Paul's Wine Tipsey

Information from deep within the winemaker’s brain fissures

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One

Good wine is fragile and doesn’t travel well. This point was re-driven home recently when I brought a few bottles of my 03 Cabernet Reserve on a road trip to the Pacific Northwest. At one stop in Oregon we broke out a bottle, uncorked it and took a sensory- focused first taste. “Not as magnificent as I remembered,” I thought to myself as everyone else praised it.

At the next stop, my sister Jeanne had a bottle of the same wine in her “cellar” and wanted to open it, so we did. My appraisal: was:

“Magnificent.”

The difference was the resting time after the jiggles and bounces of the trip, something that makes a crafted wine go “dumb,” losing a lot of its aromas and fruit temporarily. So when you receive that club shipment from me, or otherwise have wine shipped to you, deny the temptation to immediately open a bottle. Give it a rest for a few days, the longer the better, in a cool dark place and let it recuperate from its UPS journey.

Two

There are people who drink wine and there are people who taste wine. No judgments from here; wine is made to be consumed. But the difference between those two kinds of consumers is why someone will pull out that rare bottle they have been “saving since college” to share with the taster-type guest and why they open the local supermarket refinery winery brand for the other. In fact, the dilemma of having a good wine cellar is finding someone who would appreciate the wine you might have saved under perfect conditions for 10 or more years. The next few wine tips are going to focus on how you become a wine taster.

Your sense of smell makes up as much as 80% of your sense of taste. Don’t believe me? Hold your nose and drink a glass of orange juice. Still holding your nose, what do you taste? Nothing, maybe a slight acidity.. Try it again, this time inhaling the OJ smells and maybe even breathing in some air through your mouth as you drink. Big difference!

Now take your wineglass, which should have a slight tulip shape, pour in a small amount of wine, and place the base of the glass on a hard, surface, such as my wine bar. Swirl the base on the surface like it was a hula hoop, and then bring the glass up to your nose. Stick your nose in it, all the way, and inhale. Now you are starting to taste wine! Whay happened was that the wine was atomized by the tiny crystals that make up the glass. As you swirled, minute amounts were introduced to the atmosphere in your bowl. By sticking your nose into this atmosphere, you can really smell what is in there.Next: looking at color.

Three

Ever notice how in films and advertisements the "wine experts" hold their glasses up to the light? What do you think they are looking for?

The most obvious thing they'd be looking at is the CLARITY of the wine which (this might surprise you) is mostly meaningless in evaluating how a wine is going to taste. I grant you, if the wine is so muddy that you can't see light through it in your glass, there may be a problem, but our American obsession with perfectly clear and clean wines makes most wine lovers (and all Europeans) laugh. In fact, I'll go so far as to say real wine aficionados are happy to find sediment in their wine. It means the wines are not over processed in the chemical engineering sort of way refinery wineries prepare their products for market. And usually an under-processed and naturally cleared wine has, dare I say, more lively flavors.

As a winemaker, I am consciously making the trade off decision between having a crystal clear no sediment wine and a wine that has a little sediment on the cork. My 2004 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon is an example. When you pull the cork on one of these puppies, you will notice a reddish gunk on the cork. This is the harmless (unless you get some on your white tablecloth) residue from the wines deep color molecules breaking up and falling out, which in this case is onto the cork because the bottles are stored upside down. I could add an enzyme to prevent this color fallout, but I'm just not interested in changing nature that much.

The other thing our "experts" are looking at is the wine's color. In contrast to the bogus clarity issue, color can tell you a lot about what you can expect in the wine's taste.

White Wines. Generally, white wines get darker with age. If you see light browning in your glass of chardonnay, you can generally expect a nuttier and less fruity taste. As the wine oxidizes, it gets browner and browner. Finally it will take on the smell and taste of sherry, which is white wine that is oxidized on purpose and then fortified with more alcohol. When your chardonnay takes on a brown color and sherry-ized smell "nose" it has become what the "experts" will call "off" and what you'd call "bad". But by looking at its color, you could at least expect what to taste, and that is a small part of "wine tasting."

Red Wines. Generally, red wines get lighter with age. This means that a red that is deep ruby in its youth becomes a lighter, paler red and then a red-orange color as it ages. This red orange state, which will happen in some wines after 10-15 years (zinfandel is a good example), is called "bricked" because the color resembles a red-orange brick. The taste of a bricked wine is gentler with less acid, and more refined, always less fruity but in other ways often more interesting, depending on how the wine was made and how it was stored. When the wine goes past this point due to age, temperature or a faulty cork, into what now becomes a darker, browner wine, which as we have learned is "really off" or "really bad" and it can be a pretty nasty experience, especially if it was an expensive bottle you had saved for a special event. All of which convinces me that saving or "aging" wine is generally a wasted effort unless you have a properly equipped storage facility and the wines are in magnum or larger bottles.

So color sets up our expectations about a wine and to the experienced wine taster is a signal about how that wine is going to taste when it hits his palate.