The Fruits of Our Labors
At the risk of sounding a bit smug, vindication can be a nice feeling. For those of you “in the business” you know that you’ve got to kiss a few frogs (bad wines) before you you find your prince(sses) (good wines). Now not that DECANTER magazine is the be and end all of wine criticism, but we all know it ain’t too shabby either, so when I saw that they had given their “Pinot Noir Trophy over L10″ within the Central and Eastern Europe category to the Vylyan Pinot Noir 2004 from the Villany region, I was happy to know that we already had, and were selling this nifty little Pinot from the shelves here at Wine Library.
“Pinot from Hungary?!” you say…yes, indeed! Along with Pinot Noir, Hungary has a long tradition of successfully cultivating Burgundian varieties (like Szurkebarat , for example, which is the Hungarian name for Pinot Gris) which were brought to Hungary from France by Cistercian monks over 1000 years ago. This lengthy stay in Pannonia has allowed these varieties to comfortably adapt to the local soils and climates and yield wines quite distinct from their progenitors in Burgundy. This is Pinot in a different “mode” - not Burgundy, not Oregon, but something else again. Well worth a try if you delight in Pinot’s promiscuous permutations.
The whole “anti-French” thing
I guess Americans should give the rest of the world lessons on how to hold a grudge. I don’t know about any of you, but this “I won’t buy French wine” thing is absolutely baffling, and three years plus after the start of the second Iraq war, there still those who are stickin’ to it…In the lead-up to the war, I expected (and GOT, let me tell you!) this kind of reaction, but just LAST WEEK I approached a customer on the floor of the shop, and they asked me to help them put together a couple of mixed cases of wine. I of course was delighted to do so, and as always, I asked them for some guidelines…the usual ones: red/white mix, average price, style, etc. The answer I got was “I’m pretty open, but just nothing French”. I paused, and frankly, probably recoiled slightly. I assumed that I knew why, and didn’t ask the customer to elaborate, but this attititude left me REALLY perplexed and more than a little depressed…
Now let me me be clear, I am NOT a rabid Francophile. I have a great appreciation for all of the French nation’s accomplishments, vinous and otherwise, but my REAL viticultural passions lie elsewhere…I am not a French wine “homer”. Excluding French wines from this order hit no raw nerve with me.
So why all the anti-French aggro, and perhaps more importantly, with all that has transpired in the last three years, why NOW? I’ve got my ideas, but I’d like to hear yours! Maybe I’m missing something…
The Inner Life of the Wine Review
At least two or three nights a week, with my dinners, I open a bottle of wine that I’ve previously selected and purchased for our shelves, and scribble some notes in a little black notebook that I later re-assemble into a (hopefully) helpful sketch for a wine’s care and use. And, after writing a couple of hundred of these little thumbnails, I’ve learned to tease out the overall spirit of a wine for the drinker with relative ease - it’s just like anything else: practice, practice…But, then there are also a few nights a week when I’ll decide to open a bottle that I’ve previously reviewed, or one that already carried a “professional” review that has obviated my efforts. In these cases, I leave the notebook closed, and simply let the wine “wash over” my consciousness.
So the main difference in these two scenarios is really only in the writing itself - bottles are selected, corks pulled, and wines are poured ,eyeballed, sniffed, sipped and swallowed just the same - it’s just a matter of whether a cluster of descriptive words eventually fill up a few lines on a page or not. But while doing this now very commonplace activity, a very interesting phenomenon struck me the other day, namely, that my perception of a wine “differs” if I’m writing about it or not. I found it almost like a sort of “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle” within wine criticism: that the very observation and documentation of the consumption of any given wine changes the actual perception of the wine itself. To be clear, in some wines the perception of black cherries or rough tannins for example jump so directly to mind that one cannot fail to perceive them, and perhaps more importantly CONCEIVE them - perceptions that are so strong and obvious that the very WORDS “black cherry” or “rough tannins” jump directly into the forefront of the mind. But so much more frequently, when I’m just drinking and enjoying a wine with no analysis and documentation involved, a retrospective look at that just-finished bottle evokes only vague or even non existant particular sensations of this or that PARTICULAR aroma or texture. Both the in-the-moment perceptions as well as the memories of an “undocumented” wine’s characteristics just post-drinking seem more emotional, more “right brain” if you will. I can always “feel” how much I appreciated the wine, but am often very much at odds to “quantify” what I just experienced without pouring another glass, and shifting myself into “analysis” mode.
So here’s the question: Does the act of critical analysis of a wine highten, diminish, or simply differentiate the ultimate level of pleasure derived from the experience?
Tom Ciocco
Holy Crap! - Well, at least they’re honest…
Let me reiterate: HOLY CRAP! OK, let’s play “How many things are wrong with this picture?”:
1. The first and most obvious abomination in this ad is that the wine is called “Layer Cake” - yes, that’s right, “Layer Cake”…you know, everybody’s favorite dark, fudgey, luscious, DESSERT!!! As if Australia doesn’t already have 470 too many thick, flabby, over-extracted, hyper-alcoholic “red” wines!!! OK, I guess that there are boatloads of folks who dig this kind of marmalade-wine, but this name borders on the vulgar…
2. The second thing that LEAPS from this ad is the tag line: “RICH IS ALWAYS A GOOD THING”. This clearly can be taken two ways, both of which SUCK:
A - The word “rich” can be taken to mean “wealthy”, clearly implying that this wine, and perhaps more specifically, WINE IN GENERAL is just for the rich. Not only is this a complete falsehood, isn’t it just a bit insulting (and therefore ineffective as an ad campaign to the AVERAGE wine drinker) to those of us who aren’t rich?! Or are they trying to make an elitist out of your workaday ass - trying to make you FEEL like you’re rich by drinking THIS wine?
B - The second meaning of the word “rich” in this context is “unctuous”…OK, maybe sometimes we all crave a big, soft, sweet and inky drinky, but those who truly believe that “Rich is always a good thing” should really drop the whole wine thing, and take up drinking milkshakes and root beer floats. Blech.
Now I will freely admit that I have not yet tasted this wine, but with this TRAINWRECK of an ad campaign, would YOU want to pick up a bottle?…maybe I didn’t make myself clear - the wine is called “LAYER CAKE”. “LAYER CAKE”.
This whole “thing” embodies everything I HATE about wine from the top of its screwtop head to the bottom of its deep-punted feet. Your thoughts?
TOM CIOCCO
ADDENDUM - I managed to land a bottle of this to taste - here are my notes:
Opaque black-purple color. Nose of super ripe, intense blackberry fruit with mocha underlying. “Sweet and sour” plum fruit (artificially acidified?) in the mouth. Dense and chewy texture. Ultimately a bit hot (noticeable alcohol), over-extracted, heavy-handed, and flabby with a quite bitter and alcoholic finish.
No surprises here. This is classic, palate-punishing Aussie Shiraz - too much to drink on its own (at least for me) and aside from a plate of pulled pork barbecue or braised short ribs, this pairs well with precisely nothing. I want to put water in it, much in the same way that one has to dilute Coke syrup with seltzer to make it palatable…when it comes right down to it, for me, much of Australia is just too hot for viticulture, period - like trying to grow oranges or lemons in North Carolina - feasible but not recommended.
TOM CIOCCO
The “Third Stream” wine closure
As the pro-cork and the pro-screwtop wine closure camps take turns bashing each other in their respective heads, a third alternative is slowly (and perhaps too slowly) cropping up: the glass closure. The advantages that this kind of seal has over both corks and screwcaps are pretty easy to identify. Glass closures beat cork hands down on “cleanliness”,reliability, convenience, and recyclability issues: no cork taint (”corked” wines), no chance of closure failure issues like crumbly corks breaking upon removal and falling into your wine, NCN (no corkscrew necessary), and the fact that these closures are glass, and can therefore be recycled just like the bottle that actually holds the wine.
Glass closures’ advantages over screwcaps are also multifold. The screwcap’s greatest disadvantage is one of image - for some, screwcaps are and always will be tacky - simply reminiscent of $1.99 bottles of rotgut, or even worse, soda pop. And while glass closures do not carry the history or the romance that corks do, since there is little precedence for these closures, there is no stigma attached to them either. Additionally, the actual “hands on” use of these closures is indeed a little more elegant than the screwcap: there is that capsule to cut and remove, and when the glass stopper itself is removed, there is that little suck of air into the neck. Granted, it’s not the “pop” of a cork (even though “popping” a cork is considered bad etiquette), but it’s a hell of a lot better than the “crack”, “scrape”, and “rattle” of opening a screwcap…
The other elements that might factor into this argument are two. First is the “re-sealability” issue which in my albeit limited experience with glass closures, leaves the new method about as efficient as the “hammer the cork back in the neck with the heel of your hand” process and perhaps a hair better than the protection a tightly screwed-down screwcap will provide. The biggest sticking point with the glass closure is cost. Corks can be more costly if the very finest quality and longest sizes are employed, but at least for right now, glass stoppers are more expensive to produce, though as harvestable cork oaks become more and more scarce, the scales may tip in the other direction later if not sooner.
Synthetic corks lately seem to be losing ground as fast as they gained it about 4 or 5 years ago.Yes they are “clean”, they are not as stigmatized as screwcaps, and are cheaper to produce than either corks or glass closures (not sure about screwcaps - anyone?), but they are an ecological nightmare, so the more environmentally conscious EU regulations have limited these closures, and the many eco-friendly west coast producers have self-regulated, and eschewed their use.
There are always the pros that go with the cons for each of these types of closures - which of these is the least of all evils for you?
TOM CIOCCO
