Monday, Dec. 5, 2005
This is my inaugural post for this blog, which I am calling Life on the vine.
There is a reason I selected this title. I am a middle-age professional in the sunset of a career almost entirely devoted to newspaper journalism. Now, when I say "the sunset," I am not hinting that I plan to retire. Quite the opposite.
I never plan to retire. I've been at this journalism thing since 1970, when I became sports editor of my junior-high school newspaper.
So, you know one of my passions -- journalism.
Another one of my passions is wine. More specifically, I am passionate not about the actual beverage (orange juice tastes better); rather, my passion is for the mellow life associated with the enjoyment of wine.
Twice a month, you can find me in liquor stores looking for three to four bottles of wine. Whenever I travel on business, which is about four times a year, I generally buy a bottle or two.
I am blessed in that the headquarters for the company I work for -- Knight Ridder -- is in San Jose, California. So when I visit HQ, I am only an hour away from wine country.
I am blessed that most of my professional and personal life was spent in Miami, which has fantastic restaurants and people knowledgeable about wines.
The emergence of the World Wide Web has blessed all of us who love wine. I can now sample a wine at a wine tasting, go home and through the magic of the Web, find a wealth of information about that wine. Before, you may recall, you pretty much had to rely on the old method: Someone tells you about a wine and you research it by talking to wine-shop workers and consulting printed sources.
I am blessed in that I am successful in my chosen profession, and this success has allowed me the discretionary income to enjoy a luxury like wine.
But as you will see in my posts on this blog, I do not -- in fact, I refuse to do so -- recommend that you spend a lot of money on wine.
To do so is immoral.
First, wine is an alcoholic beverage. You can get drunk. You can get behind the wheel of a car and kill someone. You can get addicted to wine. You can ruin your life and the life of people who love you. Drink responsibly -- or not at all.
Secondly, this country has legions of poor and underprivileged people. How can anyone justify spending $100 on a bottle of fermented grapes in the face of such need? Help your fellow man: Buy two bottles of $25 wine, donate $50 to charity.
Third, recommending -- and drinking -- expensive wines helps perpetuate the myth that wine should be enjoyed only by the elite. I hope you already know this: A "good" -- whatever that means to you -- bottle of wine can be had for as little as $2. Trader Joe's grocery store chain sells "2-Buck Chuck," -- Charles Shaw -- wines in many states. The Indelicato Family of California, makers of Delicato wine, has been selling very smooth wine for years for $6. Retailers like Sam's Club have excellent wine offerings, many of them in the sub-$10 range. Grocery stores and liquor stores put a lot of good wines out in a basket and heavily discount the price when they can't move them off the shelves. So, you really do not have to spend a great deal of money to get acceptable bottle of wines. (Well, I can't anyway; I am also an "alfa-ista," slang for people who love their Alfa Romeo so much they will spend whatever is needed on their beloved Italian car.)
Know this: The taste of wine does not increase proportionally with its price. A $10 bottle can be just as good one for $50.
What you as a wine drinker have to determine is what kind of wine drinker will you be?
If you plan to regularly drink a glass or so a day -- which I recommend -- then just go to your local grocery store and every time you shop put two bottles of $9 wine in your car.
Take some time to find the wine you like. Over the course of a year, buy 30 different brands of wine, mixing white and red. Try each one. Let another adult in your household or a friend try some of them, too. Keep copious notes about what you like and do not like. After you have sampled all 30, decide on the 10 that you like the most.
That's your personal wine list. Stick with buying those 10 wines when you shop.
If you want to be the kind of wine drinker who is knowledgeable, then you're going to have to spend more money, invest more time and pay attention to more subtle things about wine.
First, establish a budget. My annual budget is $1,000. I spend about $50 a month just on wine. But I travel and when I do, I buy two to three bottles. I also sample wines in restaurants when I travel. I spend money on books about wine, magazines about wine and every Friday I buy The Wall Street Journal so that I can read the column of my former colleagues, Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher, authors of The Journal's Tastings column.
Setting a budget will determine how deeply you want to get into wine. So, I'd have similar advice for you. Spend three months finding out what types of wine you like. Instead of 30 bottles, you'll probably want to buy 60. Ask the clerks at wine shops for recommendations and then buy those wines. Sample them. Invite friends over. Serve them the wines. Get other recommendations from magazine and newspaper articles. Keep good notes.
After the end of the three months, make a personal wine list. But instead of exact brands, like the one for the casual drinker, decide which wine regions and winemakers you like the most.
That will be your list.
For example, part of my list looks something like this:
1. Bordeaux. Times are tougher for a lot of growers and winemakers in the bordeaux region. People aren't drinking enough of their wine to sustain the business. But that's not because it isn't the best in the world. It still is. Most of the wine that we know as bordeaux is predominantly a merlot, usually with a little cabernet franc mixed in. The stuff is good. Thirty dollars can get you a good bottle. Fifty gets you a good bottle. Don't spend more than that. It's just a bunch of grapes, remember?
2. California chardonnay. The state really has perfected the chardonnay. My favorites invariably come from two places: Napa and Sonoma, particularly the Russian River Valley.
3. Oregon pinot noir, Santa Barbara, Calif., pinot noir. Even before the movie "Sideways," I had fallen in love with pinot. I stumbled onto a bottle of it when I asked a wine shop owner for a red wine recommendation 10 years ago. To be specific: I will drink any wine, particularly a pinot, made by Lane Tanner of Santa Barbara County. She's the best there is. By the way, here is the wine list from "Sideways":
-- 2001 Hitching Post Pinot Noir
-- 2001 Sanford Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Vin Gris
-- 2001 Fiddlehead Happy Canyon Sauvignon Blanc
-- 1992 Byron Santa Maria Valley Brut Reserve
-- 1988 Tenuta San Guido Sassicaia
-- 2002 Tantara Pinot Noir
-- 2002 Sea Smoke Cellars Botella Pinot Noir
-- 2002 Andrew Murray Cellars Syrah
-- 1995 Opus One
-- 2002 Talley Pinot Noir Estate
-- 2001 Kistler Camp Meeting Ridge Chardonnay
-- 2002 Melville Vineyards Pinot Noir
-- Richebourg (Domaine de la Romanee-Conti)
-- 1998 Dominique Laurent Pommard|
4. Italian barbera. I learned of this deep red wine while reading the "Tastings" column in The Wall Street Journal. John and Dottie (that's Dorothy's nickname) suggested it as an all-purpose wine for Italian food. Before their recommendation, I had been strictly a chianti drinker when eating Italian. I really didn't like chianti, but I started drinking it when I was in college (and when I was broke), so old habits never died. I never bothered to research and try Italian wines until reading the column. Now, I'm a committed fan of barbera. You can find most of it for $20 or less.
5. Beaujolais. Wine from this part of France is fruity and fun, good with, uh, fruit like grapes and apples. And how can you be a wine drinker without loving the beaujolais nouveau that's released every fall. (This season's offerings are, unfortunately, pretty unglorious. More on that in another blog.)
6. Champagne. I mean the real champagne, the sparkling wine that comes from a region in France. All the other "champagnes" are pretenders, wannabes.
7. Rabbit Ridge. This winemaker sells moderately priced ($11 or so) wine, and you can find it anywhere. It's a cool California wine, but the real reason I like the wine is the reason I like many wines -- the story behind the story of the wine. The founder of the company was once a teacher and taught himself how to make wine. How can you not like a self-made winemaker?
So, I add to my personal wine list as I go about life. But, as you can see, this list leaves me a lot of flexibility. So when I shop for wines, I am not really looking for specific labels. I'm really looking for wine regions and, within those regions, the best years for those regions.
For example, when I shop for bordeaux, I am simply looking for a 2000 bordeaux that does not exceed my budget. That was the best year, recently, for bordeaux.
The pay-off is that selecting wines based on region (and reputation of a certain year) will yield some incredible surprises. It is by using this method that I found an incredibly good wine, Chappellet, from Napa Valley. I simply walked into a wine shop in Coral Gables, a suburb of Miami, and asked the owner to recommend the "smoothest" wine from Napa he had on the shelves. (For under $50, of course.)
I invariably go into wine shops and simply ask clerks and owners: bordeaux, please, one for $30 or so and another for $40-$50. Vintage: 2000, or if you know of a better year, I'll take that one instead.
Ok, so if you are going to have a personal wine list like mine that is flexible then you will want to do the following:
1. Visit wineries. You don't have to go to Napa or Sonoma counties. Many states have wine regions. Visit the wineries in your state.
2. Eat at fine restaurants to get the benefit of expert advice. Good restaurants and hotels have wine experts to help you select a wine with your meal. Use them. Remember their recommendations. Ask them general questions about matching wine to food. Write their advice down when you get home. Check out the wine lists of fine restaurants and try those. For example, you should be able to find the wine list of Tavern on the Green online.
3. Read about wine frequently. If your local newspaper doesn't publish a wine column, and too few of them do, the best wine coverage is done by the San Francisco Chronicle. Go to www.sfgate.com and follow the links to the wine section. The newspaper has the nation's largest staff devoted to food and wine coverage. Buy The Wall Street Journal on Friday to read the "Tastings" column. I also recommend wine coverage by the New York Times. (www.nytimes.com, follow the links to dining and/or wine.)
4. Go to every wine tasting in your area. The name of the game is acquiring as much knowledge as possible as cheaply as possible. Thus, at a wine tasting you can sample 12 wines in two hours -- without buying the bottle. So, the $30 you spent to get into the tasting yields you about $240 worth of knowledge. (This assumes you would have paid $20 for 12 bottles of wine.)
5. Cultivate a wine "source." Find one person who knows more than you do about wine. My best wine source here in Macon, Ga., is a guy named Paul, who runs a small liquor store. Paul's store is along a busy highway, and many of his customers are working-class folks who want to buy the hard stuff, booze and beer. So Paul knows he can't offer his customers a $40 bottle of wine -- even though he has several good ones in a well-stocked cooler near the front of his store. (I'm one of the few customers who actually visit this cooler.)
Paul knows that he must use bottom-line logic to convince his customers to try wine. They've been drinking $10 vodka for 40 years, say, so why should they spend $20 for some wine? So Paul has his distributor search for the best "value" wines in the world. Paul sells an remarkably strong merlot from Chile for $8. He has a hearty red table wine from Italy for $5. I've never encountered most of these labels when reading my Baby Boomer wine magazines.
You have to walk by Paul's creative signage -- "Good Italian wine, $5! Can't beat it! -- to get to the beer and booze. So every now and then, customers stop and pick up a bottle of wine.
When they do, Paul has won another convert.
Maybe you, too, want to get more involved in wine -- live Life on the vine even -- but think you don't have the time or money to invest. Sure you do. Like everything in life, it's just a matter of setting priorities.
So I hope you will make wine a priority. Talk to you soon.
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