One More Detour on the Writing Road

I like reds, too, and drink them more than whites. But every once in a while, I prefer a white. I confess that I don't know what the oak taste is--I may have drunk Chardonnays that were too oak-y, but if that indeed was the case, it must not have bothered me.

Year ago, I joined a Wine of the Month Club. Inexpensive wines, less than $10/bottle. Every month, I'd receive one white and one red. This was at the beginning of the Merlot boom, and it seemed that every red they sent me was a Merlot and 9 out of 10 were bad Merlots. Weedy. Herbal. Astringent. Figured that out without ever taking a wine-tasting course, so I know I can pick out flavors, at least in general.

And I still am not sure what "oak" tastes like.

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And I still am not sure what "oak" tastes like.

Me either. But then, I don't make a habit of chewing on trees.

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Chardonnay is popular. Most producers make one that's at least drinkable.

Most wine geeks don't look for "at least drinkable". They're looking for something with a distinctive different taste. They want a special wine, ideally one that will go with a special meal or course in a meal.

I've not tried many Chenin Blancs, but Pinot Grigio is my default fish wine. It tends to cook *well*, and it's tends to have an edge to it that Chardonnay doesn't have. That makes it work better as a poaching liquid for fish. And well, you can drink the rest of the bottle with dinner. That tends to set up nice echoes of flavor for the meal. It also holds up well to cheese or pasta.

Our default wines are syrah, grenache and cabernet sauvignon based (Spanish riojas and Aussie syrah/cabernet blends are eternal favorites). Nice sturdy reds that will stand up to beef and make both the beef and the wine better. Wines get lots of bonus points if they work well with a salad, or chocolate, or with chicken. This means we favor fairly fruity reds, with not much in the way of tannins. They're generally not very light, or lean. Think steamroller.

If I am buying a white, I look for something similarly flexible and sturdy. Reisling goes nicely with Thai and other very spicy food. It gets bought a fair bit. It doesn't hurt that Reisling tends to do nicely cooked. Chardonnay is nice, but a lot of Chardonnays don't cook as well as I'd like. Chardonnay blended with Semillon cooks better, so if I can find that, I get in preference to a straight Chard. Light, lean and spritzy isn't much use if you're cooking with wine.

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What do you think of the Rosemount Estate blends? I used to default to Rosemount wines for years, as they're inexpensive and, I think, pretty good. But I felt I was getting in a rut and made an effort to branch out.

That Mankas Vineyards sampler I bought during the summer turned out well. All reds. I need to order another one.

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Rosemount is one of the brands that we get a lot (maybe around 1/3 of the time). They're reliably good, so if we've had a few clunkers or need something that will by god be *good*, they get grabbed.

I'll poke my partner to see if he can remember some of the other reliably good ones. I have no memory for vinyard names. I remember grapes and flavors.

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Good to know that I defaulted to something that's considered decent... *g*

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Honestly, most wine snobs make wine sound all complicated. It's not. You drink what you like, and maybe have fun trying to describe *why* what you're tasting is nice. Hopefully you don't have many nights where you're left with your only consolation being "at least I can say exactly *why* I hated this wine!"

My lone advantage over most people with pedestrian tastes (and mine are *very* pedestrian indeed - prima donna wines have no place in my kitchen) is I got trained in taste testing young. So if a wine snob tries to snob at me, I can snob right back :)

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So if a wine snob tries to snob at me, I can snob right back :)

Go you! :-)

There's a Texas vineyard I tend to like. I don't know if you see Messina Hoff in your areas, but if you do, give it a shot. Don't ask me to describe their wines cuz I can't except to say I've yet to be disappointed. Even if they're not to your specific taste, you should at least be able to cook with them.

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mevennen.livejournal.com

I like some Chardonnay (though it must be said that I am, on occasion, the sort of person who, when asked 'What does it taste like?' replied: 'it tastes like wine.'

However, we do have a wine merchant and he has brought some Chardonnays round which are very oaky, too much so for my personal taste. But some have been very nice.

I hate wine snobbery, though. If you like it, drink it, even if everyone 'in the know' tells you it tastes like paint stripper. It's much less precise than some people like to pretend.

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It's much less precise than some people like to pretend.

I tend to fall in the "tastes like wine" camp, especially in restaurants. Unless I'm with someone more knowledgable, I tend to default to the house red or white. I know I'll be priced-gouged, but not as severely as if I dug into the depths of the wine list. Given that I know I can get a bottle of Rosemount or Beringer for $10-$12, and will pay double that in a restaurant, I dont want to think about how much I'd pay for something considered really good. The best Chardonnay I ever had cost $30 in the wine shop. Only found it that one time, and have since forgotten the name.

Not a connoisseur.

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equesgal.livejournal.com

I love a good Rhine Wine (which is looked upon with contempt also) and a good Reisling. I've never been disappointed by a Reisling yet.

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Aren't they sweet?

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merlinpole.livejournal.com

Not all Rheislings [Reislings?... seen the spelling deteriorate...] are sweet, particularly not these days when dry has been majorly the vogue (compare Australian shiraz with Spanish shiraz... I find most dry wines bitter and nasty for my taste buds, though I;ve only relatively recently had it dawn on me that different parts of the tongue react differently to the same wine and taste different things in it)

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I have no time for wine snobs. There're only wines you like, wines you don't and wines you haven't tried yet. I think my first wines were Chardonnays and Reislings. I liked the very sweet German wines in my teens (even *MY* folks started exploring wines in the 70s ;-). These days my tastes have gone much more to reds (which I used to hate). People say your tastes 'mature', but I think that's a poor term. It leads to the idea that if you like sweeter wines or some other 'starter' wine you're somehow *immature*. There does seem to be a sort of taste progression, but it's not hard and fast; not universal. There's certainly not any actual 'value' attached to it.

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Mom's not a wine drinker. Dad's taste ran to very sweet ports and cream sherries, which I can't stand.

Editor took me out to lunch during Torcon and introduced me to good port. My barbarian's palate betrayed me. Couldn't finish the glass and wound up giving it to her. Couldn't fault the complexity--it's rich stuff. But not to my taste.

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I've never been able to tolerate port or cognac. I used to buy my dad a bottle of Courvoisier every year for Christmas. It would last him just about a year, mostly because no one else could stand the stuff so he never had to share it. :-):-)

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excessor.livejournal.com

If you ever get a chance, you must visit the Robert Mondavi Winery (http://www.robertmondaviwinery.com/home.asp) in Oakville, CA (in the northern California wine country). The place is big, clean, and they give a wonderful tour—I think it's free—that describes how wine is made and stored. There you can see and smell the oak barrels; you'll never mistake the oaky taste in wine again.

I would also advise you go to a wine tasting class. How bad can it be? [grin] All wines are not created equal, and you'll find that in a varietal, there is wide range of tastes and notes. Those occur because of the kind of grape, the geography, the soil type, the weather, the region, and other factors. Most importantly, you'll start to appreciate the differences in wines.

One eye-opening experience for me was to taste Chardonnays. There's a wide variety of tastes in Chardonnay at various price levels: one $7 bottle might taste nothing like (and possibly better than) a $10 bottle. But you most definitely will taste a difference between a $20 bottle and an $8 bottle. A $40 bottle is very different again, in general. That said, it's very disappointing to find a $100 bottle that tastes no different than a $30 bottle, but it's all part of the (sometimes expensive) fun.

I don't think that Chardonnay is just part of the default starter set; it's just plentiful. If you get a chance, try a Domaine Drouhin (they're from Oregon) chardonnay. It's different from the Beringer, for sure.

We don't drink too much wine these days, but when we do we're very happy to try Pinot Noirs. I tend to like the ones from the Willamette Valley in Oregon and I think Pinot goes well with many kinds of food, except perhaps dessert. For a special meal like a turkey dinner, I'm most fond of a French regional wine called Châteauneuf-du-Pape. It tends to have a peppery taste overlaid with hints of dark fruit jams.

It's not even 10:30 am here in California and now I want a drink…

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Oh, thanks for the suggestions!

I should see whether any of the wine stores I visit offer classes. I really should, because that's the only way I'll ever work up the nerve to try wines outside my comfort zone.

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excessor.livejournal.com

You're welcome. I forgot to mention the most salient point: the best wine is the wine you like. Don't let other people tell you something is good or bad just because they like it. It's like saying you can't like the color green because someone else can't stand it. That said, it's fun to be challenged on the stuff. I used to hate dessert wines until I had some wines that had been paired with the food. In fact, my favorite visits to high-end restaurants involve wine pairings because I don't know much about it on my own and I would only very rarely buy a $70 bottle.

So there are two kinds of classes to go for: one is a wine appreciation class, in which each different class does a blind tasting of a different varietal, hopefully led by someone knowledgeable whose credential is beyond having liked wine for many years.

The second kind of class will tell you about wine pairings: what wines go with different foods and why. No one ever talks about why you might pair one wine over another to specific kind of food.

In my area, such classes are offered at the local community colleges. Wine stores often conduct or know of such classes, but be careful that it's not just a ploy to get you buy wine from them. That's ok if you know about it ahead of time.

One of the best things about learning about wine is that your tastes change as you grow older. I used to drink wine from a box; I like to think that my palate is a little more discriminating now.

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One of the best things about learning about wine is that your tastes change as you grow older. I used to drink wine from a box; I like to think that my palate is a little more discriminating now.

I started out with $3.95 jug chianti. Yanno, ya grow. *g*

Wine pairings can be important. I met a flavor scientist a few years ago who discussed this. The wrong food pairing can throw a perfectly good wine right off.

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The way I learned about different grapes was to try them. Sometimes I get a "dud", where the wine is just not very good, or doesn't go with the meal. But I'd never have known I liked syrah without trying it. And the reason I know I like riojas is we went through around 3-4 bottles of an incredibly cheap French wine (so cheap it was labelled with grenache rather than a region name) and it was *good*. So I looked up what wines had grenache and... Jackpot.

Of course, the willingness to try anything has left me with the occasional glass of turpentine tasting wine. Concord grapes made into wine are Not My Friends.

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merlinpole.livejournal.com

There's a store that has tastings most Friday nights a few mile from where I live... a couple other places have less frequent tastings, and this year and two years ago, there was wine samples at the official opening ceremonies marking Mahoney's set up of lots of (artifical) Christmas trees with all sorts of different decorations and trimmings (most for sale literally off the trees or wherever else they're set up) event at the original Mahoney's Garden Center facility in Winchester, Massachusetts, on US 3 (which is a local road and not limited access there), a few mies south of where Readercon has been.

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lagringa.livejournal.com

I just don't care for any white wines. When I was younger, friends and folks tried to get me liking whites by giving me chardonnay, which tastes like turpentine to me. In fact, most white wines taste somewhere between paint thinner and kerosene to me. :-) I think that I honestly must have messed up taste buds or something.

But reds...now there's a different story. I can taste infinitely subtleties in red wines, it seems.

I am partial to Bordeaux and Shiraz myself and prefer French and Washington State reds to Caifornia reds.

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Most of the reds I've tried have been Aussie or California. I really need to get out more.

Chardonnays that I like veer toward buttery/apple-y. Should've written down the blasted names...

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mevennen.livejournal.com

Someone might have answered this already, but I asked my (much more knowledgeable) partner about this and he remarked that a lot of the snobbery about Chardonnay is simply due to its ubiquity (wine snobs don't like to drink anything that everyone else likes) and also because wines that are supposed to be oak-aged are often nowadays put in steel barrels with oak chips, rather than actual oak barrels, and it does make a difference to the taste.

I am not wild about oaky wines. They come under the subtle category that I call 'tastes funny.'

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(wine snobs don't like to drink anything that everyone else likes)

They sound like book snobs. And every other brand of snob, come to that.

I really must learn what 'oak' tastes like. I probably know, I just don't know.

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kalligraphy.livejournal.com

Chardonnays tend to lack complexity. They are popular with the public, who generally just want a wine that tastes like wine. In such a case a Chardonnay is just fine. But people who really study wine tend to look for something a bit more special.

And important things to remember is that different regions have different flavors. The Alsace region of France for instance tends to have a strong petroleum flavor. If you are familiar with the different regions you can actually tell what whine came from what region based on it's particular flavors and how they arrive. Is there butter, lemon grass, chocolate does it flow into petroleum, dirt or barnyard flavors. Ultimately the wine needs to have character. Personally when it comes to serious wine drinking, it takes serious money. Sure a $10 bottle of wine is fine with an average dinner, but when it comes down to really tasting wine, you need to invest some money. A Chateuneuf de Pape Blanc, or a good Burgundy Blanc are going to cost you from $30-50 a bottle and if you are paying attention you will notice the difference. Personally when it comes to serious wine drinking I prefer French whites and Italian reds.

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