A Little Taste

Nothing short of red-carpet grand openings of art museums, fashion week and grand opera invites as much pretense as a wine tasting might.

I’ve had the pleasure to have been to all kinds of wine tastings, from casual gatherings of a few friends trying out a new wine or two, to after-service tastings with waitstaff of wines we pooled our tips to afford, to really, really pretentious ones with really, really pretentious wine “experts” who offer their arguably (though not with them) definitive conclusions about whatever is being poured.

I’ve also attended dozens of “industry” wine tastings in which you were required to wear name tags (at my age, I actually love name tags) and to be oh-so-serious and take detailed notes about every sip while some pedantic wine peddler drones on endlessly about the this-and-that of the wines he or she is selling, which, of course, sullies the whole affair. After all, how seriously would you accept a critical analysis of a political candidate offered by the campaign manager?

I’ve been to vertical tastings, horizontal tastings and blind tastings. My moment of triumph came at a “blind” tasting—we had no information whatsoever—in which I not only identified the wine as a Chianti, but a Chianti from the Rúfina district east of Florence. Not only that, I named the producer, Selvapiana. Score! I should probably mention that I hadn’t much of a clue about the other seven wines we tasted that afternoon.

I should confess too that I’ve also been to tastings that started out vertical, in which I became mostly horizontal and, finally, figuratively blind. If I didn’t enjoy drinking wine so much, I might consider addressing this as an issue.

The most challenging and oddly memorable of these many industry tastings was a French barrel-tasting of a dozen whites and twenty-four reds that ended with my having to negotiate a 56-mile drive home through two ice-covered canyons and over a snowy mountain pass, in the dark. For a multitude of reasons, this is something I don’t recommend.

It’s been my experience that wine connoisseurs can be a uniquely pompous lot. Given the chance, they will display their special knowledge of grapes and vintages and whatnot to anybody holding a wineglass. It can be annoying. It can also be humorous when recalling the legendary stories about the failures of wine experts, as well as the tres gênant “Judgment of Paris,” a wine competition held in 1976 in which French judges blind-tested wines from France and California. Guess who won?

If conducted properly, and not too far from home, and with the appropriate use of terms borrowed from the glossaries of both the French and Italian, wine tastings can be at once educational, informative and perhaps even enlightening. For instance, you might learn that a wine you thought tasted really good is actually an inferior example of a wine that has disappeared from French soil only to have cropped up in Argentina as what can only be called “swill.”

One can easily spend an hour being educated on how to read an Italian wine label; another hour deciphering those in French. One learns about “legs” (how fast a wine runs down the sides of the glass) that provides a not-so-precise indication of a wine’s alcohol content but saves you the effort of finding that information on the label.

You can learn how to properly hold the glass (by the stem, dummy, so your body warmth isn’t transferred to the wine through your fingers), and how to swirl, sniff, sip and spit, all with a certain elegance that belies the final step of the process.

The promise is that in just one afternoon, you, too, can transform yourself from a somewhat-happy, Merlot-guzzling lout into a wine snob with the uncanny ability to make White Zinfandel drinkers become suicidal.

At proper wine tastings one learns about terroir—perhaps the most important word in the vast wine lexicon—a French word that roughly translates to “dirt.” And one learns about the hundreds, no, thousands! of varietals (not varieties, mind you) of grapes and how each of the persnickety little pampered globes of flavor are grown and watered (or not) and fertilized (or not) and how far down (in meters, of course) the roots have engaged in an heroic struggle through ancient limestone deposits and fossilized clam shells in search of essential nutrients and how learning of that epic saga alone might provide one with cheap-at-any-price pleasure in a glass.

At some point you might actually discover how wine is made.

There is the Romantic View in which the grapes have survived drought and hail and ravenous birds but have benefited from morning mists, afternoon sun and ocean breezes, and are then picked by hand from the vine, carried down steeply terraced vineyards in age-old wicker baskets balanced precariously on the shoulders of under-paid migrant farm workers, placed into donkey-drawn carts with wood wheels, and taken to spa-like wooden tubs where Lucille Ball stomps on them with comic abandon.

Then there is the Modern View in which the grapes have survived drought and hail and ravenous birds but have benefited from morning mists, afternoon sun and ocean breezes, and are then picked by machines from the vine, carried down steeply terraced vineyards in colorful plastic tubs balanced precariously on the shoulders of under-paid migrant farm workers, placed onto tractor-pulled flatbed trailers and taken to sterile factories in which those grapes are processed by machinery as modern and robotic as you might find in a Toyota assembly plant.

Attendees learn about Slovenian oak and French oak and countless other kinds of ethnic oak and about the casks and barrels and barriques crafted from those various oaks. And then there is steel fermentation, which takes place in stainless-steel vats larger than the size of the tanks used to deliver gasoline to the corner Exxon station. That process captures that much-desired gun-metal crispness of taste which so beautifully allows those heady flavors of lemongrass, alfalfa and sunflower to meld into an alcoholic beverage that verily shouts “sole véronique!” while barely masking the much-desired aromatic hints of mold, leather and pine tar. Yummy.

It is at this moment that novice wine tasters have learned not only about which wines are appropriate with which foods, but that those swirling, pasture-like aromas that might give the average person reason to clean under the kitchen sink are actually something to savor if discovered lurking inside a $65 piece of paper-thin stemware with a German name.

Finally, the wine-curious learn that they are just flat-out wrong about what they’ve always enjoyed from a glass of wine, excluding the falling-down-drunk sense that may be the final result of consuming three-ounce pours of fourteen different wines during the course of a four-hour afternoon wine tasting.

My friend Kurt Winegardner, whose death seemed cruelly premature, knew more about wine than anybody I’d ever known. He offered sage advice: Trust your palate.

Santé! Salute! Cheers!

Sole Véronique

12 sole fillets, skinned
1 cup fish or chicken stock
1/4 cup white wine or vermouth
1 shallot, thinly sliced
1 bay leaf
6 whole black peppercorns
2 sprigs fresh parsley
1 Tbs. butter
1 Tbs. flour
3/4 cup cream
25-30 seedless white grapes, halved

Preheat the oven to 350°. Lightly butter each fillet and roll into coils with the skin side on the inside. Secure the coils with toothpicks and place side-by-side in a well-greased shallow ovenproof dish.

Combine the stock, wine, shallot, bay leaf, peppercorns and parsley and pour over the fish. Cover with greased foil and bake for 15 minutes, or until the fish flakes when tested with a fork. Carefully lift the rolls out of the liquid with a slotted spoon and transfer to another dish. Cover and keep warm.

Pour the cooking liquid into a saucepan and boil for about 2 minutes, or until reduced by half, then strain through a fine strainer.

In a clean pan, melt the butter, add the flour and stir for 1 minute, or until pale and foaming. Remove from the heat and gradually stir in the cream and reduced cooking liquid. Return to the heat and stir until the mixture boils and thickens. Season, to taste, add the grapes, and stir until heated through.

Divide between four plates and pour the sauce over the fish. Serve immediately.

Suggested wine pairing: Sancerre, a flinty, savory Sauvignon Blanc from the Loire Valley of France, without the overwhelming citrus of those produced in Northern California and New Zealand.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska (Place: An overview of the Paradise Valley, Livingston, Montana)