by Chuck Ferrin (The Fifth Drink, Twitter: @telephonedrinks)
- * * * Photo by Chuck Ferrin. * * *
(Continued from Part 1)
Americans, and a great deal of the people on Planet Earth, are interested in wine. The total estimated retail wine sales for 2010 are $117 billion dollars. Most of this money isn’t going to come from the wallet-busting, high-profile bottles on a Top 10 List. It’s going to come from wine that proves itself through quality and value, and the folks who are going to spend that $117 billion are mostly new wine drinkers and people recently inclined to try new types of wine.
And to be honest, I’m one of those people, even though I work in the wine business. I joined a wine tasting club when I got out of college and went to monthly tastings for years. I learned that I liked Nobilo Sauvignon Blanc, and that’s about all I can tell you from that experience. I drank it many times over, and I still do on occasion. It was only two years ago that I really started hitting the books hard to learn about wine, and it took me months of tasting to figure out if I even liked red wine. But I did it, and now I can see the upside to just about any wine, so long as it represents an honest piece of craftsmanship.
So for me, what was the best wine at “The Pulse of the Wine World” tasting? Pound for pound, I liked the Domaine Wachau Smaragd Terrassen Grüner Veltliner. I thought it had the most complexity, especially in the nose that promised tropical fruit, peaches, and minerals. But this wine costs more than $20, probably in the $22 to $30 range, so it should be good. This is an expensive white wine, but I have to say that it’s worth its salt.
In that $15 push category, I enjoyed the Juve Y Camps Brut Rosé Cava. The fruit was ripe and lush, like a platter of fresh strawberries and black cherries. Many of the rosés from Champagne are more delicate and reminiscent of softer fruits like raspberries, so this made for a nice change of pace. There was also just the slightest hint of earthiness to add a little depth and structure.
The real winner in the all-important under $10 category was the Trapiche Torrontés. Torrontés is an aromatic grape in the Malvasia family that is widely grown in Argentina and Uruguay. It hasn’t yet reached that massive level of popularity that drives prices ever skyward, so you should be able to find this bottle for as little as $5.99. This is classic Torrontés–a big bouquet of exotic fruits, perfumed even, with a pleasing, eccentric palate. Best of all, the white zinfandel drinkers seemed to really take to this one. Torrontés–perhaps paving the way past the pink and sweet.
Aside from the wine tasting, here are some of Gary Vaynerchuk’s finer points:
- Inexpensive wines benefit from decanting just as much as expensive wines, even more so. You can even take the cork out of the bottle and let it sit for a few hours if you don’t have a decanter. The small surface area of the open bottle will slowly expose the wine to oxygen. The wine gets better this way, and the aroma, in particular, benefits from a little air.
- The shape of the wine glass does influence the taste of the wine, but only slightly. The aroma is affected more than anything, but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t have the “right” glass.
- The same wine can taste better on vacation than when you’re not. Your environment does influence your perception of wine. This is where he dropped his Jets reference.
- Commit yourself to trying new wines as much as possible, because trying new things is the only way to learn. That can get expensive, so try and split the bill by forming a wine tasting club with a couple of friends, even if you only meet once a month.
- Some of the most popular wines in the world–Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay, Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio, and Yellow Tail Shiraz in particular– also have the highest sugar levels of any wines in their respective categories. My personal favorite, Nobilo Sauvignon Blanc, is another example. In spite of the perception that “dry” wine is the be-all-end-all type of wine, sugar still sells.
I agree with all of these points, even if I’m a Nobilo-drinking, staunch Riedel devotee who sometimes forgets to decant my $9 bottle of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon. But more than anything, Gary’s personality got me thinking about what wine really is. Here’s a guy in jeans giving you straight talk like a blue collar Tri-State area man should, and yet he’s one of the preeminent wine voices in the world. How did that happen? How did the wine world rife with staunch traditionalists let him crash the party?
In some ways, wine is the same as literature (here’s my own personal interjection–I can’t resist a lit reference anymore than Gary can resist the Jets). When Roland Barthes wrote “The Death of the Author” for the Aspen Journal in 1967, he was on to something. Once a person commits a piece of writing to the public domain, it’s up to the public to decide how they feel about it. Michael Crichton doesn’t get to decide if Rising Sun reads like an extended exercise in Japan-bashing, and Alice Walker doesn’t get to decide if people really find The Color Purple entertaining. Nor do they get to directly tell people how to interpret their works on any level.
The same is true for wine. All of the people involved in the production of wine don’t have much of a say in the evaluation of the final product. Christian Moueix doesn’t get to tell you if Pétrus is truly the world’s greatest red wine, and Jess Jackson doesn’t get to tell you if his Chardonnay tastes sweet or dry. In the end, it’s up to the drinkers to row the oars, and critical voices, like Gary Vaynerchuk, are ultimately a small part of a cultural experience spanning thousands of years and billions of lives. From this perspective, the scope of wine can be humbling. Wine critics can be tempted to take the fight-fire-with-fire approach, making their opinions seem as grand as wine itself. Gary often goes the other way, making himself and the entire industry appear funny and even ridiculous at times. That’s why the blue jeans and all the video blogs work. The only thing that’s missing from wine is more people like him.
Sometimes wine tastes better when the Jets win, and sometimes the Jets taste better when the wine wins. Allow me to explain–Gary likes his wine more when the Jets win, because he’s happy. Miami Dolphins fans in Gary’s wine classes like the Jets more because they’re happy. This is a beautiful moment of relativity that demonstrates the plasticity and subsequent absurdity of opinion. There is no fundamental truth to wine, just as there is no fundamental truth to sports allegiances. The Jets aren’t any better than the Dolphins, just as Cabernet Sauvignon isn’t any better than Riesling. There’s no Neo-Platonic essence to any of it. It’s just a bunch of opinions, and all of those opinions are likely absurd in the appropriate context. They’re funny even, and that’s a great way to tackle wine.
