y dad has been a great fan of wine and wine tasting for years and years, and would like nothing better than for me to grow to love it as well. I do enjoy a glass of wine now and then, but mostly as a late night sipping thing which I accompany with a few pretzels.  It's out of my budget for a dinner accompaniment, but that really doesn't matter since dad works on wine tasting events, knows hundreds of wine makers and vineyard owners, has turned most spare closets in his home into improvised wine cellars, and is always happy to give me all the wine I might ever want.  I want a lot less than he wants to give me, as it turns out. I don't really like wine enough to drink it on purpose, I only think to drink it when I'm actually doing wine tasting with dad, but when those times come I enjoy it while it lasts. The same holds true for Malaya, to a lesser extent.

This page recounts various wine tasting events of my recent life, most of them revolving around dad's relatively frequent visits to Northern California.

More recent updates are added on top of this page.

November 14, 2003

September 4, 2003

Someday soon I'll describe the whole wine-tasting expedition I tagged along with dad on, during which we penetrated deep into the yuppie-infested wilds of Livermore County. I wanted to post it as a photo journal, but since I was in Livermore and my camera was on my desk in Malaya's condo, that option is out.

Instead of that grand parade of words and images, today I shall recount just what a wine tasting is like, for the benefit of those of you with real lives, who have never engaged in such an activity.

Napa Valley is the more famous wine-tasting region in Northern California (and by extension, in the entire US), but it's become obscenely bougie and commercialized, to the point of near Disney-ification.  There are organized tours, there are tasting menus that you may not deviate from, and most importantly, you will pay handsomely for the mass-marketed experience.

For that reason, when I had a day to spend with my visiting, wine-loving father, he wanted to head south to Livermore Valley, home of lots of vintners who are almost as good, and a lot less overcrowded.  In the Livermore Valley you can find over a dozen relatively small and unknown wine producers, almost all of whom are open for several hours every day, and quite happy to chat with you about their product, and pour you free samples.  They even provide you with cool long-stemmed wine glasses to drink from, a chatty and well-educated person to do the pouring, cold water to cleanse your palette and glass between courses, and sometimes some dry snacky type fingerfood to both soak up the acid stomach and give you something to enhance the flavor of the wine you are tasting.

It's called a "tasting" since that's what you do; taste it.

Well, first you'll probably want to sniff at it and swirl it around in the glass for a while, letting it warm up some from the heat of your hand and thus bringing out more of its flavors.  But eventually you'll get around to taking a sip, providing the "nose" isn't truly septic.  And while it may be tempting to glug it and chase it with a handful of crackers, that is poor etiquette, and rather a waste of your time.  If you're thirsty, drink some water.  You're there to savor the distilled and fermented grape juice, a purely-human invention that is the result of hundreds of years of painstaking trial and error viticulture, a ceaseless toil that has reached its culmination in the ounce of lightly-chilled liquid you hold before you.  A veritable nectar of the gods!

One that may be purchased for $12.95 a bottle, or by the case at a 20% discount.

My dad has long been "into" wine.  He drinks a lot of it, but not in the brown paper bag sort of way.  I don't know if he's been drunk in 20 years, so by "a lot," I mean that he is a connoisseur of the grape elixir.  He buys it frequently, he works at wine competitions and runs tastings, and he very much enjoys taking a glass at the end of the day, or with dinner.

I don't feel like he does about wine, but I'm beginning to be able to see the attraction of it all.

Wine is hella-complicated to make, at least at a professional level, and despite all that they carefully do, the taste of the final product depends largely on the vagaries of weather, temperature, soil condition, sugar content of the grape, time it's left to age, speed with which it ferments, temperate at which it's served, and much more. My point is that aside from some of the cheapest and most commercial wines (which will always range from mediocre to mouthwash), you never really know what you're going to get.  The taste of the exact same wine, from the same grape vines, in the same vineyard, picked by the same people, produced in the same way, can vary tremendously from one year to the next.

As vines get older the taste of their grapes changes.  The taste varies by how wet or dry or hot or cold the growing season has been.  It varies depending on when they harvest it due to the ripening of the grapes, with differences detectable literally to the day. And so on.

Therefore, it's somewhat of an adventure every time you uncork a new bottle (or have one uncorked for you by the chatty 67 year old retired machinist who now works part time in the tasting room four days a week), and you never really know if it'll be good, great, or vinegar.  Plus, there are nearly infinite gradations of "good" and "great," and one man's "great" is another man's "bleh."

On top of that, the complexity and subtlety of the tastes of good wine are nearly infinite.  If you just suck down cold wine from a keg-like tap, it's not going to taste like much.  If you have several different varieties to compare, and take the time to smell them, and take small sips and swish them around your mouth, it's a very different experience.  Especially if you have an expert taster with you to offer his/her opinions on the bouquet and tapestry of flavor, and you don't just roll your eyes and refuse to be drawn into the whole thing, like a sullen 13 y/o whose mom has dragged him to do something he loved 6 months ago, but has now concluded is for babies.

Dad would sniff at the wine, which I was smelling myself and trying to think what it smelled like, and he'd say something like, "Very mellow fruit... honeysuckle... black cherries..." or "It has a sort of meaty feel, with a hint of leather and smoke." And while that sounds ridiculous when you read it on the page (or Sony G500 21" monitor while you're writing your blog), when you're actually there, your nose stuck inside the glass, trying to identify the complexity of aromas the chilled liquid before you is exuding, it's very interesting. Inexperienced wine-tasters (like myself) often are annoyed at our inability to verbalize what we're smelling or tasting.  But when you hear it described by an expert (or just read the blurb about it on the wine maker's write up), you can evaluate the accuracy of the comments, and quite often you'll find yourself agreeing. And your previously-inadequate description, "It's strong and sort of fruity." is cast aside as you realize that yes, it does smell like honeysuckle.  Or cigar smoke.  Or lemongrass.  Or whatever. Even if you don't quite know what those sorts of things would taste like.

It reminds me of the old kids' jibe, when someone says that something "Tastes like shit." and someone else shoots back, "Oh, you eat shit often?"  I can remember similar situations when trying something weird, and thinking it tasted like grass, or eucalyptus tree bark, or ivy.  I'd never eaten any of those things (well, a bit of grass), but somehow the description felt just right.

I get a similar thing when I taste, or even just smell, a wine and enjoy the complexities of it, and the adjectives for what it smells/tastes like come to mind.

Despite all of this, I don't really like wine. Dad was happy to buy me a bottle or even a case of most anything we tasted, but my wine enjoyment runs fast and shallow.  I like lots of wine for a sip or two, and some for several swallows, but when I go up to a full cup, I very seldom fail to get sick of it long before it's emptied.  And yes, I could chug it just to wash down the Mac and Cheese, but if I'm going to drink a wine, I'm going to enjoy it, and that means taking relatively small sips and savoring them.  I drink water or Gatorade or sometimes soda to wash down my food or when I'm very thirsty. I drink wine when I want a taste of something interesting and different, and that's not very often, at least partially since I know I'll get sick of it before I drink it all.

Despite this part two, I did come away from the day with a bottle to call my own.  It's a very light and clean Sauvignon Blanc from the last and smallest wine grower we visited, LVC, which stands for Livermore Valley ... something.  Cellars?  Probably.  Anyway, their tasting room was a cramped little office decorated about the same as your step-uncle's garage, and staffed by a retired public school teacher who knew about as much about wine as Dusty does. ("I just like to drink it." she said, and "All kinds." was her answer when I asked what her favorite type was.  Well, you can't fault her enthusiasm.)

I didn't like that one enough to want more than another few sips, but it was a very small place and obviously not doing all that well financially, and dad was feeling like he wanted to buy something from that day's trip, and we were both surprised that some of the best wine we'd tasted all day (out of like 25 samples) was from this very low tech, backroad, school marm-staffed, shed.  So he got me (and Malaya) a bottle of the type I liked best, and got two White Zinfindels for a friend's party that dad's choosing the wine for.

I have no idea if Malaya will like it; she's less of a wine fan than me and the one bottle we've opened since I've been up here, one picked from the mix and match case that dad assembled for me pre-San Diego departure, was a Petit Syrah that neither of us much cared for.  The last half of it went down the drain several days after we opened it when we admitted that it wasn't getting any better in the fridge, and that neither of us wanted any more.

My usual wine drinking experience is a few sips of dad's glass when he pours a new one when I'm over at his house.  I've obviously not been over to his house any time lately, since his house is now about 485 miles further away than it was for the last 10 years, but I now realize that I like that since it so neatly jibes with my apparent wine preference, which is a few sips here and there, ideally from a variety of good types.

I'd make a great wine judge, except that I can't tell them apart very well, don't have the vocabulary to express why I like one more or less than the others, and I am far too busy saving kittens and puppy-dogs from burning buildings, whenever I have some time off from my regular job of building homes for poor old people.

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I posted my "I sort of like wine." blog a couple of days ago, and talked about the vocabulary one needs to describe the wines one is drinking.  Straight to the rescue comes this weekly wine recommendation from the Wine Spectator website.  I quote:

A lush style, with plush texture. Honeydew, pear and ripe apple flavors are underscored by lingering vanilla and marshmallow nuances. Drink now. 5,000 cases made.

Wine Spectator's editors have selected this wine as the best buy of the week. For Wine Spectator reviews of thousands of other recently released wines, click here.

That's the sort of paragraph that only a true wine expert can craft. Any amateur can manage to drop honeydew, pear, and apple into a description, but would you remember to specify that it's "ripe" apple, rather than just plain old apple?  There is a difference, you know.  And can you ever hope to work in the phrase "lingering vanilla," much less when said lingering vanilla is not dominant, but merely an underscore?  And after all of that, you have to manage one last "marshmallow nuances" to really cap it all off.

Good luck.

You'll note that I've never tasted this wine, and have no idea how accurate this description is.  I can say that it doesn't sound very good to me; I mean maybe the fruit, but you want marshmallow nuances in wine?

By the way, the link only works if you're a Wine Spectator subscriber.  I am not; I got the link from my dad who forwarded me the email after I saw him reading it when he checked his email from my computer during his recent visit. However, I may have to register for it, since the comedic value of such a description is certainly worth enduring their no-doubt privacy-raping sign up page.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.