Remembering Charles Roy - Strong, Decent & Ethical

I'm going to turn 60 later this year. I think most people my age have thought about how they might be remembered when they are gone.

In today's Napa Valley Register, Pierce Carson wrote a column about Charles Roy. 

Charles Roy passed away on January 30th, 2010.  Charles was a client of Piña Vineyard Management. But he was more than just a client.

His obituary didn't tell the whole story:
http://www.napavalleyregister.com/news/local/obituaries/article_a7a05a38-13b8-11df-81d0-001cc4c03286.html

So it was nice to see Pierce's column go beyond the obituary:
http://www.napavalleyregister.com/lifestyles/food-and-cooking/wine/columnists/pierce-carson/article_7e846abc-1797-11df-988a-001cc4c03286.html

I was not as close to Charles as many folks here, including my brother John, who remembered him this way in the comment section of Pierce's column:

Charles was an amazing man. His enthusiasm was always present, even in difficult times. I will always remember him as a strong, decent, ethical man; a joy to work with and to call a friend.

John C. Piña

Winery Dog Yogi, Part 2 - The Orvis Catalog

 

Yogi Bear

For a mixed-breed mutt from the pound,

isn’t he a handsome devil?

I thought so, so when Orvis announced the “Orvis Dog Book Cover Contest - 2009”, I decided to send in the following picture. There was a small cash prize for the winner, but that wasn’t my reason to send it in.

The Orvis entry instructions were: Please include your full name, mailing address, daytime phone number, e-mail contact information and the name of your dog with your submission.

I submitted the picture giving credit to the photographer, Joe Bauer. To let the Orvis folks know that Joe was “okay” with my submitting “his” photo, I cc’d him with that email, as well as my wife, Cindy.

Cindy had been diagnosed with a serious illness the previous month. So when Joe got the email he replied:

“...and remember, if we win the $, it goes toward medical expenses. :-)”

I pretended to interpret his statement incorrectly and typed in the following reply:

“That’s good, cuz Yogi wants his nuts back!”

So I’m thinking that I’m pretty funny. As I transmitted, I thought that Joe & Cindy would get a chuckle out of that.

It was about .25 seconds after I hit the transmit key that I realized my “Reply to All” also went to the folks at Orvis.

OOPS!

Removing Orvis from the next email that I sent to Joe & Cindy:

“Oh S#*&! Didn’t realize that Orvis was on that last cc list.

To which my Cindy replied:

“Well, we can kiss that money good bye. I will explain to Yogi that it was his Dad’s and Uncle Joe’s fault his modeling career went down the tubes!”

 

================================

 

Expecting that the Orvis folks would delete that entry from the competition, I decided to submit another Joe Bauer photo of Yogi:

 

This photo was taken at Lawson’s Landing (Dillon Beach). Yogi loves to watch the campers, dogs and cattle pass by our 5th wheel trailer that is parked there, so I cut a hole in the fence for him. Everybody gets a kick out of seeing Yogi with his head out the hole. It’s not uncommon for small children to call his name when he’s not at his post looking out. Yogi is better known and has a much larger “presence” there than Cindy & I do, and we’re okay with that.

Not too long after that, the Orvis folks contacted Joe for authorization to use a picture of Yogi. We thought that was a good sign, but time passed and we didn’t hear anything else from them.

Eventually, I found out that Orvis posted a video on YouTube:

Funny and Cute Dog Photo Contest Entries for Orvis Cover Dog Contest 2009

I started watching it and thought to myself, Dang, these are some great looking dogs! No wonder Yogi didn’t make it in there.

And then, 2 minutes and 15 seconds into the video, the following image popped up!

 

There are some great pictures in that video, check it out!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn45W7S-dXI

 

Answers to an earlier post

In an earlier post, I challenged my readers to identify the 12 locations in the above picture (Click on it to enlarge).  The answers are next to the small images at the bottom.  Only one person got them all correct: Johnnie White Jr.  Johnnie is a fellow employee of Piña Vineyard Management, but he did it without any help from me.

More information on some of the locations

The Keig barn is now part of the Round Pond Estate.


Rubicon was the former Inglenook Winery. From our mom’s side of the family, we have a historical tie to Inglenook. The following excerpt is from our winery website:

“The family has been making its home in the Napa Valley since 1856 when their progenitor Bluford Stice led a wagon train into the valley from Missouri. The Piñas’ great-great-grandfather Bluford Stice’s son Lafayette was a farmer and winemaker, owning vineyards where Stice Lane is today, just south of St. Helena; he was a leader in the wine industry of Napa Valley at the turn of the twentieth century as the winemaker at Inglenook Winery.”

We also have a tie to Caymus Winery. Chuck Wagner is a 1st cousin. Chuck’s mother & our mother were sisters.


Many years ago, the Beckstoffer property was home to our great uncle, Jim Pavon, who managed the vineyard.  I mentioned in an earlier post that he had trained Rock Hudson to bud for a scene in the movie, This Earth is Mine.


The author was Arthur Hailey (April 5, 1920 – November 24, 2004). Originally from England, Arthur lived in the Napa Valley in the late 1960’s, before moving to the Bahamas.

His Bibliography includes:

• Runway Zero-Eight (1958)
• The Final Diagnosis (1959)
• In High Places (1960)
• Hotel (1965)
• Airport (1968)
• Wheels (1971)
• The Moneychangers (1975)
• Overload (1979)
• Strong Medicine (1984)
• The Evening News (1990)
• Detective (1997)

Pruning Contest

Francisco Alfaro of Piña Vineyard Management

Piña Vineyard Management sends 2 employees to participate in the above event each year.

The contestants are judged on pruning technique and speed of pruning. Each contestant will prune 6 vines (timed for speed) and then a panel of judges scores the contestants on their technique. The scoring is weighted heavier on technique than speed. The 8 highest scoring contestants then compete in the finals where the contestant with the highest combined score is declared the winner.


To determine which of our pruners would participate, Piña Vineyard Management held their own pruning contest on Friday, Feb 5th.

Prior to the start of the contest, the rules were explained and the contestants were told what the judges would be looking for.  And then, 2 sets of 3 pruners gave it their best effort.

When everybody had finished pruning, the scores were tabulated the judges

Alfonso Mora, Michael Lewis and John Derr.

Francisco Alfaro was the top scorer for the day.

Worth noting is that Francisco placed 4th in the Napa Valley

Grapegrower pruning contest 2 years ago.

Click on the following to see him in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Bg9a1GLx3o

Finishing a close second was Olvin Garcia.

Olvin and Francisco

will represent Piña Vineyard Management at the Napa Valley

Grapegrower pruning contest this coming Thursday.

An Apple, a Rusty Truck & the Bump ...

An Apple, a Rusty Truck & the Bump
in the bottom of your Wine Bottle

By Ross Workman

It’s all about oxygen, really. When you cut an apple in half it will pretty quickly start to turn brown. Or, if you leave the old pick-up truck behind the barn long enough, it will rust. And if you leave half a bottle of wine on the kitchen counter for a few days it won’t taste very good. These are all the result of oxidation. Lots of stuff changes for the worse when exposed to oxygen long enough. Oxygen is the enemy of wine.


When people started making wine thousands of years ago they didn’t have a good way to keep it from oxidizing. So, unless it was fresh from the fermentation, the wine they drank was oxidized. But, since that was the way it always tasted, that was the accepted style until people figured out a way to store the wine keeping it from exposure to oxygen. Bowls evolved into pots and then into jugs that you could put a stopper in. Big clay containers called amphorae were used to transporting wine, the kind of things that are dragged up from the bottom of the Mediterranean now and then. None of these containers sealed very well.


Then the art of glass making was developed, and, in particular, glass blowing. By blowing molten glass into a mold, the artisan could make a bottle which could be stoppered with something, eventually a cork. But, when he disconnected his blow pipe from the new bottle, there was a little dab of glass left on the bottom, so it was tippy and wouldn’t stand up right. The fix was to push the pipe up into the bottom of the still molten bottle before disconnecting it. Then the troublesome dab would not be on the surface of the bottle that rested on the table. Instead it was up in the depression in the bottom of the bottle that we now call the “punt.”


Obviously we don’t use hand blown bottles anymore, so the punt isn’t really necessary. But, since it is there, some waiters will stick their thumb in it and use it to pour the wine in a way they think looks cool. And some wineries will order bottles with a deep punt to give the impression that the bottle is bigger. Bigger, heavier bottles somehow are thought to imply more valuable wine.


Actually, the bottle is not as critical as the closure. Corks do not provide a perfect air-tight seal. A few molecules of oxygen get past the cork and into the wine and do a tiny amount of oxidizing. That is part of the process by which the wine evolves as it ages in your cellar. Or, if you just age your wine in the back seat on the way home from the store, not much evolution occurs and the wine tastes fresher.


Enter the screw cap. It provides an air-tight seal, if properly installed. Hence, you don’t get the same kind of micro-oxygenated evolution as a cork provides. Now if somebody knew how many molecules of oxygen per month the cork allowed to pass, the screw cap engineers could probably match that with a screw cap. But I don’t think anybody has figured that out yet. So mostly we find screw caps on bottles of wine not meant for evolving in the bottle. Often they are on wines that the winemaker expressly does not want to change with time in the bottle.


Gradually, the wine-drinking public’s impression that screw caps were a sure sign of a crummy wine has died down as more good wines are coming into the house under screw caps. But the sommeliers haven’t yet figured out how to appear to be as useful and expert as they used to seem when pulling a cork. Unless some better technology comes along, we will be twisting off more bottle tops every year, though there will still be some corks around forever, probably.


But just imagine how the closure question would have developed if the screw cap had been invented before the cork. If we had been drinking out of screw capped bottles for a few centuries, we would be used to and favor fresher, less evolved wines. Then, say somebody invented the cork closure and tried to introduce it to replace screw caps. He’d have to persuade people that a little in-the-bottle oxidation was a good thing. And that corks were preferable, even though some irreducible minimum percentage of them wrecked the wine through the cork taint defect called TCA. And he would have created a need for all manner of tools to pull the corks out of the bottles instead of just twisting off the tops. Now that would have been a really hard innovation to sell!


So mind the oxygen and be thankful for the punt.



Cheers!


Ross Workman

Winery Dog Yogi, Part 1 - Finding Yogi

Chances are, those of you that have visited our winery during an event have met Yogi.

Yogi is our lovable Mutt. He appears to be at least half Black Lab, but his heritage was not available from the pound.


After our purebred Vizslas, Sam & Tia, passed on, Cindy & I agreed that we would not have another dog in our lives. But that if we did, it would be a Yellow Lab.


But after about a year, Cindy started telling me about different dogs she had seen on the Napa County Animal Shelter website. I would remind her of our agreement and she wouldn't mention it again for a few days. I was concerned about what type of dog she might see pictured, feel sorry for, and bring home. I had always wanted a dog that would retrieve sticks & balls. I tried to train our Vizslas to retrieve, but after about the third throw, they would just look at me with the expression: “What’s the point of this?”


So, I too started checking out the pictures on the website. If you want to take a peek at the dogs, here’s the website:


http://www.co.napa.ca.us/petadoption/petlisting.asp?species=dog

Cindy was told that black dogs are harder to place so it seemed a minor concession to consider Black Labs over Yellow Labs.


It didn’t take long for me to stumble on the following pup waiting for adoption.

I sent the link to Cindy at work and the phone rang about 30 seconds later: “I want to go see him”.


We went to the Shelter and filled out the Adoption Application. We were initially told that Bronx was a stray that went unclaimed. We were interviewed and then we went to a small room where an attendant brought in “Bronx”. Bronx was friendly, but in continual motion appearing anxious. Once the attendant felt we were all safe, she left the room. We visited with Bronx for about 15 minutes and decided we wanted to adopt him. Cindy is much more observant than I am and she noticed 2 significant things about Bronx. First, he was very “connected” to the attendant. When she left the room, he kept trying to see her and seemed to get even more anxious. Second, Cindy had detected a very slight, but noticeable limp. At the desk, they said that all pets are thoroughly checked out by a vet and that Bronx seemed to be in perfect health. Thinking that he had been a stray with a temporary shelter name of Bronx, we decided that if we got him, we’d rename him. We were going to name him Bear since he has a big, wide ole' black head like a black bear. But we go camping and didn’t think fellow campers would like to hear us yelling “Bear”. So Cindy suggested “Yogi (bear)” and I thought that was perfect. Think it's just a coincidence that Yogi Bear's girlfriend's name was Cindy Bear???

Later, we would find out that Bronx was not a stray, that he had been dropped off at the shelter. That made more sense considering the information provided on the website about him. Even so, we decided to call him Yogi.

We didn’t find out for a few days if we would be able to adopt Yogi, but when we did, Cindy bought him a new bed and toys. Over the next few days, we learned that Yogi did not handle being away from us very well, that he had separation anxiety. Cindy had noticed that he seemed anxious when the attendant left him alone with us. Then after being checked out by our vet, and a few more diagnostic appointments, we were told that Yogi needed an operation on his shoulder… an operation costing several thousand dollars. So in less than 2 weeks time, we found out that Yogi had separation anxiety and needed an expensive operation. I would have considered taking him back to the shelter and waiting for another dog without these problems, but Cindy wouldn’t. She already felt a bond with him, even though he didn’t seem to completely accept us for several months. So we got his shoulder operated on, nursed him back to good health and started working on his separation anxiety. After working with him for the last year and a half, we can now go out to dinner leaving him at home. But we advise that you not visit during that time - He guards HIS home.


I have a hunch that Yogi's first family gave him up because they found out he needed an expensive operation. They might have even suspected that at the shelter.


Had they warned us of his separation anxiety and shoulder problem, we would not have adopted him. And it would have been our loss.


One night, less than a month after we got Yogi, he was laying next to Cindy on the sofa. She was softly stroking his fur, looking down at him and smiling. She caught me watching and quickly said: “You’re not number 2!” I replied: “Oh S#%&, so now I’m number 3?”

Stay tuned for Winery Dog Yogi, Part 2 - The Orvis catalog

A wet & soggy Napa Valley

The above picture was taken on the afternoon of Jan 15th, 2010

(click on these pictures to enlarge)

Just for fun, I thought I would mark several locations of

interest on the picture and challenge my readers to identify them

Relax! I’m going to give you the names of the locations, you just need to match the letters to numbers.


A) Beckstoffer Vineyards Headquarters
B) Cakebread Cellars
C) Caymus Vineyards
D) Corner of Skellenger & Conn Creek Rd
E) Former residence of well known author
F) Honig Winery
G) Old Keig barn
H) Piña Napa Valley
I) Robert Mondavi Winery
J) Round Pond Winery
K) Rubicon Estates
L) Rutherford


Even folks that are familiar with the area will have to use the process of elimination to get them all sorted out. But, hey, some of these are no-brainers, too!


Think you can do it? If so, email me your answers (Ranndy@PinaNapaValley.com) and I’ll note the correct responders when I post the answers a week from now. I’ll also provide some additional information on some of the locations (IE: the well known author).

Ranndy

PS: Yogi post still coming

Cindy says Goodbye

Blake & his Grammy

Cindy says Goodbye

No, she's not leaving me, she's "retiring" from being HR director at Hess Winery due to health problems. As some of you already know, Cindy is a pancreatic cancer survivor. The Whipple procedure was a success at removing the tumor in her Pancreas, but it altered how lots of other parts of her "system" function. Due to the side effects, she no longer has the stamina required for that stressful position. I'm convinced that when we remove her from that stress, her health and stamina will significantly improve.

Wednesday night, she went to dinner with the Hess Management team. Over the course of the evening, those managers heaped lots of praise on her. She came home feeling really good and she wanted to compose a nice goodbye letter to everybody at Hess... and would I help her?

The discussion continued and after a few more glasses of wine, I suggested a video Goodbye message, and she went for it. We created the following extraordinary video in just two takes, honest!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsZbFkbLIqM

And this was the 1st take, Cindy says Goodbye – Outtake :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzoA4onqTcY

Now some of you young-uns out there may not be familiar with that song. But the following should be very familiar to those in the 50+ category:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcYsO890YJY

Lastly, one of my readers sent me a message asking me to start writing again. It has been a while since I spent much time writing a post. We put our Yountville house on the market in the Fall and getting it ready to sell, cleaning out the garage, and fixing little things has been an all consuming effort - I apologize.

My next blog will be about Yogi, our black lab mix winery dog. 

If you know Yogi, please send me your impression of him or

what breeds (in addition to lab) you think he might have in him.

Happy Trails to you, until we meet again.

Terroir or not terroir? That is the question!

By Ross Workman

Terroir or not terroir? That is the question!

Don’t bother to look it up. Probably all you’ll find is that it is a French word for soil. But in the wine world it is a whole lot more than that. Expansively, it can mean the sum total of all the physical factors affecting a vineyard, including soil type, minerals therein, slope, angle to the sun, water table and drainage, daily, seasonal and annual weather patterns and just about anything else you can think of. The idea is that this vineyard is unique, unlike any other, impossible to replicate, sui generis and, therefore, the grapes and the wine coming from this vineyard are similarly unique. The wine has a sense of the place whence it came.

The believers in this almost metaphysical concept, and there are many, believe they can tell whether the wine has this sense of place. And these are not idiots; a great many of the most famous wine experts in the world are firm believers in terroir. Fanatics is not too strong a word. So it is worth trying to understand just how terroir works.

I hasten to confess I am not blessed with a gift for terroir. I love wine. Drink it every day. Usually more than once. Taste it blind every week. Have been doing it for decades. Take a lot of academic wine classes. Read volumes about it. But I just don’t get terroir. I’m a terroir agnostic, not an atheist. I don’t deny it exists; I just can’t tell if it does. I do not have the faith. And I kind of wish I did because the terroirists are getting something out of the wine that I am not.

When I drink wine I try to apply all of my senses to it. I look at its color, clarity, refractivity -- anything I can see. I smell it to sniff out all the aromas and bouquet (those are different, but that’s another story) that I can match against my smell memory bank, or I find myself charmed by ones I cannot identify. In my mouth, after the immediate first impression (aka “attack”), there are temperature, sweetness, bitterness, astringency, viscosity (aka “weight”), and texture to deal with, as well as flavors. I swallow it and contemplate the duration and character of the aftertaste (aka “finish”).

If you think about it, there are a hell of a lot of impressions and assessments of the wine that you can gather from the glass in your hand. What stumps me is identifying the sense of place in the wine. When I focus on analyzing it instead of just enjoying it, my senses tell me a lot of things about the wine itself, but they don’t tell me much about the vineyard. I can’t smell or taste the slope, drainage, wind direction, annual rainfall, etc. that make up the terroir. And if you can, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

This starts to get important when we get to the question of whether wine is better if it comes from a single place or results from blending wines from more than one place. For the terroirist, blending wines from different places erases a valuable element that he prizes. The non-terroirist, on the other hand, says “Hey, if the winemaker can make it taste better by putting in it something from here and there and there, then go for it!”

Since the wine world is filled with people making wine both ways, there is sort of a philosophical divide here. And it is not always a matter of free choice. Some countries, notably France and Italy, have enacted laws governing what is permitted to be blended with what in certain locations and circumstances. Truth-in-labeling laws almost everywhere govern what you can call the stuff depending on what you’ve put in it. Aussies have a charming way around that regulation and sell a lot of their wine without labels.

My guess is most people care a lot more about how the wine tastes to them than whether the winemaker respected or ignored the dictates of terroir. But our betters, the experts who judge, rate, write about and recommend wines for a living, often hold the concept of terroir as the sine qua non of a truly great wine. If it lacks that ephemeral sense of place, it can’t be great. And, since a lot of us lesser beings can’t taste the sense of place, we have to rely on their pronouncements of what is great and not great. More important matters than the quality of a bottle of wine have hinged on the truth revealed only to the anointed. Remember the Aztec high priests sacrificing virgins, perhaps slightly used, because they knew what was required to get a good corn crop.

Like so many other human foibles he exposed, Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels wrote about the philosophical divide between the Big-endians in Lilliput who made it a matter of conscience to break their eggs at the big end and the heretical Little-endians who broke theirs on the small end. Maybe “terroir or not terroir?” is just such a meaningless question. Unless you are blessed with the gift of tasting places in your wine. Or feel more comfortable if a high priest guides you to Truth and Greatness.

Cheers!

Ross Workman

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways . . .

Ranndy: The editing capabilities of this site are limited, especially in the formatting department. Ross submitted this file to me in perfect outline form, but I am not able to duplicate that layout.  I am not about to complain about it (not too much, anyway), because Google generously provides this site for free.  For any of you that might want to view the original document, let me know and I'll email it to you. Now, on to Ross:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways . . .


So wrote the Victorian poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, about her love of a man. The same question is posed here. But about a different object. This is about the love of wine. Let me count some of the ways. For there are so many ways we love wine.

1. We have loved wine for its health benefits. Historically, that sometimes has been because it was not water which was often polluted. The alcohol and acid in the wine kept it relatively free from harmful pathogens, so those who drank it reduced their exposure to water borne illness. Some think this accounts for much of the success of the Roman Legions in conquering, occupying and ruling a far flung empire. The conquered peoples were adapted to the bad stuff in their local waters as the Romans were not. But, by relying on their own wines, the invaders reduced their exposure to illnesses to which they were susceptible. Numerous modern health benefits of wine have been identified in recent decades. Although the alleged benefits are not scientifically proven, all my doctors, save one, drink wine regularly. The outlier plans to outlive me. And I him. We’ll see about that.

2. At a fundamental level, wine is just a tasteful beverage. Love of wine gets way more complicated than that, but one should not forget that the object of our affection is just grape juice, after all; grape juice that has been processed in a way that preserves it. We love it because it is handy, tastes good, comes in lots of different flavors, and makes us feel good. Not many other beverages can say all of that.

3. Like lots of beverages, wine gets consumed in various contexts. Often with food, but also often without it. By itself, we love to drink wine

o To warm us, as with mulled wine


o To cool us, as with wine that is chilled and sometimes mixed with fruit, think Strawberry Bowle in Germany or Clerico on the beach in Uruguay or, yes, wine coolers in America


o To celebrate births, holidays, anniversaries, the launching of ships and other important occasions when sparkling wine is irreplaceable


o To console us over the loss of a loved one at a wake


o To remind us of our faith in religious ceremonies


o To make us happy when we are together


o To cheer us up when we are alone


o The contexts in which we love wine by itself are myriad


I have a friend whose hard and fast rule is that he only drinks wine when he is alone, or when he is with someone. It’s not a bad rule.

4. When we get to the question of how we love wine with food, things get rather complicated. First, in which of the three logically possible modes are we?


A. Food Centered. Sometimes people see the wine as something that goes with the food.


B. Wine Centered. Other times we see the food as something that goes with the wine.


C. Balanced. Still other times we see the food and the wine as being in parallel, separate pleasures, simultaneous, but not necessarily inter-dependent.


Which mode you are in changes how you love the wine.


5. And what you think about the relationship of food and wine, and our love of both, changes in different circumstances. Like, for example


• Wine at a picnic


• Wine at a fine dinner in a restaurant


• Wine at home with leftovers on Tuesday night


• Wine with lunch


• Wine with a festive Sunday brunch


• Wine with salad


• Wine standing up with passed hors d’oeuvres


• Wine with hot dogs at a ball game


• Wine with dessert


• Wine at a tapas bar


• Wine with a lover -- before or after sex (bubbly wine recommended here)


• Wine with a large family meal, say, Thanksgiving Dinner


• Wine at a meal you would rather not be at, say, ditto

 

6. Talking about the love of wine with food, one unavoidably gets to the freighted question of “pairing” wine with assorted foods. We know this is something very special because we don’t “pair” other beverages with food very often. Maybe milk and cookies, tea and crumpets, beer and brats. I can’t think of anything to “pair” with bitter coffee. But with wine there are textbooks, lectures, careers, reputations, professions, friendships, and the ending of friendships, based on what foods to “pair” with what wines.


Maybe the threshold question is whether the decision about what wines we love with what foods is either 1.)Subjective, personal, idiosyncratic and nobody’s business but your own, or 2.) Objective, certain, universal, knowable and deeply involved with Right and Wrong.


If you believe #1, Subjective, then it gets easy. What wine goes with what food is what you like QED. End of game. Go forth and eat and drink together whatever you damned well please. If it tastes good, it is right! If it doesn’t taste good, spit it out! This is the system we all used as infants. There is much to be said for it.


But if you are more comfortable with clear-cut Rules, and believe there is Truth to guide us at the table, and that Experts know what is Right and Wrong, then you are probably going to vote for #2, Objective Truth. But recognize that this is a more hazardous road to travel because the Experts who would lead you do not always agree.


For example, we used to know that “red wine with red meat and white wine with white meat” was an immutable principle. But then it was revealed that Pinot Noir was sometimes OK with veal. And actually pretty good with salmon, which isn’t exactly white. Or red, for that matter, either. And what the hell is going on with Coq a’Vin? Isn’t that really chicken in red wine? Truthiness is not simple.


Turns out it is pretty hard to pin down a lot of the rules that the Experts will agree upon. There are just too many variables and too many Experts. We’ve got red wine, white wine, pink wine, sweet wine, dry wine, slightly sweet wine, high acid wine, low acid wine, high alcohol wine, low alcohol wine, young wine, old wine, fortified wine, oxidized wine, maderized wine, still wine, sparkling wine, sorta sparkling wine, etc., etc. And the variables on the food side are even more diverse!


Enter now the Experts. Some come from the food side of the equation; they cook food or do something with it. Other Experts come from the wine side, they open a lot of bottles, taste a lot of wines, sell it, study with other Experts, write about wine, or sometimes they even make wine. What you can say about them all with certainty is that they are all individual human beings with their own unique personal taste memory banks, food histories and likes and dislikes. Their mothers fed them different things growing up. So maybe it is not surprising that the Experts don’t all agree about what wine pairs best with what food. Here’s the Dirty Little Secret: the Experts are just like you and me, only more convinced they know what is Right and Wrong about what wine you should love with what food.


The acid test of the dissimilarity of Truths is the pairing of red wine with dark chocolate. For some people it is a match made in heaven. Winery tasting rooms sometimes offer chocolate to taste with their finest wines because they think it will mesmerize you and you will buy the wine. For other people, the combination is an abomination that induces gagging and makes both the wine and the chocolate taste worse than either would on their own. And there are Experts on both sides of this chasm. Remember the Dirty Little Secret!


7. One thing we love about wine is the endless variability it brings to our mouth. Every pulled cork or unscrewed cap is potentially a new taste adventure. Even if it is a wine with which we are familiar, the context or the company or the food or even the weather can make the wine taste different. Also the wine itself is changing over time. You may like it better next year, or regret you didn’t drink it last year, but it will probably be different. And again, there is no right answer. Just as some people like their eggs soft boiled and others hard boiled, some people like younger wines and others like older wines. How can we say one person is Right and the other is Wrong? Although you might find an Expert to tell you when the wine will be at its “peak”, your own opinion about when the wine tastes best to you is the best answer to optimum aging of a wine.


There are lots of ways we love the wine. You might even find some of them in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry, reprinted here for the sheer love of her skill with words. After all, Robert Louis Stevenson called wine “poetry in a bottle.”

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.



Grape juice can never match that. But it’s a hell of a beverage! Don’t we love it?


Cheers!


Ross Workman