Archive for the ‘Wine Tasting’ Category
Monday, May 13th, 2013
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
 I did something highly unusual for me last week, I judged at a wine tasting. It was a tasting of rosé organized on my friend, Bob Ecker, which took place at the Meritage Resort in Napa. I, along with four others, tasted through roughly 90 wines, trying to figure out which were the best, and which were not.
It would be very easy to accuse me of the rankest hypocrisy for participating in this event. My views on wine tasting are pretty well known. Basically, I think it is largely a waste of time, highly inaccurate, with results that are not repeatable. So how do I respond to this accusation? Guilty as charged.
But with extenuating circumstances. I guess the biggest extenuating circumstances is that it was a lot of fun, and certainly having fun is a pretty good excuse for pretty much anything. The second extenuating circumstance is that, whether these results have any remote accuracy at all, they could help someone sell some wine. And anything that helps to sell wine is worth something in my book.
Having taken part in a number of tastings over my wine life, I would have to say that the judging in this one was more consistent than in pretty much any other tasting I’ve been party to. I always felt that the thing that can be judged with any degree of accuracy are the objective factors. For example, for a red wine, lack of flaws, color, tannin level, acidity, and other factors which you can learn in large (though not total) measure from laboratory analysis.
But what about flavor? Well, I think that’s where judging is at its weakest, not because individual tasters are incapable of evaluating flavor, but because each judge has his own sensitivities, as well as flavors that he likes and dislikes, which can be entirely different from those of the judge sitting next to him.
And I think it was thus with our judging. The ones that got no award, very often earned a no award across the board from every judge. It certainly was rare to see a bunch of no awards along with a gold. In fact, I don’t think it happened even once. I think that the no award category was largely the abode of flawed wines. I know personally I would pretty much give a bronze to any wine for showing up without a serious flaw.
Once the wine got past this low hurdle, opinions differed more widely. It was not unusual to see bronzes and golds for the same wine. However even here, I think there was a level of consistency that is usually lacking in most tastings.
Another facet of the tasting was interesting. It was split into two categories, dry and sweet. It was up the entrant to determine which category his wine fell into. Essentially, 80 submitted as dry and 10 as sweet. I think this reflects more where the winemakers think the market is than where the wine’s really were. Many of the “dry” entrants had noticeable, if not elevated, residual sugar. And one of the “sweet” wines tasted pretty dry to me.
It was also very interesting to know the correlation (or lack there of) between price and quality (assuming that our awards were the gold standard of quality, a dubious assumption). If you took the average price of each award category (no award, bronze, silver, gold), there really wasn’t that much of a difference. In fact, the gold average was slightly cheaper than the no awards. Which adds another nail in the coffin of the argument that you get what you pay for when it comes to wine.
Another thing that stood out fairly well from the tasting was that I, and at least one other of the tasters whose scores I took particular note of, have a particular wine profile that they preferred. I think for me I can pretty much guarantee a silver to any wine that was not low acid, flawed in some serious way, overly sweet, or lacked a tannic, harsh finish. I think that’s a pretty good description of what a rose should be, but obviously other people would disagree. My love of acidity, for example, is not shared by all people. Certainly, if you look at what has to be considered the most successful blush wine around, White Zinfandel, it would be hard to argue that hyperacidity is a favored attribute in the marketplace. In fact, if you take an objective view of the marketplace, you’d have to say that cloying, insipid, and tasteless are the descriptors that correlate best with megasales. So what do I know?
As far as I can tell from doing a quick Google search, Bob has not yet posted the results, but I expect that he will shortly. I’ll put a link in next week’s Good Reads Wednesday for those who would like to check them out.
For those of you who live in the San Francisco area, the Meritage will be having a tasting of the winners on June 8. Anyone with an interest in Rosé should try to attend.
So I would certainly do this again, if I ever get invited (and in light of views expressed herein, that may be a long shot). But it was a lot of fun, and to the extent that anybody is able to sell some more wine as result of the tasting, more power to them. As I say, anything that helps sell wine is okay by me.
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Monday, May 6th, 2013
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
Went over to some friends’ house for a small get together yesterday afternoon. The excuse for the event was the Regatta on the Bay, which we were able to see upfront, close and personal. The sailboats on the bright and sunny day were beautiful, but the wine, at least to my mind, was even more interesting. In a world dominated by Cabernet and Chardonnay, the selections on offer yesterday were, if not exactly highly unusual, at least not the same old same old.
First in the lineup was a Vouvray. I’ve always loved these wines, which are based on the Chenin grape. This variety gets no respect in this country, for reasons that make no sense at all. True, it was totally lacking in butter, softness, and oak. I can hardly think of a better recommendation for white wine. The fruit was upfront and delicious. The acidity was more than adequate to make this a very well-balanced wine.
From there I moved onto a Bandol rose. I have to admit that I’ve tasted Bandols on only a few occasions in my lifetime, and it’s never been my cup of tea. Ditto for yesterday. There was a slight harshness to it, perhaps even a bit of tannin. At any rate, it just wasn’t anything I found very pleasant. The label didn’t say anything about which grapes were used, but Mourvedre is required to be at least 50% of the blend.
I have to admit that I find my rose best when it has just a bit of sweetness. This rose was dry, so, I missed out there as well. It just wasn’t up my alley.
But Bandol is considered the crème de la crème of rose, so I have to think that there are lots of people who like the style. The fact that I’m not one of them means nothing more than, well, I’m not one of them.
At any rate, if you are not enjoying what you are drinking, down the drain. So that was this glass’s ignominious end, at least as far as I was concerned.
Even though it was a warm spring afternoon, exactly what you would expect for a white wine gathering, as is my usual, I quickly moved onto the reds.
By coincidence, I guess, both were from Gigondas and both 2009’s. The first was absolutely knock your socks off delicious. Lots of lush fruit, strawberries and cherries.
The second, however, seemed to have none of the positives of the first, being a bit lean and even a little harsh. I can’t say as it was totally lacking in fruit, but it wasn’t exactly well endowed either.
So I spent an entire afternoon enjoying a variety of wines and nary a drop of Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay passed my lips. I don’t intend to diss those grapes, as they are both capable of making outstanding wines. But it’s nice to have a little variety in life, and the wines I enjoyed yesterday were every bit as good as your typical Cab or Chard. I would love to have more wine days like that.
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Monday, March 18th, 2013
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
I have been a bitter critic of wineries, usually the biggest of the big, that routinely churn out mediocre wines stripped of all that makes wine interesting. Start with perfectly good grapes, and filter and fine and stabilize and centrifuge them and they lose most of what makes them potentially wonderful drinking experiences. True, not a few of these wines still manage to be pretty good, but it’s in spite of, not because of, these processes. It’s not good enough to say you made a good wine, when you really started out with something capable of being a whole lot better.
So I guess I got something of comeuppance last week. One of our distributors reported that one of our wines (our Petite Sirah to be precise) had been stacked at our warehouse upside down. Since this wine is unfiltered, and naturally subject to throwing off sediment anyway (it’s a fairly tannic wine), it has been accumulating sediment on the cork surface.
My immediate reaction: So what? When I get a wine with sediment, that’s a big plus for me. It shows it’s a real wine. It’s a tradeoff I’d gladly make: a little sediment for a real wine.
Our consumers reaction? Not nearly so positive. In fact, downright negative.
It’s a bummer, plain and simple. If you don’t go the “strip everything out of the wine that any person could possibly find offensive” route, you run the risk that those someones will find the wine wanting, or even flawed. That this is the furthest thing from the truth, is a big “so what?” if what counts is getting your wines sold.
I can remember tasting some years ago the same wine, one that had been cold stabilized, and one that hadn’t been. The unstabilized wine was subject to forming crystals when put in a fridge for a period of time. But my God it was so much better. Yet pretty much everyone cold-stabilizes their white wines, because, God forbid, a consumer might think there’s slivers of glass in his wine.
Want your wine to be clear as bell, without the slightly hint of haziness? Bentonite filter the hell out of the wine, and you’ll get that super clear look that everyone likes. But taste that super clear wine against the pre-filtered version, and you’ll find it has lost a lot of what the wine originally had.
So what do winemakers do? They routinely bentonite filter their whites.
So what starts out as a vibrant, even profound, wine, gets dumbed down into something innocuous but commercially acceptable.
I can rail about this til the cows come home. But I am but one lonely voice in the wilderness.
So what to do with our Petite Sirah? Well, you can have the warehouse spend its time (and our money) to turn all the cases upside down. Of course, this isn’t the best way to store wine, since you want the cork contacting the wine, not the air (hopefully neutral air) inside the bottle. Keeping the cork in contact with the wine keeps it from drying out. Dried out corks let air into the bottle, which will result in oxidation of the wine. It’s probably not that big a deal for our Petite Sirah, since we don’t have that much of the wine left, and it’s probably not going to go off on us before it gets sold.
Of course, whenever you do anything, it has unintended ramifications. When you turn the case upside down, all of sudden your label is upside down too. Solution: plaster new labels over the old ones.
So it really comes down to simple choice: do we stick to our guns, damn the ignorance of the wine consuming public, or do we do what we have to do keep our sales going? Well, that’s no brainer if there ever was one. I’m ordering the new labels tomorrow.
I still think those big megawineries are scoundrels guilty of compromising and adulterating their products. But maybe with a little less of the vehemence I felt a week ago.
Posted in Wine Sales and Pricing, Wine Tasting, Winemaking | 5 Comments »
Monday, March 11th, 2013
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
The Wine Curmudgeon posted a blog last week, “Five things the wine business can do to help consumers figure out wine” (which can be found at http://www.winecurmudgeon.com/my_weblog/2013/03/five-things-the-wine-business-can-do-to-help-consumers-figure-out-wine.html) that I found of interest, both for those points I agree with, and those I don’t.
The point of the post was to offer five suggestions on how the wine industry should deal with the consumer. The five are listed below, in italics. My comments follow each.
• Stop worrying about vintage. One of the few things that every wine drinker knows is that vintage matters, even though that’s becoming less and less true. Vintage – the year the grapes were harvested – matters for an increasingly small percentage of wine; most of the stuff we drink every day is made to taste the same regardless of the vintage. In fact, Barefoot, one of the most popular wine brands in the U.S., is non-vintage (its grapes come from different harvests). It’s actually possible to make better quality wine this way, mixing and matching the best quality grapes from various vintages. One example: the $10 Little James Basket Press wines.
I both agree and disagree with this one. Vintages do make a big difference, particularly in Northern Europe. They may matter less in California, but the last few vintages have definitely shown that they matter here as well. But the idea that wines can be made non-vintage (i.e. blending different vintages together) is one that has never really taken off, despite the fact that it is definitely the better way to make wine. The more material the winemaker has available to him, the better the chances are that he’ll produce something that’s really good. This is recognized pretty much throughout all winemaking in all kinds of different ways (different varieties, different clothes, etc.), Yet when it comes to vintages this idea receives short shrift. That may be crazy, but it’s so ingrained into the wine market that it’s not going to change, at least anytime soon. At least not for what are considered to be premium wines.
• Use less expensive bottles: It’s one thing to use a heavy, costly, imposing bottle for a $150 cult Napa cabernet sauvignon. But producers who don’t use the best made and least expensive bottle for a $10 wine are raising the price of the product without adding quality or value. For example, why do most wine bottles still have punts – the dimple on the bottom of the bottle – when it’s cheaper and just as effective to make a bottle without one?
Well, I can answer this question. The simple reason is that heavier bottles are perceived as being higher-end, and therefore people will pay more for them. Does that make any sense? Probably not. But then pretty much everything having to do with packaging of a wine, or any other product for that matter, doesn’t make any sense either. You can rail against the inequities of life and stupidities of the consumer, but that doesn’t get your wines sold. If you want to sell wine, you have to do this stuff.
• Stop obsessing over oak. High-end wines that need thousands and thousands of dollars worth of oak to pull their various parts into a coherent whole should spend time and effort describing the oak process and how it works. But the rest of the wine we drink – 90 percent? – either doesn’t need oak or uses a substitute, like staves or chips. And these wines are often perfectly fine. Sometimes, they even make the $10 Hall of Fame.
Personally, I would not only stop obsessing over oak, I would stop using it, either altogether or at least in the high quantities that it’s used throughout much of the wine world. For some wines, I wouldn’t argue that some oak is helpful. But I would like to feel like I’m drinking a grape product not a tree product. With lots of wine, it’s hard to tell. I like pepper with my salad, but a few turns of the peppermill is enough. I certainly wouldn’t want to dump the whole container of pepper on the salad. But that’s what many winemakers do with oak.
• Appellation isn’t the be all and end all. Appellation – where the grapes were grown – matters almost not at all for most of the wine we drink, and consumers (especially younger ones) are paying less and less attention to it. They want malbec or moscato, and they don’t really care where it’s from. And, truthfully, given modern winemaking techniques, the goal is (as with vintage) to make the malbec taste like malbec, not like it came from California or Argentina. This is another opportunity to make less expensive, quality wine by mixing grapes from different appellations, and not worrying whether the bottle says California or Argentina.
This one I could hardly agree with more. If anyone could, with consistency, identify which appellation a wine came from tasting them blind against other similar wines, I might feel differently. But to a large extent this is just a marketing ruse. As far as the idea of blending wines from different appellations is concerned, see my comments above concerning blending of different vintages (great idea, will never happen).
• Write back labels in English: One wine that costs around $10 promises things that are all but impossible for a wine at that price: “chocolate and hints of licorice.” Or, to go to the other extreme, the wine drinker who buys another wine “prizes the simple things in life: spending good times with close friends.” Both do the consumer a disservice. They’ll assume they’re wine idiots because they couldn’t taste chocolate and licorice, and be totally confused by what the second wine is supposed to be. One solution, as advocated by W. Blake Gray: simple terms that we all understand, like rich, robust and fruit.
I have always been a big believer that there are only a few things that people can agree on with any consistency when it comes to a wine. Flavor is not one of them. Acidity, tannin, sweetness, oak level, maybe, even probably. Yet most wine is described primarily by its flavor profile. So what that nobody can agree on it. A simple description like “rich, robust, and fruit” beats the usual drivel that we see on the back of a wine label, even if it’s generality means it really doesn’t say that much about the wine. Perhaps this situation would be a little better if there were a little bit more honesty in the comments on wine back-labels. But I don’t think we’re going to see a description such as “lean, fruit challenged” any time soon. I think it’s fair to say that back label prose is going to continue to be one of the worst examples of writing in the English language.
Posted in Viticulture, Wine Marketing, Wine Tasting, Winemaking | No Comments »
Monday, March 4th, 2013
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
The subject of clones probably isn’t one of the sexiest ones that you can talk about when it comes to wine. Which makes the better wine, Cabernet Sauvignon clone 7 or clone 337? That certainly is not a subject that you see a lot of ink spilled over in the Spectator or the Advocate.
Clones aren’t something I think the whole lot about, either, but a recent post by Steve Heimoff, which can be found at http://www.steveheimoff.com/index.php/2013/02/26/the-chaos-of-clone-theory/, brought this issue to my attention.
The question Heimoff’s post addresses is whether clones really make much of a difference. It pretty much comes to the conclusion that clones aren’t nearly as important as they are sometimes made out to be.
Trying to figure out how important the difference in clones can be is not an easy task. There so many other variables (climate, rootstock, trellis system, and so on) that effect the ultimate result, i.e., the wine, that you get from particular grapes that isolating the effect of a particular clone is well nigh impossible, at least experimentally. That said, I cannot agree that clones are not that important. I think if you go through the different clones of Pinot Noir, for example, it’s impossible not to conclude that certain clones are vastly different than others. Notice that I didn’t say better, but different.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on Pinot Noir, since it doesn’t grow well in our climate. However, when I have done tastings of the different clones of Pinot Noir, you could almost see the difference. While I think the same can be said of Cabernet Sauvignon, at least in theory, I don’t think the differences are quite as dramatic, in practice, as they are with Pinot Noir.
Of course when considering whether clone 7 or clone 337 of Cabernet Sauvignon makes the better wine, you immediately run and all kinds of difficulties for the reasons alluded to already. Unless you were to plant the two clones on exactly the same rootstock, train them in exactly the same way, and plant them right next to each other, are the differences really the differences between clones or between some of those other things? Or maybe there is a difference, but that’s because one clone mates better with one rootstock and another clone mates better with a different rootstock. Switch rootstocks and you get entirely different results. So is this experiment, even if you could do it, very conclusive of anything at all?
And even if you were to control for everything else that could affect the quality of the resulting wine, and you were to identify differences between the two, are the differences truly differences in quality, or just differences in preference? Just as some people prefer Cabernet while other people prefer Pinot Noir, it could be that the difference between two different clones comes down to personal preference.
It is probably also a mistake to compare the wine made from different clones as though those results really did give you a good assessment of that particular clone. When you create a wine from different varieties, each of those varieties contributes its unique qualities to the final blend. Maybe one variety adds color, but not a lot of flavor; while another variety may add flavor, but be relatively color challenged. I don’t think that, in that context, it would be fair to say that one of those varieties is superior to the other. Each has its only own contribution to make to the final blend.
What applies to a blend of various varieties applies equally to a blend of various clones of the same variety. While there are certain clones that lend themselves more to being a stand-alone, in the sense that they are more enjoyable to drink when unblended, that’s probably not the right way to look at things.
But, all that said, in the end, I do believe clones make a lot of difference. It may not be a difference that the consumer is able to appreciate as he downs his Cabernet, but it is a difference that the winemaker can utilize when it comes to putting together a wine. Certainly, to the extent that the winemaker can draw upon wines with different qualities, some more or less colorful, some more or less flavorful, some more or less tannic, etc., it gives him a palette to work with that will allow him to come up with a more balanced final blend. And that, I think, is the primary reason why clones do make a difference.
Posted in Viticulture, Wine Tasting | No Comments »
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