While you were working at the wine store, or just attending some of those casual wine testing events, what was the best advice you got about becoming a connoisseur of wines?
The best advice I got was to try everything and to enter every tasting with an open mind. In other words, don’t just go for the famous names or regions, but really, really have a lowercase “c” catholic taste, and try to develop that to see what you like. And I think that advice was very helpful. You know, ironically, or maybe not ironically, in the end I’ve come around to preferring some of the classic regions of the world. But nevertheless, just the idea of tasting everything without prejudice, to see what you like, I thought that was excellent advice and what I’d give to anybody else because, in the end, there are so many good wines out there and you have to match them to your own needs and desires: the setting, the season, the food you’re eating.
What was the first wine that made you truly fall in love with wine?
My initial attraction for wine developed in small restaurants, sitting around with friends, in Paris, where I was living and playing basketball. But the Eureka moment when I realized that wine could be really special, almost transcendentally wonderful, actually occurred in London, a year later, when I was invited over for dinner to the home of some family friends who were quite well-to-do. I showed up in jeans and an old plaid shirt. Not the only time I’ve missed the dress code. Oh, well. They opened up a bottle of old Bordeaux that was unlike anything I had had before. To this day, I don’t know what chateau or vintage it was, but tasting it was life changing for me. The host poured the wine and when I took a sip, I just sort of froze, thinking, “Oh my God, this is fantastic!” Then, a few months later, I was near Grenoble in France doing research into a Huguenot family that had emigrated to Ireland. The town doctor, a distant relative of the family I was researching, invited me over for dinner, and he and his wife opened a bottle. And, again, I had one of those moments, but this time the wine was a really nice Burgundy. So those two moments made me think, wow, there’s a whole world of wine out there that can make you stop in your tracks and just think, what am I tasting? What am I experiencing here? And I caught the bug, as it were.
If you had to pick one wine to drink for the rest of your life or to take with you to that deserted island, and what would it be and why?
Oh, that’s a tough one. But, if I had to choose just one, I would say I would want a medium-bodied red burgundy. Now you might think that’s a sort of a funny answer, but it’s quite simple: it’s the most versatile wine to pair with all the foods I like. And the nose, which is wine speak for the aromas, can be heavenly!
Can you share a wine and food pairing that transformed your understanding of how flavors can interact?
Chablis and oysters. Red Bordeaux or California Cab and steak. Chianti and Italian-style pizza. Rioja and roasted suckling pig. Gewurztraminer and Thai food. But let’s talk about champagne and potato chips! What you’re getting there is basically salt, fat, and acid, that famous trio. And, if you allow yourself to use Gallenic or Humoral medical theory, the alcohol in the wine gives you heat. So, there you are, salt, fat, acid, heat. A fantastic combination because they work together to create a harmonious whole.
What are some common misperceptions about wine that you find yourself explaining to people?
Well, the big one that I always try to emphasize is the fact that wine is a very dynamic product. We often think of it as this sort of eternal product, maybe even a static product that has been around for thousands of years. We read about it in the Old Testament with Noah planting vines and getting drunk. Wine has been around since the beginning of settled agriculture. But one of the things I find so fascinating about wine is that it is so dynamic. Wine has changed dramatically over time, and it will continue to change. Wine reflects the history of the place that produces it, but also of the society in which it’s consumed, and those are not always the same thing, because wine is often an export product. In that sense, wine is much more than just wine. It’s culture, politics, economics, biology, chemistry, and technology. In short, what’s in your glass is history, as well as the present.
Do you have specific techniques that you use to evaluate a wine’s quality in character?
When it comes to the actual tasting, there are some things to keep in mind. First of all, don’t wear perfume or cologne. That may sound obvious, but you don’t want to mistake what you or your neighbor are wearing for what you’re actually smelling in the glass. Second, you want a clean glass, and the shape of the glass should be bulbous, so that when you swirl the glass all around, you release the aromas of the wine but the wine doesn’t come flying out. I like to put glass on a table and really give it a vigorous swirl. That way, the contents really move around, and the aromas rise out. Just a few months ago, a friend of mine, who I really admire as a taster, said, “I don’t think you get the wine close enough to your nose.” He kept insisting that I was holding the glass at too low an angle. He said his technique is to really get to the wine right up to his nostrils. He practically drinks with them. So, after he’s swirled it, the aromas are really entering in, and after a few takes, I agreed with him. It really can make a difference with a delicate wine.
If you could have dinner and share a bottle of wine with any person, living or dead, who would it be and what bottle?
Well, that is a tough question. There are so many people I would like to share wine with. But I guess if I had only one option it would be Shakespeare. First of all, I’d want to hear him speak and see if I could understand his spoken English. Did he speak in the same way that he wrote? Did he use so many wonderful phrases? And second, he’s someone of such intelligence and insight that I would be just sitting on the edge of my seat the entire dinner asking all sorts of questions about who he is and where he learned all this stuff and how he had such penetrating insights into the human psyche. It’s possible he could find me tedious!
What are you guys drinking?
You know, he’d probably want a glass of sack, or what we call sherry, although it was probably an oxidized sherry of some sort, like an oloroso, and not a sherry that was aged under a film of yeast, like a fino or amontillado. That seems to have been one of his favorite drinks. Certainly, he had Sir John Falstaff drink sack and the way he wrote about it suggests that he himself, was a fan. But I think I might challenge him with something like an old first-growth Bordeaux, and I think he would like it.
I bet he’d love it.
That would be my hope. But so long as we’re time travelling, if I get to choose a winemaker from the past, I’d want to share a bottle with a guy named Arnaud de Pontac, who was the proprietor of Chateau Haut Brion in Bordeaux in the mid-seventeenth century and the person who is often credited with making the prototype of first-growth Bordeaux. I’d want him to bring Haut Brion from a good vintage in the 1660s, because I’d want to find out exactly what the wine tasted like. His English contemporary, Samuel Pepys, for example, said that Haut Brion had “a good and most particular taste that I never met with.” So, Pepys found it to be a very different wine from what he was used to. But unfortunately, his tasting notes don’t go beyond that. And I’m very curious to know how it tasted.
What advice would you give someone who wants to develop a more sophisticated palate and understanding of wine? Obviously taking your YACOL class this spring is one suggestion, but what else could a person do to better understand wines?
There are all kinds of videos available on the Internet these days, but I think in some ways the old-fashioned way of buying a few books is really useful. Again, my favorite starter book that I recommend for people is Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Encyclopedia. Another essential one would be the Oxford Companion to Wine, edited by Jancis Robinson. That book in its fifth edition or something and is extremely comprehensive. One book is small and fits into your pocket; the other is a very large tome that clunks down on your desk.
You could also find a nice wine merchant who is knowledgeable and eager to help. Or, to toot my own horn, you could contact me, as I help people buy wines as part of my business. You want someone who listens very carefully to what you’ve liked in the past, and what sort of foods you like, not someone who is simply trying to sell you the most expensive bottle, unless, of course, you want the most expensive bottle.
Then, you need to start tasting and exploring. Whatever your budget, start taking notes. If you’re at a restaurant or a party, and you meet a wine that you love, quietly take a picture of the bottle. Apps like Vivino can help, but only a little bit. Start taking notes and build up a database in a notebook. Record everything that you drink, the grape, the name, the year, and the producer, and then look up things on the label in Hugh Johnson’s book. You’re drinking Chianti, let’s say, and it’s something you really like. Well, Chianti doesn’t tell you the name of the grape, right? For many people, Chianti is Chianti is Chianti. But it actually helps to know that the wine is mostly from the Sangiovese grape, because that might lead you to try Brunello di Montalcino. But then when you go to Hugh Johnson and read a little bit about Chianti, you go to the listing about Chianti, then Sangiovese, and then maybe Tuscany. You’ll learn a bit about what foods pair well with Chianti, who some of the best producers are, what years are good and not so good.
So, you start with one bottle of Chianti, but suddenly you’ve learned ten things! And if you’re keeping a small notebook, maybe you’ve got a quarter page of notes on this one bottle and then maybe the next night you finish the wine. You write down a couple more notes about how the wine changed over the course of twenty-four hours. If you liked the wine more the next day, that might tell you the bottle of wine was still quite young. But if you liked the wine a lot, either night, maybe buy three more bottles and store them on their side in a cool dark place. Then open another one in a year. Then another one a year later. And you’ve still got one left for whenever. That way, you can start to learn how ageing impacts wine, but the key thing is that by forcing yourself to concentrate and take notes, you can build a database of memories.
Then once you have that database of wine names, flavors, aromas, years, regions and grapes, it allows you to place wines inside of a mental matrix, as it were, and you become more knowledgeable and begin to really appreciate wines on a much deeper level. It’s a lot of fun. I think people are fundamentally puzzle solvers, and wine is essentially a very challenging puzzle with a multitude of variables, including the really difficult one, time.
