Category: Wine Tasting Tips

In our travels, we have often experienced the excitement of discovering a new winery or a new wine that we had never heard of.  In general, we enjoy the beauty of the architecture of many wineries and the sight of endless vineyards never fails to thrill us.  Sadly, these wonders can be undermined when a winery doesn’t take care of some basic amenities.

The first of these is parking facilities.  If we are visiting in the autumn and winter months, we don’t care as much if the only parking spots available are in the bright sun.  But if we’re in Wine Country in July or August, we really appreciate a spot that’s shaded from the sun by a wall or some trees.

For one thing, we are likely to have some bottles we have previously bought sitting in the car.  We don’t want them to be cooked.  Here are a few tips.  Pick up a simple Styrofoam cooler at a drug store or grocery.  If you happen to have a mini fridge in your hotel room, buy a few ice packs and put them in the cooler.  You can also buy a Styrofoam shipping box from the first winery you visit and put your new bottles in it.  Keep it inside the car, not the trunk.  Add bottles as you buy them.  At the end of the day when you get back to your hotel, bring the bottles with you, leaving the Styrofoam box in the trunk for the next day.  (Of course, if you’re tasting near your home, just use the cooler you take on picnics or camping.)

If you don’t have a cooler, put any bottles you buy on the floor in front of the rear seats or under the front ones.  This isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s better than leaving your newly bought wine in the full sunshine.  This is good practice even in the cooler months, when wine can still heat up in a closed car in the sun.

We love picnics and often dine al fresco back home.  A picnic lunch near the vines, with a newly bought bottle of a cool and refreshing Sauvignon Blanc is one of the best ways to maximize the pleasure of a day in Wine Country.  But some proprietors don’t like the mess and the critters that show up to share a meal with their visitors.  In some jurisdictions, the local elders limit or deny licenses for picnic grounds.

Picnicking at Frank Family Vineyards.

For example, only those wineries that predated Napa County’s restrictions are allowed to have facilities for picnics.  Perhaps the best known is V. Satui, in St. Helena, which has a fine delicatessen as well as wines that they produce.  Others with picnic grounds that we have enjoyed in Napa Valley are Rutherford Hill and Frank Family.

The wineries in Sonoma County are not so restricted.  We particularly recommend Dry Creek, Preston and Chateau St. Jean.  In Europe, picnicking isn’t frequently encountered at the châteaux and domaines.   But nobody cares if you bring a blanket and make yourself at home by the side of a vineyard or in a churchyard.

Finally, we expect any public location, especially one that serves liquids as a business, to have clean, well-lit restrooms.    We don’t insist on showplaces right out of Architectural Digest, but there’s no excuse for not keeping them clean and tidy.  Nothing can spoil a tasting visit like a dirty john.  We won’t name names, but they know who they are.

Fine wine goes with fine dining.  No one serves an ’05 Latour at a barbecue (well, at least no one we know).  When anyone is planning a party, in the office or at home, he or she rarely scans the cellar to find the finest.  Alas, there are too many people who figure that the beer and the hard stuff are the beverages of choice and, if they serve any wine at all, it comes from one of two jugs – red and white.

Photo courtesy of Zonin Prosecco.

At the same time, there is no reason that the wine at parties has to be plonk.  With a little thoughtfulness and a budget just above rock bottom, it’s quite possible to offer a variety of wines that can please both the knowledgeable taster and someone who just wants a pleasant beverage to pass the time.

Here are some tips for potential hosts.

• Don’t serve anything you haven’t tasted. Sadly, you can’t always trust the advice of a clerk in a wine store.  The wine so highly spoken of may be just the one the store couldn’t get rid of.  There are plenty of worthy wines under $20 and even some that are under $15.  Wine Spectator and the New York Times generally have issues each year dedicated to available bargains.  Use it as a guide.
• Plan to serve at least four wines. Why four?  If you assume that most people who choose wine at a party will select either a red or a white, there may well be someone who doesn’t care for one of your choices.  If there’s only one offering, that person is stuck.  If you have two of each on hand, it significantly raises your odds to please most people.

If you find yourself a guest at a shindig organized by a thoughtful host and are confronted by a small array of interesting wines, here are some tips for you.

• To begin with, try a little of each wine. Even if you’re partial to white wines, try those and the reds.  It shows respect for the hosts and the effort that they put in to please you.  It enables you to say, “I’m generally not into big red wines, but that Beaujolais really appealed to me”.
• Think of the party as an impromptu tasting. Try to appreciate the wines for what they are, not comparing them to other labels of the same grapes.  And if you’re being served something from somewhere you never heard of, think of it as an adventure.
• If there’s a wine you find particularly pleasing, don’t hog it. In fact, recommend it to other guests.  If nothing else, it gives you something to talk about with people you don’t know.  Again, your host will appreciate you talking up one (or more) of the wines served.
• Don’t worry about the glassware. If it’s a catered affair the glasses will be of the sturdy restaurant variety.  At someone’s home, expect plastic cups.  After all, you’re not going to be the one washing up afterwards.  Sure, good goblets enhance good wines, but party wine can survive inferior goblets.

 

For more than four decades, we would travel to California at least once a year to go wine tasting.  Occasionally we’d go to the Central Coast or a smaller, outlying sector of California’s Wine Country, which means most of the state.  But usually our destination was either Napa Valley or Sonoma County, sometimes both.  Then the pandemic came along, and like a lot of people, our travels were interrupted for a few years.

For a long time, planning for a wine tasting trip was fairly simple: flight, car and hotel.  The rest was mostly a matter of serendipity.  We’d choose an AVA, drive there and stop wherever we wanted.   We would park, walk in, belly up to the bar and taste.  When we were finished, we’d get back into the car and head up the road to do it again.

For better or worse, more planning is required these days.

• It still makes sense to limit a day’s tastings geographically. We want to be tasting, not driving from Calistoga to Napa and then back to St. Helena.  Why waste time behind the wheel when we could be in a tasting room?  More important, when the purpose of the day’s activities is sipping alcohol, it’s really advisable to minimize driving as much as possible.
• Appointments are necessary. Many wineries now have a “By Appointment Only” policy.  Smaller wineries – and some of the larger, snootier ones – have long been that way. That prohibition was once a ruse to keep rowdy crowds away; today the tastings are seated and the limitation is for real.  Since the pandemic, almost all Napa/Noma wineries are available only with a reservation.

A seated tasting at Black Stallion.  Photo courtesy of the winery.

• Expect fewer but longer seated tastings. Many wineries, as a by-product of their appointment requirements, now only offer seated tastings.  Bellying up to the bar is not an option anymore or there is no bar to belly up to.  Therefore, we taste on their schedules rather than our own.   The ambiance is more guest than bar patron, which has plusses and minuses.
• Sharing is more difficult. Since they are seated tastings, two people can’t occupy one chair.  As a result, both will have a full tasting.  Sure, we can each sip only a little but the temptation to take a few more sips is quite apparent and the cost of tasting becomes more expensive.
• Lunch is more important than ever, but harder. If we are likely to drink a little more at each tasting, we need to get some food into us.  But fitting in a restaurant between winery visits is a challenge, especially in areas where restaurants are few and far between.
• Packing a picnic may be the only choice. There are no restaurants and often not even delis in certain areas.  For example, there used to be the Jimtown Store in Alexander Valley, but there isn’t anything now.  And try finding a restaurant in the further extremes of Russian River.  Even with a packed lunch, there aren’t that many wineries with picnic tables in Sonoma County and hardly any at all in Napa Valley.  Dining in the car may be necessary but it’s unpleasant.

All of which is to say, Napa/Noma still has some of America’s best wineries available to visit.  They just take more preparation to enjoy them than it used to.

When we go wine tasting, we are almost always tasting wines we’ve never tasted before.  Even if we’re at a familiar winery, we’re going to sample a new vintage.  Often, the tasting room will put some bottlings on their menu for the day that we’ve never heard of, much less tasted.  If we’re visiting a winery we’ve never been to before, especially when we travel abroad, we’re in the dark.

This is all great preparation for ordering wine off a restaurant’s list, where we know nothing (or almost nothing).  What to choose?  This is where our experience with wine tasting trips comes to our aid.  A few tips might help you, too.

• You could ask your waiter. These days, your waiter may not be old enough to drink, much less to develop expertise in wine! The best you can hope for is that he or she can tell you what’s the most popular.  In fairness, the type of establishment that has inexperienced wait staff often has a less-than-inspiring wine list, sometimes consisting of two choices: red or white.

Photo courtesy of Sommeliers Choice Awards

• Or a sommelier. At the other extreme, restaurants that do have quality wine lists may also have someone trained to help you choose, i.e., a sommelier.  But there are problems here as well.  The sommelier is an employee of the house and has an incentive to direct you to the more expensive items on the list.  A good one will ask you what types of wine you like and the characteristics you prefer, such as robustness, acidity or intensity.  And definitely what your price range is.  Even then, you’re going to be offered what he or she thinks meets your tastes, which may or may not work out.
• Go with a wine that’s from a familiar region. If we’re dealing with wines from California, France or Italy, for example, we know enough to say “We don’t know these wines, but we know that a Bordeaux usually pleases us”.  But if we’re at a Hungarian or an Argentine restaurant, for instance, that’s not going to help.  And when we’re overseas, our best hope is to try our luck.
• Choose on the basis of price. Think about your overall restaurant experience with wine.  How much do you usually pay for wine as a percentage of the overall meal.  A third?  A half? More?  Less?  Use that as your guide.

Or go at it the other way round.  How much do you want to spend on a bottle that night?  Probably less on a random Tuesday, more on a weekend and even more for a special occasion.  Let’s say you’re ready to spend $75.  Look for a number in the $65 to $85 range on the right side of the list.  If the restaurant is knowledgeable and honest, you’ll get a bottle that satisfies you.  This isn’t a perfect rule, but it has worked out pretty well for us.

Christopher Columbus wasn’t trying to discover America.  He was looking for China and stopped in Hispaniola, which of course had already been “discovered” by the people living there.  All the same it worked out pretty well (except for the natives).  If you want to make discoveries on a wine tasting trip, you can’t set out to find them; you have to let them happen and recognize them when you do.

Moshin Vineyards’ tasting room.

• Be adventurous – Take the side roads off the main drag, whether that be Sonoma County’s Route 101, Burgundy’s Route des Vins, or the D2 in Bordeaux. You don’t know what you’ll find there and in fact there may be no wineries at all.  But sometimes there’s a little château with a small production and a limited distribution that blows your mouth away.  As often as not, you’ll get to meet the owner, who doubles as the winemaker and whose daughter is the only one there who can speak English.  And you’ll be served in their kitchen.  You won’t forget an experience like that.
• Be prepared to fail – Alas, some of those little unknown wineries are small and unfamiliar for a reason. This is especially true if you’re on a tasting trip through regions where the wines are just names to you.  If you’re on your own, for the first time in the South Africa’s Stellenbosch, the Barossa in Australia or California’s Santa Clara Valley, you’ll have no idea what’s to be found in the next winery down the road.  Maybe you’ll get lucky but there’s just as good a chance that what you’ll find is something you wouldn’t put on your table.  You have to take your chances.
• Recognize a discovery when you make one – Most American tasting rooms have a variety of wines available to taste. (So do many overseas, but in regions such as Burgundy or Tuscany, they may make only one kind of wine.)  If you’ve never heard of the winery or the wines they make, your reactions may be summarized as “eh, meh, ugh, and wow”.  It’s important not to let the first three color your perceptions so you can tell that a wow is a WOW.

Iron Horse Vineyards’ “tasting room”.  Photo courtesy of Pinterest.

• Make the most of what you find – The wines you try in an unknown winery may fall well below your standards but the overall experience may be a discovery in itself. There may be a beautiful landscape or a fine art collection or architecture that thrills you.  Contrarily, you may find superb wine being served in what is little more than a shed.  Iron Horse Vineyards fits into this latter category and is truly a discovery in itself.  The entire premise of Power Tasting is that the wine tasting experience is more important even than the wines by themselves.

The overall point is that you can’t and won’t make discoveries unless you are open to them.  Throw away your preconceptions.  Be ready to try something you’re unfamiliar with.  Trust your eyes and your taste buds.  You’ll reap rewards.

The headline might seem a bit facetious.  You taste wine on Long Island just like anywhere else: lift glass, swirl, sniff and sip.  Sure, but there are wrinkles to wine tasting on the North Fork that are somewhat unique.  Before heading out, give some consideration to these issues.

Workers tending the vines at Paumanok Vineyards, where visitors will soon sip wine.

• Try to visit on weekdays. Of course, wineries are busier on the weekends everywhere.  But many of them on Long Island work on the presumption that they can make more money from partiers than serious wine drinkers.  You can expect to find rock bands, food trucks and a lot of louder than usual people Friday through Sunday.  Early in the week, even the most popular wineries are fairly empty, giving more time for individual attention.
• Take off early. If like us you are starting from New York City, you can expect delays on the Long Island Expressway, mostly in leaving Manhattan and putting Queens behind you.  Generally, but not always, it’s smoother sailing once you get into Nassau County.  (The North Fork is at the extreme east of Suffolk County.)
• Consider making appointments. They are certainly a necessity on weekends, and although we haven’t been turned away on weekdays, we’ve been told by some tasting room managers that they have done so if they find they can’t accommodate walk-ins.  Of course, this means you need to know where you are going before you set off, which eliminates serendipity, the delightful discoveries that make wine tasting trips so rewarding.
• Think about lunch. Almost no wineries allow picnicking any longer.  Many sell food, but it’s more snacks than meals.  There are places to stop for lunch, mostly along Route 25, but only a few where you can dine, rather than grab a quick bite.
• Plan on staying over. We used to take day trips, but then we realized that we were spending four to six hours on the road for four or five hours of tasting.  Plus there was the danger of driving back having consumed alcohol.  There are many bed-and-breakfasts and some hotels, mostly in Riverhead and Greenport.  They can run a bit expensive but an overnight stay really adds to the trip.  And it gives you a chance to sample the local cuisine, which leans towards seafood.
• Try places you don’t know. If you’ve never been to the North Fork or last were there many years ago, then everything will be new to you.  Today, new owners are buying up familiar wineries and changing their names (and, to an extent, the quality of the wines.)  For example, Shinn is now Rose Hill; Laurel Lake is now Ev&Em.  Even more so, some people have invested serious money in new wineries.  These are often the best places to stop.
• Now, as before, the North Fork offers glimpses of small-town America. You’ll find that spirit in Greenport and Southold.  You’ll notice the plethora of churches of every denomination.  They are indicative of the roots of many of these towns going back centuries to America’s earliest European settlers.  And the names of many of the the towns – Cutchogue, Mattituck, Peconic, Paumanok – evidence the influence of the First Nations.

Wines come from and are known by certain regions.  They are AVAs in the United States, AOCs in France, DOCGs in Italy, etc.  In each one of those regions, there are many vineyards, some clearly better than others.  Knowing which ones are the best can lead to greater pleasure when you go wine tasting.  That sounds simple, but it gets more confusing depending on which sector of Wine Country you are visiting and how they allocate the land.

Bien Nacido Vineyards in Santa Maria, California.  Photo courtesy of biennacidoestate.com.

• In Bordeaux, it’s easy. The rules there are that all the grapes in a wine identified with a specific chateau or domain must be grown on its property.  If you see a wine simply called a Bordeaux on the label, it can be from anywhere in the region.
• In Burgundy, it’s difficult. In many cases, growers don’t own vineyards, they own parcels or even individual rows of grapes, within identified vineyards.  And those may be villages, premier cru or grand cru depending on the terroirs of each.  So wines made from grapes grown in certain well-known vineyards such as Chambertin or Clos de Vougeot are the ones you should look for.
• In California, things can get a little tricky, too. Many wineries boast of their “Estate” or “Estate Grown” wines.  That means that the grapes for those wines came from the producer’s own property, were cultivated by its own staff and were vinified on the premises as well.  It doesn’t mean that the grapes are necessarily the ones you can see out the tasting room window.  They can come from anywhere in the AVA that’s indicated on the bottle.
• But not all wines are “Estate”. Many wineries make wine but don’t do the farming themselves.  (And many wineries that do have Estate wines also make wine from purchased grapes.)  When you are sampling a wine that isn’t Estate, it’s fair to ask which vineyards the grapes come from.  There are some so highly regarded that the name of the vineyard alone is enough to make a taste desirable.
• For example, in Napa Valley, Beckstoffer is the acknowledged leader. And within Beckstoffer’s properties there’s the To Kalon, made justly famous by Robert Mondavi.  Morisoli in the Rutherford Bench is also well reputed, as is Stagecoach high up on the mountains to Napa Valley’s east.
• To confuse matters further, some growers sell most of their grapes and also make their own wines. So, for example, Truchard and Baciagalupi are major sources for many wineries. The former’s wide variety of grapes, especially Chardonnay, can be found in many wines around Napa.  Baciagalupi in Russian River grows Pinot Noir and Chardonnay for many other wineries.
• Further south, look for any wine made from grapes from the Bien Nacido vineyard. In the Central Coast, many wineries boast their wines from that vineyard, with Au Bon Climat claiming the largest share.
• And in the Santa Barbara area, Sanford and Fiddlestix vineyards have great reputations. Sanford also makes wines under their own name, while Etude (among others) makes a Fiddlestix Pinot Noir.

There is only one reason we know that you MUST decant a bottle of wine.  If the cork breaks as you open a bottle and you can’t get it out, the only option is to push it in.  This makes decanting necessary.

After that, there are several reasons why you might WANT to decant your wine:

• A decanter of wine on the table is attractive and adds to the pleasure of a meal.
• The wine is too young and needs extensive aeration.
• The wine is quite old and needs a little aeration.
• The wine is quite old and probably has a lot of sediment that you don’t want to swallow.

Photo courtesy of The Manual.

Some restaurants decant wine, perhaps in an effort to justify overcharging.  Some people decant wine because they think they look cool, even if it makes them look cork-dorky.  And then there are the occasions when Aunt Gertrude is coming over for dinner and she gave you the decanter.

Wineries generally don’t decant their wines, although they should.  They mostly serve younger releases that might benefit from some extra air.

If you are going to decant a bottle, here are some tips.

• Don’t decant too early or too late. A younger wine, and even one well within its drinking age, can be decanted hours earlier than you plan to serve it.  This is not a requirement but it does get the maximum benefit of airing out the wine.  But in our opinion,  if you’re serving a very old wine, decant it just before serving, to let out some of the accumulated gasses in the bottle without losing flavors.
• Simple decanters work just as well as fancy ones. The objective is to expose the wine to air and to leave the sediment in the bottle.  The ones that are examples of the glass-blowers’ art may be very pretty but not so easy to pour from.  A simple carafe can do the job.
• Don’t decant too fast, but don’t make a big production of it, either. As the wine passes from bottle to decanter, it all meets air.  If you pour too quickly, you’ll lose some of this benefit and are more likely to get some sediment into the decanter.  Restaurant sommeliers and dedicated snobs will pour the wine very, very slowly, in front of a candle.  That way they can see the first little bits of sediment and stop pouring.  All very dramatic, to be sure, but the same thing can be accomplished in front of a well-lit white or light colored wall or even a piece of paper.  Yes, pour slowly, but be reasonable about it.
• Consider double decanting. If you’re serving a bottle you’ve saved for a special occasion, you might actually want to see that well-anticipated bottle on the table.  So if you think the wine would benefit from decanting, do so.  Then pour the sediment out of the bottle, lightly rinse with a bit of wine and pour the wine back into the bottle.  You’ll maximize the aeration as you pour twice and you still get to see that pretty label.

Of course, tasting wine in Saint-Chinian is just like tasting wine everywhere.  Swirl, smell, sip and smile.  But there is a difference in approach and attitude.  This is a small region in the greater scheme of French wine.  It’s not Burgundy or Bordeaux and doesn’t pretend to be.  But Saint-Chinian makes some rather fine wines in a low-key atmosphere, with enough history to be of interest just because of its longevity.

It pays to get in the right frame of mind to appreciate what you’re tasting, without either over- or under-estimating what can be done with the grapes at hand.  And these principles can be applied around the world in regions with small producers and limited production.

• Expect good wine and you’ll be rewarded. It makes no sense to visit a tiny tasting room of a vineyard you’ve never heard of and expect to find a new Latour.  But you can find wines that have evolved over centuries into an expression of the terroir in a region that has only recently come close to its full potential.  Contemporary Saint-Chinian wineries are clean, well-run and often organic (or naturel as they call it).  You may not find great wines in Saint-Chinian but you can taste many very good ones.
• Consider the prices. What you get for what you pay in Saint-Chinian will astound the average American wine lover.  Take a sip of a Rhône-style wine, for example, and ask yourself what it would equate to in California.  Only then ask what you’d pay right there.  You very well might be given a price under 10 Euros or eleven US dollars.  As they say in the car commercials, don’t try this at home!
• Look for what makes the wines of Saint-Chinian unique. One factor is the contrast of wines from stony schist soil and those from clay or limestone.  It is amazing to realize how different the wines from those soils can be.   Considering that they may come from vineyards only a few miles apart is an eye-opener to the influence of terroir on wine.  Then look for that unique tang of garrigue, the herbal brush that grows everywhere in the region, particularly the hillsides.
• Admire how far Saint-Chinian wines have come. In the past, you might have tried wine from this AOC – or all of the Languedoc for that matter – and found them rough, acidic and maybe just a little off.  The local winemakers have realized in this century that there is real value, to themselves and their customers, in biodynamic techniques and sound sanitation.  If you can remember the old days, you’ll appreciate the results.
• Think small. There are no grand houses in Saint-Chinian, even though every winery is Château This and Domaine That.  They don’t need to reach a mass audience and they don’t try.  So just as each wine tells the tale of the appellation, so they each say something about the men and women who tend the fields, nurture the grapes and make the wine.  That they do so much so well is a testament to what winemaking on a small scale can be.

 

 

Sometimes you consume wine standing up.  At a bar in a tasting room.  At a barbecue.  At a party.  More often, for most people, you drink wine sitting down.  At the dinner table or in a restaurant.  Increasingly in wineries at tables in a tasting room.  On our porch on a late summer afternoon.

In almost all those cases, you drink wine with others you know or at least would like to talk with.  But in a certain type of wine tasting adventure, you find yourself sitting at a long table in a luxurious room, sipping wine with complete strangers.  A number of wineries offer seated tastings, by appointment only, often with accompanying foods, usually combined with a tour.  These are generally tastings at wineries that are (or aspire to be) among the elite, including wineries such as Jordan and Cain in California and Biondi-Santi in Italy.

Photo courtesy of Visit Napa Valley.

There is an etiquette to these gatherings that is worth thinking about.

• It’s really not a cocktail party. Some people are chatty and others are more interested in enjoying their wine with the person they came with.  If you’re one of the talkative ones, be respectful of the more silent types.  And if you do find other guests who’d like to converse with you, keep it down so as not to dominate the room.  That room may be like a fine dining room or a library, so speak as you would in one of those places.
• You’re not the wine expert. There’s always a server/guide who leads the proceedings.  Let that person explain the wine and the history of the estate.  Even if you really are a wine expert, it’s best not to take over.  You’ll just come across as overbearing and intimidating.
• If there’s food, wait to be told when to eat it. This is a tasting, not a party.  The foods are often little bites of pâté, cheese or crackers.  They are chosen by the winery to complement and accompany specific foods.  So wait until your server suggests a pairing before you take a bite.  We have often found it interesting to leave a little bit of each food to try it with other wines after the pairing.  It might clash or it might bring out a quality in the wines that may surprise you.
• As always, you have no obligation to buy any bottles. You are bound to be asked if you’d like to purchase some.  The winery knows that you’re at your most receptive, having been treated like visiting royalty, with a little peer pressure added to the mix.  Remember that you have paid to be there.
• Make sure to enjoy the ambience as well as the wine. Our experience has been that these group tastings are often held in beautiful rooms in buildings that either are or are meant to look like grand châteaux.  And the wines are often top of the line, often with a little extra from the library collection offered as well.  You may not come this way again, so soak it in while you’re there. Cheers!