Port, part one

(Note: for help in understanding port, I am indebted to Jason Brandt Lewis' article on The Wine Lovers' Page.)

Port conjures up images of English country homes, autumn, roaring fireplaces, and gentlemen in evening clothes relaxing over a polished dinner table while the ladies wait in the drawing room, and rain pelts the mullioned windows. In fact it was the polite custom, for many years, for ladies to get up from the table after dinner and "leave the gentlemen to their port." The hostess had the privilege of deciding when she and her friends enacted the ritual; in one of his perfect Mapp and Lucia novels, E. F. Benson writes of a hostess "collecting ladies' eyes" and shepherding them out. The almost equally delightful history To Marry an English Lord tells of the young, American-born Duchess of Marlborough almost having this privilege snatched from her by her husband's aunt, who had been the female head of the household and resented the new bride's intrusion into her domain. When Auntie "gave the signal" for the ladies to get up, an outraged masculine guest barked "Sit down! Never have I seen anything so rude" and the young Duchess firmly followed up with a velvety query as to whether Auntie felt ill -- "There surely was no other excuse for your hasty exit." (That silenced Auntie.) The gentlemen, for their part, were expected to relish their manly solitude for only about half an hour. Then it was their duty to join the ladies and carry on the amusements of the evening together, whether bridge, or music, or conversation. All of this made the scene in the movie Titanic, in which the gentlemen leave the table and the ladies stay behind, mildly funny and mildly painful. If only the director had done his research into social customs, circa 1912. What were the men leaving the women to? Their cigars and port?

Anyway. Port: it is a sweet, fortified dessert wine made from a number of obscure, naturally very sweet grape varieties like the Touriga, Bastardo (both red), or the Rabigato or Malvasia (white). It has been made in Portugal's Douro Valley since the 15th century. After harvest, the grapes are crushed and allowed to ferment up to a point. Then, the wine is drawn off its sediment of skins and yeast cells, and is mixed with high-alcohol grape brandy. This stops any further fermentation -- since high alcohol levels kill any remaining yeasts that would have made more alcohol -- and leaves a wine that is both sweet and powerful in the "proof" department.

True port, from Portugal, must say "Oporto" on the label. The wine comes in two broad categories, vintage port and wood port. Only 2 percent of all port sold is vintage, and it must say Vintage Port in large letters on the label, with those words on the same line and nothing between the words. Vintage port is usually made from grapes sourced from a variety of vineyards, but all harvested in the same year. The wine is fermented and aged only for a short time in wood barrels, and is bottled no more than two years after the harvest. After that, the wine is meant to age in the bottle, in your cellar, for years.

This ability to age in the bottle is the definition of class for any wine. Great Burgundies, Bordeaux, Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons, Champagnes, and Vintage Ports are all examples of wines that began with such fine grapes, wines that the winemaker has paid such attention to and crafted with such care, that every individual bottle can serve as its own fermenting tank, and can be relied upon -- assuming proper storage -- to produce perfection when that "tank" is opened in ten or twenty or fifty years.

And who can afford a vintage port? Anyone who wants to spend from $500 to several thousand dollars a case, depending on the quality of the vintage. Luckily, the other 98 percent of all port made, wood port, is a little humbler, a little more reachable ....

Winter interest

... what the gardening books call "winter interest."






Slices of orange are supposed to attract Baltimore orioles. We'll see ...




And to drink, with this scenery? Perhaps a nice, warming glass of port. Of which, more later.

Prose food

Almost as luscious as great food photography is great food writing. Sometimes you encounter it, at its best, not in cookbooks but in novels. Maybe that's because the novelist's perspective -- or the characters' -- is not that of the professional who is going to cook, but the ordinary soul who is going to eat.

Some of my favorite food scenes occur in novels I read at about junior high school age. Here is the simplicity of bread and water, from L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz:

When Dorothy was left alone she began to feel hungry. So she went to the cupboard and cut herself some bread, which she spread with butter. She gave some to Toto, and taking a pail from the shelf she carried it down to the little brook and filled it with clear, sparkling water. Toto ran over to the trees and began to bark at the birds sitting there. Dorothy went to get him, and saw such delicious fruit hanging from the branches that she gathered some of it, finding it just what she wanted to help out her breakfast.

Then, a real seaside clambake from Louise Fitzhugh's (wonderful, wonderful) The Long Secret:

Mr. Welsch had taken the tarpaulin off, and with the aid of tongs, was heaping things into baskets as he got down through each layer. First there was corn, steamed in the husks. Harriet grabbed an ear, burned her fingers, and dropped it, screaming. "Wait," said Mrs. Welsch. "Just wait."

Then came a layer of steamed clams, then a layer of mussels, more corn, and then the lobsters. They could hardly wait until it was all piled high on their plates. There was a big pot of melted butter, which Mrs. Welsch divided into cups for each of them. They all sat around on logs and rocks, dipping the lobster meat, the clams, the mussels, and covering their faces with butter and grins. Everything had a marvelous smooth, smoky taste ....

As we move on to the sophisticated meals of another junior high favorite, Gone With The Wind, we begin to encounter dishes that might have been washed down with a glass of wine. Here Scarlett O'Hara, barely surviving at a ruined Tara in the last months of the Civil War, remembers delicious food from her girlhood:

...her memory would rush back to the old days, the meals of the old days, the candle-lit table and the food perfuming the air. How careless they had been of food then, what prodigal waste! Rolls, corn muffins, biscuit and waffles, dripping butter, all at one meal. Ham at one end of the table and fried chicken at the other, collards swimming richly in pot liquor iridescent with grease, snap beans in mountains on brightly flowered porcelain, fried squash, stewed okra, carrots in cream sauce thick enough to cut. And three desserts, so everyone might have his choice, chocolate layer cake, vanilla blanc mange and pound cake topped with sweet whipped cream. The memory of those savory meals had the power to bring tears to her eyes as death and war had failed to do ....

But we don't know what she and her family drank with those savory meals, until later in the book when she is honeymooning with Rhett Butler in New Orleans.

The wines and liqueurs and champagnes of New Orleans were new and exhilarating to her, acquainted with only homemade blackberry and scuppernong vintages and Aunt Pitty's "swoon" brandy; but oh, the food Rhett ordered! Best of all things in New Orleans was the food .... Gumboes and shrimp Creole, doves in wine and oysters in crumbly patties full of creamy sauce, mushrooms and sweetbreads and turkey livers, fish baked cunningly in oiled paper and limes.



Blackberry wine is something I have not had the pleasure of tasting, nor scuppernong for that matter, but scuppernong would be a wine made from the scuppernong grape, one of the vitis labrusca species native to North America. Native, as vitis vinifera with all its noble chardonnays, pinots, and cabernets, most definitely is not. If Scarlett were depicted as a refined 19th-century lady, as she also most definitely is not, she would have known enough to drink the wines that writers like Fannie Farmer and Florence Howe Hall, or the very British Mrs. Beeton, simply hint at: with each dinner the usual round of sherry, Sauternes, and claret. Reading Gone With the Wind, you get the impression that her saintly mother Ellen O'Hara, and Melanie Wilkes, too, would have known to put these wines on their tables; Scarlett and her father, and maybe the madam Belle Watling, would have grabbed for the scuppernong -- or better yet, the brandy.

I have found that the subject of wine grows more interesting as it exposes me to more knowledge about and appreciation of food, and vice versa. I happen to work in a wine shop which has big placards above the shelves, suggesting what foods will go well with what wines. So I am surrounded at work all day by something that I like, and that is prose food. "Pasta" and "cream sauces" show up more than once, as does "beef" and "seafood" and "chicken" and "salads" and any other category of comestibles you can imagine. When I get home, I'm ready for a meal, and I'm ready to try some wine. Lots of different wines might be a good match with lots of different meals, so wine can make each meal, even the simplest, a new creation. The anticipation of a meal as an unfamiliar pleasure becomes a new grace in life, a grace made possible by wine. That's how you get into it. Another cup of coffee, another diet Coke, is like a stop sign sitting on the table in front of you as you eat. It will not make your sandwich, or your plate of buttered noodles with fresh chopped tomatoes and parmesan cheese, taste any better today than yesterday. Or the day before that.

Wine is a different experience, however, in the movie Sideways, the only movie I know of that is about wine. In Sideways, wine geek Miles asks his lady love, Maya, "what bottle did it" for her -- what experience of what wine made her, previously a newbie, fascinated with the subject. She replies with an obscure but, to professionals, devastatingly perfect example: "an '88 Sassicaia." Miles understands. This is an Italian cabernet sauvignon, by the way, new since the 1970s.

Maya's answer implies that an appreciation for wine is not something that grows on you along with the appreciation for food (whether prose or real) that it also encourages, but is rather something that bowls you over in isolation: you happen by mere chance to taste a divine glass, and immediately you decide "I must and shall love and know this forever." I think Miles' wine-geek attitude sets the bar awfully high -- come to think of it, it's the creating of an artificial bar to enjoying wine. What if you never happen to try that overwhelming vintage? Can't you also get into wine if you just pick up a $5.99 bottle of riesling for curiosity's sake? If Miles were to ask me his question, I would have to fumfer around and say, oh well, no particular bottle did it for me. I was laid off from my other job and luckily the wine shop in this pretty little neighborhood was hiring, and then I always liked that clambake scene in The Long Secret ....

And what wine goes with a clambake? Fannie Farmer and Mrs. Beeton would have equated fish with Sauternes, unless they simply drew their skirts aside in horror at the thought of a lowly clambake at all. I think I'd pick a nice riesling.

Wow! Time flies when you're being professional

I attended my first closed-to-the-public wine tasting last week, in downtown Chicago. Just me, and a co-worker with many years' experience in the wine trade, and thirteen white-draped tables in a private room at an upscale restaurant in the River North neighborhood. We were the first to arrive and unfortunately began with table 13 and worked our way around the room backwards. Later, as more and more people arrived, our mistake caused us to bump into traffic going the right way. After several hours, as we took a break and sat down with some bread and cheese, I had a good look around and then asked my co-worker, "So is the wine industry mostly men?" And he looked at me and nodded.

The wines were almost all German rieslings, perhaps a hundred or more of them. Needless to say, on this interesting Thursday, I learned how to spit like all the other professionals. I do like rieslings, but I know my metabolism. A hundred one-ounce swallows, or even fifty, are going to incapacitate me, especially when my stomach is empty because I've walked off my breakfast going from the train station, into the raging wind tunnel that is Wacker Drive, and then up Clark street to NaHa. I think once or twice I may have bent toward the spit bucket, or even moved it, just when some other wine professional -- usually a man -- was going to launch into it also. Luckily this situation is unique in that they can't scold you. Oops. Sorry.

And my, I do like those sweet rieslings. The sweetness levels, in a German Quality wine "mit Pradikat" (with special characteristics) -- QmP -- go from Kabinett to Spatlese to Auslese to Beerenauslese to Trockenbeerenauslese. In each case, the descriptive tells us how sweet the grapes were at harvest: Kabinett grapes were harvested first, Spatlese gathered during a second harvest, Auslese during a third, and so on. As the wine maker waits and goes through his vineyard a second and third and fourth time, he is taking a risk. The time for the regular harvest, when he pulled in his Kabinett-stage grapes, is past; now he is hoping to find more grapes that are even riper, even sweeter, but not yet ruined by pests or rot or bad weather. By the time he harvests at the beerenauslese stage, he is picking individual grapes ("beere", berries) that are still in good shape. If he can even take grapes at a fifth harvest, he is picking them trockenbeerenauslese, TBA. The individual grapes have turned trocken, dry on the vine, in other words they are raisins. With most of their water content gone, they are extremely sweet. If he lets his grapes freeze and harvests them then, all the water content is caught up and lost through being frozen, and the pure remaining juice will then make the heavenly sweet dessert eiswein.

Many people avoid rieslings because they are sweet, but the wines are so delicious that I can't help but think that those who claim not to like them are simply suffering from the training that Jancis Robinson noted diplomatically in her book How to Taste: "the mass market," she wrote, "has been schooled to feel proud of liking something dry." Maybe we all grow up on such sweet drinks, and wine is so unfamiliar to us, that we think wine -- whatever it is, and whenever we encounter it -- should at least seem different to the taste buds. I've seen people take a taste of riesling, wince, and say, "It tastes like pop." Yes, some rieslings are flaccidly sweet, but the basic tastes of pop, sugar and acid, are not bad in themselves.

And there are dry rieslings. Even the sweetest of them could be fermented dry, if the winemaker liked. I tasted a few among the professionals a week ago -- all these distinguished continentals in suits, and a lanky British gentleman of indeterminate age, very pleasant, looking as if he had stepped out of an Ealing Studios film -- and they left me with that stones-in-the-mouth, tonic water feeling that I first recognized in brut champagne. Ah yes, I thought. So this is "dry." Lovely, if you like that sort of thing. But why not have a riesling?

The Annotated Sideways

Many people who liked Sideways remember it as the film where that guy hates that one wine. When I first saw it I was distracted by the frequent dropping of the F-bomb; recently I watched it again, and was pleasantly surprised at how funny it is. I also was pleasantly surprised to find that I could understand the wine references, which helped distract me from the F-bomb. Here are a few oenophilic notes:

When Miles (the wine geek) and Jack (essentially, the cave man) begin their road trip, they open a bottle of " '92 Byron" champagne. Wouldn't you know it, this very first reference is one I cannot seem to trace. Whatever a '92 Byron is, drinking it gives Miles a chance to explain to Jack that white wines are pale because the juices are not allowed contact with the grapeskins, and red wines are dark because that contact is allowed. Shortly after, Jack says he thought Miles hated chardonnay. "No," Miles explains, "I like all varietals. I just don't like the way California winemakers manipulate chardonnay with too much oak and too much secondary malolactic fermentation." Jack grunts, "Huh." (Jack grunts "Huh" a lot. His reaction to most of the wines they taste is also simple -- "It tastes pretty good to me." After a while you get the impression that Jack knows how to enjoy wine better than poor, anxious, knowledgeable Miles.)

What Miles is complaining about, the fermenting and/or aging of chardonnay wine in oak barrels, is a practice originating in chardonnay's home, Burgundy. Centuries ago, winemakers there realized that time in an oak barrel helped give the somewhat bland but high-alcohol grape a little sweetness and mellowness that it otherwise might have lacked. Malolactic fermentation did the same. Malolactic fermentation occurs naturally through the action of benign bacteria in the wine. If these bacteria are allowed to multiply, they transform the malic acid in wine -- the acids that, for instance, also make green apples taste tart -- into lactic acid, the same acids that make milk taste smooth. When hundreds of California winemakers do this, we end up with shelf after shelf of quite uniform tasting chardonnays year after year. Real-life wine professionals complain in similar terms, which is why reaction has begun and you can now find chardonnays proudly labeled "unoaked."

Then Miles explains, for the first time, something about the pinot noir grape, which he loves. It is delicate and sensitive to climate, he says, and does very well along California's coast, where the fogs wash in and cool "the berries" every night. Later on, he will expand upon his theme with a more sympathetic listener. Jack grunts "Huh."

At the first winery they visit, Miles gives Jack a whole lesson in tasting wine: hold it up to the light, look for color, judge age, swirl and sniff. Miles senses all sorts of things in his glass, like strawberries and passionfruit and a "soupcon of smoky Gouda." Can anybody really see or smell all those things in a wine, and does it matter? The point is that the pleasures of color, aroma and taste are all a part of the wine-drinking experience. If you try to put your sensations into words, you will remember the wine better and gradually develop an understanding of what you like and don't like. By the way, I have never seen anybody plug one ear while sniffing.

In time the guys meet Stephanie, running a tasting at a small, chic winery. She pours out a cabernet franc for them, and Miles tastes it and then dumps it instantly. "I've learned never to expect greatness from a cab franc, and this is no exception," he says, and Stephanie agrees with him. The cabernet franc grape is used as a blending grape in Bordeaux, along with the noble cabernet sauvignon. It also is used alone to make red wines in France's Loire valley. Miles' dislike of the cab franc is something it will be interesting to remember.

In the same scene, Stephanie pours each of them a generous glass while they stare at her, dumbstruck. "You are a bad, bad girl," Jack growls, and Stephanie smirks, "I know. I need to be spanked," as she flounces off. What happened? During a tasting, a one-ounce pour is the norm. The winery, or the wine shop for that matter, is after all giving away free wine unless they charge a cover fee, and not all do. Depending on how many bottles they are offering that day, it doesn't take long before an ounce of this and an ounce of that adds up to a full glass of wine for the patron anyway. The idea is, of course, that the patron will be impressed enough to buy a bottle or two.

Later, Jack and Miles stop off by the side of the road and Miles talks about a picnic he and his ex-wife had here, with "a bottle of '95 Opus One. We drank it with smoked salmon and artichokes, but we didn't care." Opus One is a cabernet sauvignon, as well as a winery making just that wine, produced as a joint venture first organized by Robert Mondavi and Baron Philippe de Rothschild in 1979. The wine is and has always been very expensive -- the first case sold for $24,000 in 1981, and at the shop where I work we now sell the 2004 vintage for $180 a bottle. The reason Miles half-apologizes for having drunk it with smoked salmon and artichokes is because a smoked meaty fish would probably not be the best match for cabernet's dark heavy tannins, thick black fruit, and high alcohol content. Never having tasted it, I can't say for certain. I have encountered, though, a kind of reverse snobbery when it comes to Robert Mondavi and all his wines, from Opus One to the Woodbridge that you can find in a grocery store. "Overpriced for what it is," "all hat and no cattle," are two judgments I've heard delivered on Opus. As for Woodbridge, I've heard people sniff that they'll drink it as a last resort, perhaps if it's the best a restaurant can offer, provided they can dilute it with plenty of ice. For myself, I've drunk the Woodbridge pinot noir and found it very pleasant.

When Jack, Miles, and bad girl Stephanie meet Maya, all four -- well, all four except cave man Jack -- will exchange information about wine, about what they've tried, what they own, what they are saving for a special occasion. This is just about the point in the movie when Miles hollers at Jack that he's "not drinking any f---- merlot!" What's wrong with merlot? He never explains. (It happens that the most expensive wine in the world, Chateau Petrus, is a merlot, but the movie never tells us that.)

At their dinner together, the four friends start with Fiddlehead Sauvignon Blanc, "aged 12 months in French oak," Maya offers. The sauvignon blanc grape makes fresh, acidic, lime-and-grapefruit-smelling wines; it is also one of the noble grapes that goes into white Bordeaux. Aging in oak, therefore, is a treatment that our friend Willie Gluckstern in The Wine Avenger considers an abomination. Yes, the French do sometimes use a little oak in their sauvignon blancs, he admits, but in general oak barrel aging "would criminally mar the delicate purity of the fruit." So who knows more, Gluckstern or Maya (or rather, the scriptwriter) of Sideways? Maybe both know something. It is at this dinner, too, that Jack castigates Miles for having given them all "a ten minute lecture on Vouvrays." Vouvrays are one of my favorite wines, made from the chenin blanc grape, and named for the town of Vouvray in France's Loire valley. They are soft, rich, but not sickly-sweet, and unfortunately rather pricey ($25 and up). One of the wines prominently displayed toward the end of the dinner is a Pommard, another red Burgundy -- that is, a pinot noir for Miles.

When the four move on to Stephanie's place, we learn more about their tastes. Stephanie's prize bottle is a Richebourg, which her friends are not allowed to touch. Miles is impressed. This is a red Burgundy, once again therefore, a pinot noir. But it is more than just a bottle of pinot. Wine writer Oz Clarke (The New Encyclopedia of French Wines) says, "What a name! It has resonances of tremendous opulence, of sumptuous velvet and silk-smooth flesh, of scents dark and musky .... " Among the "best producers" of Richebourg is Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, which is nothing less than the most legendary, perfect, and adored vineyard in the world. Come to think of it, one wonders what freewheeling Stephanie is doing with this bottle. Perhaps it would have been a tad more realistic to equip her with something just a little less glorious.

Since they can't open the Richebourg, Miles and Maya settle for a bottle of Andrew Murray. "Well, okay," Miles says with quiet delight. Andrew Murray has specialized in making French Rhone-type wines, from the syrah grape, in Los Olivos, California, since the 1990s. As they talk about how they developed an interest in wine (while Jack and Stephanie are off being freewheeling somewhere else), Miles says that his prize bottle is a '61 Cheval Blanc. Maya is stunned at his possessing this treasure, and warns him he'd better drink it because the '61s are reaching their peak, aren't they? -- or even past it?

A Cheval Blanc is a French red Bordeaux, more precisely a cabernet franc/merlot blend made in the St. Emilion section of Bordeaux. Chateau Cheval Blanc is the specific producer. So, Miles' great bottle is a blend of the two grapes he can't stand. Towards the end of the movie when he sneaks wine into a diner and drinks it in a plastic cup along with his burger, this is the bottle he stashes beside him. If you hit the pause button you can read the label. Is this an in-joke? Or ignorance on the part of the screenwriter, or the novelist originally? Maybe we're to understand that great French wines -- for, like Stephanie's Richebourg, a St. Emilion is a very great wine, from a place that has been making these wines since the days of ancient Rome -- no matter their varietal makeup, are just different.

As for the wine that "did it" for Maya, that made her love wine, when she announces "Sassicaia" she is talking about another red Bordeaux-type wine, a blend of cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc. A Sassicaia, however, is Italian, made only since the 1960s by an Italian nobleman and now his descendants, who wanted to grow noble grapes on his land in Tuscany. This was a new idea in Italy then. Apparently it was a success, for the wine is covered with adoring adjectives by wine writers who have tasted it. In the huge book Vintage Hugh Johnson simply calls it "resplendent."

Alone together, Miles and Maya wax eloquent about the pinot noir grape and wine in general, and of course they are talking about life and being human, not just about a drink. They use words like need, survival, neglect, thrive, living, ancientness, and decline. More prosaically, though, they also talk about having a palate. "I discovered I had a really sharp palate," Maya says about the aftermath of the '88 Sassicaia. Earlier, Miles had reminisced about his ex-wife's great palate, and how she was able to differentiate even among all sorts of Italian wines.

What does it mean to have a good palate? I find it hard to believe that the palate, the sense of taste, is not pretty much the same among all human beings. We may have slight differences in the acuity of it as we do in the acuity of eyesight or hearing, but unless you have experienced some tragic physical loss, you can taste things. "Having a sharp palate," noticing things, is I think more a matter of paying attention and being willing to learn and remember, than a matter of a bizarre gift that some people have and some don't. Referring to the palate in such mysterious terms only serves, once again, to make inexperienced wine drinkers think the whole thing is just not for them.

The movie winds down with a couple of in jokes. Jack and an increasingly agitated Miles stop by to do some tasting at a huge winery that just screams "Gallo" -- or "Woodbridge" or whatever winery would best scream "tourist schlock heaven." There are huge crowds of people, there is a fountain burbling wine, there is a man playing trite Spanish music on a guitar, there are baseball caps and t-shirts for sale embroidered with the name of the winery. Miles is appalled at the wine offered, and calls it Raid. Interestingly, he offers reasons why: "Don't bother to de-stem the grapes," he recites bitterly, as if he is instructing the winemaker. "You're hoping for a semblance of structure. Grind it all up with mice and leaves ...." This makes you think -- after all, grapes are a farm product, and farms can't be kept pure of everything. This fictional winery is called "Frass Canyon." Frass is insect, and I think specifically gypsy moth, excrement.

And finally there's the name of Miles' would-be publisher, which eventually "passes" on his 759-page novel. It's Conundrum, which perhaps coincidentally is also the name of another higher-end California wine producer.

Liked the movie? Try the book, by Rex Pickett.