Category: Wine Tasting Tips

One of the great things about wine tasting is the diversity.  There are so many wines, from so many countries and regions, that it’s pretty clear that no one will ever taste them all.  But don’t let us deter you from trying.

There are almost as many brands and shapes of wine glasses as there are wines.  The basic model is a bowl shaped somewhat like a tulip, with a stem and a foot, so you can put it down without the wine all spilling out.  The better manufacturers make different glasses for reds, whites, Bordeaux, Pinot, Port, etc.  Among the better-known manufacturers are Spiegelau, Schott Zwiesel, Waterford, Riedel and so many more brands.  While most of the wine glasses are stemmed, Riedel has introduced some stemless ones; some bistros use tumblers.  Whatever shape or color, they all can hold wine. Besides the wine glasses, there are the balloon glasses or snifters for Cognac, whisky tumblers, goblets and highballs, Champagne flutes and dessert wine glasses.  Some shapes ask for holding them in the palm of the hand, such as for warming Cognac, as an example, and for whiskey when one prefers it straight than on the rocks. Besides the beauty and diversity of each of them, the shape helps concentrate the bouquet and intensifies the flavor.  While it may seem like snobbism to have all those different shapes in glasses, but there are reasons, not just a snobbish thing

There was once a time when winery tasting rooms used the smallest, cheapest glassware they could find, undoubtedly to cut cost.  They didn’t charge for a tasting and they gave away the glasses, which were just one step above a jelly jar and made it difficult to hold it by the stem.  But as time and tastes have improved, better wineries are now offering their tastings in fine stemware.

Almost all American wineries, to say nothing of most restaurants and bars, use stemmed wine glasses.  Of course, a stemmed wine glass is elegant but besides that, the stem is meant to hold the bowl away from the heat of your hand, so that it doesn’t warm the wine in your glass.  Too often we see people holding their glass of wine the same way they hold a glass of water, grabbing it by the bottom of the bowl.  Talking about elegance: this isn’t it.  This is something that gives us shivers when we see people, unfortunately, grabbing their wine glass with the hand around the bowl, instead of holding it by the stem.  All they are doing is detracting from the wine tasting experience.  Especially in winery tasting rooms, where the pours are necessarily small, the relative impact on the wine can be significant.

Holding your wine glass by the stem will also make it easier to swirl the wine in order to aerate it.  So get the most out of your wine when you sip it by holding the glass the way it was meant to be held.

Enjoy your wine.  Cheers!

Last month’s issue of Power Tasting contained an article on planning for a trip to Napa Valley.  We owe the same to the other half of Napa/Noma, Sonoma County.  Many aspects of the planning are the same but there are some very distinct differences as well.  For one thing, Sonoma County is a lot more relaxed than Napa Valley.  For another, Sonoma’s Wine Country is quite a lot bigger than Napa Valley’s, so there’s more travelling to do if you want to see – and taste – it all.

• Figure out what you want to taste. Different AVAs of Sonoma Wine Country are associated with different grapes.  Russian River is renowned for its Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays (although Chardonnay is grown just about everywhere).  Alexander Valley is known for Cabernet Sauvignon.  Dry Creek Valley is famous for its Zinfandels.  You’ll find some of everything everywhere and some other AVAs make a little of everything, but you really ought to focus your tasting on the local specialties.

Alexander Valley.  Photo courtesy of The Wine Country.

• Avoid a lot of driving. You will need at least a day to go wine tasting in any one region (and of course you won’t be able to taste everything in a day), so don’t plan to do a little bit in the Sonoma side of Carneros in the morning and then Dry Creek after lunch.  The main route in Sonoma County is Route 101 and even at highway speeds, it’s an hour’s drive between those two ends of Sonoma’s Wine Country.

Traveling through Russian River. Photo courtesy of Ride with GPS.

• But enjoy the drive. Unlike Napa Valley, which is laid out in fairly straight lines, Sonoma County’s Wine Country is full of rustic, windy roads many of which are especially beautiful.  Take some time to open your eyes and look around.
• Choose a hotel that’s close to where you want to taste wine. The principal towns with large hotels are Sonoma to the south, Santa Rosa in the middle and Healdsburg up north.  Each has a mix of chain hotels, inns, resorts and bed-and-breakfasts.  It’s probably a good idea to figure out where you want to taste, then ask Google how long it would take to get there from each town.  That should make it easier to narrow your hotel search.
• Think about food, too. For the most part, Sonoma County restaurants are more casual than their counterparts in Napa Valley.  Healdsburg has a few rather elegant eateries (Charlie Palmer’s Dry Creek Kitchen and Valette) but you’ll usually find both the food and the diners to be easy-going in the rest of the county.  That’s not a put-down; there are lots of places to eat with great food.  Like anywhere else, reservations are a good idea on weekend evenings in warm weather, but in general you won’t need them.
• Enjoy lunch, too. If you’re going to be sipping wine all day, you’d better eat.  There are iconic delis (the Jimtown Store in Alexander Valley, the Dry Creek General Store, the Oakville Grocery in Healdsburg).  Many wineries in Sonoma County have picnic facilities, unlike those in Napa Valley.  And having a bite on the town squares in Healdsburg or Sonoma, followed by a casual stroll, should be a part of your vacation plans, too.

You’ve decided you’re going to go wine tasting in Napa Valley.  Maybe you’ve never been or it’s been a while.  We’d like to offer some tips on getting the most out of your vacation by investing some time planning before you go.  Believe us, it will pay dividends.

• How much time do you have? It makes a big difference if you’re going for just a few days (and if those days are a weekend) or more time, including weekdays.  Don’t try to pack in too much in a short time.  For one thing, you’re dealing with alcohol, so you’d better know your limits and not even get close to them.
• Which part(s) of the valley do you want to visit? There are 17 appellations in Napa Valley, and while a few such as Atlas Peak and Wild Horse Valley don’t have wineries to visit, most of the rest have plenty.  There are more than 400 tasting rooms in Napa Valley.  You’re not going to get to them all in one vacation, so it makes sense to choose a sector (like Oakville or Calistoga) and focus on just one per day.  You want to avoid driving from one end of the valley to the other, potentially in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

The view from Viader winery on Howell Mountain.

• Choose a hotel that’s convenient to the places you want to go. The chain hotels are clustered to the south end of the valley, in Napa Town and environs.  Carneros and Yountville have many spas and resorts these days and tend to be pretty pricy.  There are bed and breakfasts scattered everywhere.  In general, the further north you go, the fewer hotels and inns there are to choose among.  Napa Valley is a very popular tourist destination these days, so don’t rely on finding a place when you get there.  Reserve in advance.
• Plan out your days. When do you usually get out of bed?  It’s your vacation, so don’t plan on getting up with the roosters unless that’s what you usually do.  Eat breakfast!  You’re going to be sipping alcohol all day, so have something in your stomach before your first wine tasting stop.  Figure you’ll taste at, say, four wineries in a day.  Leave time for a nice lunch; dining in Napa Valley is almost as much a part of your vacation as wine tasting.  Think about what you’ll do between the closing of the wineries and dinner.  Your usual vacation plan of a pre-prandial cocktail may not make sense if you’ve been sipping wine all day and will probably have some more with your evening meal.

Bistro Jeanty.  Photo courtesy of Sonoma Magazine.

• Make dinner reservations. It is hard to get a table at some Napa Valley restaurants.  Some are just impossible (e.g., French Laundry).  Others are very popular and fill up their reservations well in advance (e.g. Bottega).  There are quite a few that are local favorites, like Bouchon, Mustards Grill or Bistro Jeanty where it’s difficult to get in on weekends without a reservation.  So it’s a good idea to reserve before you travel; you can always cancel if you change yourmind.  And if you don’t mind waiting, the Bounty Hunter and Ciccio don’t even take reservations.

Have a great vacation and drop us a note while you’re there.

With rare exception, no one goes wine tasting with the exclusive purpose of sipping dessert wines.  Sure, that’s the idea if you’re going to Sauternes in France, and maybe in the Canada’s Niagara region, but that’s about it.  On the other hand, almost everywhere in Wine Country, there will be winemakers who make a bit of sweet wine as a little extra.

In Australia, they call them “stickies”, and with good reason.  In Italy, they make Vin Santo in Tuscany, Reciotto in Valpolicella and Passito in Sicily.  Canada and upstate New York have their ice wines.  Of course, there’s Port in Portugal.  And in California, as you might expect, many wineries have a dessert wine available and they’re all very different.  Among our favorites are Grgich Hills’ Violetta, Dry Creek Vineyards’ Soleil, and Beringer’s Nightingale.

There are a lot of different types of dessert wines.  The best, in many people’s opinion, are the wines affected by the botrytis fungus that sucks almost all the moisture out of the grapes.  The resulting shriveled fruit is very sweet and very concentrated.  In Sauternes, it happens almost every year, but elsewhere it happens sometimes and sometimes not.  Ice wines are made in climates where the grapes can freeze in late autumn.  In warmer places, they just leave the grapes on the vines and produce late harvest wines.  In our opinion, Port only comes from the Douro Valley in Portugal, but many others make a wine they call Port, made from Zinfandel and other white grapes.

Photo courtesy of Royal Design.

So wherever you travel, if you want to tickle your sweet tooth after drinking dry wine, here are some tips.

• Most of the time, you’ll have to ask. Many wineries don’t make dessert wines and of those that do, many keep them below the bar.  After you’ve completed your allotted tastes of table wines, you can politely mention, “Do you make a dessert wine?”.  Some visitors are shy about asking, especially if they have paid for, say, four tastes and they’ve had them all.  Don’t worry about it.  The mere fact that you knew enough to ask is enough to show a server that you care.
• Sip it like it’s the nectar of the gods. You’re often getting something extra so show your appreciation.  They don’t call it dessert for nothing.  Unless you buy some, you may never taste this wine again, so make every drop count.
• Drink these wines differently than you would a table wine. You’ll probably get a small glass with a small lip.  Take just a little liquid in your mouth and roll each sip over your tongue.  Let your sweet sensors do the work.  Then remember you’re drinking wine and look for the complexities.  It’s that complexity that makes the botrysized wines like Sauternes stand out from the others.
• Remember you’re drinking it young. Most wineries sell out their “stickies” very rapidly, usually to their club members.  It is rare to find an older library dessert wine.  Many change character as they age and some (not all) people like them better when they’ve gotten brown and mellow.  You’ll be sipping honey and fruit juices and sugar.  Enjoy it while you can.

This is the time of year that every newspaper and magazine features articles on New Years resolutions.  There are always suggestions on losing weight, learning to play the piano and buying a dog.  Why should Power Tasting be left out?  Resolute as we are, we are looking forward to living up to some our own expectations in 2019.

• Enjoy a part of Wine Country where we have never been before. In recent years we have discovered wines in Sicily, Tuscany and Languedoc.  Maybe in this coming year we will be sampling Blaufrankisch, Tempranillo or Jacques Capsouto reds.  There are no plans yet, but we are eager to go wine tasting wherever the road takes us. We hope that all our readers are open to the experience of discovery that makes wine tasting such a tantalizing pursuit.

• Visit the new homes of old favorites. There are a few Napa Valley wineries that have built new tasting rooms because of the damage wrought by earthquakes (Trefethen), the terrible fires (Signorello) or just because they wanted a new place to welcome visitors (Joseph Phelps).  We haven’t been to see them yet and would really like to do so.  And when we do, we’ll report on them in the pages of Power Tasting.
• Go back and try a few places we didn’t like that much in the past. Taking our own advice, we’ll go back, because we may fall in love again.  It won’t be just little, out-of-the-way wineries that we hadn’t heard about before (although we’ll try a few of those as well).  There are some internationally known wineries that changed hands, usually in corporate takeovers.  We haven’t always been happy with the changes they made, but now that they’ve been in place for several years, it’s worth giving them a second chance.
• Find wine tasting adventures close to home. Power Tasting is based in New York City.  There have to be some wonderful wine bars that we haven’t tried yet.  Actually, there are a lot of wine bars where we haven’t been.  Wine tasting is a part of travel but it should also be a part of staying home.
• Do at least one international comparison. We’ll open bottles of wines made from the same grape or grapes from different parts of the world.  We’ve done this before, but it’s been a long time.  So maybe Syrahs from Australia, the US and France.  Or French, American and New Zealander Sauvignon Blancs.  It’s a great way to see how different terroirs lead to unique expressions of the same grapes.
• Go to San Francisco. We’ll certainly be in California again this year.  After all, we’ve tasted there every year since the 1970’s so why  stop now?  But in recent years we’ve gone straight from the airport to the vineyards and haven’t passed any time in the City by the Bay.  It’s time we went back.
• Eat well when we go wine tasting. We always have.  We’re not going to change now.

 

Although there have been a few exceptions over the years, we mostly go wine tasting as a couple.  Our tastes in wine are not exactly the same, but they’re close enough that we generally like and occasionally dislike the same wineries.  It has happened that we have visited Wine Country with friends or relatives.  Some have been quite knowledgeable themselves and so having them along was simple.

But there have been other times when our friends knew little about wine, had never been wine tasting before and wanted to experience it with us. The objectives (well, our objectives, if not theirs) is to have a pleasant day, to introduce your guests to a pastime that you are fairly passionate about and to give them a sampling of some good wines.  Such a trip offers some nice opportunities but there are some pitfalls as well.

Photo courtesy of Food & Wine Magazine

Here are some tips for taking advantage of the former and avoiding the latter.

• Make sure your friends will still be your friends when the day is over. Don’t be a wine snob; don’t talk down to them; don’t use fancy wine lingo.  Yeah, you knew that already but say it to yourself before you set off and repeat it several times during the day.  The temptation to brag is insidious and it can be overwhelming.
• Make the day about more than wine. Plan a nice lunch, either a picnic or at a good café or deli.  Drive around in some of the prettier areas of the section of Wine Country you’re visiting that day.  Choose at least one winery with interesting architecture.  If possible, go somewhere you know the servers are good at explaining what they’re pouring.  All these steps will keep your friends from feeling overwhelmed.
• Go easy on the top end wineries. There are all too many that charge you forty dollars or more for a few sips of the one or two wines they make.  For sure, these are some of the best winemakers in the world or at least they claim to be.  But if your friends don’t have the taste buds to distinguish between “very good” and “great” you’re probably not doing them a favor by visiting the heavy hitters.
• On the other hand, don’t play down to your perception of their sophistication. Only go to places you would visit if you were on your own.  Your wine tasting adventures probably aren’t all Screaming Eagle and Château Margaux, so don’t show off.  A good idea would be to choose wineries with two tiers of tastings, with one from their lower priced, popular wines and another with their reserves.  That way your friends can taste these wines side by side.  They may prefer the easy drinking accessible wines, what’s wrong with that?
• Focus the tastings on your friends, not yourself. Tell your server that you’ve tasted their wines before but it’s the first time for your friends.  This enables the server to pitch his or her spiel to the right level, educational for them and not too elementary for you.  You may come back some day and then you can get into all the intricacies you want.

The day will be a success if your friends enjoyed themselves and understood wine better than the day before.  It would be great if they decided to visit Wine Country again on another day.  But if they just added this day to their pleasurable memories and no more, that’s okay too.

People go wine tasting for a variety of reasons.  For some it’s to have a pleasant day in the country; for others it’s to celebrate a birthday or impending nuptials.  Unfortunately, there are still some who go just to get a little tipsy.  For us, the primary reason is to be educated about the vast range of wines and the techniques for making them.  Moreover, we love the experience of wine tasting, which is what Power Tasting is all about.

The educational aspect of wine tasting begins, of course, with what is poured into your glass.  We long ago learned to swirl the wine, smell it, admire the color and consider the expansion of the taste sensations as we sip and swallow it.  More than that, if one is really intent on learning, it is important in any endeavor to ask questions and reflect on the answers.

In discussing the kinds of questions to ask, let us make some assumptions.  First, there is no reason to be intimidated.  The server is there to aid you in the enjoyment of each winery’s products (and maybe to sell you a little) so all but the most harried or uninterested is going to be friendly and attempt to be helpful.  Let us also assume that the server has a basic understanding of the wines he or she is pouring and is able to answer reasonable questions. While it would be valuable if the server were a true educator with deep wine knowledge, that’s not necessary.  Finally, lets assume that the tasting room is not packed, with numerous visitors calling for the server’s attention.

Here are some recommendations for the kinds of questions a relatively inexperienced wine taster (or even some more experienced ones) might reasonably ask:

• “Which wines are you best known for?”  It is probably easy to tell which are considered the winery’s best wines; they are the ones that are most expensive. But those might not be the ones they sell the most of or for which they have gained their reputation.  There’s a winery in Dry Creek that we return to often for their Zinfandels and Cabernet Sauvignons, but when we asked this question we were told that they sell far more Sauvignon Blanc than anything else.  This grape is not a particular favorite of ours but we then paid more attention to it at this winery and found we liked it quite a bit.
• “How long until this wine reaches its peak?”  Almost every winery will tell you that their wines are ready to drink when they are released and, unless you are tasting in Bordeaux, this is generally true nowadays.  But drinkable is not the same as ideal, so this is a reasonable question, especially if you are considering buying some.  (You might want to invest in a Clef du Vin – also known as a Wine Key – to get an answer.)
• “What foods would go well with this wine?”  Sometimes the answer is written on the back label.  You might also get a canned answer: white wines with fish and chicken, reds with meats and cheeses.  But perceptive wineries will often make specific recommendations about which wines are ideal for fine dining, barbecues or causal dinners.  You might get tips for not over – or underpowering – the food with which you open a particular bottle.  This also gives you an idea of how the wine maker positions his or her products.
• “How does this vintage compare with the best in recent years?”  No one will tell you that any specific harvest produced substandard wines.  But 2014 was spectacular in Napanoma; so was 2010 in Bordeaux and Chianti.  So by giving the serve a benchmark, you might get some valuable information.  You won’t be told that the wine in your glass is inferior, but you may be told that it is lighter, more fruity or more elegant.  And if you’re lucky, the server might open one of the older bottles and let you judge for yourself.

We Americans like our driving to be easy.  We like highways and when we go wine tasting, we like there to be a few main roads that take us to all the wineries.  In Napa Valley it’s Route 29 and the Silverado Trail.  In Sonoma County it’s Route 101.  In some parts of Europe they feel the same way.  The main roads are the D2 in the Médoc and the Route des Grands Crus in Burgundy’s Côte d’Or.

The Languedoc is much older than these regions, wilder, more spread out and frankly, poorer.  Each appellation is somewhat self-contained covering a wide swath without much of a center point.  The vineyards and wineries are often on small, single-lane roads quite removed from the major roads.  These “major roads” are themselves two lanes wide and often twist through villages and turn around precipices.

The village of Minerve, for which the Minervois is named

Of course, you can use a GPS, as we did.  We named the voice of our guide Fifi and in fairness she always seemed to know the shortest route.  But the shortest is often (in fact, usually) not the best and we spent way too much time in a car that was narrower by two inches on either side than the paved road, following a tractor that was going ten miles an hour.  Passing was out of the question.

So if you’re going to go wine tasting in the Languedoc – and we hope you do – here are a few tips for getting around.

• Don’t just rely on Fifi.  Check out the roads on the Internet before you set out.  If Google Maps says you should go the D11 to the D612 to the D909 and Fifi tries to take you on some tiny road, ignore her.  If despite that you do get lost, she can bail you out…eventually.
• Get a good map.  Presumably, the French know where they’re going but you don’t.  So when you’re driving, say, to the Minervois, you want to go in the direction of Narbonne, until you don’t.  The map will let you pick off the names of towns and villages that are along your route so you can tell the difference between making headway and getting lost.  Particularly in the Languedoc, the names of towns can be confusing.  Murveil-les-Beziers is not the same place as Beziers, nor is Cazouls-les-Beziers.  You’ll get to Poilhes before you can learn to pronounce it.

The view from the walls of Beziers

• Watch the signs closely.  The French are quite good at marking their roads.  If you keep a sharp eye, you’ll see the major destination on a green field at the top of road signs with several of the next villages listed below.  In the major winemaking areas, you will see signs pointing to châteaux and domaines with just barely enough time to take the indicated exit.  Then just keep going; eventually there will be another sign telling you where the winery is.

This sort of advice is useful in the Languedoc, but it’s also applicable in other less traveled areas of Wine Country.  So if you blunder about a bit, don’t worry.  Just enjoy the scenery.  You will get somewhere, if not always where you expected to go.

If you enjoy wine tasting and you’ve never taken a tour of a winery, you really ought to do it.  Wine making is one part farming, one part artistry and one part industry.  When we open bottles at home, we can see the artistry, how winemakers have induced humble grapes to tempt the eye, nose and tongue.  There’s a little bit of the industrial side as well, if you count the marketing that goes into the labels.

When you are actually there at a winery all three parts are right in front of you: the vineyards, the gleaming bottles and glasses at the bar and that factory right behind the tasting room.  Skipping that last part is to willfully ignore some of the mystery that ends when you swallow but begins in the field.  You really ought to gain an understanding of how the wine got from that vineyard to your mouth.

What follows is a word picture of a winery tour.  Keep in mind that this is a generalization, as each winery does more than a few things its own way.

Destemming at Saintsbury in Carneros

The grapes arrive at the winery in huge bins, packed to overflowing.  The stems and everything that isn’t grapes are removed and then the grapes are pressed.  (No, they don’t use feet anymore.)  The juice is transferred to vats and yeast is added to turn the sugar into alcohol.  Once that occurs and all the scummy stuff is removed, the juice is transferred to even larger vats where they are blended to get the mix that will eventually be wine.  From there the soon-to-be-wine is stored in barrels for months.  Finally it is pumped into bottles and the bottles are put in boxes to be sent to wine stores near you.

The barrel room at Donnafugata in Sicily

So now that we’ve told you how it’s done, why bother going?

• There’s nothing like seeing it yourself.  It’s the same reason you go to a museum rather than looking at pictures on your cell phone.  There is the pleasure of knowing what the process actually looks like.  It’s not just bragging rights with your friends; it’s the internal satisfaction of having been there.
• It may be a part of the tasting.  Quite a few wineries, particularly some of the best ones, are proud of the way they make wine and include a tour in the tasting and in fact you can’t taste without touring.  A few wineries that come to mind are Chappelet, Jordan and Cain in the US, almost all of the major châteaux in Bordeaux, and Biondi-Santi in Tuscany.
• You get a sense of how difficult winemaking is.  Particularly if you have a chance to visit during the press, you’ll see how labor intensive the process of making wine can be, how much an investment needs to be made in equipment and personnel and how long the time is before the winery can make any money from the work that is done. So the next time you shell out some serious bucks at the wine store, you can say to yourself, “Yeah, I get it.  I know why it costs so much.”  Okay, maybe it still costs too much, but you’ll understand where the costs come from.

In our last issue, we discussed the pleasures of walking through vineyards and also noted that most farmers aren’t crazy about the idea of tourists doing so.  Here are various ways to get near or into a vineyard, some more official than others.

One way is to visit a winery that has set aside a few rows of vines for the express purpose of access by visitors.  You’re most likely to find these near California wineries.  Grgich Hills in Rutherford in Napa Valley and Dry Creek Vineyards in the eponymous region in Sonoma County are two examples of wineries that have these model vineyards.  One of the advantages is that they have different sorts of red and white grapes growing right next to each other, so you can compare them.  Of course, the best time to do so is in August and September, when there are grapes hanging from the vines.

The best way to learn about the vineyards is to take a winery tour that includes a walk though the vines.  In fact, some wineries only offer tastings if you take a tour and build a walk among the vines into the tour.  Stags’ Leap and Chappelet on Pritchard Hill, both in Napa Valley, are among those that arrange their tastings that way.  There are some plusses and minuses, though. A guided vineyard tour offers particular advantage if your guide is a well-versed educator.  You can get some valuable lessons by seeing why grapes grown in this kind of soil, near that water source, produce grapes that are used to make the wine you just tasted.  However, you need to plan more time at the winery and be ready to hear the sales pitch at the end of the tour.

Weather can be a factor, too.  We once took a tour at Chappelet on a brutally cold day in December (yes, it happens) and a few sips of Sauvignon Blanc among the barren vines was not enough to warm us up.  We took another one in fall and it was the most beautiful view of the vineyard when the leaves of the vines had turned color.

In a Burgundy vineyard.

For the most part, American growers fence off their vineyards.  The same can be said of producers in Bordeaux.  But in Burgundy it’s different.  The reason is a bit complicated, tied up in the inheritance practices of centuries gone by in that region.  A person’s estate was divided among all of his, or occasionally her, children.  As a result, each child received a few rows of vines in this vineyard and another couple in that one in the next town.  Today, even in the most famous Burgundy vineyards such as Chambertin or La Romanée, there are many owners of each parcel of land.  The vineyards can’t be fenced in because too many people have to have access to them.  And so tourists are welcome (respectfully, please) to walk among the rows.

Better yet, you can take a picnic and enjoy it alongside a vineyard, which we have done many times.  Once we had stopped at a charcuterie in Nuit St. Georges and then picked up a bottle in a wine store and then headed up the road.  We found a quiet spot next to a vineyard owned by a Monsieur Dugat and settled ourselves in for lunch.  (Don’t try doing that in Napa/Noma!)  At that point M. Dugat happened to walk by. We were afraid he would ask us to leave, but he just eyed what we were eating and in particular wanted to know what we were drinking.  “Oh, just a picnic”, Lucie replied in French.  The farmer eyed our wine bottle and saw that we had chosen a nice premier cru so he said, “Quel pique-nique!” (What a picnic!) and went on his way.