http://www.lecluse-restaurant-paris.com), which means the lock, as in a lock on a canal. (To be honest, we only tried the L’Ecluse alongside the Madeleine church in the 8^th Arrondissment. There are also sister locations in on rue Francois 1^ier also in the 8^th, St. Honoré in the 1^st, in the 17^th not far from the Arc de Triomphe, and along the Seine in the 6^th.)

L’Ecluse restaurant, near the Madeleine in Paris

We at Power Tasting are not in the business of restaurant reviews, so we will only note that you can get a meal at L’Ecluse from a limited menu long on Bordelais cuisine, especially sausages and patés. In nice weather, you can sit outside, which is generally a pleasure anywhere in Paris and particularly so in the better neighborhoods. All the L’Ecluse restaurants are in better neighborhoods.

The reason for avid wine tasters to go to these restaurants is the wine. If you love Bordeaux wines (and which wine lover does not?) this is your chance for sampling a wide variety of wines from that region while still in Paris. What part of Bordeaux do you like the best? Margaux? Got it? Paulliac? Got it. St. Emilion? Got it. Get it?

Perhaps the most fun is to try wines from sectors you’re not as familiar with, such as Lalande Pomerol or Listrac. The good news, especially if you’re visiting as a couple, is to try a few things previously unknown to you and then follow them up with your favorites. We noticed something interesting: we each ordered wines we particularly liked, shared sips and found that we liked what the other had chosen better. Isn’t that what wine tasting is all about?

Not sure what to order? You’ll find the manager (more so than the wait staff) very knowledgeable and willing to listen to you (in English or French), find out your tastes and try to match them.

As stated, we don’t do restaurant reviews. But here’s a tip. If you do visit L’Ecluse and if you do have a meal, finish it off with the chocolate ganache and ask for advice on the best Sauternes to go with it. Believe us, you’ll remember the experience.

Vineyard Beauty

Something there is that loves a vine.

As we have traveled throughout Wine Country, around the world, we always feel a little thrill when we see vineyards. As we’re driving closer to grape-growing areas, the first to spot some vines growing in the distance will point them out and both our hearts will expand a little in our chests. The sight of the orderly rows of grape vines marching in orderly rows across a valley or a hillside, like an army of benevolent green soldiers. Seeing the vineyards adds enormously, for us, to the pleasure of going wine tasting.

The beauty is even more enticing in harvest season, when the leaves are pruned back and the ripe fruit is hanging from the vines. (Don’t tell anyone, but we have been known to sneak up on some unsuspecting vines and taken a few grapes. There’s nothing like the sweetness of these grapes just before they are turned into wine.) It is hard to count the number of photos we have of big, juicy clusters just hours before the crush.

Chimney Rock Cabernet Sauvignon, almost ready to pick

What is it about the vines? We are no farmers although we have read a few books about the agricultural aspects of wine production. Of trellises, pruning and irrigation we know virtually nothing, so we bring only the amateur’s eyes to our visits. All we can says is that looking at the sun glistening off seemingly endless rows of vines gives us a jolt of joy.

By way of comparison, there are times when we go wine tasting and don’t see vines at all. In some cases, that’s because we might be visiting tasting rooms in a town. This is mostly the case in California where wineries that cannot afford to build a palatial “visitors center” take a storefront in, say, Paso Robles, Calistoga or Healdsburg. (See our previous article on tasting in Napa Town.) There is a certain charm to wandering from one winery’s offerings to another and another. There is also the advantage of not having to get behind the wheel of a car, if we are staying in that town. And while it was once the case that only subpar wineries had in-town tasting rooms, that is not universally the case anymore. But without the sight of vineyards just outside, there is definitely the sense that something is missing.

That sensation is certainly multiplied when the wineries are far from the fields and the tasting rooms are in the industrial buildings where trucked-in grapes are crushed and aged. The total dissociation of wine from nature, no matter how good the wine is, leaves a rather empty feeling inside us.

And that is really the point: Wine tasting at its best combines product and place. You just cannot really understand Burgundy, in our opinion, unless you’ve seen Burgundy. Of course, the same applies to all of Wine Country. Wine tasting should engage all the senses, not just taste and smell, and the emotional attachment to the land is a factor in the passion for wine that almost every winemaker speaks of. Call it terroir, if you please, but actually seeing the soil and the sky and the vines where the stuff in the bottle actually come from adds enormously to the pleasure of the experience of wine tasting.