Wine reviews - better never than late
One of the greatest sources of frustration for both the wine retailer and the wine drinker vis a` vis the wine press is the often nearly absurd timing of wine reviews, both great and small. I cannot tell you how many times customers have come into the shop with a list from one of the big wine magazines/review services looking for something that is either long gone from our shelves, or similarly, items that are rarer than hens’ teeth. This unfortunate tendency in many cases applies to the short, capsule reviews at the back of the of the wine magazines, but may go TRIPLE for the “Wines of the Year” issue that every wine journal offers. I have on several occasions stood with a customer excited and eager to get a hold of a few bottles of this or that wine that the wine pundits have anointed as the “best” wines of the year, only to be a part of the following exchange:
“What about this one?”
“Nope.”
“What about this one?”
“Nope.”
“What about this one?”
“Nope.”
“What about this one?”
“Nope.”
Now salespeople are always taught to offer alternatives, which if we can, we do indeed do, but in the case of someone seeking out a particular item from a “Wines of the Year” list, making an alternate suggestion, to some degree, flies in the face of the purpose of the whole journalistic exercise. To some the thinking is: “Well, if Bunyon Farms’ Planter’s Wart Cuvee`#2 is THE best wine of its type, or at least one of them, why is the wine that you’re trying to sell me, if it’s so damned good, not on this list?” And while I’m not the biggest fan of these lists of wine superlatives, the question is a valid one, and is also very difficult to answer.
Further, the back and forth exchange recreated above not only leaves the customer more than a little frustrated, it can leave the retailer both embarassed as well as a little miffed at the publication. In many cases, the folks following these lists are not “wine people” and will readily accept the idea that we no longer have, or never had a particular wine, but for those who have a bit more knowledge, it is known that in many instances, at many shops, these “trophy” wines are meted out to the buying public like sugar cubes are to diabetics…the reaction from this sort of customer is nearly always one of two - either he thinks “How could they not have this, it’s one of the “Wines of the Year?”, or alternately: “This SOB is holding out on me - he’s got it, but won’t sell it to me”. The former objection is just a non-professional wine lover not fully understanding the nearly incalculable ratio of the number of “great” bottles out there compared with the totally insufficient amount of space that EVERY retailer faces to stock ALL of these wines. The latter objector however, usually asks “why?”, and expects a good answer, and even when he gets it, probably doesn’t believe you anyway. Now while in some rare occasions retailers will indeed hold back a case or two of this or that cult wine for a “rainy day”, let’s be clear that wine retailers are in business to SELL WINE, not to hoard it.
So here’s a real and honest question for those of you who might be in the periodical field: Why is this done? It clearly doesn’t serve either the seller or the buyer, and while the publication will sell truckload more copies of that month’s issue, over time, it seems that the public will begin to suss this game out, and realize that it’s so similar to a “boy who cried wolf” scenario…as the frustration of not being able to obtain many of these miniscule production/highly sought after bottlings mounts year after year, when does the reader stop listening?
A (not so) Short and (sometimes) Sweet Guide to Sugar Levels in German Wines
WE all know it, and begrudgingly, many Germans will admit it - German wine labelling stinks. The names are often ridiculously long, nearly impossible to remember, and even when you can read and remember them, the information that they actually contain are often no use at all to the consumer. So what is all of this Teutonic verbiage anyway? Well, while it is difficult to generalize about ALL of the names on German labels, most of them contain predominantly very specific geographical information, specifying the principal town in the growing zone, and very often the specific vineyard from which the grapes were harvested. Now all of this would be fine if on the back label these strings of 16 letter names were defined and contextualized, but alas, this sort of explanation is almost unheard of…
So back to German wine classifications…The first distinction is between Tafelwein and Qualitatswein. The former is simple “table wine”. Wines with this classification are basic “every day” wines with little pretention or aspiration. Tafelweins are most often made in large lots from large, often cooperative wineries. Qualitatswein is the heading under which all of the rest of German wines fall. As the name implies, these are wines of “quality” - wines that are deemed to be made to a higher standard.
The next and more specific divisions are most often known by their acronyms: QBA and QMP. QBA wines are considered to be the more “pedestrian” branch of the primary Qualitatswein classification, and unless one is really splitting hairs, Qualitatswein and QBA are synonymous. QMP (Qualitat mit Predikat) wines are qualitatsweins that the board that makes such distinctions has deemed to have special or even unique qualities.
The first level under the QMP umbrella is called Kabinett. As can be inferred from the name, these are the first level of quality that is deemed to be ageworthy (think storage cabinet). These wines tend to be fairly light. From here we move through, in order, Spatlese, Auslese, Beerenauslese, Trockenbeerenauslese, and finally Eiswein. But the REAL question here is “what does this ordering actually represent?” Now if you’re in the camp that thinks that these classifications stand for a ranking of how sweet the WINES are, you would be mostly WRONG, but despair not, better than 9 out of 10 folks think this too. This is probably the single biggest misconception about German wines. What these classifications REALLY represent are SUGAR LEVELS IN THE GRAPES MEASURED AT HARVEST. Lets take short look at the names themselves actually mean…
Spatlese means “late harvest” in German, and wines that carry this designation must be harvested at least one week later than the first pass within the greater harvest (the actual sugar levels required to meet each of these designations, by the way, vary from region to region and grape(s) to grape(s)). The next rung up is called Auslese which means “selected harvest”. This is the first classification that permits botrytis (”noble rot”) infection. Moving up the line, we reach beerenauslese. “Beerenauslese” means “selected berry harvest”. Beerenauslese wines are always picked after a bit of shrivelling and in almost all cases, the grapes have been infected by botrytis. These wines are often referred to as “BAs”. Even sweeter berries go into producing trockenbeerenauslese wines. Trockenbeerenauslese in German means “selected harvest of dried berries”. Only the best conditions in the best vineyards can produce grape with high enough must weights to be classified as “TBAs”. These wines are ALWAYS VERY expensive. The final classification within the QMP hierarchy is eiswein. As may be inferred from the name, eiswein means “ice wine”. These are the sweetest German wines of all (but also the most searingly acidic, so when all is said and done, they are balanced). Eiswein is made by literally allowing the grapes to freeze on the vine, with harvest beginning only as early as November, but depending on conditions, sometimes as late as January. Becasue of the freezing, eisweins are uneffected by botrytis. Also, unlike Canadian ice wines for example, German producers are forbidden to artificially freeze the grapes used to produce eiswein.
So like Bill Cosby said in his act many years ago, “I told you that story so I could tell you this one”…
So now we know what the German wine classification nomenclature actually refers to, but we still don’t know how to judge sweetness by just looking at the label. And I’m sure you’ll all be glad to hear that as difficult as the above system is, this one is that easy - it comes down to just one word: ALCOHOL…ready?…OK…here it goes…the LOWER the alcohol level, the SWEETER the wine. The HIGHER the alcohol, the DRYER the wine. That’s it. Period. Think of it this way: if the alcohol level is low (let’s say 7.5%), this means that much of the sugar (that with the addition of yeast, produces alcohol) has not been coverted into alcohol, and therefore remains dissolved in the wine. Wines with higher levels of alcohol are drier because the fermentation has been allowed to run on longer yielding a wine of say 11%-13% alcohol. So, there are scads of Spatlese and even Auslese level wines that are dry to BONE dry. Of late, to help folks who don’t know about the alcohol/sweetness correlation, many producers have taken to putting the word “trocken” or “halbtrocken” on their labels. Trocken means “dry”, and halbtrocken “half dry” or “off dry” in German, but the word trocken has the same SET of meanings in German that it has in English, so it can mean FIGURATIVELY dry (as in a dry tasting wine) or it can mean, as in the case of “TROCKENberrenauslese”, that the grapes have literally dried somewhat from hanging so long on the vine. Do not be confused, trockenbeerenauslese wines are ALWAYS sweet.
So guess no more about sugar levels in German wines, just follow the numbers…
TOM CIOCCO
Colares - The Wine That Is No More (almost)
The testy Atlantic rhythmically slaps the southern Portuguese coast under a flannel-grey sky. The ocean winds carry the briney spray to the little hillock on which you stand gazing out over the rippled, churning foam. A bit to your left, just down the coast, you can see Lisbon clearly through the mist. You look down toward your sandy perch and see…nothing…well, at least no vines. Vines? Who in their right oenological mind would be looking for vines here? Well, if you’re one of the Portuguese conoscenti, you WOULD be, and with great urgency too. This is, or was, depending on who you talk to, the location of one of the world’s most unusual growing zones, and one of the world’s rarest appellations to boot. This is Colares (pronounced ko - LAH - resh).
As can be clearly understood by the imagery above, the Colares zone is located directly on the sea, not near it, but RIGHT ON the sea coast, and in many cases, right on the beach! The question that you’ve undoubtedly formed is “Why”? Why would anyone try to plant vines on a windswept, chilly beach? And the only answer that anyone could give is “that’s the way that God made Ramisco”. Ramisco is the sole (red) grape variety that makes Colares (EXTREMELY small quantities of white Colares is made from the one of the Malvasia varieties) . Ramisco, for whatever reason, thrives in this most unusual terroir - it’s a beach baby that NEEDS extremely sandy soils to flourish, and has a great resistence to the rot that salty sea air would visit on most vines. And because Ramisco thrives in sand, and Phylloxera (the root eating louse that is the scourge of viticulture) does not, no Ramisco vine has ever had to be grafted to the lower quality, but Phylloxera-resistant American rootstocks. This makes Ramisco perhaps the only cultivar that is vitis vinifera, 100% intact. And with all this strangeness, it comes as no surprise that Ramisco’s care and feeding are as unusual as the place it chooses as home…
If one does actually get a chance to eyeball a Colares vineyard, it would look more like a WWI-era battle trench at Ypres or Verdun than a row of Cabernet vines in Napa. The first thing one sees in a Colares vineyard are long, 6 foot tall berms of sand. Only when one looks over the top and below these berms does one actually see any vines. When you get right down to it, these vines are technically “underground”! To protect the vine’s arms and the fruit that grows there from the often savage winds that blow off of the Atlantic ocean, when Ramisco is planted, trenches that take the place of “rows” are dug in a parallel fashion into the beach. The tailings from these operations are then piled up to form these long berms on the seaward side of the trench to serve as wind breaks for the vines.
So it might be becoming clearer why Colares is now more a legend than a reality. First, it is very difficult to get anyone to plant Colares vines. Digging 7 to 10 feet down into pure sand is not only just slightly easier than herding cats, it’s also potentially very dangerous, with the constant risk of collapsing trenches, and therefore, buried diggers. And moving along the timeline a bit, because of the sandy trenches, the harvest in Colares is much slower going than in most other viticultural zones. The next hurdle is the near impossibility to employ any kind of economy of scale: the beach is only so deep, and clearly, planting vines right in the breaking surf is impossible, so by it’s nature the production of Colares is a cottage industry. There is little to no room to grow, so there is absolutely no drive to do so, and as we know miniscule production = high cost. Further, in the near past, nearly all of the Colares production was done through a government cooperative winery that was set up, at least in theory, to thwart counterfeiting. But the government cooperative did little to maximize the quality of the wines, and much to unfairly funnel obscene quantities of the wine into the cellars of just a few of Antonio Salazar’s cronies. The last fundamental reason for the Colares’ myth is something as mundane as real estate prices. As I mention above, Colares is within spitting distance of Lisbon. Since Portugal’s accession to the European Union and the flush of money that this change brought, Lisbon’s population has grown exponentially and as is true anywhere, it’s easier and cheaper to build on undeveloped land outside the city than it is to demolish and build in center city, so Colares is rapidly being covered over by toney townhouses and 4 bedroom houses.
So what is Colares like in the glass? Good question. I personally have only tasted it once, in Portugal, at the house of a friend of a friend, and the bottle we drank was pushing 10 years old then (this was in 1990). The wine is fairly lightly colored - about like a Pinot Noir - but MUCH more tannic and spicily exotic and with a fascinating, ethereal bouquet…obviously, an informal and abbreviated tasting note from a one-off tasting cannot even hope to capture such a fascinating wine, but deal with it - none of us are likely to ever get a chance to taste one (again?). IN THEORY Colares is still produced, but even with all of my contacts in the wine world, as well as with friends in Portugal, despite the promises, I have never been able secure even ONE more bottle of Colares wine. It is THAT rare. As one might expect, a few wealthy, big-cellared individuals, and a handful of top Lisbon restaurants buy it all before bottle one ever hits a shelf…So, if you see bottle of Colares, BUY IT…and then send me an e-mail immediately!
TOM CIOCCO
The Internet Wine Message Board Denizen
Since I’m “ITB” (”in the business” for those of you who are, like me, cyberspace acronym challenged) I will stroll from time to time to a wine message board to read what the lunatic fringe of the wine world have to say for thier bad selves…Well, at least for me, they have very little to say, except maybe to themselves, and the occasional wall… First of all, there are WAAAAY too many people there buying overpriced California cult crap, winery-direct, blowing smoke up each others asses about his allotment of Steaming Turd or Caries Chardonnay - the Wanker’s Vineyard, not the GROSSLY inferior Stinky Pinky Block 666, by the way. And inevitably, those who buy this way obsess about shipping tempertures, knicked labels, uneven bottle fills, and sob about the order-taker at Ethanol Farms who he may have heard stick his tongue out at him when he was placing his order. Then there are those that spew “advice” to the great unwashed like it was his job. Others treat wine like it was a contest, starting threads to the effect of “Black Glop head to head challenge - 1999 DISEMBOWELS 2000 (15 exclamation marks).
So just who is this guy (most likely guy, though gal is certainly possible)? Is he just an oenophilic lonelyheart? A braggard with a surplus of both time and money, and a dearth of taste? An insecure tippler looking for validation for his “anorak” proclivities?… or a man that simply enjoys the company of other geeky men who squander money on wines made specifically ensnare the very beast that he is?
TOM CIOCCO
Some Myths of the “Impossible Food and Wine Pairings”
A MISMATCH
While this idea is not entirely a fantasy, there are always a few ingredients that food and wine gurus say are “impossible” matches with wine. And while certain ingredients do pose greater difficulties with some wines, most are FAR from “impossible”…The most common “impossibles” are:
Asparagus - This is by far the most baffling of the “impossibles”. Yes, with certain bigger wines, asparagus can produce certain “off” flavors when eaten with wines, but many felicitous apirings are possible
Artichokes - A bit more difficult than asparagus due to the subtle bitterness that artichokes display, but there are solid matches for ‘chokes too.
So, the three biggest DON’TS:
- NO REDS! - Tannins are the problem here. Most tannins contained in wine are derived from grape skins which are same source for the color in red wines. White wines are almost always made with little or no juice/skin contact, so tannins in white wines are held to a minimum.
- NO HIGH ALCOHOL WINES! - Keep the levels to about 13% or lower. The higher the alcohol level in a wine, the greater the discord between that alcohol and the very vegetal flavors contained in both asparagus and artichokes.
- NO “HEAVY” WINES - Wines with rich, unctuous bodies paired with asparagus or artichokes can bring out metallic flavors in the wine.
Cross these boundaries at your own risk…YUK!
So let’s be positive - what DO you want to look for in a wine to match with these items?
- LEAN TOWARDS ACIDIC WINES - Sauvignon Blanc is better than Chardonnay. Verdejo is better than Garnacha Blanca. Tocai Friulano is better than Pinot Grigio. Gruner Veltliner is better than Zierfandler.
- SEEK OUT “AROMATIC” WINES - Traminer, Riesling, Muller-Thurgau…the difficult compunds in artichokes and asparagus seem to become submerged or at least play well with the pungency of these white wines.
So after this little debunking discussion, in my opinion there are indeed ingredients that are best without wine, or ones that should be avoided if wine is being served. The greatest culinary enemies of wine are…
Hot Pepper - A BIT of heat in a dish can be MITIGATED with light-bodied, acidic, low alcohol and slightly sweet whites or reds, (depending on sauce, main ingredient, etc.) but with a vindaloo or a Mexican green sauce with some real FIRE, drink beer or fruit juice.
Vinegar/Lemon Juice - Once again, a moderate amount of these ingredients in a dish can be managed with VERY ACIDIC, un-oaked white wines like a bone dry Chenin Blanc or a brut Champagne, but tossed salads or ceviches are never very good with any wine.
Raw Onion/Raw Garlic - Yet again, SMALL amounts of raw onions or raw garlic as an INGREDIENT in another dish can be overcome, but for the most part, these ingredients are simply too pungent to match WELL with any wine. Soaking sliced raw onions or garlic in a salt bath can reduce a bit of the sting, but again, no wine really matches WELL with these foods, at least none that I’ve found…
So, a couple of questions for all of you:
- What are some of your “impossible” matches? (those above are just the most often discussed, and HARDLY a comprehensive list)
- What wines have you discovered that work well with these or any other perceived “impossibles”?
TOM CIOCCO
