Wine follies

Confessions of a wine philistine

I have a confession for you today - I have a very unsophisticated wine palate. It has always been thus, and I am comfortable with my situation. When it comes to wine, I am a “value shopper.” Actually, now that I think about it, I’m pretty much a “value shopper” when it comes to just about everything, with the notable exception of health care. With health care, I’m willing to pay top dollar for my life - that’s perhaps a topic for tomorrow.

Back to wine. We have always had friends who are very enthusiastic, and quite sophisticated about their wine consumption. They have wine cellars; they collect wine and will store it for years before pairing it with just the right meal. We, on the other hand, store our wine for I'll guess on average less than a month. We buy it, and then we drink it.

At one point, we had signed up for a discount wholesale wine club called deNegoce. I ordered a case of wine that was theoretically of great value, but I didn’t read the fine print. My wife noticed that in the description of our case, the wine was expected to be especially drinkable in about ten years. We did not take delivery.

There is one particular couple with whom we are close friends, who host fantastic, top shelf dinner parties in their very beautiful five floor house in the South End of Boston. This is a beautiful place with a stunning roof deck view of the Back Bay. The husband is a gourmand who prepared world class meals, always paired with an appropriate vintage. Well, we would bring over one of our latest value finds as a customary gift, hoping to demonstrate you could get tasty wine at a great price, and our hosts would politely thank us, and whisk that bottle out of sight, never to be seen again. Eventually, we started bringing flowers instead - everybody likes flowers.

It isn’t that I’m completely ignorant. We took a trip to Sonoma for a wedding one time, and on that trip splurged on a dinner/wine tasting. That meal was one of the best meals I ever had - the wine was perfect for the food. So I know there is something to this concept of pairing. We bought a case, took it home, but failed to replicate the experience at home. The wine wound up being just so so once it left the premises of the vineyard.

Fast forward to today, which is when I decided to write about wine. Dinner guests do often bring wine as gifts, and the quality of the wine that is brought varies dramatically, at least according to Vivino, which is the wine rating app we use to check our purchases. For fun, and out of curiosity, after all our guests have left we have taken up a habit of checking the wine gifts that people bring. One of the things we like about Vivino is the ratings are from consumers, not wine specialists. The price and quality variance is shocking, all the way from a $3.50 bottle coming in at a lowly 3.0 rating to a $100 bottle with a spectacular 4.5 rating. One thing we haven’t yet done is come up with a system to keep track of who has brought what wine - although we have our suspicions. It could very well be that the folks bringing the $3.50 wine are doing that because they have realized we don’t really value expensive wine - or they are paying us back for a sub-part bottle we had delivered in the past.

Okay - back to my original comment about my unsophisticated palate. Here’s a description of a wine we recently found after a party: It opens with a highly perfumed nose of black cherry, mulberry, plum and Oregon blackberry, all underlain by notes of cassis, kirsch, licorice, and crushed gravel. Secondary aromas of dark chocolate, coffee and dried sage reveal an elegant complexity. On the palate, it is powerful, balanced and brimming with layers of fruit and spice. Tempting flavors of Zante currant, boysenberry and black plum anticipate accents of cigar box, mocha, crushed herbs and pencil shavings.

When I tasted this wine, if I really concentrated, I guess I could taste the Oregon blackberry, although I admit to being hard-pressed in a blind taste test to differentiate between Oregon blackberry and blackberry from any other region. But what I could not detect are the notes of cassis, kirsch or crushed gravel. In the case of the crushed gravel, at least I know what that is, but I have never tried it.. I don’t actually know what either cassis or kirsch are. I also missed the licorice. That’s not the worst of it, I also missed the Zante currant (what’s a Zante currant? Is that a particularly flavorful currant?) , the boysenberry and black plum, as well as the crushed herbs, accents of cigar box, crushed herbs, and most certainly the pencil shavings.

I suspect the people that write these descriptions are having a secret contest to see who can come up with the most absurd description of a wine. Is it really possible for a wine to have that many distinct flavors? I’d like to do a test where 10 different wine experts were given a blind taste test, and compare the descriptions they produce. If 7/10 of them come up with crushed gravel, accents of a cigar box, pencil shavings, and some overlap on all of the different berries, then okay. I really am curious: Can people really discern so many distinct, nuanced flavors in a single wine? How many years of study does that take? I don’t know, I guess I’ll suspend belief. With my freed up schedule, this seems like a worthy area of study.