First Things First

“Wine cheers the sad, revives the old, inspires the young, makes weariness forget his toil”

The mystique of wine can be very attractive, but it can also be very intimidating. The first thing one must do, professional or amateur is “smash” the walls that you perceive that surrounds the mystery of wine. It is not brain surgery, or working out mathematical logarithms. There is no right or wrong when it comes to what you like to drink. You either like what you are drinking, or you don’t and the good news is nobody can prove you wrong. Nine times out of ten the person standing by your table in a restaurant with bottle in hand waiting for you to taste the wine he has just poured knows less than you do now, and certainly less after you have read this presentation. In order to dismantle the mystique attached to wine it is necessary to have some basic knowledge on how wine is made. You will be able to identify what you like and what you don’t like. You will eliminate standing in a wine shop looking for a special bottle of wine for a dinner party and feeling so totally overwhelmed that you just pick a bottle with a nice label and big price ticket hoping that your guests enjoy your “dice roll”.

The thing my partners identified in that small restaurant in Canada some 20 years ago was that wine was fermented grape juice. Let’s look at what fermentation is. Fermentation is the process by which grape juice turns into wine. The formula for this process is:      Sugar + Yeast = Alcohol + Carbon Dioxide

Both the sugar and the yeast occur naturally on the skin of the grape. The fermentation process ends when all the sugar has been converted into alcohol, or when the alcohol level has reached 15%, which kills off the remaining yeast. The carbon Dioxide dissipates into the air in most wines except Champagne and bubbly wines where it is retained by a special process.

When you think of wine you think of France, Italy, and California. Ever wonder why? Many factors come into producing a good wine including the right soil, weather conditions, but I think it has a lot to do with history and culture. I can only liken wine production to food production…you have good chefs, poor chefs and fantastic chefs. You can start with the same quality ingredients spend the same amount of time preparing the meal and end up with totally different results. If the great chef has inferior ingredients the results are inferior. However the combination of the best quality ingredients and the best quality chef is a unforgettable experience. There are definite and specific limitations on where vines can grow, and limitations on growing season, the number of days of sunlight, rainfall, soil quality and soil drainage. The right balance of all these factors in the hands of a top quality “chef” makes the difference between good, fair and excellent wines. There are many different kinds of grapes used to make wines and we will discuss this in great detail later in this blog, and some of the vines that are used have taken 40 years to grow. Red grapes need a longer growing season than the white grapes and so they are usually from the warmer and most southerly regions. Don’t be fooled however, white wine can be made from red grapes. The color of the wine comes entirely from the grape skin. If you remove the skin immediately after the harvest no color is imparted to the wine.  Champagne is made this way with red grapes and so is Californian Zinfandel. So you can see how important it is to know the regions of the world where wine is made. Why is it important to know about the year wine is made? The year or vintage gives you an idea as to the weather conditions of the harvest. Was there frost, was there enough sun, was there too much rain, not enough rain, was there any mildew…all these affect the wines taste. Every year is different weather conditions so by learning the years you are learning what the weather was like while the grapes were growing and during harvest time.

The most common question I am asked when people discover that I collect wine, and more importantly make wine,  is “how old is your oldest bottle of wine” It is a good question and I have some old wines, but most people do not realize that 90% of the wine produced in the world are meant to consume within 1 year. A basic fallacy is that all wine gets better with age. Let me explain what I mean. Tannin is a natural compound that comes from the skins, stems and pips of the grapes and acts as a preservative. In young wines tannin can be very astringent and makes the wine taste very bitter. The better wines made in renown Chateaus have stronger tannins and are therefore better kept with time to drink at a later date when the tannins have had time to mellow. To understand tannins you must just bite into a grape seed to taste what I am talking about.  To summarize I would say that the taste of wine is linked directly to it’s chemical composition and that of it’s grapes, it’s method of aging, and it’s wine making techniques. The grape variety, the soil, the region, the climate, the year of vintage, the cultivation practices, the techniques of vindication or the “recipe” the chef uses, and the storage and aging conditions encompass now what I once knew as Bingo Juice. No longer do I however, just drink it to experience the “Bingo” you feel after a couple of glasses. I now understand what John Mortimer meant when he said “The point of drinking wine is…to taste sunlight trapped in a bottle, and to remember some stony slope in Tuscany or a village by the Gironde”

It is an amazing liquid, full of spirtual majesty and beauty, nourishing and miraculous.

Under the “B” for best – Superlative wine, absolutely the best in class, Outstanding! Hard to find anything better

Under  the “I” for interesting – Good, special qualities, no major defects.

Under the “N” for no good – Below acceptability, passably drinkable.

Under the “G” for great – Outstanding characteristics, excellent wine.

Under the “O” for oopsie – Completely no good, undrinkable, “Oh oh, what a mistake”

Although sometimes you don’t know what to expect from a bottle of wine, I make a practice of only drinking the “BIG” wines, wines that fall into the “B” for Best, the “I” for Interesting and the “G” for Great. The other wines just speak for themselves. Wine that is NO GOOD and Oopsies spell “NO”, and I will have no part of them. I don’t want to waste time or money on “Oopsies”. You are throwing your money away when you buy an INEXPENISVE or BAD bottle of wine (just because of the price) that falls into the “NO” grouping…as you either don’t enjoy it or you don’t drink it. Buying a lousy bottle of wine because it is priced well is spending too much money and a luxury I cannot afford. Whatever the price may be, wine that is surely worth more than the money that it costs to buy. As Jancis Robinson said “Every glass of wine we drink represents a whole year of vineyard cultivation, and perhaps several years of effort in the winery…yet most of us throw it down our throats, without even trying to ‘read it’ “ This presentations primary directive is to look at the “BIG” wines and regions produced in the world today. Hopefully the Bingo Juice concept of understanding wine will be magically transformed into a Vine to Wine understanding, which we come to realize is God’s gift to mankind.

To Be Continued

Understanding and appreciating the not-so-simple subject of wine

A personal testimony: About 20 years ago in a small restaurant in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, I was sitting with my business partners having dinner and exchanging small talk when one of them asked me if I wanted any Bingo Juice with dinner. I was completely dumfounded. “What in the world is Bingo Juice”  I asked quite naively. They laughed “ Bingo Juice, you know what it is, fermented grape juice, have a couple of glasses and BINGO you get some personality” .Well, I had a couple of glasses with them that night and realized that they had hit the nail right on the head. Although I had ordered and drank a lot of bottles of wine over the years it really was just Bingo Juice to me. I knew nothing about wine except it was either red or white grapes, which I have come to realize now that even that assumption was erroneous. The realization that I knew nothing about wine except the “Bingo” feeling was the motivation I needed to learn something about the mysteries and magic of wine.  I then began my life long journey into understanding and appreciating fermented grape juice. I began simply by ready books and magazines. I made systematic visits to wine stores and merchants, and attacked the inventory on the shelves. I joined wine clubs and went to wine testings throughout the city. I decided since most valuable wine came from France I should learn the French language. I traveled to where they made the stuff in France, all the time tasting and trying to understand what Bingo Juice really was. I decided later to get involved in the wine business and with my partners and have opened in Pasadena, California.. We have many possibilities for new stores and potential  partners that we are exploring at the moment, having lots of fun and educating people in the art of making and enjoying wine. This journey that I chose to walk really never ends, I am learning all the time, however, many of my dearest friends and family have continually asked me to help them find and enjoy the quintessential bottle of wine, that which was just Bingo juice a few years ago. Call it “plonk”, “Bingo Juice” or in the words of Ernest Hemmingway  “the most civilized THING  in the world”. The intellectual attractions of wine as less quickly understood than the sensory attractions. Wine is, like philosophy, a subject or a field of study. One can talk about wine from the simple exchanges of liking or disliking the glass you are drinking, or move to discussions much more complex involving history, geography, topography, physics, chemistry, law and commerce.  The purpose of this presentation is to provide you with a basic foundation to build upon, something to “whet” your appetite and to create enough interest for you to continue to learn, to come into one of our stores where we will teach you how you can make your own wine, designed exactly to your particular tastes. This presentation is designed simply and easy to read with helpful information for you to experiment with.

There are all kinds of rating systems of wine today, the most common being a rating out of 100 points. These are well worth reading and considering as the professional wine tasters have developed an excellent sense of taste. However, I have learnt over the years that the most desirable wine starts with a smile and it ends with a smile. For our purposes I would like to suggest the following simple system to rate your wines. I have found most wines fall into 1 of 5 categories....To be continued