"Folks. Please. It's just wine."

I will probably one day be (God willing) a querulous old lady who is forever going on about "when I used to work in a wine shop." That occupation will always sound so much more glamorous than, say, "when I worked at the dry cleaner's." But I was lucky, not only to work there for a short time but also to work with an Esteemed Colleague who knew a lot about wine and had learned it not from books but from job experience, in retail, wholesale, winery positions, and in the restaurant business.

He used to scoff about what I suppose could be clumsily called the academization of wine -- "all this 'Master of Wine' and 'Master Sommelier' business," he sniffed. And he would say the same thing to neophyte customers concerned, like all of us, to taste and describe the right things in their glass. "Folks, please," he would exhort after a while. "It's just wine. It's wine."

He had a point, of course, but I've also wondered whether he wasn't suffering a case of sour grapes himself -- don't we all, about something? -- and I've wondered whether his non-academic, un-vetted, un-tested knowledge really did leave him untrustworthy on some matters, perhaps major matters. Take the instance of the Larkmead Cabernet from 1973, which he had opened and then sealed with a vacuum pump in the mid-1980s, and which had become, circa now, "past its best but not vinegar, proving that vacuum seals really do work well."

The famed and respected Jancis Robinson (MW), disagrees. In her Wine Course: A Guide to the World of Wine (Abbeville Press, 1999, 2003), she says, right above a photograph of a Vacuvin, that these devices are "better than nothing but not very effective over more than a day or two."

Whom do you trust? That Larkmead cabernet sealed vacuum-style for over twenty-five years did not taste good, nor did Esteemed Colleague mean that it should be judged so. But he did offer it up as something, not unpleasant, from which we could learn. I wonder now if it had in fact spoiled a few days after he had corked it in the Reagan years, and he didn't know it. Didn't know it, because he has never had Jancis Robinson's classroom training, nor passed the tests she has done. Is it really always "just wine"?

A few days ago, I tasted once more a wine that we used to carry in the store. It's called Red Guitar, and is a blend of tempranillo and garnacha, from Spain ($9.99 at the grocery store -- which means we probably charged over $15 for it, which partly explains why the place closed down. Not that I'm being querulous.) My first reaction to it was ick -- rubber. I consulted my books and began reading about what causes the taste of rubber in wine. It's all in the breakdown of sulphur dioxide, leading to mercaptans, and so on. I was ready to snap a picture of a tennis shoe, sole in obvious foreshortening, and send it to Chateau Petrogasm. But the next day, Red Guitar tasted perfectly all right. Perhaps that cough drop I had eaten beforehand, had done the wine some injury. And then I could hear Esteemed Colleague in my head. Folks. Please. It's just wine.

Maybe. Maybe it's just wine, when it's a ten dollar bottle. But, a few days after my Red-Guitar-with-cough-drop experience, my husband and I made an excursion to our favorite antique mall in Crown Point, Indiana. There I was lucky enough to find a copy of Michael Broadbent's Vintage Wine: Fifty Years of Tasting Three Centuries of Wine (Harcourt, 2002).

It is the ultimate in bedside reading and vicarious adventure. Michael Broadbent, longtime head of the wine department at Christie's, is not going to hold the reader's hand and explain How Wine Is Made. (Incidentally, that's an attractive picture of him on the back jacket flap. He looks like John Gielgud late in life, only healthier.) Rather, he reproduces his notes on items like Thomas Jefferson's Chateau Lafitte 1787, and then moves on from there. Open at random: Romanee Conti 1937 ("unquestionably the outstanding vintage in this difficult decade"), Chateau d'Yquem 1959 ("monumental Sauternes"), Ferreira port 1815 ("the Waterloo vintage"), Pol Roger 1911 ("a great vintage and the best between 1874 and 1921"). For this last, and I must quote at length, our author tasted

... a bottle produced by Hugh Johnson for his first Bordeaux Club dinner: sipped reverentially but with immense satisfaction by the members on a perfect summer evening in Hugh's exquisite garden -- I have a happy photograph, taken by Judy Johnson, of Harry Waugh, Jack Plumb (in straw hat) ...

... and others. Yes, it sounds happy. Mr. Jack Plumb, according to the glossary, is the late Professor Sir John Plumb, famed historian, Master of Christ's College, Cambridge. His name on his history books -- my local library owns one, but used to own more -- or in copies of the old Horizon hardcover magazine -- I own the set -- is rendered J.H. Plumb. I'm glad he was a member of the Bordeaux Club.

Anyway, Michael Broadbent's book gives the lie to the idea that it's "just wine." I thought of my Esteemed Colleague when I read, just below the attractive, Gielgudian photograph, that Broadbent became a Master of Wine in 1960. That's a notably and a respectably long time ago, I think, for any phoney academization of wine to have been underway. More importantly, the thousands of closely printed entries in the book surely tell us that there is another universe of wine out there, far above the ten or even the thirty-dollar shelves, beyond the grocery stores and beyond the big suburban discount chains which do have a lot to offer, maybe enough for a lifetime of plain drinking, but not this. Not (open at random again) Assmannshauser Hollenberg Spatburgunder Spatlese 1993, a late harvest pinot noir from Germany, "very good now," if you happen to have it. See page 377.

In his introduction, Broadbent fundamentally explains in what sense it isn't always just wine. "Life is short," and he doesn't waste his time on bland, indifferent wines; he "would rather drink a half bottle of something with character than drink six bottles of plonk." In How to Enjoy Your Wine, Hugh Johnson of the exquisite garden agrees. There is no comparison, he says, between everyday wines and something really superior, and you cannot know -- maybe won't believe -- the difference between glister and gold until you try it for yourself. Besides, Broadbent continues, the world is now so awash with wine, most of it intended to be plain and pleasant, that there is no point trying to keep up with that. In taking the time to write and publish tasting notes, at any rate, "one has to specialise," and not waste the effort on wines, again, of no character. Nor on all those deep-colored, fleshy, alcoholic, vogue reds -- "undrinkable," he says. (Might he also add "licorice cough syrup" to that list of descriptors?)

So, is it "just wine," and do MWs have little to teach us with their trumped-up qualifications, or are we missing the entire divinity of the experience unless we move into the realms they know? As will be obvious by now, I suspect Esteemed Colleague was wrong. Though to be fair, his judgments were not inflexible. He rolled his eyes at our wine shop proprietor's claim that the champagne she offered for sale was the equivalent to Veuve Clicquot, only cheaper. He also rolled his eyes at the way she pronounced "sommelier." In fact there were quite a few things he rolled his eyes at. I adore human nature.

And, because I do, when I am invited to the next Bordeaux Club dinner in somebody's exquisite garden -- well hey, I've got a stand of evening primrose next to my garbage cans -- I promise I will try to wangle an invitation for him, too.

"Tight" wine

La Vieille Ferme Cotes du Ventoux 2006; grenache (50%), syrah (20%), carignan (15%), cinsault (15%). $7.99. Child's licorice medicine -- "tight"

La Vieille Ferme is one of those workhorse wines that show up on grocery and liquor stores' inexpensive lower shelves as an example of a standard but good quality European product. It is an AOC wine, therefore legally a step above "vin de pays" or country wine. This is the red version. There is a white La Vieille Ferme, with the same cute chickens on the label. Both are blends of grapes typical of the southern Rhone - the white version combines white grenache, bourboulenc, ugni blanc (also known as trebbiano, one of the most important white grape varieties in the world, because it is so widely planted and contributes to so many wines), and roussanne.

Last year when a wholesale distributor hosted a tasting at the shop and brought La Vieille Ferme, red and white, he promoted them to customers as everyday bistro wines, which French restaurant-goers would sip alongside a nice simple meal. I remember, when I first sniffed the red in my glass, getting the wild impression that I could smell summer. Sunshine, heat, and dust on a French country road all wafted up from the glass, I thought. Which is funny since I've never been to the south of France, in summer or otherwise.

This latest bottle of La Vieille Ferme, red, disappointed. Perhaps the atmosphere of a delightful little shop helps foster more poetic impressions of wine than come to mind in my own pantry, for as I sipped my glass a few weeks ago, I smacked and gurgled and savored and thought -- as my notes above repeat -- child's licorice medicine. Since I like to contribute to Chateau Petrogasm when I can, I do try to think of wine in images as well as words. That's what came to me. A stick of black licorice and a bottle of Robitussin. Neither of which I like.

I also thought, this is what people mean when they describe a wine as "tight." I'm not sure what other words would serve to elaborate on that word, because "tight" really does fit best. Tight here means hard, simple, narrow, cold ... unforgiving, unforthcoming, uninteresting. And yet, not necessarily spoiled or flawed. Do tight wines improve? According to the Wine Lover's Companion (which also told me about trebbiano, above), they can mellow with age. However, a rustic, bistro-style Vieille Ferme is not exactly meant to sit in your cellar for years, surely.

A spell in a decanter would help, perhaps, or a night relaxing and opening up a bit in the fridge. The wine, not you. A lunch of soft cheesy scrambled eggs next day might be a good accompaniment to it, for I don't think I'd like to pair this particular bottle, at any rate, with what seems a rather bruising Rhone dinnertime cuisine heavy on lamb, garlic, and peppers, not to mention frightening, unpasteurized French artisanal cheeses (see Karen MacNeil's The Wine Bible, p. 251). But perhaps your sample bottle -- and you'll find one, down on the inexpensive shelves -- will be softer, suppler, and just summerier than mine.

Yes, we can?

The Illinois Wine Consumer Coalition

Southern-French meatballs ("Boules de Picolat")

These boules de picolat, or Roussillon-style meatballs, come from one of the most splendid cookbooks one could hope to find, Clifford Wright's A Mediterranean Feast (William Morrow, 2001). History, recipes, personal anecdote, historical anecdote, maps, illustrations from medieval and Renaissance art -- who could ask for more absorbing reading?

Only his politics do interfere with the fun. Scarcely a page passes without his crediting the invading Muslim Arabs, circa 650 A.D. and beyond, with being the fount of all joy, peace, health, culture, wisdom, and of course good food in the entire Mediterranean region. (If so, why was everybody also starving -- the major theme of the history?) And why should a cookbook author scold his readers not to criticize the wearing of the Muslim veil (see p. 207)? Mr. Wright's having been a staff fellow at the Institute of Arab Studies, and then the executive director of the "American Middle East Peace Research Institute," may explain a little something about his decidedly unculinary idee fixe.

A further truth be told, I have never made great practical use of the recipes in the book. They tend to include long ingredient lists and sometimes bizarre or very gourmet supplies. "A Grand Moroccan Pigeon Pie" (p. 296) will require the use of orange flower water and saffron as well as the pigeons and everything else.

Still. These meatballs in the style of Roussillon, a town in southern France, are good. I am always enthused by any recipe which combines garlic and cinnamon. And olives.



We begin with seasonings dropped in a spacious bowl: 4 diced garlic cloves, 2 and 1/2 Tablespoons of chopped parsley leaves, 1 Tablespoon of chopped fresh basil or tarragon, and some ground cinnamon "to taste" -- begin with 1/4 teaspoon, I would suggest.

Then mix in 2 pounds of ground meat, either beef, veal, sausage, pork, or a combination of any and all. Mix in an egg and salt and pepper. Knead all this together and make small meatballs of it. And yes! Wetting your hands with cold water as you make the meatballs does prevent them from sticking to you.



Next, dredge the meatballs in flour -- gluten-free, in our case. This is tedious and I almost never flour meatballs, but I must admit it enhanced both flavor and appearance for browning.

Brown the meatballs in batches in olive oil until they are golden. Set them aside, and then heat 1 pound of fresh or canned tomatoes, 1 large diced shallot, and a pinch of cayenne pepper in the drippings. Cook until the tomatoes reduce to a sauce, about 15 minutes. Then, return the meatballs to this sauce.



Now add 1 cup of green olives and 1/4 cup chopped fresh ham, if you wish, to the meatballs and sauce. Pour in 1 cup of beef or chicken broth, bring to a boil, and simmer until the meatballs are completely cooked, 20 minutes or more. In fact this can simmer quietly away for as long as it takes you to make some rice, or perhaps fried potatoes? -- and toss a salad or prepare a vegetable.



And pour the wine. Would a hearty and simple southern French Rhone do, red or white? Or even a good dry Vouvray from the Loire Valley, a wine I have been enjoying with a number of rather strong, spicy meals lately?

And what's for dessert? Here, Mr. Wright can't help us much. His is a most unusual cookbook, divided into chapters with sumptuous historical themes -- "Islands of Paradise and Isolation," "Harvest of Sorrow, Food of Dreams" -- but into nothing so prosaic as Desserts or Candies and Confections. For all his dwelling on the fact of long-term Mediterranean starvation, his recipes are heavy on meat, the food of the rich. Anyway, perhaps a nice French apple tart would do, or a little bit of chocolate. A date nut bar ... a sip of cognac ... we are staring vacantly into space, aren't we.

Culinary hall of fame: Mrs. Beeton

My own new "meme" for the New Year



When modern Western women complain about long-standing sexism in society, I sometimes want to lift a dubious eyebrow, and then glance meaningfully at something like Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management, published in London -- apparently by the family firm, S.O. Beeton -- in 1861. A sexist society, a woman trapped in a sexist society, does not just vomit out an achievement like this.

I glance at it meaningfully, that is, assuming I've found it. My local library has a facsimile edition of the book, printed in 1969. It is just about two inches thick, its pages closely printed with Victorian-looking type, and all bound in that wonderful, rock-hard, plain reinforced library binding that sets an antique book-collector's pulse a-quiver. My, what have we here?

What we have is a massive "modern" cookbook, whose recipes include exact amounts for ingredients, plus estimates of the time and expense required for each dish. There are many illustrations, both color drawings and woodcuts. There are explanations of all foods and where they come from; Mrs. Beeton, I think, was still heir to a scholarly tradition which insisted that anyone demanding the public's notice in a book lay out for it the most fundamental proofs of intent to attack the book's subject with absolute thoroughness and understanding. "The exercise or diversion of pursuing four-footed beasts of game is called hunting...." Well, yes, it is. This, mind you, only comes on page 508, after all the chapters on soups, fish, and meat, and before the chapters on vegetables, puddings, breads, and bills of fare. Before all that, she started her book with chapters on the role of the mistress of the home ("the treatment of servants is of the highest possible moment"), and she concludes it with information on the duties of these servants, on the upkeep of the stables, on child rearing, on when to summon the doctor, and at last on "legal memoranda."

It is all a breathtaking accomplishment. One wonders if, like Shakespeare, there was anything this woman did not know. She is, for example, the first author I have happened to come across, who has made me understand what poaching was -- not poaching in the sense of cooking an egg, but in the sense of killing someone else's wild game illegally. Poachers, it seems, were the drug dealers of previous eras. They supplied something which the wealthy wanted, and which could only be bought, because all wild game lived perforce on noblemen's estates and therefore was construed to belong to them as the gift of the sovereign from whom they technically held their lands. If you were not a good friend of the Duke of Soandso, to be invited to his country house for a haunch of venison brought down by his people, then you had to buy the product. From somebody. The law's penalties for poaching were "very severe," Mrs. Beeton acknowledges. And they "will never" work. With hard-headed sense she writes that the wealthy but socially unconnected will have their game, and thus must continue to encourage poaching, "which, to a very large extent, must continue to render all game laws nugatory as to their intended effect upon the rustic population."

One of the delights of an old cookbook is the information provided about basic, almost medieval- style food preparation and preservation techniques which we no longer have to bother about. The human race probably took a long time learning this, learning how to eat safely: perhaps it is just as well that it is written down somewhere, for what will become of us if the good people at the sausage-making and jelly-making corporations should forget why they do what they do? Mrs. Beeton knows how to smoke and pickle meat, how to take the cream off milk -- it must be put in a shallow pan, because cream cannot rise through a great depth of milk -- how to gut a freshly killed suckling pig, how to dry cherries.

She also seems to know everything about every other household task, event, or problem which may arise. She knows the duties of a maid-of-all-work (they started their careers at age thirteen), how to iron a lady's fine clothes, under what circumstances the cook should also help make beds, and how to pay "calls." Is it a condolence call? A visit of friendship? A morning call? And be warned, you young people. An introduction at a ball does not count as a proper introduction. No gentleman, afterwards, has the right to address a lady. "She is, consequently, free, next morning, to pass her partner at a ball of the previous evening without the slightest recognition." Probably a most wise rule.

Mrs. Beeton has also been deep inside the nursery and has seen things, in this era before modern medicine, that most of us have, again, been spared. Of course she knows the trouble that young mothers have with their early experiences of breast-feeding -- keep the nipples dry afterward, and get a breast pump for the excess -- and she is adamant against the practice of bringing the baby into the parents' bed. It is an invitation to accidental smothering. But she has also seen babies die, of the mysterious causes that seem to have killed so many in their first hours, causes that responded to no treatments whatever. "Sometimes, however, all these means will fail in effecting an utterance from the child, which will lie, with livid lips and a flaccid body, every few minutes opening its mouth with a short gasping pant, and then subsiding into a state of pulseless inaction, lingering probably some hours, till the spasmodic pantings growing further apart, it ceases to exist."

But the bulk of Household Management is its recipes. Are any of them worth following today? Although a calf's head complete with palate, eye, tongue, and brains, will surely never be brought to a table again, I think quite a few of the less gothic recipes are worthwhile. What is daunting about her book is the amount of food she expects to be served at any and every meal. This is the age of servants, we must remember. A "plain family dinner" for November, for example, is fried soles and melted butter, roast leg of pork with apple sauce and vegetables, and macaroni with parmesan cheese (this whole menu constitutes item number 2110 -- Mrs. Beeton has the book arranged brilliantly thus, with every new paragraph, recipe, or piece of advice numbered. Number 2152, for example, specifies "Beverages not to be forgotten at a picnic." She lists six bottles of claret just for a start. Don't bother with water, you can get that anywhere.)

Anyway I don't know if I am equal to dishing out all that one plain family night soon, but many of her individual recipes are simple and worthwhile because in this era before refrigeration, convenience, and waste, she made great use of leftovers and of single, seasonal ingredients. Her baked tomatoes under butter and bread crumbs sound very good (No. 1158). So does her leftover beef stewed with gravy and three bunches of celery (No. 667). Some of her recipes are painstakingly professional, like No. 1350, a casserole of rice which is baked with pieces of bread in it, to hold open places which will then be stuffed with meat "ragout" when the casserole is done and the bread is removed. Some of her recipes show an imagination -- or a use of seasonal, cheap ingredients -- that I have never seen before (No. 1397, "A pretty dish of apples and rice"). And then as you flip along happily through the book, you'll come across things like the addendum to item No. 1627, in which the authoress describes what sounds like lactose intolerance. Or the addendum to No. 451, (about pickles) in which she says that really the mark of a thrifty and accomplished mistress, as opposed to the lady "to whom these desirable epithets may not honestly be applied," lies in her arrangement and labeling of the things in her store closet. It is such a saving of time and trouble to be able to lay one's hands instantly on what is wanted.

True enough, though nowadays we flatter ourselves that liberated women have more important things to do. I wonder. Until our own era produces another Mrs. Beeton -- Madeleine Kamman comes close -- I think I'll flip happily through her massive tome, and go on wondering.

Refreshing my riesling memory

As I have been out of the wine business for several months now, I have lacked the opportunity to sample the variety or quality of wines I used to. What a pleasant refresher, therefore, to drink a few nights ago a good German riesling. I've been buying Washington state and California rieslings, and one standby from Germany (St. Gabriel), all from the grocery store and all under $7. This time I drank a glass of unknown provenance -- I couldn't politely peek at the label or ask questions, because I was being treated and besides, the restaurant was really dark -- but definitely authentic and definitely from what we might call the fatherland. The nice man pouring said so.

Comparing the taste of this riesling to more recent purchases was like comparing a story that has a beginning, and a middle, and an end, to stories that begin and end but tell nothing in between. (Are there stories like that? Well, imagine there are, for the moment.) My grocery store rieslings start out with a bit of pale gold color, and a bit of tanginess in the smell; then they taste sweet and then they leave that mouthwatering acidity after I swallow. That's it.

A good German riesling tells the full story. In this one, I saw the glorious, rich, amber-gold color, and smelled that sharp lemon cake-and-clove smell. The missing middle of the story was fruit, which is what lesser rieslings lack. I tasted what seemed like an orchard full (pardon the exuberance) of delicious, almost thick, peach and lemon-apricot fruit. Do I dare surmise that this example might even have been an Auslese, that is, a wine whose grapes were plucked in enticingly ripe bunches during the third harvest in a good year? There's no one to correct my guess so I'll let it stand. ... And then came riesling's typical acidity, not tongue-curlingly alone but just in balance with fruit and sweetness, and all as it should be. I think.

It made for a lesson in what wines can be, and in what they sometimes are not. It was, I suppose, a lesson in terroir. Wine writers say that of all the noble grapes, riesling is just about the most "transparent," meaning most able to convey something of the soil and climate in which it grows. Oz Clarke writes, "The ability to translate the vineyard into the glass through the medium of winemaker and vine is what makes Riesling so endlessly fascinating" (Oz Clarke's Grapes and Wines, p. 194). My California and Washington state examples seem, in retrospect now, to have translated into the glass all the reasons wine writers give explaining why riesling does not generally do well outside its native Germany. "Early ripening ... when planted in a hot climate, its juice becomes quickly overripe and flabby" (Jancis Robinson, Wine Course). "Few areas [outside Germany] really seem to have got the hang of it" ... "most are dull and bland" ... "so many New World leaders are basically hot countries, too warm for successful Riesling" (all Oz Clarke, Grapes and Wines).

One place, though, that is making fine rieslings these days is Australia, hot though it is. Clarke mentions Australia's Eden and Clare Valleys specifically as producing what he calls one of the three "benchmark" styles of the wine, the other two being of none other provenance than Germany and Alsace (in eastern France), where we would expect benchmark styles. It seems that the two valleys' "convoluted topography," cool nights, and high altitudes replicate German conditions well enough to make riesling happy there. Clarke is willing to reproduce illustrations of two Australian riesling wine labels in Grapes and Wines, which certainly looks like an endorsement: Mount Horrocks is one, Pipers Brook Vineyard another. He also reproduces an illustration from, and says nice things about, Kiona White Riesling from Washington State, which would seem to endorse the possibility that there is hope for other New World rieslings.

If you try any of them, I would suggest a benchmark in evaluating them: ask if they tell the whole story, beginning, middle, and end. Sweetness, fruit, and acidity. (Of course, in all of the above we have ignored the existence of dry rieslings.) The happy news is that all of your explorations should not break the bank in these difficult economic times. Wine writers who praise riesling to the skies -- and they all do -- also note that it remains so generally unpopular as to be generally a great buy. A wine so splendid and so difficult to get right shouldn't also be a steal, but there it is. "There's only enough top quality wine available for those of us who crave it," Clarke says.

I'm guessing, therefore, that those limited amounts of top quality product, comparative bargains though they'll turn out to be, are not likely to be tempting me from my grocery store shelves anytime soon. I may have to expand my hunting grounds ... but at least I begin to understand why.

Apple stuffing

The weekend is almost here, and maybe you'd like to gussy up a weekend-treat roast chicken, duck, or a pork tenderloin with a whiff of the holidays just past. One way to do it is with my favorite stuffing/dressing in the whole world -- not that I've tried every stuffing or dressing in the whole world, but then, once you eat this, who needs to try any more? It's called Apple Stuffing, and it comes, with a twist, from my kitchen Bible, Marion Cunningham's 1986 revision of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook.

It really could not be much simpler. Core an apple (don't bother peeling it). Chop it in rough small pieces, and saute all the pieces in a small quantity of butter, perhaps 2Tablespoons or so.



Add a few slices of cubed bread, wheat or white, heels or middle slices. Stir them into the apples. Add one-quarter teaspoon cinnamon and mix that in. Even if you love cinnamon and are playing with your other proportions, be careful not to add too much. You want a savory stuffing, not the effect of an apple cake.



Stir and heat the bread and apples. You can now moisten the stuffing with wine, meat drippings, or a broth. Make it as dense, or not, as you like.



Once the mixture has reached a good consistency, pile it into a buttered glass baking dish. I use a 1 and 1/2 quart clear glass dish with a clear lid. I put the dish into a preheated 350 F oven for about 30 minutes. It all gets piping hot and the clear glass allows the bread to toast nicely. That way, the stuffing soaks up your meat or poultry gravy most deliciously.



And that is quite, quite all. I never stuff the actual meat or bird in question, because I did that once and the stuffing came out horribly gray, wet, and sporting big purplish splotches from the ahem, cooking juices.

And doesn't it all just whisper chardonnay at you? Happy weekend, early.

Vintage

Let's pretend I'm a teacher, and I'm giving you a pop quiz to start the new year off right. One question, multiple choice.

Choose the phrase that best defines "vintage" in wine:
a. "This is really old"
b. "This is really rare"
c. "A panel of experts agreed this is very good"
d. "The weather was great that year"
e. A, B, and C

If you answered D, you're right. "Vintage" refers to a single year of (good, we hope) weather in the vineyards, rather than to old age or to special-ness per se. In fact, in previous centuries when almost no wine had any keeping qualities at all, to declare a vintage meant to warn people that a certain year had been unusually bad, and that the wine of that year would turn to vinegar even faster than usual. (I am almost sure this reference comes from Hugh Johnson's Vintage: The Story of Wine, but of course now that I want it, I can't find it there. However, his chapter "Jug and Bottle" explains why wine spoils and why it could not be aged -- except possibly in the cold cellars of the Rhineland -- before the invention of glass bottles with cork stoppers.)

The mental picture of vintage as a beautiful sunny day therefore, as opposed to a mental picture of it as a grande dame in pearls, only became clear to me as I was reading a local newspaper article about wine this weekend. The food columnist wrote about Champagne as a New Year's Eve tradition, and as I read, I thought I had caught him out in a major error. My smugness radar went off and I was all set to fire off a chiding, sympathetic, deeply polite letter to the editor about it. Then I did a little research -- just to be absolutely sure, you know -- and learned that the columnist was actually perfectly right in his information, as far as he went. So I kept on reading, eventually did fire off a complimentary letter to the editor on her staff's explanation of the topic, and by the end of the morning was able to look up from my books, blink a little, and say to myself, Oh. So that's what vintage means ....

A vintage, a wine made from grapes all grown and harvested in one season of fine (we hope) weather, is something that some growers "declare," with equal parts trepidation and delight I would think, after watching the sun and the rain, and the flowering and fruiting of their vines all year. If the weather conditions have matched what their experience tells them is needed to make a great harvest, if the grapes taste right and the final product seems as promising as it could be, then they say, "keep all this juice together and see that it is unmixed with anything else. Label it with this year. This is a vintage."

Now, any bottle of inexpensive wine in the grocery store, and any bottle of expensive wine at a chic downtown shop, is going to have a year stamped on its label. I'm no longer drinking Frontera Chardonnay 2006 (Concha y Toro, Chile, $4.99), and have moved on to Frontera Chardonnay 2007 ($4.99). These wines were made from grapes grown and harvested in the years displayed, but I don't think the good people at Concha y Toro have gone to the trouble of declaring a vintage in either case. The trepidation and delight of that task has the most meaning for winemakers who routinely make very complex, blended wines of high quality, namely Champagne and port. If you look at the vintage charts at the back of Ed McCarthy's and Mary Ewing-Mulligan's Wine for Dummies (2003), you will see that every year is a vintage year for every major wine region, whether in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, or California. That is to say, alongside every year is a code indicating whether that vintage is considered Outstanding, Excellent, Very Good, and so on, all the way down to Very Poor. (Watch out for a 1991 Pomerol-St. Emilion, a red Bordeaux, primarily made of merlot -- both Very Poor vintage and probably too old to drink!)

The only regions/categories in the charts that show up with the mysterious letters NV applied to certain years are Champagne and Vintage Port. NV means non-vintage: the weather was not good enough for the growers to say "keep all this separate: this will be a fine wine." No vintage port was made in 2001, 1999, '98, '96, '95, or '93; no vintage Champagne was made in 2001, 1994, or 1992. Of course, "ordinary" Champagnes and ports were made in those years. On the other hand, there were great port vintages in 1977 or 1970, and great Champagne vintages in, among others, 1964 and 1961. I seem to recall Sean Connery's James Bond instructing the girl, at some point, on the proper way to drink a "Dom Perignon '61." He was right. He also knew something about too much Bon Bois in his Cognac, but that's another story.

The reason the weather can be watched and vintages occasionally declared for Champagne and port is because those wines are labor-intensive, high quality, usually very uniform blends to begin with; grape-growing conditions are so difficult in chilly, chalky Champagne, for example, that the place has only ever been able to make a palatable wine by blending dozens of different barrelsful together year after year, letting it all sit, and hoping for the best. When it began to fizz as well, dedicated Champenois winemakers like the monk Dom Perignon slapped their foreheads in frustration. Over time, they learned to turn the fizz to advantage, and the whole world's definition of a celebration expanded accordingly. Still, under these painstaking conditions, a really distinctive single cache of grapes is worth celebrating, and the only criterion possible for such distinction comes from a year of delectable weather.

Well, there is one other criterion. That is, only rarely mind you, the vineyard from which the grapes were harvested. Mysteriously, some vineyards just seem to produce glorious grapes, and the wines they make are kept apart from mere blends in any year. In The Wine Bible Karen MacNeil writes of a four-and-a-half acre plot called Clos du Mesnil, belonging to the Krug Champagne house. This plot has earned enough attention to be enclosed by a private wall since 1698. "The vineyard produces wines of such unique and extraordinary flavor that Krug feels it would be almost sacrilegious to blend it with other wines." By the same token, some ports are not only vintage -- remember the mental picture of a year of great weather -- but "single quinta," made of grapes from only one port estate (quinta).

But this leads us to one final, delicious complication. The thing about ports and Champagnes is that the non-vintage blends, the "ordinary" product, is the point of it all -- the point of the work, the expertise, the care and experience, the point of each harvest itself. A little of every year's harvest, both port and Champagne, even a little of the vintage years, is held back to contribute to the blends of the future. Those single-quinta vintage ports may not, as a matter of fact, use the grapes of the best harvest, but only of a good one. Taking off the best of a vineyard in the best year is taking off too much from the future's needs. And where Champagne is concerned, wine writers say that it takes more skill and judgment to create a non-vintage champagne than a vintage one, precisely because in making his ordinary multi-blend the winemaker is balancing the effects and characteristics of up to sixty different wines, all from less than par years, poured into one vat. It's up to him to anticipate future flavors and to create something that will maintain his "house's" reputation and please its loyal customers years hence, after the bubbles have started. The winemaker dallying about with superb, vintage-weather grapes has it easy by comparison.

And -- more deliciousness -- Jancis Robinson writes that in "some circles" in Champagne it is even considered "poor form" to make a vintage bubbly at all. In these circles, vintage is considered, yes, "an ambitious style that tends to cream off the best grapes and diminish the quality of the non-vintage, 'proper' Champagne" (Jancis Robinson's Wine Course: A Guide to the World of Wine, Abbeville Press, 2003, p. 176). "And the proliferation of luxury, prestige, or de luxe cuvees [blends] since Moet's hugely successful Dom Perignon was launced in 1937 has tended to cream off the finest produce of the top rated villages in the best years." In other words ... it's vulgar.

I'm not sure if there is a comparable school of thought in Portugal, but its attitude does begin to make some sense. A year's worth of splendid grapes lost to one prestige vintage, when they all might have contributed to making all the "proper" blends just that bit better, does look a little splashy, doesn't it. A little selfish. But just think what this does to our smugness radar. Good heavens, let us understand this. Dom Perignon as loud and arriviste.

It's almost too much to take in, without a good stiff drink. Blend what you like.