Good Wine Hunting

When people say that they don’t like wine, I don’t believe them.  When they tell me that they can’t appreciate good wine, I know that is not true.  It’s not as if I think they are lying.  Certainly these people may never have been served a wine that they like, nor given a chance to directly compare a good wine to a lesser wine.

However, unless you have something physiologically wrong with your sense of smell or taste, there is a wine out there for you.

I went through this with my in-laws and helped them realize their misconceptions about their own preferences though a series of structured tastings.   Now they are wine enthusiasts who have a soft spot for Pinot Noir, Zinfandel and Shiraz.  It’s a far cry from the Catawba Pink they used to drink when they thought better wine would be wasted on them.

Recently I found another friend with a different wine issue.  It seems that she only liked really sweet and cheap wines or really expensive well-aged Bordeaux blends.  I was sure that I could find some wines in the middle ground that she would enjoy.  So I brought her along to the recent Albany Chef’s Food and Wine festival to try and find a good red wine.

The success of this quest was owed to one very useful trick.

If you can articulate what you like about certain wines, your ability to find wines that you will enjoy is almost guaranteed.  But it’s not as easy as it sounds.  And it helps to be able to use descriptive words that wine people understand, because you will need to enlist them in this effort.

Let’s pretend the word smooth doesn’t exist, because it’s not useful at all.

A wine festival is a great place to hone in on preferences.  There were scores of wines to try, and once you pay the entry fee you can try as many as you like.  Plus there is no shame in dumping the ones that aren’t enjoyable to you.

Granted, it’s no fun to put something in your mouth that’s unpleasant.  But if you can describe what’s unpleasant about the wine, you can start weeding them out.  Or you can just bring me along for the ride, and I’ll help you figure it out.

Let me explain, using Friday’s case as an example.  We started off simply looking for fruity red wines.  Wines with rich, ripe fruit can be perceived as sweeter even if they don’t actually have much residual sugar.  But these wines turned out to be a mixed bag.

After a few of the rejects it dawned on me that the wines with any perceptible levels of tannins were being rejected.  Even pairing a mildly tannic wine with a Kobe beef slider didn’t improve its lot.  But when I asked her to try a wine that had some really good fruit to it, but some serious tannin too, it was pronounced to be the worst wine of the evening.  That’s when her tastes became crystal clear.  So from that point on, we went along asking the representatives at each table if they had any bottles that were fruity without a lot of tannin.

No matter how much you know about wine, one cannot be expected to be an expert on every single bottle.  Good wine retailers, on the other hand, should be well versed in the wines that are on their shelves.   Representatives from the respective wineries and their distributors should know their products inside and out.  Asking them for a wine with a specific taste profile yielded positive results every time.

That is until we spoke with winemaker Joseph Carr.

I actually would have liked to spend more time at his table, taste his full line, and talk with him about what he does.  But by that time, we had already begun this project.  Anyhow he didn’t take too kindly to the idea of fruity wines. I thought this was kind of funny, since he makes his wine out of fruit.  But I understand where he was coming from.  Fruity can imply a lack of seriousness: simple, foxy wines without much depth.  Still, my friend who enjoys fruity wines really enjoyed Carr’s Bordeaux blend.  

After that encounter we modified our descriptor to “juicy wines without much tannin.”

Some tables felt like trying to push the envelope a bit, but nothing more challenging passed the taste test.  And that’s fine.  Wine appreciation is a journey.  There is no reason to rush it.  I was thrilled that my friend walked out at the end of the evening with a list of reasonably priced bottles of good red wine that she enjoys.  But more important than that, we honed in on what she likes.

Now she can walk into any respectable wine store and say, “I’m looking for a bottle of wine that is less than (insert dollar amount here) to go with (insert food item here).  I like wines that are juicy without a lot of tannin.  What would you recommend?”  And 9 times out of 10 she should walk out with a pairing that will be great.

Happy hunting.