July 3, 2008 by Thomas.

Something can be said for the fun of that parlor game when you single out the wine know-it-all and get that person to taste a wine—blind—to try to guess what it is.

It’s fun to serve a wine that is close to a certain other wine that you know this person will have tasted before and so is likely to be fooled this time around.

It’s even more fun when you throw in a $5 cheapie and this knowledgeable fool proclaims it Pavie or Cheval Blanc or some other high achiever.

The above may be fun, but it has nothing to do with blind tasting wine, and I was particularly amused (and somewhat surprised) to discover that there are people out there who consume a lot of wine and spend a lot of money every year on it, but they don’t know the value of a truly blind evaluation and comparison.

Recently, I got into a discussion about the attributes of Finger Lakes Riesling. It was the same old discussion of how Finger Lakes Rieslings don’t hold up against German or Alsatian counterparts, a belief that I am convinced is of questionable merit.

The reason I think that consumers who make the claim that Finger Lakes Rieslings, though good, are not world class, is because I have numerous times sat in on blind evaluation comparisons. Finger Lakes Rieslings easily held their own.

The kind of evaluation I’m talking about is when the tasters know only that the wines are Riesling and that each flight of wines is within a certain stylistic parameter and vintage. We know nothing about their location, winemaker, producer, and price. That’s a blind tasting.

A double blind evaluation means that the taster knows nothing about the wines, not even the grape variety. That method is best used for training purposes, to hone one’s sensory abilities.

The task in a blind tasting is to evaluate each wine on its merits, to see if it lives up to varietal character and to stylistic parameters.

A blind tasting is not when a bunch of geeks bring bottles of their favorite wines and then someone puts them into a brown bag and the tasters don’t know which wine is in which bag. Just knowing that your wine is in the bunch will either expose or shatter your bias. It’s human nature to look in every glass of wine served for the wine you brought. It will confuse the hell out of you. You may find the wine, or you may think you have found it. (Not to mention that bottle shapes can give a lot of information.)

A blind tasting is not when the people selecting the order, opening, and pouring the wine also serve it to the tasters. To remove all bias, even the servers shouldn’t know what they are pouring. That way, they can’t give something away with unconscious body language.

In a well run blind tasting, the wines are poured in a back room or kitchen. The glasses are numbered to correspond with numbers that have been assigned to the tasting sheets. The pourers give the glasses to the servers and they take them to the tasting panels to serve.

Tasters are free to taste in whatever order they want, but they must be sure to correspond the correct glass numbers with the tasting sheet numbers.

The evaluation can be done with scores, verbals, or both. But everyone should conform to a pre-established set of scoring rules.

I and two other fellows proposed to the unbelieving that if they claim that Finger Lakes Rieslings do not belong in world class status with their beloved European products, then they should be willing to compare the wines in a completely blind tasting setting.

One geek said I was a chicken, apparently meaning that I was using the blind tasting as a way to back out of proving my point, which is that Finger Lakes Rieslings are likely to surprise those geeks.

His childish chiding, however, illuminates to me that he hasn’t a clue what the purpose of a blind evaluation is. More important, he seems to think that he has super-human talent, that he can remove all bias by simply willing himself to do so. I’m worldly enough to smell the bullshit in that concept.

I’ve seen too many so-called unbiased wine tastings in my day. The main purpose is to prove an already expressed opinion and to have fun while doing it. That’s a parlor game.

The truly blind tasting method is closer to science, and we all know that science is supposed to search for answers—not validate preconceived notions. Well, maybe all but the biased wine geeks know that.

I’m unsure if the blind evaluation will take place, but I know that I am willing to take the risk. I believe that tasters would find many Finger Lakes Rieslings to be world class wines, especially since they won’t know that they are tasting Finger Lakes Rieslings.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
July 2008. All rights reserved.

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June 23, 2008 by Thomas.

Being born with a small physical frame has its advantages and its disadvantages.

As a youth, the advantages of my small frame produced a decent track runner and base stealer, not to mention an ability to squirm through small spaces like side windows to perpetrate my share of adolescent indiscretions.

Some of the disadvantages of my small skeletal frame include a put down at a party for being too short for a great looking Air Force nurse, a small bladder that has caused me to rack up many miles over my life on my small feet as I made my way—frequently—to restrooms across the world, and a mouth of gums that are too small to house all my teeth, making flossing a challenge as the string continually gets caught and snaps between the tight spacing.

Speaking of gums, the phrase “long in the tooth” refers to a particular condition of aging, when gums begin to recede. In some cases, the recession can expose nerves located where the teeth’s roots begin under the gums. A person long in the tooth, as I am, sometimes knows exactly why wine is considered an acidic medium.

Last weekend I was a judge at the New York State Fair Wine Competition. The State Fair competition draws more Finger Lakes wineries than wineries from the other New York appellations. The common thread among Finger Lakes wine is acidity. A guy who is long in the tooth has to be careful.

The judging was broken into panels of four judges each. After each wine flight, each panel of judges compared scores then decided whether or not to award medals by forming a consensus.

Only a few times did the judges on my panel have to discuss to make a case to gain consensus. The majority of times we had to do nothing more than to compile our aggregate and form an average to arrive at a consensus that fit the wine.

In a field of more than 100 wines that day, our panel awarded only one Gold Medal, a few Silvers, mostly Bronzes, and a number of no medals at all.

With so few outstanding wines having reached our panel, I began to wonder whether or not wineries have the ability to determine the quality of the wines they submit for evaluation. Or maybe they have little regard for the abilities of the evaluators. Or maybe, since winning medals is one way to promote and sell wine, they just send in their wines and hope for the best.

This is volunteer work. Judges are paid only for expenses incurred, like travel to the site and overnight hotel and dinner. It would be nice to know that wineries try to send us their best. In my case, I don’t even mind suffering a little pain afterwards for the good of great wine, and by the end of this all-day judging I was rewarded with short bursts of pain every time I drank or ate something cold, hot, sweet, or salty. The acid worked on my gums.

Yet, considering the results of the judging, I have to wonder whether I should try to suffer a little less in my waning years. Maybe I need to lobby the organizers of the wine competition so that I wind up on the panel with the most Gold Medal entries instead of the least!

I probably should retire from wine judging, but I won’t.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
June 2008. All rights reserved.

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June 9, 2008 by Thomas.

In early spring, I read somewhere that this summer was scheduled to be hot and dry in the Finger Lakes, thanks to El Nina. Well, it ain’t summer yet, and it surely is hot and dry.

My land is cracked the way it usually gets in late August. Right now, I have eggplant, okra, and Israeli melon plants far ahead of their usual slow start in this region. For the first time since I can remember, in June I have bell peppers and tomatoes already fully flowered and maturing!

All this is to say that if it keeps up, this could be a truly anomalous vintage year in the Finger Lakes, and that isn’t necessarily a good thing. We like our crisp, acidic wines here—we don’t want no stinkin’ California style vintage…

Speaking of the Finger Lakes, two weeks ago I hosted two separate groups of six people here at Keuka Lake. The first group comprised old friends who have been here before but never for an extended stay and never for the red carpet treatment that my wife and I gave them. It was a glorious Memorial Four-Day weekend, topped off by a fabulous dinner at the Pleasant Valley Inn, outside of Hammondsport.

I’ve known the owner of the Inn since he took it over in 1991. He knew it would impress my friends, so he brought out an old wine list from 1993 on which he had listed my Gewurztraminer, which he loved and used to sell at the restaurant when my winery was in business.

Looking at restaurant wine prices of 17 years ago surely induced nostalgia!

Tom, that’s the owner’s name, never charges exorbitant prices for the wines he serves. He told me a long time ago that his aim is to offer great food with decent wines at prices that bring people back, not push them away.

My old friends are not wine geeks. They simply enjoy wine with food. When we dine out together, they usually allow me the privilege of selecting the wine, and they rarely, if ever, complain either about my choices or about the prices. This held true at the Pleasant Valley Inn.

On the heels of the first group to visit, the second group comprised new friends, all of whom are more wine centric than my old friends, one of whom seems to go over the edge every so often with geekism.

My friend claims he does not care for wine geeks with inflated egos. He knows they are concerned more with themselves than with the wine. I generally agree. But wine geeks do other things that drive me crazy, and my friend did it at the Pleasant Valley Inn.

First, he mentioned that he would like to bring wine to the restaurant. I did not like the idea. Reasoning that the only wines my friend had with him were the local Finger Lakes wines that he picked up at some of the wineries, I told him the restaurant would have Finger Lakes wines, too. Fine. He brought no wines with him.

At the restaurant, however, my friend grew interested in a 1982 Lynch Bages on the list that he said was reasonably priced (I did not look at the price. I felt if he was buying the wine, I should be gracious and not try to determine what he is paying for it.)

My friend wanted to be sure that the wine had been stored properly so he asked the waiter to find out the temperature of wine storage at the restaurant. This is where I became nervous.

I reasoned that I know Tom, and if he were to sell a wine that the customer thought was spoiled he would easily take it back. I figured if the price was good, it was worth the risk. Quite frankly, I was trying to head off my embarrassment in front of both Tom and my visitors, because either way, this was a no-win situation for me.

My friend was not having any of my ideas and so I went to Tom and asked him myself about the temperature of his wine storage.

Tom told me that he keeps wine in his cellar over winter (about 58 degrees F) and when he opens the restaurant between May and November, he brings the wine upstairs and stores it in a room with cement floors and no windows that remains between 65 and 68 degrees F. Then Tom said, “Tell your friend not to buy the wine. I don’t need the aggravation of having to stand their discussing the intricate details of a few temperature degree shift.”

It was obvious that Tom was annoyed and that embarrassed me.

After having worked in the wine distribution trade, and after having sold wine to restaurants, I don’t often trust restaurants about wine storage either. But I handle the matter in a different way. I simply don’t order certain wines in restaurants—I opt for the ready to drink crowd.

If I find myself in serious doubt about a restaurant, even with the ready to drink crowd of wines, I simply eat elsewhere. I certainly don’t care to grill the restaurant owner about his wine storage practices while my dining partners look on.

To me, there’s a distinction between dining out with friends and evaluating wine with geeks. If pressed, I’d always prefer the former to the latter, and that guides my attitude at a restaurant.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia, June 2008

All rights reserved.

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May 14, 2008 by Thomas.

Well, now I am awakened. My last entry received more responses than all my earlier blog entries-some responses online, and some via email.

Generally, I have been supported, yet mildly taken to task for being cynical and giving up. An email I received this morning from another Finger Lakes-based writer made a good point about my cynicism, not to mention the relative difficulty in posting a comment on the Worpress version of Vinofictions, as opposed to the ease of doing so on Blogspot.

Unfortunately, the Wordpress version is more prone to spammers, and I am a simple writer. I don’t want to spend my time fending off spammers and various forms of sludge. Hell, I don’t even want to take the time to look into the stats to find out how many and who is reading this blog. I just want to write. So, I take the easy route. Maybe I should shut down the Wordpress version—maybe I will.

I’ve decided not to quit, but I will have to scale back my entries for the summer. My wife and I are erecting a greenhouse plus, we have various guests coming from the world over throughout the season.

For now, let me say a few words about why I made the previous entry. Primarily, it was because of the wine forum Websites. I read them in the hope of gaining information and to keep up with events, but I generally am sick of most of them. Not only are the conversations circuitous and repetitive, they are often abrasive and obsessive. But what truly gets to me about them is that the majority of their habituates seem comfortable with their myths—impervious to greeting a fact and shaking its hand.

My other problem: too many people don’t seem willing to take their own initiative, to go out and explore wine for themselves. They need one or two critical palates to guide them. Being a general “do it my way” kind of guy, I admit to finding the lemming trait offensive. But I do understand the argument that there is so much wine out there it is impossible for any one person to find them all.

I understand that argument, but I don’t buy it. In the immortal words of Dick Cheney: so what?

Once you realize that there isn’t enough time in your life to drink them all, it doesn’t mean you need to let someone else direct you to the wines, and it certainly does nothing to change your tastes, provided you are willing to trust your own taste and not the taste of the self-anointed.

Then there’s the argument that “I have only so much money, I don’t want to waste it on buying wines I may not like.”

First, a review and a high rating maybe helps, but it’s no guarantee. I’ve never thought that I need anyone else’s palate to guide mine, and I don’t believe anyone else does. Consuming wine is a matter of personal taste.

Second, so much that we spend our money on comes with risk. As an example, take the Maytag dishwasher that I am throwing out the window this week.

Remember those TV commercials with Jesse White playing a Maytag repairman who sits alone most of his life because the units don’t need much service?

I stupidly bought into the Maytag reputation (not realizing that the company was sold to Whirlpool). I might as well have taken the $500 I spent on that dishwasher and lit it in the fireplace—that way I would have gotten something for my money. In other words, I took the easy path, didn’t do my own homework, bought from reputation and suggestions. What I got didn’t work (in less than four years, I had to replace the control panel three times!).

Buying anything comes with risk. High ratings and high praise do not negate that risk. In fact, if you look at it another way, they probably increase the risk by creating complacency, a sense of false security.

Sure, we’ll never get to taste every wine in the world, but we can have fun finding them on our own and trying as many as we can. In fact, sticking to one style or one place creates a stagnant taste preference. What fun is that?

I believe that with all the wines available to us, obsessing over the possibility of missing one of them means needing help, but not in wine buying…

Thanks to all who slapped me a little. You made me realize that there is an audience for my ramblings, and even if it is a small audience, it’s a fine one.

PS: To Tom Wark I have a suggestion (and to anyone else interested). Maynard Amerine once wrote a beautiful essay concerning wine quality: how to evaluate it and why it can and should be done. Try to get your hands on a copy of it. Look up Wayward Tendrils, a California organization of wine book collectors. Someone there might be able to help you find the essay, which Tendrils covers in its latest quarterly.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
May 2008. All rights reserved.

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May 11, 2008 by Thomas.

So, I’m sitting in my chair facing my keyboard and looking at a blank screen—that’s today’s version of a writer facing a blank page.

In this case, the blank screen is because I am no longer sure what to say about wine online.

A number of adjectives describe what the online discourse about wine sometimes does to me. This week, I stumbled upon one too many adjectives, along with one too many jerks.

It saddens me that so many times those who voice their self-righteous proclamations seem to know just enough about wine and winemaking to be dangerous and not enough about humility and the general way that people need to act toward one another in order to peacefully share this planet.

In other words, a hell of a lot of wine geeks should never have been let out of high school!

How did it come to pass that people use the gift so pleasant as wine to bring attention to their status, to their self worth, and to their self-appointment as arbiters of taste? They subvert the goodness of wine. They claim they speak and consume wine out of passion. What comes through to me is obsession. Passion is an emotion of the heart—obsession is an emotional illness.

In any case, wine geeks never were my intended audience for Vinofictions. They are not my whole problem.

I aimed for the general wine consumer. My aim was to use Vinofictions to educate to the extent of my knowledge, which in wine amounts to about 26 years of study and experience in the business, from grape growing to winemaking to wine selling and wine writing, alongside decades of wine consumption that reaches back to age seven.

I am fully aware that, while I may have learned things through study, I don’t know it all, and so I also hoped that through dialog on Vinofictions I could continue to learn from others while they learned from me. But Vinofictions hasn’t really captured much attention and has generated even less dialog.

Wine writers with more than just opinions can help others come to their own decisions by giving them an understanding of the facts. But that doesn’t appear to be what gets the attention. What seems to get attention are wine writers who issue proclamations and position subjectivity as if it were information. I don’t do that kind of thing well because I do not believe in it.

I am suspending Vinofictions for the 2008 summer while I consider if I have anything left to say and also to find out if what I have to say has much of an audience. Right now, I’m of the opinion that the audience isn’t nearly as large as the time and effort warrants.

The blog will remain online so that the archives will be available to sift through and read.

A few of you have been kind enough to take part in this blog and to throw me encouraging words. I thank you. I wish there were more of you.

And to prove to you that I am not a saint, and that I, too, have something to sell: my third book is scheduled for an autumn release. Hope you all read it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
May 2008. All rights reserved.

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May 6, 2008 by Thomas.

It’s probable that every one of us has had the experience of a wine that tastes different from glass to glass over an evening. We call the phenomenon evolving, and by that, we generally mean that the wine evolves. But could it be that the taster is also evolving?

Surely, exposure to oxygen changes a wine; how much and how fast it changes I suppose is determined by the wine and the amount of oxygen to which it is exposed. But it’s highly possible that as the wine changes, so, too, does our perceptive capacity.

Maybe something volatile in the wine’s aroma that is subdued by time also hits a threshold point that subdues our aroma receptors. Or maybe what we taste first is still slightly closed; opened, it may offer more, but what if that excessive offering happens to land on a dull palate? Will it make for a good or a bad perception?

These kinds of concerns (and further myriad possibilities) may prevent from ever producing a definitive answer or an answer that even satisfies. You’d have to track every oxygen molecule and every person in the room to do it!

What about the other perception phenomenon, the one where you taste a wine today that you had tasted two weeks ago from another bottle but within the same box, and the present taste seems quite different from the previous one? Is it that the wine has changed, the bottle is a variation, or is it something about you or the conditions that causes the change in perception? Or maybe after a lengthy time span you simply can’t recall a taste exactly .

This subject came up recently on the Robert Parker Web site (see link below). Along with the usual unsubstantiated opinions that many provide about wine-related phenomenon, the thread received many considered responses, some of which come with a tinge or at least the possibility of truth.

See if you agree or not, but reading the thread reinforces the conclusion I came to a long time ago: the reasons are many that cause us to remember a past taste as different from the present taste of the same wine. I don’t think it’s either a good or a bad thing—just the way things are.

What the variance tells me is to enjoy the wine in front of me, if I enjoy it, and dislike the wine in front of me, if I dislike it. That’s another way of repeating that, “there are no great wines, only great bottles of wine.”

Looking at this subject objectively, it’s obvious that collecting wine can produce future unintended disappointments. I’m so glad I stopped collecting wine.

TasteThread

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
May 2008. All rights reserved.

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April 29, 2008 by Thomas.

One afternoon a number of years ago, a local restaurateur came into my winery to order some wine from me. During the conversation, I asked if he had anymore of an older wine left in inventory. He said he wasn’t sure, since his cellar was so full that he had to develop another cellar in his basement to keep the inventory that was spilling out—then, he complained about slow wine sales.

I knew that this fellow charged too much for wine at his restaurant and so I asked if he ever considered lowering his prices. He looked at me as if I had just cursed his grandmother.

Here’s how the rest of the conversation went.

He, “If I lowered the price I’d lose money on each wine sale.”

Me, “But you just said that your wine sales are slow.”

He, “Yeah, the wine doesn’t sell as fast as I’d like it to sell, but that’s no excuse to give it away.”

Me, “You wouldn’t be giving it away. You’d be charging a little less so that you can sell the wine faster.”

He, “So what would be good about selling it faster at a lower price? Speed up my losses?”

Me, “First, you’d lower inventory carrying costs. Second, faster sales will likely increase wine sales over the course of the year, since the price will induce more people to buy more wine from you. In retail, the idea is called volume selling—you move more units and so in the end, you make less percentage per unit but more profit on overall sales.”

He, “That’s plain stupid. If I can’t get my full mark up, I’d never make a living.”

Me, “Right. I’ll see you in a few months to sell you another case of wine.”

These many years later, this fellow’s wine pricing remains disgusting. His formula is to price wine at triple plus one-half retail. For instance, he had a Vinho Verde on his list recently that retails for $7.00 a bottle. His price was $25.00 a bottle—he rounds up the half, of course.

Most restaurants aren’t as greedy as triple plus half—they usually go double plus half retail, which still is absurd, in my view.

I’ve heard the arguments from restaurateurs: they have glasses to clean and wine service to account for. But I don’t accept those excuses. Simply put, restaurants charge what consumers allow them to get away with charging. It will be interesting to see if this period of economic woe will have an effect on wine prices if restaurants start to sell less, but I doubt it.

To be sure, the price of wine in restaurants is a tired subject. I know, I’ve been talking about it for twenty-five years, much of that time trying to persuade restaurateurs when I sold them wine that they should consider reducing their prices. But like just about everyone else who complains to restaurants, I failed at persuading them.

Yet, every so often a smart restaurateur comes around and does what other restaurant people probably view as either stupid or insane—he or she prices wine a little better than the competition.

Recently, a wine bar called Terroir opened in Manhattan’s once grungy but now fashionable East Village neighborhood. The bar is owned in part by one of the city’s truly successful and innovative wine purveyors, Paul Greico.

At Terroir, Greico offers wines that are mostly under the radar, the ones that most critics and obsessive wine hobbyists don’t seem to care about but regular people who consume wine not as a hobby but as part of their daily routine do care about. When you search for or consume wine regularly, as opposed to collect wine or buy what you are told to buy, it pays to keep searching for new products and at new prices.

Greico’s wine prices are as under the radar in Manhattan as the wines, and I wish him all the best for his effort.

You can get a nice glimpse at his place by following the link below. The link will also give you a glimpse into what some wine geeks think about such matters. Pay special attention to the person who wanted to know if Terroir allows BYO.

I can think of three reasons to go to a wine bar and want to bring your own wine:

1. You are cheap.

2. You are uninterested in exploration.

3. You think that your wine cellar is the greatest thing since wine was invented.

If you fit any of the above, it’s probably best that you stay home and drink from your cellar. You probably neither will be nor have any fun at a wine bar.

Terroir

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
April 2008. All rights reserved.

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April 22, 2008 by Thomas.

It was quite a trip. My latest sojourn to New York City lasted three days. In that time, I crammed numerous meetings. Sadly, none of the meetings were wine related and so, I also managed to miss my daily muse.

Then, upon my return, I read a few blog entries by Tom Wark, at Fermentations. It seems that Tom is in a philosophical mode—and a deep one at that.

Tom’s postings concern the value of establishing a wine quality parameter. He seems to think that the task is insurmountable.

Tom’s basic point, I believe, is that quality is put forward in such a subjective manner by wine reviewers and critics, as well as by wine consumers, that an objective measure simply cannot be pinned down.

I agree, and I disagree—how’s that for being unequivocal?

First, I agree with Tom because he’s gotten it right: self-appointed arbiters of taste are forced to make definitive proclamations. If they don’t, why would anyone listen to them? And the only way anyone can make a definitive proclamation, especially when that anyone has little or no technical training, is to be subjective.

The fact that wine reviewers and critics can lure others on board their ship of fools is because so many of us are insecure about our abilities. One of the most distressing revelations I gained while operating a wine tasting room was how often people seemed proud to proclaim their lack of knowledge.

Even regular wine drinkers often started out by saying that they didn’t really know much about wine. I countered with, “You know what you like, and that’s all there is to know.” And then, I shamefully proceeded to tell them what I thought they should know. This is the same methodology that critics use. I call it gaming the consumer.

The result of such a situation is reams of paper and digital print about what “I” find appealing and little discourse concerned with what it might be that “you” want. And why not? The words of critics spring from self-assurance, they have no need for another opinion; discourse is not their modus operandi. Under such conditions, quality is a moving target.

Where I disagree with Tom, is that I believe there are ways to establish quality parameters for wine. The point is, though, that they must be established and agreed upon.

Many wine consumers would agree that the smell of TCA is not part of quality in wine. Many probably would agree that wine isn’t supposed to be vinegar. Even the most self-assured critic is likely to agree that wine isn’t supposed to taste like Coca Cola—well, most critics might agree…

In my view, the best way to establish quality is to codify the technicalities of wine. The only way for that to happen is through an organized effort of technically trained people to create and agree upon technical parameters. Following that, an organized effort must make sure that wines are measured, and the parameters are met before they are subject to analysis by critics and reviewers.

Consumers are then assured that every wine that is reviewed has been rigorously passed through a quality analysis, and that the reams of paper and digital print produced by reviewers and critics are in fact what they have been all along: a bunch of subjective opinions. It might be fun not to let reviewers and critics in on the result of the technical analysis—a method that should underline their subjectivity.

Establishing quality parameters and exposing subjectivity for what it is are actually the easy parts. The more difficult task is the one that I believe Tom’s posts truly address—a few questions.

Do we have or should we have a relationship with wine? Why?

Why do we feel the need to agree or to disagree about wine?

What is it that makes us think that others should heed our proclamations?

What is it that makes any one of us imagine that he or she is the arbiter of taste?

Why do so many of us seem to need the approval of someone else before we can enjoy a glass of wine?

When did wine become a subject of philosophical thought rather than merely the lubricant that allows philosophy to flow?

Why can’t we simply enjoy something without having to dissect and obsess over it?

I’m sure Tom has other, more important questions in his head. In fact, I think that for a fellow whose function is to create and write PR for others in the wine industry, Tom may be thinking too deeply. If he keeps it up, he may find himself writing good books instead…

Tom Wark’s blog

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
April 2008. All rights reserved.

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April 11, 2008 by Thomas.

Wayward Tendrils describes both the way of the grapevine and a wonderful little group of wine bibliophiles—yours truly included.

Most members of Wayward Tendrils are serious collectors of wine and food books and other writings on the subjects. As I am with all my interests, I don’t get too geeky about it: collecting books isn’t as much fun to me as reading them, and so I can live without owning an out-of-print book that I know is available at my local library.

Still, some things are unapproachable and because of that, they are more intriguing. Such is the case with Inaugural Medical Address About Wines, by John Michael Schosulan; Vienna, 1767.

Until the 19th century, especially in Europe, but also in the U.S., the custom was to study and write about medicine in Latin. To gain a doctorate in medicine in Europe required a thesis written in Latin. That is what Schosulan’s medical address was, a 55-page thesis concerning the properties of wine.

A Danish physician, Erik Sklovenborg, introduced 22 paragraphs of the dissertation in the latest Wayward Tendril’s Quarterly, a publication for members. Piero Perron, an Italian nuclear engineer with a “Jones” for Latin studies, translated the thesis.

Much of the medical benefits of wine that come to us today as news, were already believed in ancient times. Certainly, Schosulan believed much of it in 1767. Perron is also president of an Italian beer brewer’s association, but he admits that after translating Schosulan’s thesis, he developed a respect for, and began moderate consumption of wine.

In the translated thesis are wonderful passages about wine’s workings through our digestive and circulatory systems. Not to mention the marvelous things that wine can do for us (there is, however, mention of the downside of over imbibing). One of the many insights that caught my eye was Schosulan’s mention of the use of sulphur (we know it as sulfur dioxide, SO2).

Schosulan talks about protecting wine from the degradations of oxidation, which he quaintly refers to as “air.” He talks about topping up casks and adding olive oil as a film on top, of aromatic spices sprinkled on a cloth and then lit, or of lighting distilled alcohol, presumably to use up the air around the wine. Of all the methods, however, he points out that sulfur dioxide alone makes all other methods needless. Where have I heard that before?

I suggest anyone with an interest in wine books and wine history sign up for membership in Wayward Tendrils—it costs no more than a bottle of wine for a one-year subscription to the quarterly.

Being made up of a bunch of bibliophiliacs, Wayward Tendrils doesn’t seem to have a Web site. But there is an email address: tendrils@jps.net.

On another note connected to writing, Mike Steinberger has a fine piece of writing in Fine Wine Magazine, a truly expensive but well executed wine-centric periodical from Britain that, sadly, for me, I have yet to infiltrate as a writer.

Steinberger’s piece is about the wine critic/writing world of today. My only beef with the piece is that, like most, he seems to equate wine criticism with wine writing. I view them as separate functions.

The article has stirred a lot of online talk. Take a look at it for yourself, at:

FineWine

PS: I’ll be traveling next week. Will post my next entry the following week. I hope to have something to say after a few days in New York City.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
April 2008. All rights reserved.

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | 1 Comment »

April 4, 2008 by Thomas.

Slowly heat up some sugar to 300-plus degrees Fahrenheit and you will soon have yourself some caramel; slice an onion and slowly cook it in almost the same manner and you will have caramelized the sugars in the onion; bake a head of garlic at 350 for about 40 minutes and you will get yourself a caramelized aroma plus a wonderfully sweet taste.

Cook a sweet brandy-fortified white wine at about 105 degrees Fahrenheit for a few months and you will have created a cooked wine called Madeira, which, to me, smells an awful lot like caramel.

Over on Robin Garr’s Wine Lovers Web site forum we’ve been discussing the subject of cooked wine. It’s quite a discussion for two reasons:

First, for an online discussion, it is tame, showing what adult communication can provide. With one or two exceptions, Robin’s Wine Lovers site is normally inhabited by less confrontational wine geek than on many other sites—certainly, it doesn’t suffer from a divisive moderator.

Second, after going around a few times with the discussion I have come to the conclusion that the word “cooked” to describe a wine that has been heat damaged somewhere in the traffic between producer and consumer may be a quick and easy way to describe the problem, but it may not be an accurate description.

Many wine geeks claim that a cooked wine smells like sherry. What they mean is that the so-called cooked wine smells oxidized. I am not so sure about that.

Granted, a wine that is exposed to heat will oxidize quicker than it normally would, but a cooked wine is exposed to excessive heat, to the point of Pasteurization.

To me, the overall smell of cooked wine is a pleasant kind of burnt sweetness. The overall smell of oxidation leans more toward acrid or decaying.

To my nose, the aroma of a truly cooked wine supersedes its oxidized component. When I smell the purposely-cooked Madeira, the more prominent among the aromas is caramel, with a hint of sulfurous reduction that reminds me of cooked onions—I pick up the oxidation but underneath the caramel.

In the first thread on this subject, someone mentioned that he has smelled butterscotch in heat damaged wine but never caramel. I find that interesting, too, because to make butterscotch you cook sugar as you would to make caramel but you add cream.

A major component in cream is lactic acid, which happens also to be a component in finished wine that has gone through malo-lactic fermentation, converting malic to lactic acid. So, it makes sense to me that the smell of butterscotch would show up in such wines if they become cooked.

Also, as a way of seemingly refuting my claim that caramel describes the smell of cooked wine, the gentleman who mentioned butterscotch also pointed out that caramel requires not only cooked sugar but also cooked amines (I presume in the sugar).

I accept that. I also accept that wine contains amines as well as sugar and ethanol, the alcohol in wine, which, when cooked, has a vaguely sweet smell. Wine that undergoes natural malo-lactic fermentation normally has a high amine count (Wikipedia provides a pretty good definition of amines—click below).

In the second thread on this subject, I recount a wine cooking experiment that I did the Cooked 2 link below.

All of this leads me to believe that when people identify a wine flaw with the descriptor “cooked,” they likely aren’t always talking about a wine that has been cooked. The question then is: what are they talking about?

Amine

Cooked 1

Cooked 2

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
April 2008. All rights reserved.

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | 3 Comments »