| Waxing about Wine |
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| Written by Neil Gernon and Monica Bourgeois |
| Wednesday, 21 January 2009 15:57 |
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Band-Aids and bong water, cats pee and petrol, these are a few of our favorite things…to smell in wine. They might not sound appealing, but neither did escargot the first time you found out what it was. Wine has the power to make the disgusting divine. Open your mind and you will experience tastes that only uprooted prune and pot fields produce. Our first article is a wine tasting101, so whether you’re an expert or a newbie, there’s always something fun to learn about grown up grape juice. First, we believe that wine should always be enjoyed, whether alone, paired with a meal, or just sipping throughout the night. When drinking wine, you should first ask yourself one question before anything else: do I like this? After deciding whether you do or don’t, you can move on to either discussing and enjoying the bottle or pouring it out and popping another. Hopefully you will have found something about the wine that you enjoy. If that is the case, you can spend your time dissecting its qualities, or you can be creative with the pleasure the wine is bringing you. You will notice that we take a more creative approach to wine tasting and hope you enjoy our outlook on the process. The Basics: After uncorking the wine, pour a small amount into your glass, swirl and give it a sniff. This is that intimidating ritual they do at restaurants. The reason they present the wine in this manner at restaurants is not for you to take a taste and decide whether or not you like the wine, but rather, whether or not the wine is “good” meaning the cork or storage conditions have not tainted the wine. It takes a while to familiarize yourself with what a tainted wine smells like, but once you’ve smelled a bad bottle of wine, you will not likely soon forget the scent. All of us Katrina survivors are familiar with the smell of mold, must and other stale, earthy scents. If you smell wet cardboard, stewed fruit, or slight mildew, your wine is probably bad and you can request another bottle or for the sommelier to test it. Approximately 5-7% of all wines enclosed with a cork are “corked”; so if you have any concerns about what’s been poured into your glass, do not hesitate to ask for a second opinion or replacement. Assuming the wine is good, you can move on to the first of the many sensory observations that go along with tasting wine; the color. People often hold a white piece of paper behind the glass to see the color of the wine. For whites, wine can either be clear, lemon-green, lemon, gold, amber or brown, whereas the color scheme of reds includes light red/pink, ruby, purple, tawny or brown. Again, this is a basic guide. Please try not to take yourself too seriously. If you want to have fun, put sunglasses on while checking out the color. Even the biggest wine geek should giggle when you do this unless they suck. In this case, the person definitely has passed the point of being able to enjoy wine. It has become a complete study and the passion is gone. They will never be someone to share a beer with, much less a dirty joke. The next sensory subject to address is the nose. For whites, try to identify commons scents, such as flowers, citrus, perfume, oak, exotic spices; and for reds, see if you smell pepper, bright red fruit, dark red/black fruit, berries, earth, tar or meat. I recently had a Napa syrah made by Surh Luchtel Cellars that smelled like smoked bacon. Divine! The power of smell is deep rooted in our subconscious. I like it when a wine reminds me of childhood memories. Whites can flood the mind with memories of eating cheerios, while every now and then, a sniff of red brings me back to munching on dill pickles while watching cartoons. The candy smell of zin reminds me of baseball card gum and a Howell mountain cabernet sometimes flashes me to sharpening my no.2 pencil in preparation for a standardized test. Finally getting to it, we have taste, the most enjoyable part of the wine experience. For this, you look to the nose for follow through. I like to come up with quotables when I taste a wine. For example, I’ve been known to say about particularly pungent French wines; “like funk in the trunk of an old Volkswagen, it hits you in the front”, or “good funky, like The Meters.” The more descriptive you are, the more fun you will have tasting wine. The fewer pretenses you put toward your tasting, the greater your enjoyment will be. Now, we shouldn’t leave out a very important aspect of enjoying wine and that is pairing it with food. Most wines are meant to be accompaniments and enhancers of a meal. Some work perfectly on their own and are best enjoyed on your porch on a hot summers day, while others, such as Chianti, are highly acidic and therefore work best, and sometimes exclusively, with food (think pizza!). Of course, we drink wine daily and not all that often with food. Why eat when you can chew on a bottle of Napa Cabernet? Instead, we like to pair our wines with our experiences. To say creamy Chardonnays goes great with Chilean Sea Bass is accurate, but to say that a Viognier pairs well with a claw-foot tub filled with lavender and rose petals, well now you are making memories and sensory experiences that you will not soon forget. Cheers! Monica and Neil |