There’s little more disappointing than a corked bottle of wine. You choose a bottle of your vino of choice, looking forward to its aromas and flavors, anticipating its tap-dance on your palate. Grab a glass and the corkscrew, peel the foil back, and ease the cork from the bottle. The liquid splashes red, or golden. You lift the glass to your nose and… ugh.
What is corked wine? Why does it happen? What should you do about it?
Thanksgiving is a hard meal to plan for. Logistically, it’s a nightmare – lots of separate dishes, all having to come together at once. There’s a huge bird to roast that takes hours to prep and cook properly. A vast array of sweet and savory flavors lie in wait to sate the palate, and put us all into a postprandial coma.
All of which presents a dilemma. I want to have a good glass of wine with dinner. But the quantity of food and the flavors makes choosing an appropriate drink a bit of a challenge. With candied sweet potatoes, oyster stuffing, and turkey legs waiting to send you into carbo-overload and tryptophan nappy-time, this is not an opportunity to whip out the best vintages. That being said, Thanksgiving is a “special occasion” with friends and family gathered around the holiday table, and cheap plonk just doesn’t seem right.
So, what’s called for are decent wines that won’t get lost or be squandered competing with the bounty of the rest of the table. They also need to be assertive enough to hold their own against a fair amount of heavy eating without adding too much of their own weight. To this end, I would suggest serving three wines, scaled in quantity to serve all of your guests at least one glass of each.
So, the Euro-to-Dollar conversion is kicking our ass, and the cost of good California wines is climbing ever higher as wine collectors realize the potential of premium vintages. The economy is swirling the bowl, and you’re just an average Joe, plumber or not, trying to find a decent bottle of juice to quaff with Friday night dinner. You’re no power exec, surfing the company expense account while buying vintage Bordeaux’s and “cult” Californian Cabernets. You want something red, something solid, something that isn’t going to put your kids’ college fund in the crapper.
Fortunately, there are still quality wines to be found that won’t send you into sticker shock. When an entry-level Burgundy or Bordeaux starts at $30 a bottle retail, it’s good to know that by shopping from the neighbors of great wine districts, or by choosing younger wines from the same pedigree, you can get the quality and character without the price tag. By shopping wisely, you can keep yourself in good vin rouge for $10 a bottle, with a splurge up to $14-15 for those relaxing weekend evenings.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Zinfandel. It’s a vividly dark purple grape that unfortunately sees most of its utility in pedestrian, sweet “white” Zins of miscellaneous and anonymous vintage. White zin made from this dark grape, but the juice is not fermented with the skins. It is the quintessential non-wine-drinker’s wine, the base for summer spritzers and the refuge of someone who’d rather be drinking an alcopop. When treated well, however, the Zinfandel grape produces big, burly, fruit-driven wines with flavors of black fruit, spice, and licorice. Zinfandel is genetically identical to the varietal that Italians call Primitivo.
BV Napa Valley Zinfandel is an affordable wine: $13-14 most days. Beaulieu wines are generally solid, but not necessarily outstanding in their field. Zins are usually pretty big with lots of tannin structure, so before tasting this I poured it into a decanter, to sit for a little under two hours prior to sampling.
Name: Beaulieu Vineyards 2004 Zinfandel, Napa Valley
Type: Red
Country: California
Region: Napa
Grapes: 100% Zinfandel
Price: $14
I’ve just decanted a 2004 Napa Zinfandel from Beaulieu Vineyards – we’ll see how that goes.
A package was waiting for me today from Upton Teas, containing 20 individual samples of teas to be tasted. I’ve got a bunch of Darjeelings and Assams, along with a couple Chinese Keemun. Two of my favorite Darjeelings and Assams aren’t available anymore, and I’m seeking their replacement. Most people aren’t familiar with the varieties of Chinese black teas, so the Keemun should be interesting.
By the way, let me just take a chance here to plug Upton. They’ve got a great catalog, and sell nearly everything in it in 10-15g samples, most for $1 per. Their staff is pleasant and knowledgeable, and can help you choose teas depending on your tastes. They’re based in Massachusetts, and delivery normally takes 2 days to Baltimore via standard cheap USPS.
The fall crops are coming in and we’ll be seeing more cool weather squashes and brassicas (cabbages, cauliflowers, etc.). Fall’s also traditional game and pork season, and I’ll be trying to dig up some goodies there as well.
Update: First tea is a miss for me. The wine’s pretty darned tasty, though.
Dear Maryland Wineries,
Shape up.
You pitch your wines as a boutique product, with prices to match. I’m not going to pay $20+ a bottle for wine that’s quite obviously inferior to $7 California plonk I can pick up at any wine shop. I’m not going to go out of my way for your products, because they don’t offer anything more than a warm fuzzy feeling for supporting local producers. That isn’t enough. Goodwill only goes so far.
I spent a day at the Maryland Wine Festival in Westminster, MD on the 21st of September. I visited the tents of every winery there. Of the 3 hours I spent sampling wine, I found fewer than a half dozen that were even average examples of their type. There were many horrible wines – oxidized whites with sherry aromas, bitter reds, sharp, sour, and tasteless varietals that poorly represented their key characteristics, and dessert wines that taste little better than slightly alcoholic grocery-store grape juice. In this day and age, there is no excuse for producing undrinkable wine, but you all are managing it with aplomb.
No wonder sweet wines are your biggest sellers – your dry table wines are just not good. Do you even drink wine? Do you appreciate what makes wine appealing, and what qualities make up a good wine? Do you really believe that your products compare favorably to those readily available to the wine consumer? I find it hard to believe that you can honestly, and with a straight face, put a Pinot Grigio or Sauvignon Blanc out on the market for $15-25 that lacks the even a hint of the balance of fruit and acid, minerality and toastiness that even the most average $10-14 bottle from New Zealand, California, or Italy offers. If the examples I tasted this weekend are the best you can manage, you are delusional.
Flaunt your Governor’s Cup medals all you want – they’re bloody meaningless and they’re awarded in unseemly volume. I’d really be interested in seeing those scores, because there are gold- and silver-medal winners listed here that I immediately dumped after the first taste, as they were wretched. The state agriculture folks need to stop rewarding bad product – you as winemakers need a reality check, and the state organizations need to stop cheerleading for inferior goods. It does you and the state of Maryland no favors.
Stop trying to grow Pinot Noir. It all sucks. It is a very challenging grape, and Maryland does not have the climate nor terroir to support good Pinot. Just because it’s the hot varietal doesn’t mean you should plant it. Retire your DVD of Sideways and leave Pinot Noir to the Willamette Valley, Santa Barbara, Sonoma County, and Burgundy. Neither does Cabernet Sauvignon do all that well here – it’s thin and lacks body. It’s best blended with other varietals, not sold as a pure alternative to the excellent offerings from Napa. Riesling requires cool summers and mild transitions to colder weather to develop their famous acidity – our hot summers produce flabby Rieslings.
Find varietals that do well here in the Mid-Atlantic and exploit them to their fullest. Take a cue from Virginia and pursue perfecting Cabernet Franc and Viognier, grapes that seem to thrive on Mid-Atlantic hillsides. Your Chardonnays are middling, and that can be helped with better treatment in the winery, especially through eschewing aging in wood. Italian grapes like Sangiovese and Barbera show some promise. Stop trying to be Napa Valley. Maryland is not Napa, not Sonoma – it’s Maryland.
Oak is not your savior. Oak is not a magic spell that makes poor wine good. Please, please, please quit over-oaking your wines. I got so sick of smelling funky, overwhelmingly woody oak barrels every time I lifted a glass to my nose. I don’t want to taste barrel, I want to taste fruit and acidity and grape tannins, with oak’s vanilla components as a complement. I don’t want to feel like I’m chewing a mouthful of oak chips along with every sip. I don’t want to be roughed up with a two-by-four in every glass. More oak does not equal more quality or more class. Learn what the hell stainless steel tanks are good for. Limit the amount of time your wines spend in wood, or use older casks. Right now, the signature Maryland wine characteristic is not that of the vineyard or winery, but that of a lumberyard.
If you’re going to pretend to being serious winemakers, get serious. Find out what works, and take maximum advantage of it. Drop varietals that have no business growing in our climate. If your wines cannot stand alone without massive amounts of oaking to add body, then you need to fix that. If you really love wine, show it.
Because right now, you’re a joke. Your wines are an insult.
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