I like to consider myself a somewhat cultured person. Sure, I can recite most of the lines of Caddyshack, and occasionally go to work without underwear (hey, all rules are off on laundry day), but I also like to think that having a grasp on the comprehensive works of Mozart and passing two semesters of Art History with straight A’s has left me with an appreciation for the finer things in life. So when Brian started taking me with him to wine tastings, a hobby that he is as passionate about as he is knowledgeable, I was all up for learning something new that might "put a little class in dat ass".
Wine tasting is a funny thing. I have yet to determine whether it is a cultivated, methodically developed skill or shot-in-the-dark, this-is-what-I’m-tasting rollercoaster of brand hype and personal opinion. Brian, along with several other well-versed wine connoisseurs, has assured me that it is a combination of both. Personally, I can tell a really great wine from a really crappy wine, and that’s about as far as it goes. But there are people out there who can supposedly pick a Willamette Valley pinot-noir out of a selection of 20 Oregon region pinots without blinking, and can determine the type of barrel used to age the wine from smell alone. In fact, I was on hand when a “mystery” bottle of wine was poured and Brian, without even taking a sip, confidently proclaimed the origin of the wine to be German based on the color alone. The color for christsakes! WTF is that about?! But on the other hand, I’ve heard stories of people claiming to taste, among other things, white truffles in the wine, but when asked, point blank, if they’ve ever even had a white truffle, they admitted that they had never tasted one. I mean, c’mon. We’ve all seen the movie Sideways (or, at least some of us had). Holding your ear to taste rosemary and Belgium chocolate in your Merlot is just silly. And there are a LOT of silly people like that in the business of wine tasting.
Having had two “warm-up” sessions at a winery near Pennington (excellent) and a wine festival in Shamong (not so excellent), I went to my first real wine tasting event this past Tuesday in Princeton. It consisted of about 25 to 30 pinot-noirs, separated by region. So what you do is you take your wine glass, go up to a table, and ask to try this or that wine. They pour a few mouthfuls in your glass, and then you’re supposed to swirl it to aerate the liquid. The swirling is hard, I’m not going to lie. It seems easy, until you’re at a fancy schmancy event and you need to be absolutely sure that you don’t make a mess; enthusiastic swirling is a disaster waiting to happen in my book, but I did my best to keep the wine contained IN the glass and not ON me and the people around me. You then put your nose to the glass and breathe deeply (or not, if you don’t want to, but I like to think of the smell as the ‘prologue’ to the wine; you get a hint of the style without necessarily understanding the context). Finally, you take a sip. You hold it in your mouth for a bit, and swallow. Easy, right?
Sure, it was easy. And pretty interesting. The first table displayed pinots primarily from the west coast. I could tell the ones that I liked. I could tell the ones I liked a little less. I tasted chocolate in this one and oak in that one. Very cool. We moved to the second table and it was there that I lost my stride. To be honest, I can’t even remember the regions the wines were from. Maybe the west coast still? Maybe not…There was one that was big and dark, and I kind of liked that one. There was another one that just tasted flat to me, so I decided I didn’t like that one. The rest tasted the same. I listened closely to the people around me commenting on the different “bouquets” and “varietals,” suddenly realizing to my embarrassment that I was actually LEANING IN to catch what they were saying. Whoops. The wine was definitely getting to me. I righted myself, suppressed a hiccup, and followed Brian to the hour d’oeuvres table to absorb some of that alcohol making its way through my system. There was a lot of grilled veggies and cheeses, and not a lot of bread, which was pretty stupid in my mind, but I nibbled, hoping I would lose that giggly edge that wine is notorious for giving me.
On to the next table, where we sampled pinots from Germany and Italy…I think. The German one was swill, I decided immediately (did I mention that too much wine gives me an inflamed sense of…uh…being right no matter what?). The Italian wines were okay, but nothing special. I heartily agreed with a random wine taster who described one brand as “earthy,” and corrected a second wine-tasting stranger, saying that the wine was “not full bodied, exactly, but had a modest degree of oak paired with cherry and apple overtures.” And then I looked at Brian...who was looking at me like I had two heads, and remembered that this was my first wine tasting and I had less than a clue as to what I was talking about. Being drunk was getting fun, but I decided it was time to shut up. I was eager to move on to the next table, which featured wines from New Zealand, Australia, and Tasmania (freaking cool!). By the time we reached the table from “down under,” I noticed that I was starting to like everything. And I mean everything. I liked the Australian wines. I liked the New Zealand wines. I liked the wine labels, especially that one with the cute sheep on it. I liked the person who was pouring the wine, I liked Brian, I liked Brian’s dad, who had accompanied us to the tasting, and I even liked the table cloth. I was drunk.
By the time we hit up the French pinot-noirs, my face had a pleasant numbness and my pronunciation of words was getting noticeably slurred. Thankfully, I noticed by then that the room had gotten much louder, and the crowd much “warmer” (as Brian politely put it). Thank god I wasn’t the only one experiencing the unfortunate side effects of fermented fruit. I was sober enough, however, to realize that as far as pinot-noir goes, the French have it down to a science. In fact, I (a little too loudly) declared my number one favorite to be one of the wines from the French table. I’ll be damned if I can remember the name of it now, but I do remember that it had this lovely taste of cranberry, followed by about a million other flavors, all pleasant, progressing seamlessly across my tongue. It was amazing. And then I finally got why wine tasting is such an interesting hobby. It challenges you in a way that many other tasks don’t. It forces you to focus intensely on your least-developed sense – your sense of taste. And the more you concentrate, the more you pick up. That wine that was once described as “good” now overwhelms you with oak and spice and fruit, and maybe a little honey or chocolate or coffee, or even white truffle (just kidding). It’s a profoundly personal experience. In the end, it doesn’t matter if the brand is well known or the price is high. All that matters is if you like it or not. In the end, it’s just about you and your preferences, and how much you want to develop them.
And then my revelation was gone. It was replaced by a sense of woozyness and warmth and tingling and the sense that my hands were “so far away from my body!” Yep, I was definitely drunk. But along with being an outlet for public drunkenness (and don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely an appeal in that), wine tasting is a really, really interesting and educational pastime. I learned a lot, met some great people, drank some great wine, and even made friends with a table cloth. The evening was a success, and I look forward to many more. If Brian will ever take me out in public again, that is :-)
1 comment:
LOVE this one! You've gotta come to the Finger Lakes...Yuki always drives.
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