The Wine Noob Tries Her Hand At Tasting Notes

I opened a bottle of 2006 Pillar Box Reserve Shiraz from Henry's Drive Vignerons this afternoon. It's an Australian, and at $20 it is by far the most expensive bottle of wine I've ever bought. Yeah, I'm just extravagant like that.

So how does one properly taste wine? I called upon my trusty sidekick, Google, for some guidance. There's plenty of information out there, to be sure, and I settled on How to Taste Wine Like a Pro from the folks over at eHow.

Step one: Observe the color. It's pretty. Deep, inky purple. I want that color on my toenails. It would be sassy.

Step two: The classic Swirl'n'Sniff maneuver, which wine snobs in movies execute with a dramatic, comic flourish. "Try to detect the smell of fruity or floral notes. Decide what they remind you of if possible."

Okay. Um. I dunno. I drew upon the article's own list of example adjectives for some prompting. Peppery. Chocolaty. Burnt toasty. Those made some sense to me. Maybe a little bit of burning Autumn leaves in there, too. (They had "smoke" on their list, but that felt inadequate.)

Step three: The Sip'n'Swish, a small sip with a bit of air swished in. "Spicy" is a slam dunk. Syrupy. Toasted. Mole sauce and cheap cigarettes. It was reminding me of something, but I couldn't put my finger on what, exactly until I rummaged through my spice drawer. Cardamom. Yes. That would be the missing link.

Step four: Note the length of the finish. Hmm. Well, it seems longish to me. The aftertaste leaves me badly wanting a thick slice of fresh buttered sourdough.

Frankly, this particular Aussie shiraz isn't really my cup of tea. I think it was very highly rated by one of the wine rags, or I wouldn't have picked it up for the price. However, the bottle does say it benefits from decanting. I don't have a decanter, but I'll usually pour a glass and put a potholder over it for an hour to let it breathe, figuring that's close enough for government work. I might like this better tomorrow after it's had some more air time.

So how do you taste wine? I probably still don't know, but this was a fun little experiment that tickles my natural wordsmith streak, so it's definitely one worth repeating.

EDIT: For amusement, here's the Wine Advocate review:
"The grapes for the 2006 Reserve Shiraz were selected from the best Shiraz parcels used to make Pillar Box Red. They were aged in new oak, 75% French and 25% American. Opaque purple-colored, it offers up a classy bouquet of smoke, vanilla, saddle leather, bacon, and blueberry. This leads to a full-bodied, plush, seamless wine with no hard edges to its lengthy finish. It has the stuffing to evolve for 2-3 years but I can think of no reason for delaying gratification. It is a great value." - Wine Advocate

Coming Attractions: The Wine Noob Hits the Road

I haven't done anything wine-y this week, partly due to school and partly due to being half-sick the last two days, sorry about that!

HOWEVER!

One week from today I shall embark on a weekend of exotic travel, consorting with exciting characters and sampling a variety of fine grape-based libations! There will be pictures! There may even be VIDEO!

Where am I going, you ask? Is it Costa Rica? Paris? Bangkok?

NO! It's better than all of those places! It is... *drumroll please*...

LINCOLN, ILLINOIS!

I'll be hanging out with my wine industry buddy, Dave, in the land of our mutual childhoods, in the shadow of the courthouse dome. Drinking wine. Possibly LOTS of wine. Because frankly, there isn't much else to do in Lincoln.

However, this is exciting to me because I haven't spent more than 20 minutes in Lincoln since my family moved away while I was in college. I didn't go to the ten year high school reunion since there wasn't really anyone I was dying to see. I went to Italy instead. My family and I occasionally take a drive through to see landmarks like our old house, if family Christmas is nearby and we have some time to kill, but Lincoln is not a place I have ever experienced as an adult.

I am anticipating. Imagining what it will be like...

A Lincoln where I can drink without worrying about the cops busting the party for underage drinking.

A Lincoln that's much smaller than I remember since I'm twice the height that I was for so many of my years there and have grown accustomed to the size of an urban city block.

Lincoln as seen through the lens of my camera while rediscovering a place I hated passionately while growing up.

A Lincoln where I have friends who profess to be excited for the opportunity to hang out.

I expect it to be an intriguing, spooky, and deeply satisfying sort of trip. With copious amounts of wine. Yes. Indeed. Get ready for it, my darling wine loving readers. This is a bag full of wine stories waiting to happen!

Back to School Means Keeping Wine Open Longer

I start school again tomorrow. I only had two weeks off between classes this time, but it feels different because for the first time the end is in sight. This is my last year, and I will graduate in May. And when it's all said and done, I will have a masters degree - an MBA in International Business.

Wow.

Now is the time for me to start asking myself: "So, what was the point of all that?" And that is a very good question.

It has occurred to that wine is a very international business by nature, and I'd be lying through my teeth if I said that wasn't a very, very appealing direction. Any wineries or distributors out there want to hire an MBA? Haha... (but no, seriously...)

But that's still about a year away. I have five more courses to get through first. And that is kind of a big deal since it's invariably going to cut into my wine appreciation time. It will take me longer to go through a bottle once opened.

Here's my current wine-saving protocol: stick a stopper in it (which I got as a party favor at a friend's wedding) and put it in the fridge. Yes, even if it's red. If I happen to have two open bottles, I'll cap it off with some aluminum foil. Ta da! I'm sure there are better methods out there. I should probably look into one of those wine saver vacuum pump kits.

However, I have to wonder if this is a good argument for screw caps. The problem with a cork is that once it's open, it's open. Sure a cork is an aesthetically pleasing, satisfying bit of tradition dating back to the cavemen who poured their pinot noir into wooden cups and coconut shells around their bonfires. I get it. But fast forward a few million years to me, my eyes bleeding from reading a hideously boring text on information systems management, and dammit, I need to keep it for more than a day or two!

Or, half bottles. A half bottle would be awesome. Wine for a single girl whose cats are sadly disinterested in splitting a full-size bottle with me.

Wait. I mean, "For a single girl who is too busy to split a full-sized bottle of wine with a date since she has no time for dating while grad school commands so much of her time." Right!

The Beautiful Disaster of Pertinello (Or, How I Learned The Definition of "Corked")

It's not the point of this blog to write about specific wines, but it's bound to happen from time to time. This review is a tale, though, one that is long and storied.

Way back when I was making that first horribly misguided wander through my local wine barn, one of the bottles I picked up was a sangiovese called Pertinello. I chose it because the label was different: a red circle the size of a slider bun. I thought this was novel and of course had to try it.

It was my first sangiovese, and, honestly, my first true love in the wide and wonderful world of wine. (See what I did there? ALLITERATION! That's how you know I'm getting all misty and poetic.) Instead of that inky, purply red everyone attributes to red wine, Pertinello is the color of a blood orange. And tasty, ohhh, still so tasty, even after having learned what I'm doing! It was a lucky strike for one so "young" as I.

I am writing this with a bottle open, in fact. Even after all the grief it has caused me, I love it still.

Yes, grief. PAIN. This is also the wine that put me in my place.

The first thing you should know about Pertinello is that it is hard to find on a shelf. You can find it all over the place through the online retailers, but good luck finding a review. It's Italian, from Galatea, produced by Tenuta Arpineto. This website is the best I've ever been able to do, and keep in mind, internet search is my job. (And it's a job I am damn good at, by the way.)

So here I was, bragging about my favorite wine, this brilliant and obscure sangiovese no one has ever heard of, to my wine industry buddy. In a terribly misguided attempt to impress him, I helped him track down a bottle to try. I patiently waited for him to tell me what he, a sort of wine genius/savant, thought of it.

"It's good," he told me. "It's very good. A bit corked, but still good."

I had no idea what he meant. And, well, I'm new to this, he knows that, and he's been a great teacher. I can't fake knowing what I'm doing with him. If I ever tried, he would know. I know this. I've never tried.

I had no idea what "corked" meant, but I already knew it was a bad thing. I already knew he was just being nice to me. My heart broke a little bit.

A deep breath, then, "I don't know what 'corked' means, not the way you're using it."

And so he explained it. How the wine had soaked into the cork a bit too far. How the top of the cork had been pushed up above the glass rim. And why it was bad: that it means it's been stored in heat, that the cork quality wasn't that great to begin with, that it's been oxidized and how that's just not supposed to happen.

"But it's still pretty good stuff," he tried to console me. "It would have been tight if it had been stored properly, but this comes out of the bottle just about perfect."

No one had to explain to me what "tight" meant. I figured that one out on my own.

Sigh.

I know this conversation. It's the same speech we girls give guys after a, uh, disappointing night. You know, the "It's okay, it happens to everyone, and I still love you" speech. My beloved Pertinello was, ah, how can I put this politely?

Not "up" to par.

So I checked my own bottles. (I keep it in stock. I currently have too many bottles, actually, a customer service fiasco which will probably spawn another entry someday.) Sure enough, one was raised well above the lip, the bulging foil straining like the flesh of a fat guy in a Speedo.

Did you feel a piece of my heart die there? This was a seriously heartbreaking revelation.

And yet, here I am, draining a corked bottle of Pertinello as I write this entry. When I opened the bottle tonight, the cork wasn't bulging, but it was so soaked through and disintegrated that it broke in half as it was extracted. There's a good metaphor for real life in this story, I'm sure. Probably several, actually. But it doesn't keep me from wondering what this 2003 Pertinello would be like, if only...

Whatever. Flawed as the bottling may be, I love it anyway. Bottoms up.

Getting Converted by a California Wine Evangelist

My wine industry friend is a California evangelist. Which makes sense, since it's essentially the source of his income, but it's pretty clear that he would still heap his adoration upon California if it were not.

My point of entry in this whole wine adventure was Italy. Mia bella Italia. I have a rather wretched Italy fetish, and so with nothing else to guide me it made sense that, when I hit that wine barn for the first time, the Italian section was the first place I went out of sheer sentimentality.

So my friend was evangelizing California wine to me, and I was being hesitant and stubborn. Every time we talked, he was trying to convince me to try a bottle of this or that. My entire experience with California up to that point was cheap, mass produced white zinfandel, which I'd grown up knowing as "California Kool-Aid". He had quite a job ahead of him.

He finally managed to talk me into trying a Hayman & Hill Meritage, though. And it was good enough that the door was opened to further California experiments. ("Good enough" is understating, by the way. It was actually really good. Or, sticking to "good enough", it was good enough to buy again - which from me is a pretty high compliment since I don't often buy the same bottle twice.)

He was pushing me to look into red blends. "What's your favorite wine, again?" he asked me. It's sangiovese. "Okay, then I want you to look for one that's blended with sangiovese."

So I trolled the California aisle looking for just that. It was harder than I thought it would be. Lots of cabernet sauvignon and shiraz blends, but I wasn't finding anything at all with sangiovese. I was getting frustrated.

And then, there it was. It was perfect. It was a blend of a bunch of old school Italian varietals grown in California. Monte Volpe Primo Rosso. It felt like a little bit of a cheat, since they were all crazy Italian grapes like sangiovese and nebbiolo plus a few others I'd never heard of before, but it fit the criteria. And, of course, since it was straddling that line between California and Italy, I adored it. Big and meaty, fit for a carnivore. It made me want to dive into a juicy medium-rare steak.

When I described it to my wine industry friend, he was shocked and amused. "That's a big boy blend. I was thinking of something simpler, but damn, you went all out..."

Drinking Wine from Tea Cups at a Taiwanese Restaurant

For several years now, my friends and I have had a sort of "family dinner" every Friday at the same Taiwanese restaurant in Denver. We've gotten to know the owners, who consider Monica, Dave and Sean to be their kids. We'll clear tables and take orders if they get overwhelmed. So whenever we bring beer or wine in to share over our potstickers and dumplings, they don't mind.

I've been looking for an excuse to open the dessert wine I bought on my day trip to Palisade, Colorado two weeks ago. It's called "Vin au Chocolat". Red wine infused with chocolate. Its maker, Garfield Estates, only sells it in its tasting room.

Garfield Estates was my last stop on my whirlwind wine trail "Get the Hell Out of Denver for a Day" roadtrip. To be perfectly honest, while their traditional wines were not by any means bad, neither did they blow me away. However, I was getting a bit tired of tasting wine at that point, and my wallet was beginning to feel uncomfortably light, so my taste buds were demanding brilliance or nothing at all.

And then the lady pouring for me broke out the Vin au Chocolat. Now, I'm not normally all that big on sweet wines. The fruity sweetness is so much of why I have traditionally disliked white wines. But this one, a chocolate infused red, was a stroke of sweet tooth genius. I generally can't pick out flavors for tasting notes, but this one to me was distinctly raspberries and dark chocolate. It was divine.

So I took it to dinner with me tonight, to our little Taiwanese dive. We drank it from tiny Chinese tea cups over dumplings and sesame cold noodles while the swamp cooler whirred nearby.

How To Make Amazing Homemade Fried Rice

What does this have to do with wine, you ask? Well, let's just say that this is my dinner tonight, and it's going to be fantastic with the Chardonnay I picked up at DeBeque Canyon Winery in Palisade a little over a week ago...

First, you'll need a bit more than a cup of cooked brown rice. I like to add a little sesame oil to the cooking water. While it's cooking, prep the chicken and veggies:

You'll need unmeasured handfuls of the following:
- diced chicken breast
- chopped scallions
- snow peas
- chopped shiitake mushrooms
- chopped fresh garlic cloves (LOTS.)

Stirfry these together with eyeballed quantities of these:
- lemongrass paste (be generous)
- chili paste (roughly 1 teaspoon or less)
- black bean paste (a dollop)

Once the rice is finished, add it to the skillet. Once it's mixed and heated through, make a "bowl" in the center. You should be able to see the bottom of the skillet. Make it as sturdy as possible.

Crack an egg into the "bowl", and scramble. Cook the egg until it's almost completely done - then mix it throughout the rest of the rice/chicken/veggie mix. Heat through until egg is finished cooking.

Enjoy this miraculous concoction with an awesome, buttery, old school Chardonnay, like my 2004 DeBeque Canyon.

Ta da!

How Not to Buy Wine in Italy

November 2003, just outside Vatican City. My feet hurt after tromping through the cobblestone streets of Rome in the worst boots ever. And after threatening all day, the skies finally opened up. November is the rainy season in Rome, and though I'd been lucky with good weather for my vacation thus far, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

I ducked into a tented flea market. It was an opportunity to shop while I waited out the rain. There were lots of vendors selling touristy things like Murano glass elephants and cheap Vatican souvenirs. Many were selling wine.

This is the tragedy of my trip to Italy: I was still in my wine-hating days. However, I thought some bottles of wine from Italy would be good gifts for family and friends, so I started perusing the bottles.

I was in way over my head. I knew nothing about wine. I didn't recognize any of the varieties printed on the labels. The selection was truly dizzying. I had no idea what to buy. But, I figured, how hard could it be to transact wine in Italian? I'd taught myself as much as I could before I left the United States, and well, "wine" "red" and "white" were easy enough.

One of the wine vendors approached me and began to speak to me in Italian. I don't remember if I knew what she said, but I do remember stumbling over something along the lines of "Bisogno vino... dolce..?"

It should have tipped her off that I probably spoke English, but it did not. There was something about the way I said it that led her to ask me, "Hablas español?"

This caught me off guard, because I do speak Spanish. Not fluently, but certainly better than Italian, and definitely well enough to buy some wine. In retrospect, it makes sense to me that she would have picked up on this, since my Italian was undoubtedly tinged with a Spanish (not Mexican) accent. "Sí," I gratefully replied.

She pointed to bottles. "Blanco... rojo... dulce..." I have no idea what I bought, except that they were Sicilians. I didn't keep any of them for myself. Ohh, how I mourn this missed opportunity! In many ways, as amazing as that trip was, I think I went to Italy too soon. Today I would revel in the wines and take much better pictures with a professional grade camera. I also speak Italian as well as Spanish now.

And that, my friends, is the story of how I went to Italy and ended up buying wine in Spanish. Actually, most people I met in Italy thought I was European, though, with my fair skin and green eyes, most guessed Scottish.

During that same trip, I wandered into a basement pizzeria near my hotel and found myself seated between a priest and two drag queens. When I asked for a Coke, the waiter brought me a glass of red wine instead.

Here's a picture of me from that trip, sitting on the Spanish Steps. I hope I can go back sometime and do it right!