Wine Blogging Wednesday #47 -- "Brought to you by the letter S"

The host for this month's Wine Blogging Wednesday is Grape Juice and the theme is a nod to Sesame Street: "Brought to you by the letter S." Also a nod, perhaps, to the age demographic that is increasingly drinking and blogging about wine: note that the theme happens to have nothing to do with, say, some previous cultural phenomenon like Howdy Doody or Woodstock.

For this month's virtual tasting, all are asked to sip and to comment on a wine beginning with S. No further rules. Great fun.

I pretended, even internally, to consider what bright and interesting paths I might follow with this one. Think of all the possibilities! Just an S .... But in truth there was no question what I planned to try. S is for Sandholdt, and for Cabernet Sauvignon.

Which brings me to the hope that it isn't considered cheating to "try" a wine that I know and like. This Sandholdt cabernet and I go back at least to this past January, when I tried it for the first time at a wine tasting at the store. My first notes on it were: oaky -- spicy -- plain.

Then we got to know each other better. Through subsequent tastings and a purchase or two, I learned that this cabernet took on delicious licorice/taffy flavors, especially a day or two after opening. When I recommend it to customers, some love it, some are turned off by the taffy-caramel taste. I find it's the only red wine that I can simply sip as a cocktail, without food. Moderately thick (medium bodied, I should say), purple with fruit, not shrieking with tannins and not blazing with alcohol -- 13.5%, high enough but it could be higher -- I don't see why it could not be an occasional summer patio wine, chilled, along with the army of crisp whites we are all supposed to prefer at this time of year.

This past weekend, in the store, a couple came in whose accent and conversation told me that they were from Italy. The Sandholdt happened to be out for tasting again (not my doing this time, honest). The gentleman tasted it beside another red which I consider friendly and good, but lacking Sandholdt's opulence. And he, with his natural Italian exposure to a lifetime of wines, preferred the friendly red. He shrugged politely at my pet tipple. "There are better cabernets," he said, "but this other, this is quite good."

The dregs of that particular bottle of Sandholdt were in the fridge at the store even yesterday, and I took them home last night. It was hot and humid inside the house. Outside blew a cool if humid breeze, and there was a crescent moon in a hazy puddle of cloud to admire. I sipped my cabernet -- I would have listened to the crickets, but it's too early for crickets yet -- and I thought, well. Okay. It is a bit like drinking a fruit-caramel candy. But a drinkable candy! Isn't that wonderful?

A few professional details, from the apparently close-lipped company that owns? sells? markets? all three and more? Sandholdt:

This wine is a blend of 80% cabernet sauvignon, 15% petite sirah and 5% cabernet franc; I am surprised, since I thought legally no wine could be called by a varietal name unless it is absolutely at least 85% that varietal. It spent 18 months in both new and aged French oak, which no doubt accounts for the caramel and taffy flavors. Its pH is 3.57. This would be gibberish to me, except that my daughters both took high school chemistry so they can tell me that the number puts the wine at an acidity roughly comparable to something between soda pop and tomato juice. The company produced 5,000 cases of this 2005 vintage.

I don't know -- is that a lot?

GAAAA! Too much flavor!

Now this is wonderfully counter-intuitive, as the smart people say. A few weeks ago I tasted a Barolo, famed, seductive &c., which seemed to me thin and uninteresting compared to a California merlot from the evening before. And then it happened, as I surfed about the Internet educating myself about wine, that I came across not one but two articles by respected and knowledgeable oenophiles announcing that, indeed, the current market-driven (alarm bells here) explosion of "big," rich flavors in wines is something to be deplored. No less a person than Eric Asimov of The Pour said as much in reference to pinot noir in particular; another favorite blogger, Arthur Przebinda of redwinebuzz and now Sooth, said the same of all California wine.

I was puzzled, and said so frankly in a comment to Sooth which I felt was rather pithy. Why should flavorful (mostly American) wines be considered poorer than thin, sourish (European) ones? Could it possibly be that ordinary consumers like flavor, and true oenophiles are horrified at the plebs' imposing their tastes on the market? I suggested that perhaps centuries from now, historians will simply note that vitis vinifera made very good wines in the Old World, but excellent wines in the New.

Arthur replied that "big" wines heavy in fruit, and alcohol, lack finesse and delicacy, and that since the human tongue can only taste four flavors -- sweet, salt, sour, and bitter -- any increase in "flavor" is bound to be just an increase in sweetness, which is not the same thing as flavor. I'm still a bit puzzled by this. If we can taste sweetness as a flavor, then why isn't sweetness flavor? By the same token, if "sour" is a flavor, then why aren't all those elegant, thin European pinot noirs, full of promising, age-worthy acidity, also dismissed as too flavorful?

I turned from the blogosphere to people I know, whose opinions seem to me worth cultivating. One colleague simply shrugged and said yes, California wines have their own style. He also said there are a lot of amateurs out there who think reading Wine Spectator for two or three years qualifies them to judge the grape. Two others, however, agreed instantly with the idea that modern wines are overdone. One happened to be pouring out a California cabernet which he said reminded him of the "cabs of the early '80s -- it's not such a fruit bomb." I tried it and thought it seemed a little thin. And another simply glanced over the Sooth article that I had printed out and said, "Oh yeah, I agree. It's happening all over." Later in the week, a third wholesaler came in, agreed briefly with "what they've done to pinots -- it's disgusting" and then poured out for us a new California pinot noir which he said was "awesome." I tried it. Oh dear -- it was delicious. Full of flavor.

So I have had to think about all this and try to understand in what sense too much tastiness could be bad. Wine writers, after all, seem to be so often concerned with lost traditions, forgotten grapes, legendary vintages, local peculiarities in this village or that, which have been superb for so long, but are on the point of toppling off a historical cliff into oblivion right now if they are not deliberately maintained, and competing ideas or habits fended off. I wonder if our ancestors said the same thing about the glories of wine carried in goatskins, or mixed with warm sea water?

The only comparison I can think of, to help me recognize that the experts may be correct in misliking flavorful wines, lies in the field of art. I love the paintings of Titian, but I would not want Titian's to be the only art there is. We must have Van Dyck's portraits, and Matisse, and the whole world of Chinese porcelain as well. The same is true of literature and music -- we don't want a whole world full of only romance novels and rock and roll, either. And then I think of the nice people who come into our store. Very often, they buy sweet red dessert wines, the sweeter the better. Even my jaw drops when, occasionally, they wince at these and say "that's kind of tart for me." Yes, these people are driving our little corner of the market to satisfy their own tastes. We stock more and more dessert wines each month. Alarm bells ring. I would not want the whole world to be full only of the wines they like.

Oh dear. The road to wine snobbery is not even a road. It's the deck of an aircraft carrier, and you're launched almost before you know it.

Deception

If you love Bette Davis, and of course you must, you will have seen the wonderful Deception, in which she plays a pianist reunited with her great love (Paul Henreid, a cellist), who must also fend off the jealousies of her older mentor (Claude Rains), a wild-eyed and fabulously successful composer.

The movie is a different Bette Davis vehicle, in that it gives her something to do besides cry, die, or renounce things or people. Or be completely wicked. All three lead actors have good, meaty speaking parts, and really seem to be playing off each other as characters who, as is true in life, do not know what is going to happen next. When they play musical instruments, they really seem to play, Bette the Appassionata of all things. And there is a delightful dining scene, in which Claude Rains has the time of his life ordering and re-ordering an elaborate meal for the three of them, just before a performance of his own cello concerto by the hapless Henreid, who crumples into a tangle of nerves as the evening wears on.

Rains' character is famed and great, and they are in a French restaurant, so there is no question but that he can either order whatever he wants, or else the chef is so superb that anything he is doing in the kitchen tonight will be sublime. Or both. Rains inspects and snuffles a platter of freshly dead partridges to start with, and approves; then he decides that they must have a trout before the partridges, and the birds must not be served plain, a l'anglaise, but must be stuffed with a forcemeat of pork, pullet livers and truffles, moistened with a half glass of dry Madeira. He insists on pronouncing truffles "troofles," which is no doubt correct. And then the partridges could be served aux choux, but that would take too long. But before that, a canape? Or soup? What soup? Is there a parmentiere tonight, or a petite marmite?

And what of the wine? A Hermitage, or a soft Burgundy? Let it be a Hermitage '14 ... and a salad and a "kickshaw," something sweet, for Bette at the end if she wants it. But what if the Hermitage is not right with the partridges? ("I really am most uncertain.") Perhaps ... a woodcock. A woodcock! Then, they could all have a Vosne-Romanee, or even a Romanee Conti, and the woodcock could be served, why, a la Vatel, or a la Perigord. "The greater the pleasure, the more important to preface it with a good meal," he purrs in explanation, while Bette and Paul slug back martinis and wait.

We'll note that in this movie, all the wines are French, and not a mention of a varietal passes Claude Rains' lips. An "Hermitage '14" would be a wine from the Rhone valley, made, if red, primarily of the syrah grape, and if white, of marsanne and roussanne. They are, says Oz Clarke in The New Encyclopedia of French Wines, among the finest France can produce, the white Hermitages especially capable of the kind of aging that Rains' character is asking for (in 1945) when he wants a wine thirty years old. All the other wines he mentions -- a "soft Burgundy," a Vosne-Romanee, a Romanee Conti, are made from the pinot noir grape, indeed are all Burgundies. Vosne-Romanee is a village having no fewer than five grands crus vineyards around it, that is, vineyards legally classified as of topmost quality ("great growths"). Romanee-Conti is one of these. It makes the most fabulous and expensive wine in the world, "the cloud-capped pinnacle of Burgundy for many very wealthy Burgundy lovers," the only comparable bottle being perhaps a Chateau Petrus -- this is a Bordeaux, made from the merlot grape. But Romanee Conti only produces 7000 bottles a year, 580 cases or so, from its four and a half acres of land. As Clarke notices, "there are sure to be at least 7000 well-heeled Burgundy fanatics desperate for a slurp at any price" in any year. We can only hope they don't slurp immediately because this wine, too, must be aged. Ten years, fifteen years, whatever it takes to bring its orgy of flavors and smells to satiny, brown sugar and earth -- and troofles -- maturity.

I'd like to know what the scriptwriters knew about wine when they wrote dialogue for a sophisticated character who is meant to have the world at his fingertips. An hour's research in a library would enable the most rank amateur to find and copy out the words "Romanee Conti." The wine has been fabled for a long time. In his (not very good) book on the subject, Richard Olney wrote that the vineyard took on the added "Conti" in the late eighteenth century, when a prince of that name bought it up and reserved the entire production to himself. But the screenwriters do have Rains mention his Burgundies with roughly correct, greater and greater specificity, and then there's Hermitage, too, which would have been a little more obscure. And all those foods he knows -- marmite and parmentiere, and a "kickshaw." (Properly pronounced kickshaws, from the French quelque chose, literally a little "something.") Were Deception's screenwriters at ease with all this information to begin with, and did they expect the audience, in 1945, to sit back and relish it all, or were these references bookish things intended to float far over everyone's heads, and render Rains' character a hilarious dilettante?

Do rent a copy of Deception, and if you like, use the English language subtitles to help keep up with all the food references in the dining scene. Rest assured that in the end, Claude Rains gets his. And I think I will spoil nothing when I add that the final line in the movie -- " 'You must be the luckiest woman in the world!' " is understated perfection. A kickshaw.

In which I make a wine cellar, and it turns out to be a mistake

The first bottle I put into it was Nina Negri Inferno -- Valtellina Superiore 2002. Delicious, finishing like currant and raspberry jam -- velvety.



Unhappily, this is the basement of a hundred-and-fifteen-year-old (we think) house. Humidity doesn't begin to describe what lurks in the air down here. (Think of it ... the bricks were laid when Queen Victoria was a doughty 74-year-old grandmother, just a few years away from celebrating her Diamond Jubilee. And the wooden steps up from our basement are warped in the middle, from generations of use.)

Even with my cellar up off the floor, my bottle of Inferno -- which I soon rescued from the depths and opened because someone who should know told me that the wine is at its peak now -- tasted like a basement. I don't think the bottle was corked. There was just enough whiff of rain-soaked cardboard to make me doubt my judgment, certainly to rethink my definition of a wine cellar, and to ruin the bottle. For the moment, then, I am reduced to my usual expedient, drinking what I buy ....

My First Barolo

Yesterday I was lucky enough to arrive for work just in time to take part in an impromptu wine tasting, being held under the hopeful gaze of two wholesale distributors anxious for us to like and buy their product. Seven Italian wines stood open on the counter top, and I had already missed the first five. The charming Italian gentleman in charge of matters poured out the first five for me in quick succession -- thank God I had made a substantial lunch -- and each one seemed delicious. There was a prosecco, a light white from the arneis grape (new to me), then a light red which I'm sorry to say I forget, then a Montepulciano, then a Valpolicella. Both our wholesale distributors soon packed up all these wines and carried them off to their next account, so I did not have time to note labels or take pictures. After the first five we tasted one more, heavier red, and at last, a Barolo.

A Barolo is a legendary wine of northern Italy's Piedmont region, made of the Nebbiolo grape, but only when the vintage is judged excellent.


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"Powerful, deep-colored, and long-lived," said Frank Schoonmaker in his Encyclopedia of Wine more than a generation ago. Another one of my favorite sources, Willie Gluckstern in The Wine Avenger, writes of having tasted one many years ago, and of its indescribable, sumptuous earthiness. They are to be had no more, he (evidently) exaggerates, because they have all been bought up as investments by rich orthodontists who keep them in their cellars and probably drink diet Red Bull instead. At our little impromptu sales-tasting yesterday, my colleague who has thirty years' experience in the wine industry gazed humbled and admiring at the Barolo. That color, that aroma ... a lovely, lovely wine, for the price, he added.

My sampling of the Barolo was the seventh wine, as I have said, in a quick succession of tastings, and anyway I do notice that whenever I taste wine, I tend to like whatever I tasted first, best. Perhaps that's simply a question of the palate and the mind being freshest then. And I was busy thinking that this impromptu tasting had already taught me one thing, that the gentleman in charge knew what he was doing. The progression from light and sweet to heavy and dry was perfectly controlled -- I could, as it were, feel the wines progressively saying something different in my mouth, and louder each time, as I went along. And at the store we do wash our glasses with soap and water, which my colleague says should not be done, only the health department has rules about that.

What I am leading to, of course, is disappointment in the fabled Barolo. I fear I smelled chlorine, and the taste of the wine was thin and unremarkable. So was the color. Of course I agreed with everyone else who adored it, because we all know about Barolo, and one doesn't want to be a barbarian. After the nice wholesalers had gone, I asked my colleague whether I'd go to hell if I don't like Barolo, and he said no, of course not, "it's probably just too big for you."

Now this was annoying. Too big? Only the night before I had tasted a high-end but probably not legendary California merlot, Sbragia, which was everything I should have thought an excellent red should be -- all those indescribable things, berry, spice, earth and leaf, subtlety, lushness, joy. Why is Barolo considered better than that?

Wine snobbery and wine ignorance are such strange things, yin and yang, like a bickering married couple who need each other desperately and don't know it. I left my pour of Barolo out on the counter top to "open up," because I was determined to give it another try, determined to like the damn thing. But who knows? Perhaps nine knowlegdable people out of ten would have agreed with me that the previous night's merlot far outclassed it. Perhaps this particular maker of the wine is infamous, among knowledgeable circles, for not doing all he could with it. In the last year (it's a year ago today I started work at the wine shop, in fact), in myself and in other people, in new customers and established customers, in colleagues retail and wholesale, I have seen the yin and yang of snobbery and ignorance play out. It's amazing how quickly it starts, sometimes. Everybody wants to like what is best -- Barolo! in hushed and portentous whispers-- but everybody also wants to be secretly experienced enough to shrug at the best and say it's not that good. And then everybody wants to take a turn secretly shrugging at the poor soul who doesn't realize, for heaven's sake -- it's okay to have an opinion, but that was Barolo. Of course it doesn't taste like a California wine. Get a clue.

Why wine should bring out this unpleasant little streak in human nature continues to puzzle, but it is great fun to watch. It's a streak of jealousy, really. Very odd. Other gustatory pleasures, fried chicken for example, do not bring this out, though I gather Authentic Texas Chili Recipes do. Anyway, -- yes, that Barolo did "open up" in my glass, a little it seemed. It took on softer caramel notes, and it did linger on the tastebuds as wines don't do very often. I am not sure when I will ever have a chance to taste, still less afford to buy, another Barolo. But at least I can say I've tasted it, for what it's worth.

Retro

I'm very fond of the fashions of the 1950s -- adult fashions, not poodle skirts and jeans -- and also of fifties retro kitchen ware. Somehow, on a beautiful summer Sunday, and Father's Day no less, while Dad has taken Junior to the movies and the girls are out shopping, it seems completely appropriate to make a grilled cheese sandwich on white bread and eat it out on the back porch. It is vital to tuck slices of fresh tomato into the sandwich and to salt it just before eating. If you drip tomato juice down your front, it's o.k. because you are wearing your Sunday grubs anyway. The plate is nice and solid, and has a design of cherries in the center.

With this you'll want either a glass of iced tea or a glass of whatever wine is left in the fridge -- would that it had been left from last night's dinner party, where you wore your new sheath dress and peep-toe red pumps! Anyway, what I had left in the fridge was a "super-Tuscan" from Castello di Lucignano, a 70% sangiovese, 30% cabernet sauvignon blend of 1998 vintage. It was nice and tart and freshly berry-like. To sip it from what looks like an old parfait glass also seemed retro and appropriate. Or maybe just goofy.

Afterward, there was nothing to do but go take a nap, while the Father's Day roast cooked in the oven. Perfect.

The noble grapes: pinot noir

Pinot noir instantly brings to mind the movie Sideways: this is the grape and the wine that Miles loves, the sun and the moon and stars, as opposed to the dark matter he loathes (merlot). He rhapsodizes about pinot's delicacy and need for special treatment, and about its grace and subtlety in the glass, so different from the cabernet sauvignon's brawny power. "It's not a survivor," he says.

Of course he is also talking about himself and his friend Jack, but we need not pursue tired old sophomore year Lit. class analogies any further. The pinot noir grape is, it seems, not so much fragile as just weirdly difficult to grow. And, with apologies to Miles, it is a survivor. Oz Clarke in The New Encyclopedia of French Wines writes that pinot noir may have been among the first wild grapevines that mankind isolated and grew deliberately, at least two thousand years ago. It has kept its wildness, he says. It tends to mutate readily, and has a hard time "setting" fruit. The wine grower therefore prunes the vines not in order to reduce growth, as with other varieties, but to encourage it; but when he succeeds and gets lots of bunches on his vine, the grapes then lack distinction and give poor juice. The grapes themselves grow very tightly packed -- pinot comes from the word for pine cone, a reference to the look of the bunches -- which invites rot.

The prime underlying challenge for the pinot grower is that the variety ripens early. What he wants, then, is a steadily cool climate which will help make a sort of growing-season-in-miniature, slotted in to the early part of the agricultural year when other grapes are perhaps just flowering and fruiting, with a whole summer of flavor-inducing sunshine and rain, and then the fall harvest, in front of them. (Mind you, the information that "pinot ripens early" has come to me from books. At a tasting of rieslings and other German wines that I attended this past spring, I'm almost sure I remember a German wine grower telling me that pinot ripens late.)

In either case, what a cool climate does mean, for any variety it seems, is a grape high in acidity. (Heat plus sunshine equals sweetness and prolific growth. Hence, heavy, high-alcohol Californian and Australian reds, and lots of them.) This acidity is good for bottle aging, not so good for drinkability now. Pinot also happens to have a light body, little tannin, and shall we say "subtle" fruit flavors. Throw in the fact that the place where pinot eventually comes to perfection in spite of every obstacle, Burgundy, is also a quite small area capable of little production, and you have a combination of factors that can make an expensive, tart, "watery" disappointment to connoisseurs and ordinary wine drinkers alike. But they can also combine, and do, to make the most "glorious" and "fabled" wines in the world. They make not only solid good red Burgundies, but such legends as Vosne-Romanee, Romanee-Conti, Gevrey-Chambertin, and Pommard. The point used to be that you did your homework about the best vintages, bought them and laid them down, and kept your fingers crossed with regard to Burgundies' "notorious unreliability."



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Do any of us have the patience to buy a bottle of pinot noir and put in the basement for five years, or ten? The hard part would probably be just getting over the first few weeks, when the memory of the purchase is fresh. After forgetting it, we likely would not miss it, just as we don't chew a lip and think about all the other things sitting in the basement. After three or four years, rediscovering it would be a delightful treat; and having lived without it all that time -- and think how expensive such a purchase would be now! what a steal it was! -- we would certainly have the strength to wait another year or two, or even more. Especially if we had already had been treating ourselves to other, older bottles, which we had put away in just this spirit years before, giving us a never-ending supply.

If only. Well, one can always start. Besides, the good news is that the winemakers who grow pinot, amid all their difficulties, are nevertheless trying to make a wine that we can drink now. Jancis Robinson in How to Taste suggests Russian River or Central Coast California pinot noirs, and Oregon pinots of course. Cool climates are the common denominator in both places. And in Burgundy itself, the ancient grape's ancient home, a winemaker quoted in Eric Asimov's The Pour acknowledges he and his colleagues "have to respect" many consumers' love of "fleshy" wines with little astringency, and presumably vinify some pinot to be a little more such. Funny how he describes what the fabulous pinot noir is not.

I don't stagger under a weight of experience when it comes to pinot noir, and have certainly never tasted a Romanee-Conti. Of my most recent samples, I have liked a Blackstone and a Talus pinot noir. I should add that I've overheard wine wholesale reps laugh at Blackstone's quality, apparently because it is served in restaurants. And just in the last few weeks I was disappointed in a Robert Mondavi Reserve pinot, because it seemed tart and watery. So it seems I'm absolutely on the right track.