Category: Experiences

Power Tasting is a magazine about wine tasting.  It’s our great pleasure to travel through the various corners of Wine Country, visiting vineyards and sampling the wines that are made there.  We have found over the years that where wine is made, people are friendly and live well.  There is always some rather good food to eaten and washed down with very fine wines.  But we have to return home; all we can bring back are great memories and often some bottles of pretty good wine.

As the months, and sometimes the years, go by we open those bottles and savor the aromas and tastes once again.  And we remember where we were when we bought them, what it looked like and even in some cases the person who sold it to us.  Such is the power of taste and smell to evoke mental images that we can’t even replicate by looking at travel photos.

The same can be said about wines ordered in restaurants.  It is rare that we find a wine on a list that is exactly what we tasted when we were where the wine comes from.  But when we order a Beaujolais, we can never taste a Moulin à Vent without summoning up images of the famous windmill for which the wine is named.  Or if it’s a Morgon, we always think of a fabulous meal we had at Le Restaurant Morgon.

We have made so many wine tasting voyages to California that we have plenty of memories from there too.  But no matter how beautiful the scenery, we were still in the United States and a lot was similar to back home.  However exotic the winery, even Chateau Montelena or Darioush can’t compete, for example, with opening a Brunello and seeing Biondi-Santi in our minds eye.  Part of the appeal of Napa Valley and Sonoma County is that we know them so well.  We have had brief introductions to many diverse sectors of Wine Country outside America.  It is precisely because we don’t know those places as well that makes remembering them so piquant. 

Photos fade.  Even the ones we take digitally are locked up in our phones.  We don’t look at them very often.  But we open wine bottles quite frequently and each one comes from somewhere far from home.  Every bottle has a story to tell if one only knows how to listen.  It tells us of histories, people, cultures and lifestyles that we have briefly taken a part of…or hope to someday.

So when we open a bottle of Champagne, for instance, we see sprightly bubbles in our glasses but also rolling vineyards, the cathedral in Reims, and sweaty laborers saying hello as they picked the harvest.  Of course wine is made of alcohol, but it has the power to intoxicate us without even taking a sip.

There are many wonderful places in the United States where wine is made and tastings are available.  Most are located in small towns, often near large cities, such as Sacramento or New York.  What we don’t have in the US are villages.  Oh, certainly some of the towns are small and picturesque but they lack the atmosphere that only comes from centuries of families living near each other, with only a few roads (or only one), with homes nestled along the roadway.  For those, we have to go to Europe or in Quebec.

We are not immune to the pleasures of Europe’s great cities, so we often take our vacations in the great cities such as Paris, Rome or London.  But every few years we choose to stay somewhere where the pace is slower, there are no famous sights to see and there is no traffic on the streets.  And where the grapes are growing right outside our window.  In this article, we will use the tiny village of Poilhes in the Languedoc as an example, but it could as easily have been San Leonino in Italy, Nyons in France or Widdicombe in England.  (Okay, there are no grapevines in England, but the feel of the place is the same.)

By the way, Poilhes is pronounced something like POU-yeh.  Close enough but not exact.

There is only one road in Poilhes and we were lucky enough to rent a house along it.  It was well equipped and had air conditioning, which is becoming increasingly important for any travels in Europe between May and October, the best times to be in Wine Country of course.  There is a tiny church, whose bell announces the hours and serves as a sometimes unwanted alarm clock.  It’s amazing how quickly we stopped hearing the ringing.

We were about 100 feet from the historic and picturesque Canal du Midi, once used for commerce and now only for pleasure boats.  On the other side of the canal from our house, there was the only grocery store in Poilhes, the Épicerie du Canal, which was only open a few hours in the morning and another few in the afternoon.  Upon awakening, we’d throw on some clothes and head to the Épicerie for a baguette, croissants and a pain au chocolat (chocolate croissant in this country).  Let us tell you, there is no better breakfast than freshly made French bread and pastries with country butter and locally made preserves that we bought in the weekly market.

What is there to do in a village such as Poilhes?  We took walks by the vineyards. We went to the village farmers’ market and to the ones in neighboring villages.  We befriended one of the cats that run wild in the backyards.  We picked figs off the tree that grew in our backyard.  We learned all about Languedoc wines at the rather superb wine store/tasting room, the Vinauberge.  We snacked under a spreading platane tree at a bistro across the street run by a transplanted English couple, who frankly couldn’t cook all that well.  We dined at a fancy restaurant that was a stopping point for the pleasure craft on the canal.  And of course, we tasted the wines made nearby and all around the village.

We recommend to anyone who would like to get the feel of Wine Country as well as the taste, that they plan a stay in a village like Poilhes.  It’s an experience that will generate a lifetime of memories.

This is the latest in an irregular series of articles introducing readers to some of the great wine bars of the world.  Some of them are in frequently visited cities, like Paris or London.  Others are in wine making regions, such as the wine bar featured in this month’s edition.

Roberto Sarotto is a wine maker in the town of Alba, which is at the center of the Piemonte in northwest Italy.  The region is the source of some of Italy’s finest wines.  Signore Sarotto produces just about all of them: several Barolos and Barbarescos, Dolcetto and Barbera among the reds; Arneis, Gavi di Gavi and Chardonnay among the whites.  There’s even a choice of rosatos (Italian for rosés), sparklers, Grappas and other wines. 

But Roberto Sarotto is not satisfied to be only a winemaker.  He has also opened a wine bar at a prominent corner of the Piazza Michele Ferraro, the primary square in Alba.  In good weather people gather to taste his wines under the umbrellas outside.  Of course, it does rain in Alba and these years the summer heat can be oppressive, so there are tables inside where the air conditioning accommodates tasters.

Almost all the wines on the extensive list are available for purchase by the glass or the bottle. The exception is the wines designated as “Bottiglie Museo”, which we Americans would call library wines rather than museum bottles.  The prices range from a low of €7.50 for a glass of Mosto d’Uva, which is essentially non-alcoholic grape juice to a high of €36.00 for a well-aged reserve Barolo.  There are plenty of wines by the glass to choose from that are €10.00 or less.  Barolos and Barbarescos are on the list in the twenties and thirties of euros per glass.

But a tasting at Roberto Sarotto is more than wine.  In the land of the aperitivo, no bar will serve you wine without a little something to munch.  In most cases it’s olives or potato chips.  At Roberto Sarotto, they serve you a repast.  As illustrated here, you will receive an assortment of bites that may include pizza rustica, local cheeses and salamis, a ham sandwich and breadsticks.  The actual selection varies from day to day but it is always ample.  It certainly could be a lunch or an appetizer before dinner.

There are positives to having such a wide selection from a single winemaker.  Visitors can sit and have a vertical of an individual wine or a horizontal across multiple subregions of the Piemonte.  However, despite all the different wines, they are all from the same winemaker; they only serve their wines, as in a tasting room not a wine bar.  There is a stylistic similarity among them.  If you have only one day in Alba, we recommend a visit to Roberto Sarotto.  If you have a little more time, taste there but also try other wine bars for greater variety of styles.

This is a little gem of a wine bar, nestled in a major sector of Wine Country.  And if you ask nicely when it’s not too busy, you can even get a tour of the cellar below the bar.

In the northwest of Italy there is a section called the Piemonte, which is Italian for “foothills”, in this case the foothills of the Alps.  As is true almost everywhere in Italy, they make wine there.  But the wines from this region are particularly well known, starting with Barolo, considered among the best the nation has to offer.  There are other wines as well.  Barolo and its close cousin Barbaresco are made from Nebbiolo grapes, as is Langhe Rosso, a perfectly fine wine that doesn’t meet the requirements for the Big Two.  (Langhe is a local word for the Piemonte region.)

But as they say in the late-night commercials, that’s not all.  In the reds, there’s wine made from Barbera grapes, centered in both the towns of Alba and Asti.  There’s also wine from the Dolcetto grape, which is dry despite its name; the best comes from Dogliani to the south.  There are some unique whites as well, including Arneis from the Roero subregion north of Barbaresco and Cortese that’s used in Gavi wines, made in the southern reaches of the Piemonte.  You can also find Vermentino and the omnipresent Chardonnay.

Those of us who enjoy tasting wines in the places where they are made have so much to choose from in the Piemonte.  We focused on visits to red wine producers, drinking whites with meals in the oppressive heat that is haunting Western Europe this year.  Winery reviews will be in this and successive issues of Power Tasting.

The winemaking areas of the Piemonte are famed for their beauty.  No matter how often you may have seen pictures of the region, including the one included in this article, nothing prepares you for the reality.  It is stunning and there is a new vista to take your breath away around every bend in the road.  (This is European Wine Country so there are many bends in the roads.)  There are many villages on hilltops, built there in medieval times for security reasons.  Seeing them across endless vines is rather special.

When not visiting wineries, you can sample local wines at the many wine bars that you find both in the towns, Asti and Alba, and seemingly every little village as well.  The wine bars are especially popular in the early evening, aperitivo time.  You can spend anything from a few euros for a simple Arneis to thirty or more for a grand Barolo.  Better yet, every bar, no matter how humble, provides a spread of olives, cheese, salami and maybe a bit of pizza – to go with your drink.  We found that having had a full lunch in a village after visiting a winery, the aperitivo offering was enough for dinner.

The winemaking area of the Piemonte is rather concentrated.  Alba is in the center, and most of the wineries are only about 15 minutes’ drive from the town.  Even the time to go from village to village takes no more than 20 minutes between them.  It makes it easy to see, and taste, a lot in a short time.

Often, when we talk with friends and acquaintances about our love of wine tasting, we get the question stated in the headline.  Of course, it’s an impossible question to answer, much akin to “Which one is your favorite child”, which we often tell the people who ask.  Sometimes they mean to ask which is our favorite wine and we have to answer with the unsatisfying reply, “It depends”.   With what food?  What time of year?  How do we feel that day?  It’s easy to say, “Those Rothschilds sure make mighty fine wines” and be done with it, but that’s just dodging an answer.  The best we can say is that we can’t answer that question and explain why not.

Others, perhaps more interested in wine tasting themselves, ask “What is your favorite winery to visit?”.   Of course, that’s just a backhanded way of asking which wine we prefer, but we admit there is more to it.  A wine tasting visit incorporates the wines, the servers and the winery itself.

A fairer question is what region of Wine Country do we prefer?  Even that is a tough one.  We have visited Napa Valley more than any other locale over the years, both for the quality of the wine and the fact that in our earlier years of wine tasting, it was the only place to go, or at least it seemed that way.  But we also have visited Sonoma County often and we enjoy the more relaxed attitude there.  Long Island’s North Fork is a drive for us, not a plane flight.  And can life be any better than sipping Champagne for a few days in the place where it’s made?

A fairer question, one that we often turn the conversation to, is what is our favorite type of winery to visit for tasting.  The ideal winery has architectural beauty, without going completely over the top.  It’s even better if the building has some historical interest as well and is surrounded by grape vines.  The servers should be informed and interested in educating as well as pouring.  And, oh yes, the winery has to have excellent wine. 

These days, it’s too much to hope that a tasting of top-tier wines would be inexpensive.  Seated tastings are what we generally find in the US, and they’re becoming more common in Europe as well.  At our ideal winery, sitting at a table by ourselves, not with the server, who is being helpful but not too intrusive.  And if they can find a few little “extras” that just happen to be behind the bar, so much the better.

There are a few wineries that come to mind that meet all or most of the specifications we have in mind.  Chateau Montelena in Napa Valley is one; Dry Creek in Sonoma County is another in California; Biondi-Santi in Tuscany and Château Mouton Rothschild in Bordeaux fit the bill overseas.  Anyone who loves wine and wine tasting should try to visit these and others like them in their lifetime.

It’s almost commonplace these days: We walk into a wine shop and there’s someone standing behind a little podium with a few open bottles of wine and a rack of glasses or more often small plastic cups.  “Hi.  Would you like to taste a little wine from <fill in the name of a wine region>?”  The wine might come from anywhere, from California to Georgia (in Eastern Europe, not the American South).  Our answer is generally, “Sure, why not?”

To be honest, the great majority of the time the wine on offer isn’t very good.  We rarely say, “Wow!  Let’s buy some.”  Although there have been a few occasions when we have done that.

There are also some tastings held in wine shops that are a great deal more sophisticated.  A representative of a winery arrives with bottles – sometimes cases – of various wines from their vineyards and sets up behind a makeshift bar.  In these instances, shoppers sip one wine after the other, just as if they were in a tasting room somewhere in Wine Country, except that there is no charge for the tasting.

We were recently in St. Paul, Minnesota and stopped by a shop called Solo Vino.  The proprietor is Chuck Kanski, a friend of long standing.  We always go to Solo Vino when we’re in town, to say hello and buy a few bottles.  That day, he was hosting a wine maker from Raptor Ridge Winery in Oregon.  She had brought a selection of six whites of various styles.  We can sincerely say that we gained a pretty thorough understanding what her winery produces.     

So far, we’ve been talking about free tastings.  Then there are some stores that really dig into their inventories and offer a serious comparison tasting.  We well remember an event at New York City’s Morrell wine store tasting of Châteauneuf-du-Pape; it was truly an education.  There’s a store a short walk from our home called Le Dû.  They just had a tasting of Iberian wines from all over the peninsula.  We don’t remember the price for that CdP tasting, but the one at Le Dû cost $60.

There are many wine shops that have those gas-filled cases that pour a few ounces at the touch of a tap.  We’ve enjoyed them at Union Square in New York and some SAQ stores in Québec.  The selections are generally not extensive but often have high-quality wines on offer.  There’s usually a fee for each pull of the tap and for the amount that pours out.

Finally, travelling in European corners of Wine Country, we have often encountered dégustations (or degustaziones) in towns like Béziers in France or Montalcino, Italy.  Enterprising owners of local wine shops select a few bottles and open them as a sales pitch to get visitors to buy some more.  The wines are all representative of the famous wines made there, but the quality is hit-or-miss.  It all depends on the integrity of the proprietor.  We’ve found that if we are truly interested, there’s something special just under the bar.

The overall point is to take advantage of wine tastings where you can find them.  We often find them where we’re going to shop anyway.

Sometimes in Power Tasting we have used the term “mass producers” with a bit of a sneer.  That’s unfortunate, both because it’s a bit snobby and because it’s not fair.  There’s no definition as to what constitutes “mass”.  Sure, a vineyard that grows enough for 5,000 cases or less is small (or perhaps the winemakers would prefer the term “petite”).  But does mass start with 10,000 cases? 100,000?  A million?

Yes, Gallo turns out 70 million or more cases of wine a year and they certainly are America’s largest producers.  Most of the wines they make are intended for people who are not sophisticated wine drinkers.  But Gallo also owns numerous labels and some of them make wine of a pretty high quality.  One of these is J, producer of some pretty good sparkling wine that we have enjoyed.  To be fair, these days we don’t buy wine under the Gallo label.  But we sure did when we were younger.

But we do buy Moët & Chandon Champagne.  They make 2.5 million cases annually and that’s still pretty massive.  And that doesn’t include their Chandon bottlings from California and Argentina, which probably add up to the same number of cases.  Of course, the best price we have seen for Moët & Chandon is around $45; there are Gallo wines that sell for less than five dollars.

The point is that quantity is not necessarily relevant to quality in judging wines.  And for those of us who enjoy wine tasting, we should not avoid visiting the tasting rooms of the larger producers just as a matter of principle.  There are several reasons for this. 

One is that makers of lower priced wines often have higher-end lines as well.  Perhaps there is no better example of this than Guigal in the Northern Rhône, that makes a Côtes du Rhône that sells for under twenty dollars and top-ends such as La Mouline, La Landonne, La Turque, and La Reynard that are among the most coveted wines in the world.  In the US, Louis M. Martini (a Gallo label, by the way) sells a lot of their low-price Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon but are now making some quite respectable higher-end wines.  And for that matter, the Sonoma Cab is a quite respectable wine for picnics and barbecues or Tuesdays.

Another reason to visit some of the bigger wineries is that even though they primarily sell inexpensive, lower quality wine, the owners often give their winemakers some latitude to choose the best grapes and make a more crafted wine that is sold only at the tasting room.  We have had that experience once at Clos du Val in Napa Valley, which at that time was making 90,000 cases, surely enough to be called mass producers.

Finally, it might make sense to visit a tasting room of a mass producers because there are times that we might be looking for what we call “Tuesday wine”.  Alas, we don’t open Mouton or Lafitte every night at our house; sometimes a simple red is just fine.  And it helps to try them before we buy them.

When we go wine tasting, we not only sip.  We buy. Oh, not cases, but a bottle or two where we taste something particularly enjoyable.  If we’re really impressed we join the winery’s club.  Once at home, we put the wine in the rack to let it settle.  We may not get around to opening the bottles for months or even years.

And when we do, we often seem to remember that the wine tasted different at the winery.  We don’t have connoisseur-level taste memory, but we do have a sense of what we drank – and liked enough to buy – once before.  What’s in our glass back home somehow just isn’t the same.

Of course, that’s as it should be.  The wine we drank in a tasting room was, for the most part, recently bottled from a vintage at most three years before and more likely only two.  The mere fact that we put the wine down in our “cellar” gave it more time for the tannins to blend in and maybe for some sediment to drop out.  Age alone doesn’t make a wine great, but it does in many but not all instances, change it.  The wines we tend to value the most are the ones that sit longest, so change is expected.

There are other reasons for the difference between what we tasted then and now that are more psychological.  For one thing, it is rare that we buy the first wine we taste at a winery.  That one is likely to be a white, which we purchase and drink less frequently.  But the Sauvignon Blanc they often serve first at a winery primes our taste buds for the Cabernet Sauvignon or Grenache that we care about more greatly.  At home, we don’t often open more than the bottle we are going to have with dinner that night, so we only have the one taste in our mouths.  That doesn’t make it worse, just different.

Generally, that bottle at home is an accompaniment to a meal.  In the tasting room, wine is the star; it’s why we are there in the first place.  But when the bottle shares the table with, say, a roast beef there are several taste experiences vying for our tongues’ attention.  There are times when the wine steals the show, but the experience of that wine is different than it was back where we bought it.

Moreover, the meal that the wine accompanies changes our perception of its taste.  The California Cab or Italian Barolo is going to match up differently with a steak versus a pasta, for two examples.  That’s really a good thing and it’s why some people are so interested in wine pairing.  We’re less picky than other people, but we recognize that some bottles fit better with some meals than others.  The reverse is also true: The choice of food changes our enjoyment of the wine.

So don’t fret if the wine you remember so well from that tasting trip a few years ago isn’t exactly what you thought it would be.  Enjoy it for what it is at the winery and then again for what it is at your dinner table.

We love wining and dining.  We have found that around the world, where people make good wine, they like to eat well, too.  Robert Mondavi famously said that the good life includes wine, art and food.  So the meals we eat in Wine Country are as important as the wines we taste.  Well, almost as important.

When we go wine tasting in areas we’re familiar with, it’s difficult to try new places, because we just can’t bear to forego a meal in the places we’ve loved in the past.  In Napa Valley, for example, how could we not have a meal at Mustards?  We remember the quenelles de brochet and boeuf bourguignon at Bistro Jeanty and have to try them again.  We could skip a Thomas Keller restaurant, but why?  Unless we’re staying for a week – and we don’t take trips that long – we seem never to have time for a new restaurant.

It’s a little different when we visit regions we’ve never been to before.  We read up on what the best known restaurants are and make reservations online.  But then we’re in a little village where there’s a bistro that just screams out “Eat here!” in our minds.  So, since most of Europe closes for a few hours at midday, we eat a delicious lunch and don’t have the appetite for the famous places where we had reservations.

There are certain meals that we’ve eaten in this way that are so memorable that we frequently tease our taste buds with reminiscences.  The foie gras in Colombier in Languedoc.  The crêpe filled with mushrooms in Morgon in Beaujolais.  Salad on the beach in Marsala in Sicily.  Lamb shanks in Sainte-Cécile-les-Vignes in Provence.  And on and on.  We’re salivating just writing about these meals.  The lesson is: When faced with temptation to dine at a place you’re never been but looks like you want to, give in and eat.

But fine dining is only a part of the culinary adventure while wine tasting.  Prior shopping at a cheese shop in Burgundy or a salumeria in Tuscany, followed by a picnic at the edge of a vineyard is as great a way to dine as there is in the world.  A stop at Oakville Grocery can accomplish the same thing in Napa Valley.  We used to wash it all down with a bottle of the local wine, but we’ve become a little wiser about our consumption nowadays.  These days, it’s never more than a glass.

There is a time and a place for a burger at McDonald’s, but it’s not when we’re in Wine Country.  Way out in the countryside, it’s usually easier to find a café where the locals go than a fast-fooder.  Dining in the same place as the people who make the wine you’re tasting adds a little understanding of the place that goes along with knowledge of the terroir and the grapes.

So Mangia! Bon appétit! Eat up!

Some of our wine tasting trips are certain to be full of novelty.  That’s because we are visiting winemaking regions where we’ve never been before.  Most recently for us, that was our travel to Penedes in Spain, as reported in a previous issue of Power Tasting.  But mostly, we return year after year to certain areas in California, New York and France.  (Even the great Robert Parker specialized.)  Every time we go wine tasting, we face the same dilemma: Do we re-visit old favorites or do we find wineries that we’ve never been to before.

There are several attractions to going back where we have been before.  For one, we like to stop in at wineries where we are members of their clubs.  Tastings are free for us at these tasting rooms, which is appealing in these days of high-priced degustations.  But just as important, we know that we are going to have wines we enjoy.  How do we know?  Because those wines are waiting for us back at home.

Domaine Carneros in Napa Valley, known for its sparkling wines, but where we prefer their Pinot Noirs.

Then why go out of our way to taste those wines?  Because we never get to taste them side by side.  We recently visited a winery where we regularly buy Pinot Noir as club members.  Tasting each of the wines one after the other, sip at a time, we discovered nuances in wines we knew we liked that weren’t apparent to us before.  We also found a Pinot Noir on their list that we hadn’t previously tried and realized that we really liked it.

Beyond the wines, we know that as members of the club, we will receive an especially warm welcome.  In many instances, we have known the servers and staff for years.  Even those we don’t know seem to go out of their way to give a better explanation of what they pour and maybe find a little something that isn’t generally served to the general public.

On the other hand, we experience a special excitement when we discover a winery we hadn’t heard of before.  There’s a sense of “Where have you been all my wine tasting life?”  In areas we know well, we may have driven past that winery for years, only happening to stop by on one trip. Finding a wine or two that we truly enjoy is like getting a birthday present when it isn’t our birthday.

It is also a unique experience when we visit a famous winery in the US or abroad that we had only read about before.  There is a feeling we get when tasting wine made by a French aristocrat in his château, that can’t be replicated elsewhere.  That’s a real château, not a faked-up Napa palace!  And if the wine has been known to be great since 1855, so much the better.

There is an old expression, “New friends are like silver; old friends are like gold.”  This applies to wine tasting as well.  We’ll keep our old favorites and visit them again and again.  But we’ll continue to seek out new wines and tasting experiences as well.