Red and green wineglasses, circa 1887

We drove to the antique mall in Crown Point, to look for a few new wine glasses (since we have found one or two pretty ones there before) and to look for old books about wine. I'd like to know what Americans thought and wrote about wine two or three generations ago, and I'd especially like to find wine books written before 1933, so that I may frankly cannibalize them for any possible art works or maps without fear of infringing copyright.

Crown Point's big red brick courthouse looms over the center of the town; I always think of my late aunt and uncle when I see it, for their elopement to Crown Point as teenagers, in 1937, was an ancient family scandal, and I suppose they must have formalized the deed inside that courthouse. (Apparently in 1937 a judge would marry two seventeen-year-olds from Chicago, because they wanted to.) As you drive south on Taft into town, you can see where the new strip malls and unnaturally wide streets are slowly encroaching on a slightly shabby core of tall Victorian homes set in small lawns, surrounding a main square of old, two-story crenelated brick office buildings. There is even a Carnegie library, now a cultural center, its cornerstone engraved -- if I remember correctly -- 1910.

The antique mall is a weird three-story monstrosity that has, over the years, been put to who knows how many uses. The entire second floor is the size of a basketball court, and was once used as such. The wooden floorboards of the third story still carry a coat of decorative paint for some reason -- flowers and curlicues making the pattern of a painted rug. Here and there in little nooks and crannies and under stairways are old kitchens, complete with sinks and cabinets, which must mean the place used to be an apartment building. There are air conditioning units shoved into odd windows, any gaps to the outside plugged by wads of newspapers of who knows what date.

And there are antique vendors, by the hundred in every nook and cranny, their wares for sale overflowing every old dry sink. We had no luck finding wine glasses -- could it be that the farmers of Indiana, who have become the unwitting source of all these dealers' livelihoods, had no wine glasses to bequeath? -- but I did find an old book.

It is called Social Customs, by Florence Howe Hall. The book was published in Boston in 1887, and someone must have received it for a present that very year, for it is inscribed in pencil on the flyleaf "Helen Louise Hutchins, Xmas 1887."

The book is charming, and entirely intelligent. It breathes of a day when leisured women sat down in their long skirts and wrote, with pen and inkwells and the vanished paper called foolscap, -- wrote, well, whatever they liked, and got it published. (Has the internet and its plethora of blogs partly recreated those conditions?) Our author gives us no less than thirty-three chapters running from "The early origins of manners, and their foundation on human reason" to "Etiquette of the ball-room" to "Gestures and carriage" to "Hints for young men -- Washington customs." Her education has been such that she can quote Shakespeare and Homer as needed, although she is modern enough to acknowledge Oscar Wilde, too. It takes intelligence to write:

... many persons think any dress is good enough to work in, no matter how old, shabby, and soiled it may be. This is a most unsound theory, and one which has more than a little to do with making people feel ashamed of work ... a person who thinks any clothes are good enough to work in does not appreciate the dignity of labor.

And it takes that touch of acidity, so delightful in an old-time author whose refined language makes her seem at first glance treacly-sweet, to notice:

Our political rulers are often men of no especial culture or early advantages. Even those who set themselves up as our social rulers are often utterly deficient in the important social prerequisite of grandparents ....

Mrs. Hall -- and I am sure that is what she would have liked to be called -- writes only briefly of wine. Like Fannie Farmer, she expects her readers not to need too much detail about the subject. She notes the new fashion for "broad, low, flaring" champagne glasses, but says she prefers the flute. For serving "hock" she recommends a green glass, and for claret or Burgundy, a red glass -- both suggestions which would be anathema now, when clear plain glass is insisted upon so that the wine drinker can appreciate his wine's color. As for what wine goes with what part of the meal, again like Miss Farmer, she repeats what must have been simple standard knowledge. Sherry with soup, then chablis, hock, or Sauternes with fish, then claret and champagne with roast, finally Madeira and port after the game; then more sherry, claret, or Burgundy with dessert, and then liqueurs or cordials after everything else.

No mention of varietals, no talk of merlots or chardonnays or what "jammy hints" will go with what. Hock, by the way, was the old British word for German white wines, as claret was the British term for red Bordeaux. So, roughly speaking, Mrs. Hall is recommending white wines with fish (though a Sauternes would be a very sweet choice), reds or champagne with a roast, and reds with dessert, with the fortified Madeiras and ports dropped in somewhere between courses, near the end. While red wine with dessert may sound odd, I must say I have had a pinot noir -- in other words, Burgundy -- with apple pie and have found the combination very nice.

Mrs. Hall also tells us that the vogue for setting the table with a tablecloth, plates and glasses, and decorative flower arrangements is all owing to the Russians. "These people," she writes in wonder,control in large measure the diplomacy of Europe, invent wonderful and dreadful forms of modern liberalism, write our best contemporary novels, and last but not least, lay down the law which regulates the tables of every civilized land.

She calls this vogue diner a la Russe, and it seems she's right about it. It includes not just the set table, but the bringing in of the different parts of the meal, as portions, to each diner individually. Mrs. Hall expected your servants to "attend" your guests in this way at your dinner party; today our waitress does it at the local restaurant when she brings appetizers first, then soup, entree, and so on. As the modern vernacular puts it, who knew?

Mrs. Hall also mentions dining with Emerson. This is startling. How did she attain the privilege of dining with Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the greatest literary lions of nineteenth century America? Her publishing house being in Boston provides one clue. A search of the internet -- little did she know she'd be googled someday -- adds another. Florence Howe Hall was prominent enough, and talented enough, to publish not one but several books, most of them on etiquette. But she also wrote The Story of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and there on its title page is her identity: daughter of Julia Ward Howe, poetess of the Hymn that Americans most recently pulled from storage for memorial services in the week after September 11.

History may not come full circle, but it does sometimes spiral around in striking ways. "If the reader finds as much pleasure," she says, "in reading these little details of ancient customs as the writer has enjoyed in collecting them, she will feel amply repaid for her labor."

The noble grapes: chardonnay

It's fun to come across a wine book from thirty or forty years ago and find that it now contains just slightly outdated information. The grapes don't change -- much, although vitis vinifera in general is said to be quite prone to sudden sports and mutations (Karen MacNeil in The Wine Bible) -- and winemaking is still a matter of sun and rain, ripening, fermentation, and waiting. What changes, I suppose, is fashion and business trends, in wine as in anything else. Here is Frank Schoonmaker on the chardonnay grape, in his Encyclopedia of Wine (1973):

"In California, due to its extremely small yield per acre, [chardonnay] has not been widely planted; its wine, almost always marketed as 'Pinot Chardonnay,' is perhaps the best white table wine made in the United States ...."

Flash forward a few decades to spend some time with one of my favorite wine writers, Willie Gluckstern, and you will find an entirely different opinion on chardonnay. (I like Gluckstern's The Wine Avenger precisely because he is so opinionated he makes things easy for a newcomer to understand. Later on, we can learn subtlety.) By the time he wrote, of course, chardonnay had become the grape that ate California. He considers chardonnay ridiculously overrated, lacking in aroma and flavor, but bland enough to take on a nice, consumer-friendly, and rather sweet uniformity through fermentation in oak barrels -- or simply through being aged in stainless steel fermenting tanks along with giant "teabags" of oak chips. Jancis Robinson, in How To Taste, agrees with him on chardonnay's intrinsic blandness ("perhaps that's why so many people like it," she hints) and also points out the grape's tendency to reach high alcohol levels, which among other effects can make the wine taste still sweeter. That easy-to-pronounce, easy-to-spell name is no drawback.

But dear me, what are we to think if we still like chardonnay? Are we bland? And wasn't the grape designated "noble" a long time ago?

It seems that chardonnay keeps pride of place in the wine books as well as in the vineyards because, no matter what fashion and business trends come and go, it retains the characteristics of "nobility": it is a grape that can produce consistently excellent wine, capable of aging well in the bottle. Excellent here seems to imply not just our reaction of gee-this-is-tasty, but to mean complex, different each time, changing, even mysterious. In other words, perhaps, it means responsive to the wine maker's art. After acknowledging the grape's basic blandness, Jancis Robinson nonetheless goes on to describe what a great chardonnay will taste like, and she uses words like broad, weight, meaty, fullness, intensity, serious, fascinating, and powerful. Some combination of physiological factors -- sugar levels, acid levels, skin thickness -- have to be present in the grape for this kind of mysterious excellence to emerge in the wine, and for noble to be applied to the variety. And even before the winemaker's expertise can be factored in, the grape has responded to the climate. And to the soil ...


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The chardonnay grape is native, as far as botanists have been able to uncover these things, to Burgundy in eastern France, and that is exactly where the greatest chardonnays -- "white Burgundies" -- are made. It was here also that wine makers learned to ferment chardonnay in small oak barrels, giving the wine new flavors, clarifying it, smoothing out some of its astringencies, and helping it age (from How to Taste). It is these wines -- a Meursault, a Montrachet, named European-style after the place, not the grape -- that will set you back $35 or $40 a bottle at least. Because white Burgundies have been so good for so long (nobility, again), Burgundian wine making techniques are followed anywhere chardonnay is grown. And that leads to, as Robinson puts it delicately, "a remarkable uniformity among BFC's (barrel fermented chardonnays) virtually everywhere."

So much so that there has been a reaction, and on some chardonnay labels now you will see the proud announcement that the wine is unoaked. Here, winemakers are not bucking but are still following French traditions. Some French chardonnays have almost always been unoaked, particularly in Chablis, the very northernmost region of Burgundy. (Which means, strangely enough, that a Chablis is a Burgundy.)

As it happens, thirty-five years ago Frank Schoonmaker's encyclopedia entry on Chablis was far longer than that on chardonnay. Even then, place names were better known than varietal names. He tried to dispel the confusion. "Those interested in finding a California counterpart [of chablis]" he said, "should look for bottles labeled 'Chardonnay' ...."

Food and wine pairings

The meal: sweet Italian turkey sausage with peppers and garlic; rice; buttered peas.

Saute an onion, a red pepper, and a green pepper in a little olive oil and perhaps a little butter. When the vegetables are soft, remove them from the pan and add 9-10 links of sweet Italian turkey sausage. Begin to brown them a little. When they have taken on some color, pile the vegetables back into the pan, add a drizzle -- perhaps 1/4 cup -- of wine (any kind, really), and a chopped garlic clove. Then add 4 or 5 Roma tomatoes, halved. Throw in some snippets of fresh basil and some thyme and salt and pepper. Cover the pan, and let it all simmer for an hour while you cook up some rice and boiled peas.

The wines (there were four):

Gagliole Rosso 2002, an Italian red from the Chianti region of Italy;
Sandholdt Cabernet Sauvignon 2005, from Soledad, California
Marietta Cabernet Sauvignon 2004, Alexander Valley, California

St. Gabriel Riesling 2006, Mosel-Saar-Ruwer, Germany

When it came time to sample the wines and decide which matched best, I was rooting for the St. Gabriel Riesling to "win." I like the low-alcohol sweetness of a Riesling, and I have read more than one authority say that Rieslings tend to be the most versatile of all wines with food. The sweetness in particular, they claim, is excellent for "cutting" spicy tastes. The Italian Gagliole Rosso, I expected, would come in "second," because Italian wines are reputed to be also ideal with food -- their dryness and acidity are meant to wash things down, not stand alone.

These two wines, the Riesling and the Gagliole, were pleasant enough and seemed to keep their character next to the meal -- they didn't take on different flavors as the two Cabernet Sauvignons seemed to do. But the Riesling was a little too fruity and syrupy, and the Rosso just light and tart. The Marietta Cabernet only grew hotter with each sip (its alcohol level is 14.9%, quite high).

To my surprise, the best match was the Sandholdt Cabernet Sauvignon. After five minutes in the glass, it took on flavors of licorice, taffy, and caramel that turned out to be delicious with spicy sausage, peppers, onions, garlic, and tomatoes. Its alcohol level is 13.5%, the same as the Italian red, and so it carried no afterburn.

(To which, my future self -- November, 2009 -- can't help replying, "Oh really?")

Adding it up

I must admit that when I go shopping for wine, one of the biggest considerations in my mind before I make my purchase is cost. Wine seems a luxury, almost a decadence; after all, I don't really need it, I'm spending my money on something that I'm not yet sure I'll like, and so a price tag above $8 or $9 still gives me a bit of sticker shock. That standard, 750-ml wine bottle holds about 25 ounces of wine, or about 4 six-ounce glasses. I could spend $8 on it, or $15 or of course far more if I wanted to. By comparison, an 8-pack of Coke (12 ounce bottles), on sale 3 packs for $10, works out to $3.33 for every 96 ounces. Day after day, meal after meal. You can count on uniform flavor and pretty uniform price. Soft drinks are far cheaper than wine.

If you like statistics, the numbers involved in various countries' wine consumption and soft drink consumption rates are revealing. Americans lead the world in downing pop, not surprising since we seem to have invented it. (This makes a very interesting story, by the way, in historian Paul Johnson's book A History of the American People. He says that, after the German invention of carbonated water in the 1780s -- Apollinaris was one -- Americans, especially in the "hot and humid South," recreated it and then added flavored syrups to it. When American druggists devised a way to dispense this flavored carbonated water from their shops' soda fountains, the soft drink industry was born. The new drinks were meant not only to taste good and to refresh in a hot climate, but to produce the beneficial health effects and emotional stimulation of alcohol, without the intoxication.)

Different sources peg Americans' soda pop habit at about 57 to 60 gallons per person per year. Sixty gallons is about 630 twelve-ounce cans a year, or almost 2 cans of pop a day. If we all think about our daily habits, this will probably make sense. By contrast, we're said to drink about 2 gallons of wine per person a year, when total consumption of wine is averaged out among the population, whereas a Frenchman or an Italian drinks around 13 or 15 gallons a year. (When you come across drinking statistics expressed in liters per person, just multiply each liter by 0.264 and you will have gallons.)

Since about 5 bottles of wine make a gallon, consuming 2 gallons a year should mean that last year we all bought about ten bottles of wine. Or more, since obviously all the children in America were not busy consuming their two gallons per capita. Karen MacNeil in The Wine Bible has this explanation: only 11% of the American population, she says, are responsible for consuming 88% of all wine sold in the country. If you do the arithmetic of ounces and population figures, you'll find that this means America's small coterie of dedicated wine drinkers enjoys the beverage at a real French or Italian clip, about 15 gallons a year.

Which brings us back to the cost, and decadence and luxury and sticker shock. The devoted wine drinker's 15-gallon a year habit translates to about 75 bottles a year -- which is not even two a week, actually. He's not necessarily "dedicated" or a "connoisseur" in a way that you and I can never be. He is just having wine with his meals, which is what wine is for. If he is careful and absolutely only buys the least expensive product, say in the $5 range, he'll spend about $375 a year on wine. (Two cans of soda a day from a vending machine, at perhaps 60 cents each, amount to $378.) If he parcels out his purchases so that he can splurge on some pricier bottles occasionally, of course he'll spend more.

It all leaves us with a personal question and a personal decision. How much are we willing to budget each year on wine? Three or four hundred dollars? Six hundred? Or -- if we consume our statistical two gallons, and maybe spend five on each bottle -- fifty?

Buying wine means spending money on an often non-uniform experience, and like a lot of consumers I do balk at that. The nice thing about it, though, is that the experience usually turns out to be so interesting and so flavorful, and it leads to so many more because it helps you learn more. A cabernet sauvignon, that seemed a bit plain and sharp in my glass (for $17.99!), in ten minutes took on flavors of caramel and licorice that were so delicious I would not hesitate to buy it again as soon as I could. Price-wise, it's the equivalent of maybe a week's worth of my morning Starbucks. That's a trade-off I can live with.

Wine with mulligatawny, circa 2008

I decided to make mulligatawny, because my sister in law recently made it, it sounded good, and my dinnertime repertoire needs expansion. Since the recipe calls for chicken, apple, green pepper, tomato, curry, nutmeg, and clove, among other things, and since I happened to have three open bottles of wine in the refridgerator, I thought here was the perfect chance to experiment with food and wine pairings. Willie Gluckstern in The Wine Avenger suggests investing in a Vacu-vin, a small pump which you can use to pump air out of your half-finished bottles before storing them, so that you may have several open bottles at the ready and all not going stale with oxygen exposure. This way, you have a number of wines to sample with any meal: and so you learn, fairly quickly, what is a nice match with what.

In my fridge I had a bottle of Woodridge Robert Mondavi Chardonnay (California 2006), one of Woodridge Robert Mondavi Pinot Noir (France 2005), and a Bella Sera Pinot Grigio rose (Italy 2006, by way of Gallo). Which of these would "stand up," as the wine writers say, to apple, curry, tomato, green pepper, and nutmeg?

None of them probably would have been an experienced wine drinker's first choice. And yet, none of them was a terrible match, perhaps because no one of the (at first glance, wildly incompatible) flavors of mulligatawny dominate the final dish. It's a simple saute of the vegetables, including the standard onion-carrot-celery medley, apple, and chicken cooked in butter. The spices, chicken broth, and tomato are added, it simmers for an hour, and you serve it with rice. Originally an East Indian dish, its Tamil name, milagutannir, means "pepper water." But the flavors simply blend into something rich, slightly sweet, slightly tangy, a little smoky, and very good.

I sat down to dinner with three wine glasses at my place, and my children gave me startled looks. I sampled all three wines as I ate. The pinot noir seemed to lose any grapey or fruity flavor it had, and to take on a pure butter taste that made it the worst choice of the three. The chardonnay at first had the right richness to match the soup, but it had an alcohol burn afterward that also wasn't a good fit (its alcohol level is 13.5%). The Bella Sera pinot grigio rose -- an unusual wine, a rose made from a white grape -- was pleasantly light, but finally too light and too citrusy.

What would have been the best choice? Perhaps a Riesling, the wine whose sweetness and acidity many food writers credit with making the best match to the most foods. Perhaps no wine at all would have been better, though a wine newbie hates to admit this. Mulligatawny comes from East India and East India is hot. Madeleine Kamman, in her huge book The New Making of a Cook, advises:

"If, for centuries, hot foods have been served in hot climates where no grapevines are grown and if, for centuries, people there have served beer or tea with their hot dishes, is their taste not to be trusted?"

Good point. A Darjeeling, then?

Here is the recipe for mulligatawny, from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook:

Mulligatawny Soup

This soup from India found its way into American cookery long before the Civil War. A recipe for it appeared in the original Fannie Farmer Cookbook of 1896.

4 tablespoons butter; 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1 small onion, diced; 5 cups chicken stock or canned broth

1 carrot, diced; 2 cloves,crushed

1 stalk celery with leaves, diced; 2 sprigs parsley, chopped

1 green pepper, diced; 1 cup canned or chopped tomatoes

1 apple, peeled and diced; 2 cups hot cooked rice

1 cup diced raw chicken (about 1 pound); salt

1/3 cup flour; freshly ground pepper

1-2 teaspoons curry powder

Melt the butter in a large soup pot. Add the onion, carrot, celery, green pepper, apple, and chicken, and cook slowly, stirring frequently, for about 15 minutes. Mix the flour with 1 teaspoon curry powder and the nutmeg, add it to the pot, and cook over low heat for about 5 minutes, stirring from time to time. Stir in the stock, then add the cloves, parsley, and tomatoes. Partially cover and simmer for about 1 hour. Add salt and pepper to taste and more curry powder if you wish. Pass the rice separately or spoon some into each bowl as you serve the soup.

Wine with dinner, circa 1896

I have a facsimile edition, brought out by Weathervane Books in the 1990s, of the original Boston Cooking School Cookbook first published by Fannie Merritt Farmer in 1896. This is the cookbook that was updated by Marion Cunningham and published as The Fannie Farmer Cookbook in 1983 -- hence, no doubt, a market for the fascimile a few years later -- and Cunningham's edition, by the way, remains the most used cookbook on my shelf. I have had to "re-bind" it with brown paper once, and it needs a re-binding again (it's no use finding another copy on eBay, because this copy was a birthday present the year I got married, is so inscribed, and so has sentimental value).

The 1896 edition, while it hasn't proved as useful, is nevertheless fun to look at. Weathervane issued it exactly as it appeared, old-fashioned font, instructions for lighting a coal-burning iron stove, and advertisements for Imperial Granum ("food for dyspeptic delicate infirm and aged persons") intact. At the back of the book there are menu suggestions for breakfasts, luncheons, and dinners, all sounding wonderfully sumptuous and all obviously from the days when even middle-class people had at least one or two servants to help with the work. "Grapefruit -- Wheatlet with sugar and cream -- Beefsteak -- Lyonnaise potatoes -- Twin mountain muffins -- Coffee" ... for breakfast. These were probably also the days when middle-class people still worked hard enough, physically, to burn off all those calories. If you have ever read the Little House on the Prairie books, you know that farmers' meals were even more gargantuan. And Ma worked without servants.

The last five menus in this section are the best of all. One is for Thanksgiving dinner, one is for Christmas, and three are simply "Full Course Dinners." Here I imagine a nineteenth-century wedding, or a great feast in honor of Junior's graduating from Yale. All the uncles sit jovially in a cloud of cigar smoke, and Grandpa's watch chain stretches perilously across his great girth .... Just reading over these menus has become a little five-minute tradition of my own during the winter holidays.

They are similar. Each has its set of ten or twelve courses, each begins with something light and ends in black coffee. Here is Miss Farmer's idea of Thanksgiving:

Oyster soup -- Crisp crackers

Celery -- Salted almonds

Roast turkey -- Cranberry jelly

Mashed potatoes --- onions in cream --- Squash

Chicken pie

Fruit pudding --- sterling sauce

Mince, apple, and squash pie

Neapolitan Ice cream -- fancy cakes

Fruit -- nuts and raisins --- Bonbons

Crackers -- cheese -- cafe noir

Only ten courses. Actually, a lot of this meal is what we would consider appetizers and desserts; we simply would not stay sitting at the table as we ate it all. Perhaps families in 1896 did the same.

At any rate, Miss Farmer then moves on to the wine. She is surprisingly brief about it. "Where wines and liquors are served," she begins, but then she simply sketches in basic suggestions, and you have the impression that she is writing for people -- "where wines and liquors are served" -- who already know what goes with what. A Sauternes or other white wine with the first course, sherry with soup, more white wine with fish, claret with game, and champagne with roasts and "other courses." What is a Sauternes, what's a sherry, what is claret? She assumes her readers know.

There's more. "After serving cafe noir in the drawing room, pass pony of brandy for men, sweet liqueur (Chartreuse, Benedictine, or Parfait d'Amour) for women; then Creme de Menthe for all." If you are a time-traveler at this lovely party, you have already drunk four or five wines with dinner. In the drawing room, after a bracer of coffee, you will now have two liqueurs, and Miss Farmer has not mentioned the port that the gentlemen might have had privately after the ladies left the table, nor the aperitifs the whole company might have had even before the butler rang the gong for dinner. When it is all over, "Apollinaris should be passed." That's sparkling water. By this time it must have been quite enough.

And incidentally, a Sauternes is an expensive, luxurious and famed sweet white wine from Bordeaux; a sherry is a fortified wine, either sweet or dry, from the Jerez region of southwestern Spain, near Seville; and a claret is a red Bordeaux -- there are all kinds of possibilities here, and we can only surmise that Miss Farmer meant her readers to serve the best they could afford.

A Nice Glass of Gallo

According to author Willie Gluckstern in The Wine Avenger -- a good book by the way, especially for the novice -- brothers Ernest and Julio Gallo really got underway in the wine business by making and marketing inexpensive, sweet, high-alcohol wine to lower-income urban neighborhoods. One of their most popular products was Thunderbird, a wine that sold via the commercial jingle, "What's the word? Thunderbird." Today Gallo still makes Boone's Farm and Carlo Rossi, the wines that teenagers are famed for starting out with. They also make Bartles and Jaymes' wine coolers, those wine "lites" which were all the rage some years ago.

However, the company has long since ventured beyond the bounds of the jug or the starter wine, which makes it all the more interesting to encounter not only Gallo wines in all their disguises, but also people who know enough about Gallo's rotgut traditions to insist that, whatever else they might try, they at least avoid Gallo -- all the while they are drinking Gallo.

The company now makes, markets, and distributes no fewer than fifty-three wines and brandies, among them quite a few familiar names and labels from our grocery store shelves. Barefoot Cellars, Bella Sera, Dancing Bull, Da Vinci, Ecco Domani, Livingston Cellars, MacMurray Ranch, Mirassou, Rancho Zabaco, Red Bicyclette, Sebeka, and Turning Leaf are all Gallo products. Some, like Barefoot, were once small independent California wineries which Gallo bought out, not an unusual thing these days when the second generation of a small vineyard does not want to go into the family business. Some, like Red Bicyclette, are European-made wines -- Red Bicyclette is from France -- which Gallo markets and distributes.

How do they taste? Are they any good, or all they all tainted somehow by their descent from Thunderbird? The answer, of course, lies in how they taste for you, the wine drinker. This may sound like a condescending way of disguising wine snobbery, as if I were saying "Well of course they're Gallo, but if you like them ...." Not at all. I enjoy Barefoot Cellars Zinfandel especially -- it's one of Martha's Vineyard picks, as you see! -- and logically there is no reason why a Gallo wine should not be good, unless the company subjects all its new holdings to the same treatment that produced Thunderbird: acres of vines, un-pruned, overproducing over-sweet grapes that make flaccid, high alcohol wines. Thunderbird had extra alcohol added, plus citrus flavors (see the book Blood and Wine by Ellen Hawkes). My guess is that a company with any smarts is not going to sabotage their product like that, because the wine market is big and growing and increasingly sophisticated, and has been for a long time. Not least of all, the people at Gallo must know the reputation they labor under (is that why they disguise their wines?) and they must know the way to quash it is to make and sell good wine.

So the next time you go shopping for wine, you might take a look at the fine print on the label. If somewhere you see "Modesto, CA," you very probably have a Gallo product. And that may not be a bad thing at all.

Blend vs. varietal

A good question: when I go out to eat at a restaurant, I know I want to order a blended red wine, because I prefer them to varietals. What do I ask for?

First of all, what on earth is a blend and what's a varietal?

A blend is a wine, red or white, made of several different grape types. A varietal is a wine made entirely or almost entirely of one single grape -- one variety, hence "varietal." As author Karen MacNeil points out in The Wine Bible, until the 1960s most people had never heard of the actual grape varieties, like chardonnay or cabernet sauvingnon. Wine making was a European tradition and European wines were very often blends of grapes, the wines themselves named after the places they were made. Champagne, Chianti, and Bordeaux are all places.

When California and other "New World" winemakers got started making serious amounts of serious wine, they made and labeled their product after the grape type, for two reasons. First, because they were working with the noble grapes that Europeans had always used, and they wanted people to know that. Second, because California, Australia, South Africa, and South America didn't and don't have the centuries of wine making traditions behind them which help buyers instantly anticipate what "a Napa" or "a Victoria" will taste like.

Now, European winemakers are beginning to put varietal names on their labels, too, as a kind of backup I.D., perhaps because they realize the American wine market has learned to buy and drink according to grape type, not necessarily place of origin. This backup labeling works especially for the European wines, and there are some, that have traditionally always been made from one varietal anyway. White wines from the French province of Burgundy, for example, have always been chardonnays. Red wines from Burgundy are pinot noirs. A Vouvray (it's a town) will be made from chenin blanc grapes.

If you want a blend, therefore, you might try one of the French, Italian, or Spanish wines that have typically been blends. Bordeaux, Chiantis, Rhone wines, and Spanish riojas fit the bill. Of course, American, Australian, and South African wines can also all be made as blends, too, not least because New World winemakers want to try their hand at blending the grapes that have made exquisite wines in Europe for centuries. If you buy a glass of, say, a cabernet-sauvignon/merlot blend from Chile, you'll know that the winemaker is recreating the blend that is Bordeaux. But a European -- or New World -- wine that carries a place name, not a varietal name, will likely be your blend.

What's the difference in taste? Blends, especially blended reds, can be a bit softer and smoother than the single-variety wines. Some pure cabernet sauvignons, especially, are what Hugh Johnson calls "turbo-powered" -- dark, astringent, high in alcohol, and not necessarily what we are looking for as we start our adventure.

GAAAA! Corked!

Actually, it's not as serious as a full-throttle "Gaaaa!!" Once in a while, however, you will encounter a "corked" bottle of wine. (Remember the old Fawlty Towers episode in which a snooty customer informs John Cleese's Basil that the bottle he has just opened is corked, and Basil replies, "No it isn't, I just uncorked it, didn't you see?") This simply means that something was wrong with the cork from the time the wine was bottled -- it was moldy, or inadequately disinfected. It will spoil the taste of the bottle, so of course you should not be heroic and try to drink the stuff anyway.

How can you tell if your wine is corked -- what if you simply have a sound wine that you don't care for? Even for novices, the smell and taste of a bad cork is pretty unmistakable. If the cork is literally moldy, of course you will see it. But if a swirl and sniff, and taste, of the wine takes you right back to childhood memories of a flooded basement after a summer storm, then chances are you have a corked specimen on your hands. It's the fault of the winery, not the store where you bought the wine.

Most expert wine authors that I have read agree that about 5% of all wines are corked. In about six months of wine tasting through my work, I have probably tasted an average of five wines a week. That works out to about a hundred different wines, and in that time, I have encountered three corked bottles. Statistically, therefore, my experience seems to be almost exactly on target. The ever-present risk of spoliage through bad cork, incidentally, is one of the reasons so many wineries are turning to screw-cap closures for their wines. A screw cap is a perfectly good seal, and it cannot mildew.

And by the way, don't forget that, for the majority of wine bottles sealed with good sound corks, storage on their sides is necessary precisely to keep the wine in contact with the cork. A good cork that is not moistened with its own wine may dry up and shrink, and eventually leak and allow air into the bottle, which will also ruin the wine.

Can I grow grapes in my backyard?

Certainly. (As Mrs. Quantock says in Lucia in London, " 'I'm all for everybody doing exactly as they like. I just shrug my shoulders.' And she heaved up her round little shoulders with an effort.")

I know it is possible to grow grapes in this area -- south suburban Chicago -- because my neighbor three doors down grows a big grapevine on a trellis every summer. However, I doubt he is growing vitis vinifera, the wine grape.

For some reason, vinifera wants to grow in soil so unforgiving as to hardly count as soil. It also wants to grow on a hill. The good black farm dirt and flat, sun-washed, snow-smothered land of northern Illinois would not please it. In the ancient wine-making regions of Europe, in France and Germany especially, the vines grow on chalk cliffs, on slate, on the actual pebbles and stones of prehistoric river beds. Apparently, these conditions force the vines' roots to struggle deep into the ground in the search for nutrients, and this in turn makes for a strong plant and good grapes full of flavor. But just a few grapes, not many: apparently, also, these bad conditions force the vine to produce comparatively little fruit, and that too is a good thing. The less fruit, the more intense the flavor of what is there, and the better the eventual wine. Grapevines that bear too lavishly are pruned, hard, by the grower. Where the grower does not prune his vines, and where the summer's rainfall and sunshine were good, he will get acres and acres of grapes of no distinction, and therefore lots and lots of wine, also of no distinction.

Why vinifera prefers to grow on hillsides is a bit puzzling. It has to do with the danger of frost to the crop, and to the fact that cold air runs down hillsides and "pools" at the bottom. Since a really hot climate would make vinifera bear too abundantly -- the grape grows rougly at around 45 degrees north and/or south latitude -- winemakers have learned to cope with the good and bad points of the cooler regions that the vine does like. Hillsides answer the problem. By their angle, they catch all the rays of the summer sun possible; their slope drains off the frosty night air; and if the hillsides happen to be poised above a convenient river, then that, historically, was all the better for transporting the final product to market. When you see a French wine label with the word "cote" on it -- Cote d'Or, Cote de Beaune, Cotes du Rhone -- you are looking at the product of a slope (cote) near a river.

So can you grow grapes in your yard this summer? Certainly. They may be very tasty eating, and the neighborhood birds will thank you.

Wine words

Etymology can sometimes be a little history lesson in itself. From a glance at Webster's New World dictionary, we trace the origins of the word wine from the English language back to Latin, Greek, possibly Hebrew, and a surmised lost language of remote times ...

• wine -- from the Middle and Old English win, the Old Norse vin, and the Gothic wein; all coming from Germanic borrowing of the Latin vinum, meaning "vine"
• vine -- Middle English and Old French vine, from Latin vinea (vine), vineus (pertaining to wine), vinum (wine); from the Greek oine (vine), a loanword from a pre-Indo-European language -- akin to the Hebrew yayin (?) -- wine; from a root word meaning "to effervesce" (See the Hebrew lexicon at studylight.org).

And from Hugh Johnson's Vintage: The Story of Wine, more thought-provoking words on wine (pp. 20-22):

• Noah -- the first planter of vineyards (Genesis 9:20-21)
• Ano -- a hero of Basque legend, "who is credited with bringing the vine with him in a boat with an unknown port of registry. Ano is also the Basque word for wine."
• Noya -- "a similar legendary figure of Galicia"
• Oannes -- a "kind of merman" of ancient Sumerian legend, who taught mankind the arts of civilization;
• Ino -- a sea goddess, nurse of the ancient Greeks' wine god, Dionysus
• Dionysus -- "his own name can be seen to embody the syllables which form the Greek word for wine" -- which is ...
• oinos
• oenology -- the study of wine
• oenophile -- wine lover
• Orestheus -- in Greek myth, the first planter of the grape vine, after the flood sent by Zeus to punish mankind's evil

Why is wine associated with the sea, with floods, and with heroes in boats who resume planting grapes after catastrophe? Our explorations continue ....