Selecting Drinking Collecting Obsessing

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Selecting, Drinking, Collecting & Obsessing A WSJ Guide to Wine

Lettie Teague & Will Lyons

The Wall Street Journal New York, NY

Contents

How to Read This Book v ON SELECTING WINE (INTRODUCED BY LETTIE TEAGUE)

11

What You Need to Know About Grape Varieties How to Read a Wine Label

17

How to Write (and Read) a Good Tasting Note

21

How to Break the Rules When Ordering Wine

27

How to Order a Second Bottle

32 38

How to Order Wine on an Airplane

ON DRINKING WINE (INTRODUCED BY WILL LYONS)

47

How to Make Sense of Wine Scents How—and Why—to Do the Swirl

52

How to Match Wine and Food Without Overthinking How to Break the Rules of Food-and-Wine Pairings 66

When, Why and How to Decant Wine

How to Serve Wine at the Right Temperature How to Select the Proper Glassware

70

75

ON COLLECTING WINE (INTRODUCED BY WILL LYONS)

How to Develop Wine Expertise

85

57 62

91

How to Start a Wine Cellar

How to Think About Aging Wine

96

Understanding Wine Auctions and How They Work

100

Go Inside the World’s Largest Wine Storage Facility

107

112

Why Wine Collectors Love Magnums

ON OBSESSING OVER WINE (INTRODUCED BY LETTIE TEAGUE)

121

What Happens at Winemaking School How to Buy a Vineyard

128

How to Make Your Own Bordeaux Blend A Visit to Château Lafite Rothschild

135

141

How a Burgundy Wine Domaine Became the World’s Most Exclusive 146 A Defense of Wine Snobbery About This Book 159 WSJwine Offer 160

153

How to Read This Book

Is there a “right” way to drink wine? For some, the answer is simple: If you’re enjoying it, you’re doing it correctly. Others see the matter as more complex. They believe the utmost enjoyment comes from making a lifelong study of the art and science of wine—from what to drink, when to drink it and how to serve it, to the specialized tasks of growing grapes, bottling wine and storing the finished product. Whether you’re sure where you sit on the question, could be convinced to update your position, or just want to burnish your credentials, this book is for you. “Selecting, Drinking, Collecting & Obsessing: A Wall Street Journal Guide to Wine” gathers columns from our pages into sections that follow the progression from choosing a bottle to getting the most out of it – and then to the next levels of collecting wine and turning it into a lifelong passion. Each section is introduced by a member of our two-person winewriting team. Will Lyons, our European correspondent, has been

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recognized in the Louis Roederer International Wine Writing Awards and was short-listed for the prestigious Glenfiddich Wine Writer of the Year in 2006. Lettie Teague, based in New York, has won three James Beard Awards, including the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. Feel free to start from the beginning and read through, scan the contents and pick a topic that strikes your fancy, or jump to the end. Whatever your relationship with wine, we think you’ll find plenty here to make you more curious and better informed; to inspire you to make different, new and wiser decisions; and to make you laugh, think and appreciate wine and life just a little bit more. Enjoy. Signed, The Editors

On Selecting Wine

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

What could be easier than buying a bottle of wine? After all, it’s available everywhere: in supermarkets, specialty shops, restaurants—even online. And yet wine buyers fret over their selections in a way that purchasers of beer or soda would rarely think to do. Wine, clearly, is much more than a drink. So, how to go about it? Some oenophiles are emboldened by the use of wine critics’ scores. Others are compelled by good tasting notes. Some situations, however, call for specialized knowledge. What’s the best wine to choose when you’ve got a long plane flight? In restaurants, should you opt for the familiar or the new? If the time has come to order a second bottle, should you get another like the first or try something else? If the latter, what should you choose?

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Thankfully, centuries of wine-drinker experimentation and study means many seemingly esoteric questions have thoughtful answers. On planes, you’re better off forgoing Bordeaux and opting for an Australian Shiraz. (A softer, richer wine is the right choice at high altitude.) In a restaurant, pick the obscure over a well-known bottle: Familiar labels generally get bigger mark-ups because sommeliers know they will sell, while they fill in their offerings with lesserknown wines they truly love. As for second bottles, avoid a repeat purchase. Not only is it boring, but it’s unlikely to match the courses yet to come. Of course, it always helps to know the names of some important grapes. While there are thousands of varieties—in Italy alone—there are only a few you’ll see over and over again all over the world: Chardonnay, Cabernet, Merlot, Grenache, Pinot Noir, Syrah and Riesling. My advice for avoiding stressful wine choices? Start with a framework that helps guide your decisions – then start exploring.

What You Need to Know About Grape Varieties

BY WILL LYONS

“I know nothing about wine—where do I start?” is perhaps the most frequent question I am asked. An obvious starting point is with grape varieties, which each have their own distinctive character and flavor. There are more than 5,000 varieties of wine grapes planted in the world. Luckily, for those new to the subject, only 100 or so have enough appeal to be deemed commercially viable. Luckier still, it’s a relatively small number that have found international recognition. These used to be referred to as the Noble Grape Varieties, a term coined by the British wine trade to describe the classic grapes of Europe (though it’s no longer used in professional wine exams). Nicholas King, research and development manager at the Wine & Spirits Education Trust, says it drifted out of use in about 2003. After

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using “common” or “international,” the educational body has now settled on the term “principal” grape varieties. Whatever the term, it refers to the eight classic varieties—Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, Syrah, Grenache and Riesling—whose flavor and character have led to them being exported around the world. Their success has, in many ways, been detrimental to their reputation: the level of planting being such that quality has inevitably been diluted. Wherever you are on the wine journey, whether a connoisseur or a novice, an understanding and appreciation of these varieties will benefit you enormously. I rather like the old term for them as, in their finest form, these grapes are capable of producing wines that are among the very best in the world. Here’s my guide to what every wine drinker should know. CABERNET SAUVIGNON

Principally associated with the red wines of the Médoc in Bordeaux, this variety has been planted all over the world. A late ripener, its small red berries produce wines that when young have a concentrated, dark color and taste predominantly of blackcurrant. Young Cabernet can also have a spicy, herby character and a lot of tannin. With age (and the very best will be long lasting), they develop secondary notes of cedar. Often blended with other varieties, Cabernet Sauvignon is also grown in Australia, Chile, South Africa and California, where it is very successful.

Selecting, Drinking, Collecting & Obsessing • 13

(Jean-Manuel Duvivier)

CHARDONNAY

Due to the fact that it can be grown successfully almost anywhere, this white grape variety from Burgundy is a global superstar. It can be all things to all men, from rich, buttery and nutty in Burgundy to taut, clean, crisp and dry (most notably in Chablis); sparkling where it

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is part of the Champagne blend; and ripe with a nose of exotic fruits in warmer regions. Sublime in Burgundy, Chardonnay is also successful in Australia, California, New Zealand and Italy. GRENACHE

Powerful, low in acidity, high in alcohol, this hearty red-wine grape is the staple for Châteauneuf-du-Pape, where it finds its greatest expression. Extensively planted, it is believed to have originated in Spain before being introduced to the Rhône valley, where it produces rich, fruity wines. Often blended with Syrah and Mourvèdre, you will also find Grenache in Australia, California, Spain, and throughout the Mediterranean basin. MERLOT

Soft, supple and fruity, Merlot is the yin to Cabernet Sauvignon’s yang. Mainly grown on the Right Bank of Bordeaux, it is the principal variety of Pomerol and is often blended with Cabernet. It produces red wines that are packed full of fruit notes such as blackcurrant and plums—wines that can be high in alcohol but, due to their soft tannins, can be drunk young. Outside of France, it is grown in northern Italy, California, Washington state and Chile. PINOT NOIR

Delicate, early-ripening and, with thin skins, difficult to grow, Pinot Noir grapes find their natural home in France’s Burgundy region. Here, the variety produces texturally light red wines that have aromas of raspberry, cherry, violets and sometimes game. It is also success-

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fully grown in cooler regions such as Oregon, Germany, parts of Australia, California and New Zealand, where it achieves greatness. As well as producing red wines (for which it is rarely blended), it is also grown in Champagne and blended with Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier. RIESLING

This ancient variety from Germany is particularly popular with oenophiles. In Germany it produces wines that are crisp, light and fruity. Their nose can range from pungent perfume to flowers, limes, lemons and, with age, petrol. Their charm is the way they can marry acidity with either dryness or sweetness on the palate. The very best are always refreshing. Riesling is also grown in Alsace, Australia, Oregon and California. SAUVIGNON BLANC

Refreshing, grassy, aromatic, scintillating, light, direct—there are myriad descriptors suitable for this white grape variety. Now widely planted, it was originally grown in Bordeaux and the Loire, where it produces a crisp, dry style. Today it is best known for its new spiritual home in New Zealand, where it overflows with ripe, tropical characteristics such as gooseberry, pineapple and green pepper. SYRAH OR SHIRAZ

In France, Syrah produces a dark, brooding red wine, packed full of tannin, that smells overwhelmingly of pepper and can age beautifully. In the northern Rhône it is found in such famous appellations as Her-

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mitage and Côte-Rôtie. In Australia, where it is known as Shiraz, it produces an altogether different wine, replacing its savory northern Rhône notes with dark fruit, chocolate and licorice. Widely planted around the world, this variety produces big, bold red wines that are best drunk with red meat. This article originally ran on March 27, 2014, under the headline “Get to Know the Global Superstars of Wine.”

How to Read a Wine Label

BY WILL LYONS

Wine labels can be a little like cryptic crosswords: unfathomable, infuriating and intimidating. Browsing the shelves of one of my favorite local wine merchants, a cozy little shop in London where the wines are stacked in bins that stretch from the floor to the ceiling, I was faced with a scrambled collage of labels. There were wines with chickens on the label, wines with etched drawings of Neo-Gothic houses, brightly colored Impressionist-style labels, watercolors depicting far-off vineyards or simply the name of a French village written in attractive, bold font. Some wines had the name of the grape variety clearly marked across the label, but on the whole the display presented a pretty mysterious picture. No wonder most people were wandering around in silence, I thought, afraid to reveal their lack of knowledge. The subject of wine

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can reward a lifetime of study, but for those coming to it for the first time, it must feel like a puzzle. The good news is that armed with just a few simple rules, you can decipher the most complicated of wine labels, helping you avoid the pitfalls of confusing a sweet with a dry wine or a full-bodied red with a light, fruity Beaujolais. Of course, there are myriad exceptions. But when it comes to European wine, the first puzzle to solve is that wine producers use location as the descriptor of the taste, style and character of a wine, and not grape variety. If it says Burgundy on the label, it will be a Chardonnay if it is white, or a Pinot Noir if red. As a rule of thumb, the more specific the location, the higher the quality of wine. For example, Meursault in Burgundy is the name of a village with a particularly strong reputation for producing Chardonnay. Saint-Émilion is a village outside of Bordeaux, whose neighboring vineyards are known for producing blends of Merlot-dominated red wine. So a wine with Saint-Émilion on the label will be more interesting than one that is labeled as a generic Bordeaux. Every region uses a specific blend of grape varieties, which, with a little application, one can learn. The year the wine is made is referred to as the vintage. Most wine is made to be drunk straight away, certainly within five years of its bottling. Fine wine benefits from bottle age, as it develops tertiary characteristics and more mature, complex flavors. These wines can be cellared for 10 to 20 years. The numbers on the bottom right-hand corner of the label are the alcohol percentage. Labeling rules can vary by country, granting the

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winemaker a tolerance of around 0.5%. So it’s worth remembering that if it is as high as, say, 14%, it could actually be 14.5%. Regular readers will know that I favor drinking wines with an alcohol level of 11%-13.5%, which sadly, due to modern viticultural practices that favor a fuller, riper style, are becoming harder to find. Labels also offer a slew of other information, from the name of the individual vineyard and the winemaker, to whether the wine has been bottled at the winery, to whether it has been produced from old vines, or “vieilles vignes” (older vines produce fewer grapes, with more concentration and flavor). All of these tend to suggest the wine has been made by an individual winemaker from fruit grown in the estate’s vineyards. Aside from the label, one can also identify European wine by looking at the shape of the bottle. All Bordeaux wines come in a highshouldered, straight bottle. The glass is green for red wine and clear for white. Speaking generally, outside of France, these high-shouldered bottles are used for a plethora of styles, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Malbec. Gently shouldered bottles are found in Burgundy, the Loire and the Rhône. Outside of France, these are also—but not without exception—used for bottling Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Long, thin bottles are used in Germany and Alsace. These invariably contain Riesling, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc and Gewürztraminer. In Germany, green bottles indicate the wine comes from the Mosel, and brown from the Rhine, where the wines tend to be drier. These general guidelines will help in understanding a wine label

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and, more importantly, take you a step toward solving the perennial puzzle—how good is this wine? This article originally ran on July 22, 2011.

How to Write (and Read) a Good Tasting Note

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

If price is what most wine buyers notice first, the second must be the wine-tasting note. In fact, I’d bet a few good lines of prose tacked on a store shelf sells more bottles than a low price or a high score. Tasting notes help would-be buyers by telling them what the wine tastes like, smells like and pairs with (chicken, meat or fish), not to mention when to drink it (now or in 10 years). And yet, wine-tasting notes are often mocked and lampooned as pretentious and silly, or both. One former sommelier turned blogger recently raised this brand of mockery to a high art when he awarded a “Pulitzer Prize for Wine Reviews.” Ron Washam, who calls himself “the HoseMaster,” noted in a guest post on Tim Atkin’s wine website that Wine Spectator critic James Molesworth had mastered the form. Mr. Washam posted, tongue firmly planted in his cheek:

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“Molesworth has created what can only be described as an amazing body of work in very short sentences. With the precision of E.E. Cummings, the opaqueness of Donald Barthelme, combined with an intimate and commanding knowledge of fruit rivaled only by Del Monte, Molesworth entices us into a world where wine isn’t just a beverage, it’s the key to unlocking the secrets of the human soul.” Mr. Washam’s post goes on to offer this sample James Molesworth tasting note: “Ripe and lush, but very pure, with gorgeous yellow apple, white peach and Cavaillon melon fruit aromas and flavors, lined with honeysuckle, heather and quinine and sailing through the long, stone- and mineral-framed finish.” While this write-up may be a touch florid, it shows a remarkable attention to detail (not to mention expertise with fruit). It also makes me curious to taste a wine that inspired this kind of prose. It’s not the type of language that most wine retailers employ—in fact it’s the sort that many eschew. Lorena Ascencios, head wine buyer for Astor Wines & Spirits in New York, said that elaborate descriptors mean little to her customers who simply want “a good bottle of wine.” Although Ms. Ascencios writes most of the tasting notes that appear in the store, she encourages her staff to contribute “staff picks”—and lays out only one rule: The write-ups “cannot bash other brands.” Ms. Ascencios discourages brevity because “a longer note seems more sincere.” She uses simple words, like “rich” or “light-bodied”—the kind of language that non-oenophiles can understand. She also indicates

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whether or not a wine is oaked. “Customers always want to know,” she said. I can personally testify to the power of Astor staff prose. I’ve purchased wines I didn’t know I wanted—obscure Italian reds, smallproducer Champagnes and several cheap roses—on account of enthusiastic, sometimes long notes. More often than not it turned out quite well. I’ve also been moved to action by the tasting notes written by buyers at the K&L chain of California wine stores. As at Astor, K&L staff members can write almost anything they choose, but unlike Astor’s website, the K&L website also includes wine critics’ scores. It’s the tasting notes that are key, K&L vice president Trey Beffa told me. “We try to refrain from ‘pointing’ wine,” he said, referring to the practice of citing the points without prose. At the Wine Spectator, a publication famous for its numerical scores, the magazine’s executive editor, Tom Matthews, maintains that words matter just as much as numbers. In fact, Mr. Matthews, who estimates that he has written more than 10,000 tasting notes in his 26-year career, called tasting notes a real art form—even if they are easy to parody. “Whenever you try to translate a feeling into words—whether it’s about wine or music or art—it’s easy to make fun of,” said Mr. Matthews, who gamely tweeted about the “Pulitzer” that Mr. Molesworth’s work in his publication earned. Meanwhile, Mr. Molesworth said that he was “flattered” by the award and that some people even emailed to congratulate him, not realizing it was a prank. “Tasting notes are meant to inspire,” he said. In fact, Mr. Matthews said he encourages his staff to “keep it personal

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and fresh,” in their notes—albeit at 50 words or less (shorter than this paragraph). He advises his staff to write much less if the wine gets a low score. “The lower the score, the shorter the note,” said Mr. Matthews. But even a perfect 100-point wine isn’t to receive more than 50 words. I told Mr. Matthews that I’d read restaurant reviews where the number of stars and the actual description of the meal didn’t seem to match up. What did Mr. Matthews do when the wine’s score and note were far apart? In the case of a discrepancy, the staff did a “remedial” tasting that involved re-tasting and rescoring the wine, said Mr. Matthews, adding that such variances tended to happen with less experienced tasters. Some critics use words as if they were scores. English wine writer Clive Coates rates wines “Fine” or “Very fine plus” or “Very good plus” or “Disappointing,” at the end of his tasting notes, whose style could best be described as “anti-Molesworthian.” Here is the very practical Mr. Coates’s complete entry on Domaine Louis Jadot Clos de la Roche in his book, “My Favorite Burgundies”: “Full colour. Rich. Concentrated, closed nose. Full body, concentrated, tannic, backward, and very profound on the palate. Very lovely fruit. Lots of energy. Splendid finish. Very fine plus.” “The whole point it seems to me is to convey information. Not emotion,” Mr. Coates wrote in a recent email. He admitted his notes were utilitarian, even boring, but he believed a reader only needed to know a few basics: “The size of the wine, its balance, its elegance and its potential for aging.” As for those fanciful, Molesworthian writeups, Mr. Coates felt that notes with a plethora of adjectives simply

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said too much. “I want to be able to taste the wine in my imagination,” he wrote. Of course, some wine drinkers have better imaginations than others, and after many decades as a wine critic, it’s likely that Mr. Coates can fill in the blanks of just about any utilitarian tasting note. But for those of us whose range of reference is smaller, a more elaborate note might be useful. As a reader, I look for a few basic facts in a tasting note (that’s pretty much all I tend to write as well; I’m more Coates than Molesworth, alas). But I was gratified to find the same is true of Eric LeVine, the founder of CellarTracker, a website with a repository of over 3.5 million tasting notes written by passionate amateurs. Mr. LeVine said that the most useful things he found in a note were mentions of whether or not a wine was ready to drink, as well as its structure and personality. He looked for notes about fruit, acid and tannin. Mr. LeVine also wanted to know about “pleasure”—did the note-taker enjoy what he or she drank? My friend Richard said he reads notes by amateurs and professionals but never retailers (“they’re just trying to sell me something”). There is one thing that he cares about most: aroma. He likes to read about the aromas that others had found and see if he could locate similar ones. “What’s really unique about tasting notes is what people smell; there are things in there that are delightful,” Richard said. I thought Richard would appreciate hearing the James Molesworth tasting note—it was, after all, full of aromas. Richard paused, then chuckled a bit. “Wow, I’m impressed. There’s someone who wants to be F. Scott Fitzgerald,” he said.

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Maybe that’s the real story of wine-tasting notes—and why we hate and love them so much. From wine writers to retailers to regular wine drinkers, we all hold a secret desire to be F. Scott Fitzgerald—in 50 words or less. This article originally ran on Sept. 28, 2013, under the headline “WineTasting Notes Don’t Need to Overflow.”

How to Break the Rules When Ordering Wine

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

As wine drinkers have grown more discerning, not to mention diverse, certain “rules” about ordering wine in restaurants may no longer apply. For example, a man is no longer considered the automatic recipient of a wine list; women are (more) frequently regarded as eligible, too. In fact, I was handed the list just the other week (full disclosure: my male companion was frantically waving the sommelier away). Cowardly dining companions aside, one reason women may be getting the wine list more often may be that there are more female sommeliers working the floor. Belinda Chang, wine director at the Modern in New York, estimates there are 30% more female sommeliers now than when she started out in 1995. Ms. Chang (who says she is handed the list 50% of the time when she’s dining out) takes a direct approach to determining the gender

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of The Decider when she’s working. She simply approaches the table and asks, “Who’s in charge?” Half the time, said Ms. Chang, “The man will point to the woman.” (Though for some couples, this sentiment may apply only to the question of wine.) Ms. Chang said she can pretty much predict who is going to end up with the wine list. The aperitif is usually the giveaway.” If a guy orders a glass of lager, I probably won’t be handing the list to him,” said Ms. Chang, who gives a man—or woman—who orders a glass of Grüner Veltliner much better odds. Meanwhile, the wine list has lost a bit of its ceremony, not to mention heft. Another rule gone by the wayside is that a serious wine list should look—and feel—like a library book. Today, a wine list may be no more than a few sheets of paper or even the back of a menu. It could even be a tablet computer. (Except at a steakhouse. Where beef is king, the wine list comes leather-bound.) Scott Monette, co-owner and wine director of the Flagstaff House in Boulder, Colo., switched from a traditional wine list to an iPad a few months ago—a move apparently so shocking it made the local news. With a wine list that features nearly 3,000 selections and is updated daily, Mr. Monette said he needed to reduce his paper and printing costs. So far it hasn’t been cheaper—the restaurant spent about $10,000 on 13 iPads. But in the long run Mr. Monette said he expects to save money. A smart wine list might be the reason to dismantle rule No. 3: Sommeliers are the best source of advice. With wine lists that allow diners to access the Internet, sommeliers may not be diners’ first source of information. Electronically emancipated diners can now

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look up descriptions, get the latest wine scores—and even find out how much that Cabernet really costs at retail. I asked Mr. Monette if he was afraid the iPads would stop his customers from talking to his sommeliers. And did his sommeliers resent the change? I experienced a bit of iPad antipathy recently myself during lunch with a wine collector who spent about half an hour researching a bottle on his own iPad—ignoring both me and the hovering sommelier. Mr. Monette wasn’t worried. Though his wine stewards had been nervous at the beginning, Mr. Monette said the tablets had actually inspired his customers to ask better questions. According to Mr. Monette, there was a “deeper discussion” between stewards and diners. (I wondered if that included such penetrating questions as “Why is this Cabernet marked up four times retail?”) This brings us to the fourth rule ripe for discarding: When in doubt, order the second-cheapest wine on the list. The idea behind this rule was always that the second-cheapest wine would be a pretty good deal and the person ordering it wouldn’t look like a cheapskate—or at least not as much as if he or she had ordered the wine at the absolute bottom. Mark Ellenbogen, founding wine director of the famed Slanted Door in San Francisco and now the wine director of San Francisco’s Bar Agricole, was dismissive of the second-cheapest-wine rule. “The second-cheapest wine is a formulaic maximum that obviously doesn’t work,” he said firmly. Obviously? Well, it certainly wasn’t easy to find the second-cheapest wine on Bar Agricole’s list. That’s because Mr. Ellenbogen has

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organized it mostly by producers—a few famous, most obscure. The second-cheapest wines that I found were the 2009 Señorío di P. Peciña Rioja ($29) and the 2009 Domaine de la Pépière Cabernet Franc ($30). In many cases, the second-cheapest wine isn’t such a great deal. As Christopher Oppewall, wine director of the Hospitality Restaurant Group of Cleveland noted, “The markups on the more expensive wines are much less.” This is pretty much a universal truth—a wine that costs $9 at retail will often show up on a restaurant list for $28. On the other hand, on the Blue Point Cellar Big Bottle list, a magnum of the terrific 2006 Quintessa, a top Bordeaux-style blend from Napa Valley is $275 —about $40 more than retail. My fifth and final invalid rule is the largely unspoken one that dictated certain wines—Pinot Grigios, Merlots and Chardonnays (particularly from California) were unfit for consumption by wellinformed oenophiles. Wines such as these were considered obvious or “starter” beverages that true wine lovers learned to outgrow. But as wine directors have discovered compelling examples of these grapes, wine drinkers have responded accordingly. Serious wine lists feature minerally Chardonnays from California’s Russian River and Sonoma Coast, well-structured Merlots from Napa and Washington state and complex Pinot Grigios from the Italian regions of Friuli and Alto Adige. Even Mr. Ellenbogen, whose wine list is an exercise in vinous esoterica, has a Chardonnay among his Bar Agricole offerings, albeit one made in the mountains of Jura, France, and blended with the Savagin grape. When I complimented Mr. Ellenbogen on the selection,

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he disputed that he deliberately picked the obscure. It was just that he believed the best wine values were in the “least known” parts of the world. That’s a sixth rule, as yet unbroken: A great wine list (and a great wine director) will always have a point of view. This article originally ran on April 9, 2011, under the headline “Some Wine ‘Rules’ Are Made to Be Broken.”

How to Order a Second Bottle

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

First impressions matter the most. According to college recruiters, corporate executives and humorist Will Rogers (among others), “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” But what may be true about life is not necessarily true about wine. In fact, I’d argue it’s the second bottle that counts most of all (unless it’s a second bottle of the same wine—but more on that later). The first wine prepares the palate—its responsibility is pure refreshment. It’s more vinous entertainment than vinous enlightenment. Or as Michael Madrigale, sommelier of Boulud Sud and Bar Boulud, says: “The first bottle is the overture, the second is the crescendo.” (That’s the way sommeliers talk when their restaurants are located across from Lincoln Center.) I almost always start with a white wine that doesn’t have too much weight, in terms of fruit and oak, but has plenty of acidity. That’s

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why a Chablis is so often my default choice. I might also opt for a minerally Chenin Blanc, or maybe a dry Riesling or Grüner Veltliner. Other common options include that Spanish mainstay, Albariño, as well as Soave, Verdicchio and Vermentino (Italy is particularly fertile ground for first-bottle whites). If the first bottle is sparkling, it almost always has to be Champagne—most often a simple nonvintage, though occasionally a tête du cuvée (the prestige bottling of a Champagne house). I’ll rarely start with a cheap sparkling wine, as it seems like too great a leap to the second, inevitably much better, bottle. It would be like risking the vinous equivalent of the bends, the decompression sickness of deepsea divers who ascend too quickly from the bottom of the ocean. When it comes to rosé, I’m of two minds. Many people I know dislike rosé—they think, as one friend of mine does, that rosé signals “cheap.” (Never mind how fashionable rosé has become.) But I also find that if I order rosé first, I often want to keep drinking it—there’s something so seductive about a good rosé that I’ve even committed the sin of ordering a second bottle of the same wine. And it is considered a sin of sorts to order a second of the same. People who drink the same wine twice over the course of a meal are not only displaying a lack of imagination and missing a chance to try something new, they’re also probably doing a disservice to the meal. After all, how likely is it that the wine will go as well with the second course as it did with the first? I feel like there should be a warning posted on wine lists: “Ordering the first bottle twice may be injurious to your wine education.” Alas, there are plenty of people guilty of this particular sin. At Tony’s

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(Marc Rosenthal)

in Houston, which happens to have a really good wine list, the restaurant’s general manager, Scott Sulma, told me that his customers ordered the same bottle “about 50%” of the time.

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Has he noticed any particular patterns? “Cabernet drinkers tend to stay with the same Cabernet more often than anyone,” Mr. Sulma said. The people who tended to be the most adventurous were adventurous with both their first and second wines, he noted. And what about that second wine? What sort of qualities should it possess? According to Aldo Sohm, chef sommelier of Le Bernardin in New York, the second wine should build on or maintain the qualities of the first. Mr. Sohm believes that first and second bottles are equally important, though he noted that the second wine should “evolve” from the first in terms of both complexity and price. My friend Mark, a collector, believes much the same thing—although the last time I ate dinner at his house, he served two wines that I consider second-bottle types, 1998 Soldera Brunello normale and 1998 Soldera Brunello riserva. Both are rare, and both are great wines. Not that a great second bottle always has to be a great wine. As Mr. Sohm noted, it can also be the proper evolution from the previous bottle. That was the case at a recent dinner with friends at I Trulli restaurant in New York. I asked one of my dining companions, a rosé-avoider, to choose the first bottle. “I like to start with a nice, crisp dry white. I think it should be something that people are comfortable with,” my friend opined. “Maybe a Vermentino or a Soave.” Just then, I Trulli’s owner and wine director, Nicola Marzovilla, appeared. He suggested starting with a light red. “Why does everyone start with white?” he asked. He had a section of his wine list, entitled Chillable Reds, for this very purpose. Alas, we were all fixed on a white. “Then try something different,” said Mr. Marzovilla. “Order a Nosiola instead.”

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The Nosiola, a Vermentino-like white wine from Trentino, was delicious—light, bright and charming—and a perfect start to the meal. (It also came with a perfect first-bottle price tag of $39. That’s another of my first-bottle rules: It should be inexpensive enough that the second bottle can cost a bit more.) We complimented Mr. Marzovilla on his choice. Did many people order the same wine twice at his restaurant? I asked. Mr. Marzovilla looked horrified by the idea and practically threw up his hands. “Why do people do this?” he asked, addressing the world at large as much as our table. “You wouldn’t have salad salad salad for your meal!” The Nosiola was so delicious and so drinkable, it soon disappeared—too soon, in fact, as our appetizers had just arrived but the bottle was empty. We had two courses to go—would a second bottle see us through, or would we need to plan for a third? A third bottle presents an altogether different dilemma—and it puts the second bottle into a different category as well. The second bottle, instead of being the crescendo, becomes more of an intermezzo. My friends and I discussed our dilemma. What should the price and character of the second bottle be? Should it be another white or should it be a red? We thought it should be pricier than the first wine but not that much more expensive since we now had to budget for a possible third. We pored over the wine list, weighing our options. There were attractive Barberas, Dolcettos and other light reds that would pair well with our pastas and provide a good transition to our next possible wine. Mr. Marzovilla reappeared and suggested a Tuscan wine

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made with grapes grown on his own estate, the 2010 Massoferrato Sangiovese. You’ll love it, he said—and at $39, the price was certainly right for a wine that might not be the last of the night. We quickly agreed, and Mr. Marzovilla returned with the wine. He poured us a taste and we all concurred it was delicious—marked by bright red fruit and a lively acidity. My friend the rosé-hater loved it so much that he declared it was a “Sangiovese by way of MoreySt. Denis,” a reference to a famous wine village in Burgundy. As Mr. Marzovilla began filling our glasses, I noticed he wasn’t pouring from a regular wine bottle but a liter—a third larger than a standard-size bottle. Our problem was solved. Sometimes a perfect second bottle isn’t a matter of evolution, complexity, color or price—sometimes it’s simply a matter of size. This article originally ran on March 15, 2013, under the headline “Second Thoughts: How to Follow Your First Bottle.”

How to Order Wine on an Airplane

BY WILL LYONS

We all dream of flying first class. Admit it, when the plane pushes back from the gate and begins its taxi to the runway, those of us not quite as close to the cockpit as we had hoped begin to entertain envious thoughts about those up front, sipping vintage Champagne and nibbling their smoked salmon and Osetra caviar. I’m one of those who still experience a little pang of excitement as the catering trolley makes its way down the aisle. But such has been the downgrading of air travel in recent years that food is no longer a given, let alone wine. To compound matters, modern aviation regulations mean the oenophile hasn’t a hope of bringing his favorite bottle on board. I’m always reminded of the final scene of “Hannibal” (2001) when Anthony Hopkins, flying in economy, takes delivery of a Dean & Deluca hamper complete with a half-bottle of 1996 Château Phélan

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( Jean-Manuel Duvivier)

Ségur from Saint-Estèphe, an assortment of fruits, caviar and cheese and, infamously, a tiny pot of brain. Not that I would recommend drinking such a delicate wine in such a small glass at 35,000 feet. Wines taste very different in the air; a combination of altitude and low humidity tends to accentuate a wine’s acidity and alcohol. Meanwhile, the cabin’s dry atmosphere will make the tannins—the bitter-tasting compounds found in red wine—more pronounced. And it’s not just the wines that are affected. The way we taste things also changes at altitude. As the recycled cabin air dries the mucus in our nasal passages, our sense of smell diminishes, wreaking havoc with our olfactory appreciation.

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Saint-Estèphe is known for producing wines with plenty of tannins and acidity in their youth—Dr. Lecter would be advised to plump for something a little riper and softer to pair with his brain; maybe an Australian Shiraz. Which brings me to Australia and its flagship carrier, Qantas, which has, for the second year running, picked up a string of prizes in the annual “Cellars in the Sky” awards. The airline was judged to have the best overall wine cellar, above Emirates, which won silver, and El-Al and Cathay Pacific, which shared bronze. Qantas says its success lies in its wine panel, created in 2003 and comprising three Australian winemakers: Vanya Cullen, Stephen Pannell and Tom Carson. They meet several times a year and assess hundreds of wines, asking questions such as, does it represent a premium wine? Is it a benchmark of its style? Is it drinking well and will it show well under flying conditions? A spokesman for the panel says altitude dulls a wine’s aroma, potentially ruining a good bottle of wine. Soft fruit and citrus flavors are reduced, whereas wines with riper, red-berried fruit tend not to be so badly affected. Meanwhile, a young wine can seem hard whereas older wines tend to taste better. With its mainly Australian wine list, Qantas has got it right. My advice to fliers has always been to opt for those wines that are bigger, riper and more expressive, with low acidity. Something like a Merlot, Pinotage or Shiraz for reds or Chardonnay, Semillon and Viognier for whites. It does seem a shame, though, that some of the finest wines in the world are consumed under such poor conditions. Having said that, if

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I were traveling first class and were handed a cool glass of effervescent vintage Krug after takeoff, I’d take it. This article originally ran on Feb. 20, 2014, under the headline “Getting On Top of Wine’s Altitude Problem.”

On Drinking Wine

BY WILL LYONS

There is a difference between drinking wine and tasting it. Both have merits it is foolish to deny. When we drink, we don’t give much thought to what is in our glass. The job of a chilled glass of uncomplicated rosé, poured swiftly from the bottle on a hot summer’s day, is to refresh, lift the mood and jolt our taste buds into action as we await the arrival of food. To extract the most possible sensory delight from a bottle, however, needs a little extra effort. Wine isn’t as complicated as most experts would lead you to believe, but like the appreciation of music, art or literature the more care and attention one gives to it the more pleasures will unravel. When I was training as a young wine merchant in London, one of my first jobs was to prepare the wines for the lunches my employer held for his more illustrious clients. I would be given a list of wines,

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usually containing the best of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Napa and—always—a vintage Port to serve, and great care was taken in their opening, presentation and tasting. Stepping into the damp, chilly cellar to find the bottles, I would check the labels and make sure the year and estate were correct. I would unwrap the small coil of foil and pull the cork. This little ritual, repeated hundreds of times, never lost its appeal. As I poured a small measure into a tasting glass, inspecting its color, I would give it a large sniff. (It is our noses, not our taste buds, which pick up the layers of flavor a great wine reveals.) After checking that the wine’s temperature was correct, I would carefully pour it into a decanter before presenting it to my boss. Invariably, he would take a sip and ask “What do you think?” There are dozens of ways to enjoy the taste of wine, and at least as many occasions for doing so. Everyone will have their preference; I am for learning the basics, then improvising. As my boss’s question illustrates, there is no better palate than your own.

How to Make Sense of Wine Scents

BY WILL LYONS

A few years after I embarked on a career as a wine critic, I found myself in the cellars of a fairly well-known Bordeaux producer. My wife and I were on holiday and I had surreptitiously scheduled an afternoon appointment at a château not far from Saint-Émilion. The only problem: The vigneron hadn’t been told, and I hadn’t told my wife. So, as he poured out his first barrel sample, I thought I’d better concentrate. Lowering my nose into the tasting glass, I managed to detect a few telltale aromas: blackberry, red currant, vanilla and a hint of dark chocolate. It was enough. The vigneron’s mood visibly improved and my spouse later admitted that it was the first time she actually believed that, when it came to wine, I knew what I was talking about. Wine appreciation is fundamentally linked to smell. Much of what we taste in the glass—about 70%—is based on its bouquet. There are

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more than 1,000 different aroma molecules in wine and yet, outside the rarefied world of professional wine tasting, I suspect most drinkers can only detect a handful. Our sense of smell is one of our most powerful senses. But unlike our eyes, which automatically recognize color, and our ears, which are attuned to detect sounds, our nose needs to be trained. What I had demonstrated in the cellars of Château Fonroque wasn’t some sort of magic trick but an analysis based on concentration and olfactory memory. It isn’t hard, anyone can do it. But it does take a little application and time. And as anyone who has sufficiently developed their sense of smell and learned the basics of a wine-tasting vocabulary will tell you, once mastered, wine will never taste the same again. Our sense of smell comes into play not just when we sniff a glass but when the wine is in our mouth as well. This is because our sense of smell is based above and behind our nose. Indeed, our nose is merely a passageway to our olfactory bulb, which is part of the limbic system, whose other functions include emotion and long-term memory. Hence when we walk into a room and smell a particular aroma, we are transported back to our childhood. In my case, this is always wood polish, as my school had wooden floors. Trained wine tasters will have spent a fair amount of time in florists’ shops, bakeries, vegetable stalls and spice counters, learning and honing their smell memory banks. I have even known one Master of Wine student who used to eat Parma Violet sweets so that he could detect the faint trace of violet in Malbec. A more conventional route is simply to taste as much wine as you can. But unless you are in the wine trade or live in a city like London, which hosts a large

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(Jean-Manuel Duvivier)

number of wine tastings, this is both expensive and logistically challenging. Around 25 years ago, in the Burgundian town of Chalon-surSaône, an amateur wine enthusiast named Jean Lenoir decided to solve this problem. Convinced from the wine-tasting classes he was hosting that more needed to be done to educate people on taste and smell, Mr. Lenoir identified 54 aromas in red, white and rosé wines. Collecting everything from pineapple to cut hay and dark chocolate, he bottled the scents in tiny perfume bottles and created Le Nez du Vin. Starting at €25, each kit comes with an instruction manual,

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a collection of numbered aroma vials and a key to tell you what they are. Mr. Lenoir suggests settling down in a quiet room and blindly smelling a random bottle. With time, your nose should be able to identify a number of aromatics. He divides wine aromas into three categories: primary (those that originate from the grape variety); secondary (those that come from fermentation); and tertiary (the aromas that emerge from maturation). Within these broad categories, there are five essential notes: fruity (anything from lemon to blackberry); floral (acacia to violet); vegetal and spicy notes (green pepper to thyme); animal notes (leather and butter); and roasted notes (toast and coffee). There are flaws to the system: Some scents are hard to identify, and it is a different skill smelling the aromas in isolation, compared with the crowded combinations found in a glass of wine. But for anyone unfamiliar with certain fruit descriptors, it is extremely useful. Personally, I like to use it to keep sharp and to keep on top of the berry scents, which are often confused. There is now a range of kits, from wine faults and oak to coffee. Recently, Mr. Lenoir launched Le Nez du Whisky (€300). Created in conjunction with whisky writer Charles MacLean, the kit contains an eclectic group of smells, including tar, broiled meat and tobacco leaf. Mr. MacLean says it is useful for identifying certain aroma profiles. For example, if a whisky has a fruit character, one can then ask if it is fresh, dried or tinned. My advice would be to try to master the scent of a few unusual but prevalent smells. Then, the next time a sommelier hands you a glass

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to taste, or you find yourself in the cellars of a well-known winery, you’ll be able to sniff like an expert. This article originally ran on Oct. 17, 2013, under the headline “Making Sense of Wine Scents.”

How—and Why—to Do the Swirl

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

After decades of wine drinking, there are certain things that I do almost automatically: Check the alcohol level on the wine label, examine the cork upon removing it from the bottle and swirl the wine around in my glass. The latter is an absolute among oenophiles—an action as necessary as tasting, perhaps even more so considering the importance of a wine’s aroma. Swirling releases the wine’s aromatic compounds, known as esters, into the air. Every wine has these volatile aroma compounds, although some wines have more than others, depending on the structure and character of the grape. Swirling can also affect the wine’s flavor. The oxygen introduced by the act of swirling binds with the tannin molecules to make the wine seem softer, more accessible. I began thinking more seriously about swirling after watching a YouTube video a few weeks ago. (Isn’t that where most of today’s

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obsessions begin?) Created by a group of physics professors and students from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, the video, titled “Modelling the swirling of a glass of wine,” depicted research team member and Ph.D. candidate Martino Reclari (unaccountably attired in a Guinness T-shirt) swirling a glass of wine and explaining that his team had studied the “shape of the wave” of a swirled glass of wine in the belief that it could be applied to their study of cellular cultures. While the Swiss researchers found wine swirling worthy of scientific analysis, the wine professionals I talked with seemed a bit more blasé. “Swirling?” Alexander LaPratt repeated when I told him the reason for my call. I thought Mr. LaPratt, the sommelier of New York’s DB Bistro Moderne and the reigning Best Sommelier in America (as the winner of the biannual competition hosted by the American Sommelier Association) might have some deeper insight into the subject of swirling—perhaps he’d even taken a few swirling tests in his title quest? He had not, but he did, in fact, swirl all the time. “I do it automatically. It’s a reflex,” he said. What did Mr. LaPratt consider the greatest benefit of swirling? That was easy. “Oxygenation,” he said. “Swirling is like a kind of miniature decanting.” What about Champagne? There are conflicting theories about this: Some wine drinkers believe Champagne should be swirled like any wine, others believe the act is deleterious to the bubbles in the glass. Then of course, there is the practical challenge—it’s hard to swirl a Champagne flute or detect much aroma from the narrow bowl of the glass. “It’s funny how controversial things get when you add bub-

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bles,” laughed Mr. LaPratt, who does swirl his Champagne, which he drinks out of a regular glass. “But I’m fine with drinking flat Champagne,” he said. The glass is of great importance when it comes to swirling. So is the volume of wine: The glass should be no more than one-third full. This allows the aromas enough room to circulate—and gives the swirler sufficient space to fit his or her nose into the glass. The glass itself should be generously proportioned; the glasses that Mr. LaPratt employs at his restaurant are large enough to fit the contents of an entire bottle of wine. Is there an optimum swirling glass? I put the question to Maximilian Riedel, scion of Riedel glass. “The glass must be lead crystal,” Mr. Riedel said. “When you swirl a wine in lead crystal, the aromas are easier to identify—the wine rubs the inside wall of the glass.” Lead crystal is rougher than regular glass—it agitates the surface of the wine, thereby increasing the oxygen flow. Though Riedel makes hundreds of types of wine glasses, seemingly one for each grape—and Mr. Riedel strongly recommends having multiple sets of glasses for different varietals—I decided I’d use one type of glass for my swirling exercises. After all, most people can’t afford that many sets of glassware. And in his book “The Taste of Wine,” famed Bordeaux oenologist and researcher Émile Peynaud recommended using a single glass for tastings: “Otherwise a wine’s odor cannot be analyzed exactly the same way.” I decided on a Riedel Vinum Burgundy glass—the bulbous shape and large bowl of the Burgundy stem is designed to allow the accu-

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mulation of aromas. I gathered a group of friends and an eclectic group of wines, some overtly aromatic and others not: Pinot Noir, Gamay, Zinfandel, Cabernet, Sauvignon Blanc and Gewürztraminer, as well as less famous grapes like Falanghina, Greco di Tufo, Torrontés and Frappato. I chose only young wines. Many older wines may not benefit from a vigorous swirl—for example, a fragile old Burgundy is best left unswirled. It’s also important to smell the wine before swirling to note the difference. In most cases, we didn’t find much in the way of aromas preswirl, save for the Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc, whose grassy character practically jumped out of the glass. Then we swirled. For how long? No one seemed to know the ideal, but four or five seconds seemed like the right amount of time. Some wines were aromatically reticent even after a vigorous swirl, so for those, I put my hand over the top of the glass and reswirled. This helps to concentrate the aromas—or, in some cases, amplify a wine’s problems. I noticed that we were all swirling in the same direction: counterclockwise. Why? “Because I’m right-handed,” offered one friend. “Because I live in the Northern Hemisphere,” suggested another, positing that people in the Southern Hemisphere swirled their wines clockwise, just as their water went down the drain in a different direction. (I checked with a couple of Southern Hemisphere winemakers, Peter Gago, chief winemaker of Penfolds in Australia and Susana Balbo of Crios in Argentina, and found that both swirled

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counterclockwise, though Ms. Balbo said sometimes she went the other way, too.) Could the direction of the swirl make a difference? For example, did a clockwise turn emphasize fruit, while counterclockwise produced more notes of oak? I had read that some winemakers believed that direction made a difference, but when my friends and I tried swirling both ways, opinions were decidedly mixed. Some thought the fruit was more vibrant in a counterclockwise direction, while others disputed there was a difference at all. There is clearly much more to know about swirling, which for all its simplicity and benefits is an act whose particulars—direction and duration of the swirl and optimal glass—are unknown. Perhaps the Swiss physicists knew more? I emailed Mr. Reclari, who replied that he was in the middle of additional research but the results would not be available for several months. Meantime, I’ll keep swirling. After all, as Prof. Peynaud said, “The study of aroma requires considerable application and many repeated attempts.” This article originally ran on March 3, 2012, under the headline “The Art—and Science—of the Swirl.”

How to Match Wine and Food Without Overthinking

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

While wine may be worthy of extensive, even exhaustive study, there’s one aspect that I think has received far too much scrutiny in recent years: matching wine with food. I could eat and drink quite happily for decades without hearing anyone ever again utter those four consecutive words. It’s not that I don’t like putting wine and food together; I do it every day of the week. It’s the ceremony that I object to—the elevation of a few common-sense principles to something approximating great art. When did wine-and-food pairing start having to be studied so carefully—as if it were postmodernist art or “Beowulf”? Once upon a time, not so long ago, food-and-wine matching rarely rated more than a mention on the back label of a bottle: pair with chicken, pasta and fish. Its glorification is a fairly recent

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event—in fact, I’d date it to 2006. That’s when two of the most successful books on the subject were published: “What to Drink With What You Eat,” by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, and “Perfect Pairings,” by Evan Goldstein, a master sommelier and wine educator. Mr. Goldstein—who has educated tens of thousands of sommeliers over the years, by his own estimation—believes that sommeliers are to blame for the overemphasis on overly exact wine-and-food pairing: “The modern-day sommelier feels very strongly about you having the right wine with the right food—they become quite draconian,” he said during a phone call last week. “And it’s not always done with the customer’s pleasure in mind.” (Presumably, those sommeliers weren’t educated by him.) The book by Ms. Page and Mr. Dornenburg is quite comprehensive—every wine in the world seems to have been examined for its suitability to food—while Mr. Goldstein looks at just 12 grapes and pairs them with appropriate recipes (created by his mother, Joyce Goldstein, the San Francisco restaurateur and chef). Mr. Goldstein’s advice is sound and the recipes are appealing, but what if someone didn’t want to think about pairing? Could he recommend wines that would work with most types of food? He could. And they all shared the same attributes, said Mr. Goldstein, who offered a list: moderate alcohol, moderate to high acidity, soft tannins and little or no oak. There were lots of wines with these qualities—made from all kinds of grapes from all over the world—but a few examples that came to his mind first were red grapes like Bar-

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bera, Gamay and Pinot Noir, which Mr. Goldstein called “the silver bullet.” Was there a sommelier who could simplify things as well? Alpana Singh, a Chicago-based sommelier, author and almost-restaurateur (her Boarding House restaurant is opening soon), had a useful rule of thumb: Look for red wines “that you can see through,” she said. These included the same three grapes that Mr. Goldstein mentioned but a few others as well, namely Cabernet Franc, from the Loire, and Frappato, a red grape native to Sicily. “I’m drinking a lot of Frappato lately,” said Ms. Singh. What about white grapes? Were there any that she considered just as versatile? “Pinot Gris,” Ms. Singh replied decisively. “It’s my Velcro of wines. It has acidity but also roundness and a little residual sugar—that’s the magic fairy dust of wine pairing.” There are only a few Pinot Gris on her list right now, although there are several Chenin Blancs—my personal all-around favorite white grape with food. I liked the idea of wines that were so flexible it wasn’t necessary to think about how to match them with food. But was it simply too good to be true? I decided to stage a little food-and-wine-matching experiment. I assembled a few of the basic foods cited on those back labels of bottles (meat, chicken, pork, fish and pasta) and made them simultaneously to taste with the wine (no small feat on a four-burner stove). I made a pan-fried steak, a piece of sautéed salmon, a link of grilled pork sausage, a braised chicken breast and a pot of cheese tortellini and paired them with some of the food-friendly grapes suggested by the experts: Pinot Noir, Gamay, Barbera, Pinot Gris and

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Chenin Blanc. While the cooking wasn’t completely successful (see: four-burner stove), the wine pairings all worked—almost. The Gamays (the grape of Beaujolais) were definitely the most food-flexible of all, with just the right measure of acidity, earthiness and fruit. Of the three I tried, the 2010 Julien Sunier Régnié, a cru Beaujolais, was particularly good—substantial yet lithe. The two Barberas were almost as versatile, especially the bright and juicy wine from Elio Perrone. The Pinot Noirs ran a close third. The lighter examples from Oregon and Burgundy were a touch too delicate for the steak, but the velvety-textured 2010 Arista Ferrington Vineyard Pinot Noir, from California’s cool Anderson Valley, overperformed, with a bright bolt of acidity balancing all its rich, ripe fruit. The two white grapes, Chenin Blanc and Pinot Gris, went well with almost everything—the pork, the chicken, the pasta and the salmon all fit, and the wines were rich and viscous but also minerally and clean. (I tasted both domestic and imported examples of each grape.) The only sticking point was, unsurprisingly, the steak. While the wines’ voluptuous texture matched the steak’s richness, their minerality proved a bit of a jarring contrast, particularly in the case of the 2011 Chidaine Vouvray Les Argiles. (A minerally white just isn’t as versatile as a minerally red.) But they both came admirably close to universal usefulness, and I was quite pleased with my food-and-winematching experiment, not to mention the advice of my experts. Then I had a chat with Thomas Pastuszak, wine director at New York’s Nomad restaurant, who said the best match wasn’t between wine and food at all but between wine and diner. “I would rather pair the right wine with the right person rather than the dish,” he said.

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How did how that work? Did he ask diners to fill out a questionnaire, submit to a brief interview? It was far more practical than that, said Mr. Pastuszak. He simply gave them a taste of the wines he poured by the glass and waited to see which wines they liked best. More often than not, they cared less about choosing the right match with their food than choosing a wine that came with a good story attached. Winemakers clearly know this to be true. After all, their back labels feature stories about the winery, the winemaker and the winery dog—and only a few words about food: “Pair with pork, chicken and fish.” This article was originally published on Nov. 25, 2012, under the headline “Wine and Food: Pairing Without Overthinking.”

How to Break the Rules of Food-and-Wine Pairings

BY WILL LYONS

There isn’t an exact science behind choosing wine at a restaurant but I’m guessing that when most of us step inside the dining room we select the dish we want to eat first and then a wine to accompany it. What happens when you reverse the process? Imagine asking for the wine list first, choosing the style, country or vintage you would like and then asking the waiter to choose a dish to go with it. In most cases, I suspect it would throw up some pretty safe options: oysters to accompany that glass of Chablis or perhaps a roast leg of lamb to bring out the subtle flavors of the cru classé Médoc you have carefully selected. But with the plethora of international cuisine now available to us from southern India to Thailand and Japan, the traditional European-based rules of food and wine matching are no longer the preeminent catch-all guide they once were.

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Readers of this column will know that in the past year we have explored the subjects of what to drink with seafood and whether white wine pairs well with cheese, but what about often spicy Asian dishes? Traditionally, European based experts, of whom I am one, would recommend steering clear of pairing delicate wine with hot food. A glass of beer used to be the preferred option or, if one did have to opt for a wine, possibly a Riesling. These wines get their structure from acidity, which, together with their mineral-infused fruitiness, can prove an appealing partnership with delicately flavored Asian cuisine. Moreover, in Germany’s Mosel valley you can find examples at 8% alcohol, which works well with the heat of some Asian food. But as more wine, mainly red wine from France, is being consumed by traditionally non-wine-drinking countries such as China, Japan, Singapore and India, we are gaining more knowledge and experience of what pairs well with non-European food. Recently, I spoke with Nicolas Glumineau, technical director at Bordeaux’s Château Montrose, who now visits Southeast Asia several times a year. Marvelling at the variety of recipes found in countries such as Thailand, he also explained that from his experience Asian consumers weren’t as afraid of tannins as Europeans. Moreover he said that the tannins found in red Bordeaux match well with certain Asian dishes based around duck and veal. I was surprised, as I always found that spicy flavors matched with the bitter tannins of red wine can prove an unpalatable partnership. But I was falling into the trap of imagining the unknown from what I knew; most of my experience of Asian cuisine has come via Europe.

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As Fiona Beckett, author and publisher of matchingfoodandwine.com, says, food and wine matching isn’t just about matching different flavors, it is cultural too. “In the Far East, people want to and expect to drink serious red wines with their food. In places such as Szechuan in China they like chilli and heat. The fact that a tannic red wine accentuates that character is a bonus rather than detraction.” Sriram Vishwanathan Aylur, chef and proprietor at London’s Michelin-starred Indian restaurant Quilon, says the picture is complicated, given the variety of recipes and dishes found in Asia. “If you look at Indian food, you can eat in the north of India and the south of India, and you can almost feel that you are eating food from two different countries. It is not just about the dish being spicy, it is about how spicy it is and how it is cooked that also make it complicated.” He points to red wines that are low in tannins, such as a New World Merlot with plenty of fruit, as a possible accompaniment to dishes flavored with strong spices as they absorb the heat of the dish. From my own experience, I still enjoy matching white wines from France’s Alsace region with Asian food, in particular Pinot Gris (which pairs well with a variety of dishes) and dry Rieslings. But I also feel soft, fruit-driven red wines pair well with grilled or barbecue meats in the Indian tandoori style. It seems that, given the international flavor of today’s wine-drinking landscape, we’re learning all the time. If you would like to drink red wine with your Asian food, by all means give it a go. Just remember to ignore the quizzical look from your sommelier.

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This article originally ran on April 19, 2014, under the headline “Breaking the Food-and-Wine-Matching Rules.”

When, Why and How to Decant Wine

BY WILL LYONS

For wine lovers, there are many established norms that always seem to provoke heated discussion. Should you serve only white wine with fish? Does wine need to be chilled? And, the classic restaurant tussle, is your wine corked? But perhaps the most universal flash point is that of decanting. As with all matters vinous, the answer is never straightforward. On one side are the pro-decanters, among whom I count myself, who argue that all wine improves with decanting, while the aesthetic appeal of a shimmering decanter adds to the theater of an evening. Others dispute this, saying decanting can actually deaden the wine’s flavors, losing some of its character. The two principal aims of decanting a wine are to remove any sediment and aerate the wine. The latter will help draw out its nuanced flavors, soften the harsher, spicier, bitter notes and invigorate the

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(Anna Parini)

wine. Whether you are decanting a mature or young wine will affect how you pour it into the decanter. All wine that will throw sediment should be decanted; this includes red Bordeaux, Rhône, Rioja, vintage Port and heavy grape varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah. Also—and this is open to discussion—young wines. In my experience, exposure to air unfurls the complex layers of flavor in young fine wine. A wine that was tight, closed and rather difficult to taste can, with time in the decanter, transform its personality. The smell changes, becoming replete with ripe fruit; the bitter tannins subside; and the wine opens up, revealing its true character. Generally, I have found this to be the case with Old World wines from the classic regions of Europe, as opposed to New World wines, which change less in the decanter. White wines can also be decanted.

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Old Rieslings, white Rioja and young Chardonnay all improve with aeration. If you prefer your white wine chilled, there are various decanters that will fit in a fridge, or you can buy an ice-pocket decanter, which has a small built-in capsule for ice that will help keep your wine cool. I prefer my whites lightly chilled and find that a bottle that has been in the fridge for an hour or two benefits from decanting, to take the chill off. How long you should decant a wine for before serving depends on the age and type of the wine. When reviewing wines, I always prefer to decant. A recent example was with an Italian red wine made by Cantine Paradiso. On the first night, the wine was impenetrable, tasting hard, closed and bitter. On the second night, it still wasn’t quite there, but by the third evening, I could taste a host of intriguing flavors. There are those who believe certain vintages should be decanted at breakfast, hours before they will be drunk at dinner. Sadly, there are no hard and fast rules on this and it is really down to personal preference. Certainly, very old wine should be decanted just before serving, as exposure to oxygen can cause it to lose its flavor quite quickly. Young wine can withstand up to three or four hours or, in some cases, days. I am in favor of decanting shortly before I serve the wine—that way I can taste it immediately and track its evolution in the glass. If it turns out to be particularly impenetrable, I can always leave it for the following evening.

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CHOOSING YOUR DECANTER

This is purely about aesthetics. The shape, size and look of a decanter will not affect the wine inside. The traditional decanter, a glass vessel that holds one bottle of wine, has changed very little in design since the 18th century. There are a range of decanters on the market, from traditional shapes, such as ship’s decanters and Claret jugs, to modern, sometimes overly elaborate designs. But any vessel will do—even, if pushed, a jug. CARING FOR YOUR DECANTER

Decanters should be washed and rinsed with hot water after use. Drying a decanter can be particularly tricky; although the outside can be wiped clean with a dry cloth, the inside needs a little more attention. You can drain a decanter by placing it upside down on a draining stand. Another way is to buy drying crystals; these come in a long, thin packet and, when hung inside the decanter, absorb all its moisture. To remove troublesome stains, there are various decanter brushes available. For encrusted wine from the night before, fill the decanter with a handful of uncooked brown rice, pour in hot water and swirl around. Finally, microfiber polishing cloths will help add a shine to your glass. This article originally ran on Jan 31, 2013, under the headline “To Decant or Not to Decant.”

How to Serve Wine at the Right Temperature

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

One of my early wine mentors, the late, great wine writer Alexis Bespaloff, gave me a brief—but nevertheless valuable—piece of advice: “If the wine is too warm, put an ice cube in the glass, swirl it around for four seconds then take it out.” His suggestion became what my friends and I called “The Alexis Bespaloff Four-Second Rule.” Over the years, I’ve passed the A.B.F.S.R. along to every wine drinker I know—or, for that matter, anyone I’ve ever encountered who complained that his glass of wine was too warm. It’s a technique best suited to an overly warm red, as cooling a white takes a few seconds longer, but it will make any wine brighter, more refreshing, more vivid. Whereas warmth can blur a wine’s character, the right degree of coolness brings the wine more fully into focus. Unlike proper wine glasses or the act of pairing wine with food,

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wine temperature isn’t something that most wine drinkers think much about. Even some wine professionals don’t seem to consider it overmuch, judging by the service and storage conditions I’ve encountered over the years. I’ve been in restaurants where the wine bottles were stored at a temperature best described as “balmy”—stacked over the bar or lined up under lights on some very high shelves. I’ve even been served red wine in a glass that was taken straight from the dishwasher to the table and was literally too hot to touch. (This happened at a famous steakhouse in New York.) Correct wine temperature—in both service and storage—is one of the most crucial aspects of the enjoyment of wine. A bottle that is too cold or too warm is a wine that’s not going to be fully enjoyed. The ideal temperature for serving isn’t actually that far from the one at which the wine should be stored. In both cases the answer varies according to the wine’s color, type (sparkling or still) and even varietal. For example, a sparkling wine should always be served much colder than a still one—in part because sparkling wines are generally high in acidity and a high-acid wine is particularly unpleasant to drink warm—but primarily because the cold preserves the carbon dioxide (aka the bubbles). The colder the bottle of Champagne, the more carbon dioxide is dissolved into its contents, and the longer the sparkle will hold. The inverse is true too: A too-warm Champagne is a Champagne that may well be flat. (While a refrigerator is a good short-term storage place for Champagne, long-term storage in

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a fridge can also make the wine flat, as such a dry environment will eventually dry out the cork.) Texture and acidity are important parts of the temperature equation. Non-sparkling white wines are best stored around 50 to 55 degrees (about 10 or 15 degrees warmer than the average fridge) and served a bit warmer if they are particularly full-bodied and rich. For example, a big Chardonnay can be served several degrees warmer than a Sauvignon Blanc—which in turn can be served a bit warmer than, say, a very light Pinot Grigio. Red wines can be stored around 55 degrees or colder and served about 10 degrees warmer (60 to 65 degrees) though light red wines like Beaujolais or Dolcetto can be served lightly chilled (55 degrees, bearing in mind this is all an inexact science). The rule here is similar to that of white wine: The higher in acidity and lighter in body the wine, the lower the serving temperature. If you only have one place to store wine and are limited to a single temperature setting, the classic cellar is 55 degrees. Too-cool has a price: When a wine is very cold, the flavors are muted, while other aspects like alcohol and tannins are likely to come to the fore. The aromas will be pretty much obliterated as well. Try drinking an ice-cold glass of red wine and see if you can tell much about it. If this is a good wine then you’re missing a lot—of course, if it’s a cheap wine it’s probably just as well. As for an oxidized wine (one that is flawed or flat due to excessive exposure to air), it’s better served really cold, as a high-profile New York sommelier who preferred to remain anonymous, knows. He was confronted with a large number of oxidative Burgundies that had

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been flown over from France for a private dinner. The winemaker didn’t have replacements for the flawed wines. “So we piled on the ice,” the sommelier recalled. “It was the only thing we could do.” Wine temperature is also a matter of individual taste. Some people like their beverages very cold; some don’t like anything on ice. Often this has to do with geography. Chris Baggetta, wine director of Quince and Cotogna restaurants in San Francisco and formerly a sommelier at Eleven Madison Park in New York, found that “New Yorkers like their whites colder and their reds warmer” than their Bay Area counterparts. Why was that? I asked. Ms. Baggetta speculated that San Francisco’s “more consistent” climate allowed Bay Area diners to be more sanguine about temperature while New Yorkers were more accustomed to extremes in temperatures (not to mention in daily life). San Francisco diners are more open to discussions about proper wine temperature, said Ms. Baggetta. “They’re really curious and inquisitive about temperature variations,” she said. They’re also flexible; they will allow Ms. Baggetta to decide whether or not to leave the bottle on the table or to put it in a bucket with ice. New Yorkers, on the other hand, like what they like. I told Ms. Baggetta that I hate it when a sommelier puts my bottle of wine in an ice bucket. The wine gets too cold and it’s usually somewhere far away, often out of sight. I worry that someone else is drinking my wine (yes, this has happened). Surprisingly enough, Ms. Baggetta agreed with my point; she said she doesn’t like to have her bottle far from the table either. Of course I would always choose too-cold over too warm. Around

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a decade ago there was a trend among New York sommeliers to serve white wines at room temperature. A sommelier would bring a bodytemperature bottle to the table and ask in a disapproving tone, “You don’t want this chilled, do you?” Clearly anyone who replied in the affirmative would be cast as a fool. I’d hedge my answer: “Just a bit.” A friend who remembers that period said he would always respond, “Yes! Yes! I want it cold. As cold as you can get it”—an over-the-top response that he said made sommeliers think he was nuts and leave him alone. Geoffrey Troy, proprietor of New York Wine Warehouse, a retail store and wine storage facility that is home to some great collections of Burgundy and Bordeaux, believes that cold is always best. He cited his father’s personal cellar, which was set to a constant 48 degrees (seven degrees colder than the conventional cellar temperature). The lower temperature kept his father’s wines so well that “they taste years younger than the same wines,” said Mr. Troy, who keeps his professional warehouse at 55 degrees in part because a lower temperature would cost much more. But if he could afford it, he would set his storage thermostat to 48 degrees too, he said. Consider it the Geoffrey Troy 48-Degree Ideal Cellar Rule. This article originally ran on Aug. 30, 2013, under the headline “Strike the Just-Right Degree of Wine Cool.”

How to Select the Proper Glassware

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

Some children grow up in musical families and learn how to sing or play an instrument. I grew up in a family whose focus was glassware. Did you ever see a glass so well-proportioned? Did you notice how it catches the light, my father might ask, holding up a wine glass made somewhere like Poland or France. (He rarely mentioned the wine.) A running joke between my sister and me was that no matter what the topic might be, my father could turn it to glassware. My father spent decades working for a variety of glass companies, and our cabinets contained glasses from all over the world: Ireland, England, Austria, Finland, Germany and the U.S. Today, my own glassware collection is much less wide-ranging. There are three types of wine glasses in my house—red, white and Champagne—although the red wine glass is the only one that I consistently use. The white wine glass is too small, and the flutes are too

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fussy. Perhaps it’s a very late form of childhood rebellion, but I don’t focus overmuch on glassware. After a few memorable encounters with some particularly impressive stemware, though, I began to think I might be missing out. And as Aldo Sohm, chef sommelier of Le Bernardin restaurant in New York, said to me recently, one glass simply isn’t enough. Or as he put it: “Life is simple. But not that simple.” In fact, Mr. Sohm went even further, saying, “You can’t love wine and not care about wine glasses.” Mr. Sohm was one of two New York sommeliers whom I met with in recent weeks to talk about glassware. The second was Thomas Carter, wine director of Estela, a trendy newish restaurant downtown. Both men are quite knowledgeable about glassware, and could even be described as glassware-obsessed. Mr. Carter is an impassioned audiophile, and he finds many parallels between the two worlds. “Speakers are to music as glasses are to wine,” was one of the first things that he said to me when we met at Estela. Although Mr. Carter’s restaurant is small and the wine list is short, his collection of wine glasses is large and somewhat untraditional. For example, he likes to pour Champagne into white wine glasses. “Champagne flutes make no sense,” he said. “Champagne is a wine that just happens to have bubbles.” Mr. Carter believes that a wine glass can alter the taste of a wine—for better or worse—and he pulled together a sampling of his stemware to prove his point. We had six glasses for tasting two wines—a red and a white. There was a bulbous Burgundy glass, a straight-sided Bordeaux glass and a smaller white wine glass, all made

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by the German company Stölzle, as well the 7-ounce glass from Bormioli Rocco that Mr. Carter was using for all of his wines by the glass. He also brought out two possible replacements for the Bormioli—a glass made by Riedel and one by Spiegelau. He began with the red wine, a Gamay from the Loire, which we tasted from each of the glasses. The Bormioli glass was so small that I could barely get my fingers around the stem, let alone fit my nose in its bowl. It didn’t offer much of an impression of anything. The wine was as lacking in distinction as the glass. The Bormioli glass’s two possible replacements were a bit better—they had larger bowls and more room between the bowl and the stem. (Mr. Carter explained that he initially chose the small glass to convey a certain casual, unpretentious attitude about wine.) But the bowl of a wine glass must be large enough to facilitate swirling, which all serious wine drinkers do to coax the aromas out of the glass. (Mr. Carter, a dedicated swirler, calls it “kneading the wine.”) “‘You can’t love wine and not care about wine glasses,’ said a sommelier.” The wide-mouthed Burgundy glass accentuated the wine’s bright cherry notes, and made it seem pleasingly fruity. (Burgundy glasses are generally believed to accentuate fruit; they tilt the wine toward the front of the tongue.) The taller Bordeaux glass showed a higher acid side of the wine. (Bordeaux glasses generally orient the wine to the back of the tongue, and are said to highlight a wine’s structure.) The white wine glass made the red wine seem rather herbaceous. “Some people might even call that aroma ‘mousy,’ ” Mr. Carter

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offered. That was a very good reason not to serve the wine out of this glass, I thought to myself. The differences were striking, and they turned out to be even greater in the case of the white, a Chardonnay from Jura, in eastern France. The Bormioli bombed once again. The wine tasted like something you’d be served in coach class on a plane. (Mr. Carter, equally displeased with the glass, has since switched it out for one from Spiegelau.) Clearly the glass from which we were tasting wasn’t doing the wines any great favors. The Chardonnay was pleasant if simple in the smaller, tulip-shape white wine glass. In the rounded Burgundy glass, it seemed a bit flat. But in the squarish Bordeaux glass, the Chardonnay was round and generous, even complex. It was an interesting, if somewhat inconclusive exercise. There wasn’t one glass that consistently showed best. Mr. Carter said it would have been different if he’d had his Zaltos, Austrian glasses with a slight trapezoidal shape and a cultish following. “Everything shows in a Zalto,” he said. Alas, his Zalto glasses were at home, not at the restaurant. “They’re just too expensive,” Mr. Carter explained. I’d heard about Zalto glasses many times. They’re delicate, handblown, lead-free crystal glasses whose angles, the company says, are designed to mimic the tilt of the Earth (which somehow improves the taste of the wine, according to Zalto). The one time I drank from a Zalto, I was worried it would break. When I mentioned this to Mr. Sohm, he told me that the glasses weren’t fragile at all—in fact, he’d carried two in a bag on the subway from Manhattan to Queens and back without breakage. The intra-borough odyssey was one of sev-

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eral tests that Mr. Sohm performed before signing on as the “American face” of Zalto glass. Mr. Sohm said that the glasses were the “most powerful” he’d ever encountered. He still uses Riedel and Spiegelau stemware at the restaurant; in fact, when I stopped by Le Bernardin one afternoon he brought out a couple of Spiegelau glasses to compare with the Zaltos in an impromptu tasting of Meursault and Champagne. Once more, there were stark differences—the bulbous Spiegelau Burgundy glass made the Meursault seem fatter and flatter while in the Zalto Universal glass, it was more minerally, showing a higher level of acidity. In short, it just seemed more precise. I tried them both over and over. The Spiegelau shows the fruit and the Zalto shows the minerality, said Mr. Sohm. Mr. Sohm was certainly an impressive advocate, but since he earns a royalty from the company, I needed to try the glass again for myself—and against the one I’d been using at home. So I bought a Zalto Universal (said to work with all wines—never mind Mr. Sohm) for $59 from Crush Wine & Spirits in New York. I poured a simple Dolcetto into both glasses. The wine was pleasant, if a bit muted, in my standard glass. It was brighter in the Zalto, but it seemed a bit simple and one-dimensional. That’s another thing people say about Zalto—everything is sharper, for better or worse. I thought of Mr. Carter’s audio analogy. It was like hearing mediocre music blaring out of very good speakers. I repeated the experiment a couple of days later with a much better wine—the 2010 Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey Chassagne-Montrachet Les Baudines. The wine was still young and showing a fair

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amount of acidity. Marked by citrus notes with a firm mineral thread, it was lovely in both glasses, but it practically vibrated in the Zalto. My husband, who had been happily drinking from our basic glass for years, tasted the wine from both. He preferred the ChassagneMontrachet in the Zalto, but he was even more impressed by how the Zalto looked, and the way that it felt. “I don’t want to stop holding this glass,” he said. That’s another quality of a great wine glass—it must be lovely to look at and to hold. That was something that my father knew best. This article originally ran on Jan 3, 2014, under the headline “Glassware That Raises the Wine Bar.”

On Collecting Wine

BY WILL LYONS

Wine is ever-changing: No two bottles, barrels or vineyards are ever quite the same. Wine renews itself each year, its style, aging potential and flavor shaped by the vagaries of each growing season. It is against this backdrop that wine can become a collector’s dream. There are literally thousands of wines to try, and the range of varieties, regions and food pairings to taste create what the English wine writer Hugh Johnson refers to as a “moving target.” I have been collecting wine since the late 1990s, and I always try to follow the advice of Professor George Saintsbury who urged readers to steer from the “known to the unknown” in his seminal “Notes on a Cellar-Book.” I keep a copy on my desk at home and often dip, glass in hand, into his fascinating chronicle of the vineyards and vintages that brought him the greatest pleasure in his drinking life. “Notes” was published in 1920, long before the current fashion of

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classifying wine by grape variety (Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and so on) or flavor (light and crisp, or heavy and smooth). Instead, it is through the villages of France and countless other countries that we learn how each bottle of wine offers a flavor snapshot of the place and time where it was made. That unique combination of soil, climate, culture and tradition is what the French call terroir. If the options for collection seem daunting, I’d recommend a theme that is entirely personal. Vintages from the year one was born, married or graduated, perhaps. Or you could focus on wine discovered during a particular holiday, or a favorite Château, estate or domaine. You don’t have to take Professor Saintsbury’s advice. If you want to collect by grape variety or taste profile, by all means—do. Wine is a journey you can travel any way you like.

How to Develop Wine Expertise

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

I’ve studied the French language for decades in the hope of attaining some form of fluency. And yet all the conversation, the reading and the travel hasn’t produced a “plus française” me. My conversational powers are largely limited to discussions about wine and, oddly enough, furniture. I know some aspiring oenophiles who say much the same about wine; they’ve taken classes, bought reference books and tasted lots, but they can’t seem to get beyond the six basic grapes. Wine can be just as hard to learn as a language, even though the main requirement—regular drinking—seems like less of a grind than the conjugation of verbs. Becoming a wine expert is actually just as formidable as learning a language, requiring a similar degree of dedication and practice, as well as some form of full-on immersion. While a student of language might be advised to live abroad, a would-be wine expert is often counseled to work in a restaurant or wine shop.

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(David Schwen)

That was how my own wine education began. While I was still a student in college, I decided I wanted to spend my life in wine—even though I didn’t know exactly how or where. A wine importer I’d met told me that I needed to learn the business from “the ground up,” and recommended me to the owner of a prominent wine store in New York. My year and a half in the retail business taught me far more about wine than I could have learned on my own. I was constantly tasting wine, and surrounded by people who knew much more than I did (many of whom were actually my customers). But what’s the best way to gain a deep knowledge of wine if some-

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one doesn’t want to commit a year or more to working in a store? I guess it depends on how much you want to know. If it’s just about learning to buy a good bottle, then that shouldn’t take long. But if it’s about understanding wine altogether, that’s a bit more involved. Is there a form of wine education that’s best overall? I put the question to a few top wine educators and wine professionals. The first person I called was Kevin Zraly, the unofficial dean of American wine educators. Mr. Zraly has been teaching Americans about wine since 1976, when he opened his Windows on the World Wine School in New York. His book, “Windows on the World Complete Wine Course,” is on its 29th edition. Mr. Zraly said that he has sold more than 3 million copies of his book, making him the only wine educator I know who calculates his number of followers in the same way that McDonald’s estimates customers served. The name “Wine School” is a bit of a misnomer because there is no actual school—just an eight-week-long course that Mr. Zraly teaches in a Midtown hotel. The weekly classes aren’t meant to turn students into experts or pros, said Mr. Zraly, but to familiarize them with the process of trying various wines. This is the key to acquiring expertise, he said. “I thought for years that geography was important until I realized it’s all about tasting,” he said. It’s also important for an aspiring expert to visit wineries and vineyards, said Mr. Zraly—a point I agree with, as long as the student gets out of the tasting room and into the winery. Seeing how wine is actually made makes the learning experience complete. Mr. Zraly, by the way, doesn’t believe in calling someone a “wine expert.” It’s possible to be an expert on Italian or Spanish or French wines, he said,

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but there is no such thing as broad “wine expertise,” as the world is simply too wide. Mary Ewing-Mulligan, the president of the International Wine Center, a New York wine school, and a co-author of the “Dummies” wine books, believes that tasting is important, but thinks that wine expertise can be acquired by reading. “At least for a certain type of person,” she added. (Such expertise cannot be achieved by reading “Dummies” books, she admitted.) An education by the book will take longer, and it lacks the dimension of one in the “structured setting” of a school, added Ms. EwingMulligan, who holds a prestigious Master of Wine certification. The “MW” from the London-based Institute of Masters of Wine is generally regarded as the greatest educational credential a wine professional can earn. A candidate can spend years preparing for written tests. There are currently 314 MWs in the world. Ms. Ewing-Mulligan finds that formal schooling is likely to be much broader in scope than the sort of education that people undertake for themselves. “People who are self-taught are more likely to focus on wines that they like rather than a variety of wines,” said Ms. Ewing-Mulligan. “That produces a more narrow sort of expert.” I thought this was an especially good point. I know certain collectors who will only drink one type of wine (e.g., Burgundy or Bordeaux or grower Champagne) and only ever learn about that wine. The wines of rest of the world remain a mystery. For example, one Burgundy collector friend of mine had never tasted Vermentino, one of the most common white grapes of Italy, until he and I traveled to

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Tuscany. And yet he had tasted some of the greatest Burgundies ever made—many, many times. Marnie Old, a Philadelphia-based sommelier, wine educator and author of the recently published “Wine: A Tasting Course,” is less than keen on structured learning that includes memorizing grapes and regions. She thinks information learned by rote isn’t easily retained. She questioned the teaching of tasting terms and grapes instead of focusing on larger issues. For example, “Why don’t people address important questions like the difference between white wine and red?” she asked. Ms. Old’s book is full of eye-catching visuals and a lot of fun exercises (e.g., comparing sweetness levels in wine or varying shades of red wines) but it also contains plenty of that more structured information, such as facts on countries and grapes. I guess the “basics” like grapes and regions are as impossible to forgo as the tenses of verbs in French language books. But it’s one thing to know that Chardonnay is a grape, another to describe what Chardonnay tastes like when it’s grown in Chablis, France, versus California’s central coast. That’s something that can only be fully understood by experience—and tasting. Keith Wollenberg, Burgundy buyer at the multistore K&L Wine Merchants of California (who said he received his wine education “on the job” in a wine shop), believes that the best route to gaining expertise is developing a relationship with someone who is passionate about wine. Someone with a palate and preferably a cellar that outmatches your own. And if you don’t have such a friend? “Then

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befriend a wine merchant,” he said. (Wine books, he felt, were best suited as background references.) Of course, some wine merchants are more passionate than others—and just because a person owns a wine store doesn’t mean he or she prizes education over a sale. For example, the manager of the wine shop where I once worked used to suggest wines that he thought I should try. It was only later that I discovered they were all wines that he wanted to sell. I stopped asking for his advice. There is also a small group of wine merchants with whom I consult regularly about wines that I don’t know or I haven’t tried. These professionals possess a desire to share their knowledge—and to sell wines at a fair price. So with a small caveat, I think Mr. Wollenberg’s suggestion is an excellent piece of advice: Find an honest, wine-loving merchant or friend. The best kind of wine fluency is achieved through a mix of all these things: wine-loving friends, a trustworthy wine merchant (or sommelier), a shelf of good reference works and regular visits to vineyards—preferably where great wine is produced. All that goes beyond acquiring wine expertise to making wine an important part of your life. If only I could do the same with French verbs. This article originally ran Jan. 31, 2014, under the headline “The Long and Tasty Path to Wine Expertise.”

How to Start a Wine Cellar

BY WILL LYONS

If you enjoy wine, are starting to take more than a passing interest and have perhaps bought the odd reference book about vino varieties, it might be time to think about beginning your very own wine cellar. The worst habit you can get into is to stop off at your local wine shop once a week and pick up the odd few bottles. A much better approach is to buy by the dozen or a six pack, as most wine merchants will offer a discount on a mixed case. Better still is to select two or three wine merchants, order their catalogs or look online and, when you’re in the mood, spend some time selecting your favorite wines and comparing prices. I like to do this on the weekend, with a cup of tea and all the catalogs spread out over the kitchen table. But a cellar isn’t just a few cases of your favorite wine. It may sound like a cliché but a good cellar requires a bit of forethought and planning to provide pleasurable drinking over the long term. I like

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to break wine collecting into three categories: wines for immediate drinking, wines to lay down that will improve with age, and investment wines—those special bottles whose value will steadily increase year on year. I started my own cellar soon after I left university and began working in the wine trade. I well remember buying a case of northern Rhône Syrah to lay down—I still have four bottles—and six bottles of a well-known New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc producer. I now buy most of my wine twice a year: during the bin end sales at the beginning of the year, when merchants are unloading old stock at discounted prices, and when a wine is offered En Primeur (wine futures). This is where the wine is put up for sale from the barrel, months before it is bottled and shipped. The advantages are that you can guarantee an allocation of your chosen wine, you can choose the size of the bottle it is shipped in and also secure it at a discounted price. However, the latter isn’t always guaranteed—Bordeaux 2010 being a case in point. Many of the wines are cheaper now than when they were when released En Primeur. The common practice was always to buy three cases of your favorite wine. As the wine went up in value, one case could be sold, the profit of which would pay for the other two. Now wine investment isn’t as simple and it’s worth consulting an established, trusted wine merchant before buying wine to lay down. The golden rule is that investment wine should never be delivered to your home cellar; it should lay in professional storage, as provenance and storage history are crucial in retaining resale value. So, after all this, what should you be buying? A good cellar should

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(Jean-Manuel Duvivier)

be a collection of your favorite style of wines, growers and years. The latter requires a bit of understanding and research. A good wine merchant, a specialist magazine or a wine column will tell you which years are better than others. Within the categories of drinking now, laying down and invest-

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ment, I would divide any collection into five categories: sparkling, sweet and fortified, full- bodied red to lay down, fruity red for youthful drinking, full-bodied white to lay down, and young fruity wine to consume. In an ideal world, investment wines pay for future purchases and no category is ever fully depleted, although the latter normally isn’t an issue as many collectors I know have more wine than they will ever be able to drink! But a word of warning: Once you catch the collecting bug, it’s difficult to shake off. THE GUIDE TO STORING WINE

Your wine’s delivered, so time figure out how to store it. Leave investments to the professionals, but the rest can be stored at home using the tips below. WHERE TO STORE YOUR WINE

A north-facing room is best, so long as it retains a constant temperature, is free from vibration, isn’t exposed to direct sunlight and is fairly humid. Below the stairs or in the garage is also suitable, as long as the rooms are well-insulated and aren’t too dry. Wines for immediate drinking can be stored in a more accessible place than those that need to be aged. As a rule of thumb opt for the coolest room in the house. TEMPERATURE

This is the most important element in wine storage. Wines should be stored between 10-20°C, with an ideal temperature being between

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10-15°C. I have found the constancy of the temperature is more important than the actual temperature, so avoid large fluctuations. A simple maximum/minimum thermometer, hung on the wall, will be able to give an accurate reading. HUMIDITY

A very dry room can, with time, cause the corks to dry out, which can affect the seal. Too humid, and the labels will start to peel and rot. Buy a cellar hygrometer to check levels. A caution: Apartment blocks tend to be very dry. WINE RACKS

Bottles should be laid down on their side to prevent the corks from drying out. Racks should be positioned away from sunlight and vibration, and should be spaced out enough for easy access. Cellar tags are a good idea as they can hang on the neck of the bottle, avoiding the need to keep pulling bottles from the rack for identification. WINE FRIDGES AND BESPOKE CELLARS

If space is a premium and your collection isn’t huge, it may be worth investing in a wine refrigerator. They come in all shapes and sizes and can store wine at a constant temperature. For those looking for something a little more permanent, install a spiral cellar either below the floor boards or in back garden. Starting at around £9,500, these watertight cylindrical systems can safely store up to 1,500 bottles. This article originally ran on April 30, 2014.

How to Think About Aging Wine

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

“Aged like a fine wine”: Has this phrase become more of a marketing tool than a relevant wine-drinking fact? Has aging wine become an outmoded custom? After all, nearly every wine in the world today is made to be consumed soon after it’s bottled. (I’ve seen figures as high as 99%.) Wine drinkers seem willing to do their part. According to Bear Dalton, wine buyer for Spec’s, a Houston-based wine store chain, nearly 98% of his customers drink the bottles they buy in under a week. At Calvert Woodley in Washington, D.C., proprietor Ed Sands posits that 90% of his customers drink their wines quickly, so most of his inventory is comprised of wines meant to be consumed within two years or so. Even at Sherry-Lehmann in New York, a bastion of blue-chip (aka age-worthy) Bordeaux, nearly half the store’s customers are buying wines under $15 a bottle, according to the com-

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pany’s president, Chris Adams. Mr. Adams lamented that not many wine drinkers were likely to experience the enormous pleasure that a well-aged wine could bestow. Mr. Adams had a point, though I couldn’t help wondering how many people would share this regret. It isn’t just that a well-aged wine can cost so much money or require a long wait (Americans don’t like their pleasures deferred)—there’s also the question of flavor. An aged wine tastes very different from a wine that is young. In the place of dazzling, bright fruit, there’s subtle restraint. While the tannins may soften, the fruit may be dim a bit, too, replaced by flavors more earthy or mineral—flavors that are not necessarily familiar or easy to like. Of course, this happens only with age-worthy wines: Non-ageable wines that are left unopened for years usually just taste tired, dried out—and old. All age-worthy wines have certain attributes in common, the most important of which is acidity. Wines that are low in acidity can be easy to enjoy while young, but they don’t mature very well—think of the perpetual adolescents who fail to ever become adults. White wines that are high in acidity—like German and Austrian Riesling, not to mention Chablis, Champagne and Chenin Blanc—can improve for decades, though much depends on producer and vintage. A wine from a too-warm vintage may lack sufficient acidity, while a wine from a too-cold vintage may not have completely ripe fruit. If a wine isn’t in balance, it won’t age well. In ageable reds, tannins are an important component—they serve as both preservative and frame. Tannins are derived from both barrels and grapes and while all grapes have tannins, some, such as Cabernet,

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Nebbiolo and Syrah, possess tannins that are particularly strong. Some great ageable wines are made from these grapes (Bordeaux, Barolo, Hermitage), though a lot of mediocre wines are made from them as well. The difference is a matter of winemaking talent, location and vine age, and all the mysterious components that make up terroir. Wines that are high in extract (the components of the wine that aren’t acids, water or alcohol) also tend to age more sturdily. That’s one of the reasons that winemakers strive to make wines of greater extraction, though it also happens to be the fashion in winemaking right now, as winemakers try to make wines of maximum concentration, both in flavor and color. It’s possible to take this too far, however: over-extracted wine can be bitter and coarse. Most of all, an age-worthy wine needs a track record—historical proof that it has actually improved over time, many times. That’s one reason for the high cost of great Bordeaux. Great Bordeaux have a long track record—longer than most other wines in the world. But none of this matters if the wine isn’t well-stored. No wine is age-worthy if it’s stashed in a closet or left on the floor. The latter was actually the preferred location of a late wine writer and friend of mine who “stored” everything from cheap Cabernet to first-growth Bordeaux along the edges of his living-room rug. Dinners at his house were a fraught mixture of desire and dashed hope as pedigreed bottles were opened and poured—into glasses and down the kitchen sink. The expense of storage is another reason so few wine drinkers might think about aging wine—and for restaurateurs, it’s much the same. Few restaurants have the space or the deep pockets to keep bot-

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tles that they won’t be selling for decades. One of the exceptions is Crabtree’s Kittle House in Chappaqua, N.Y., where there are dozens of affordable wines on the list, in part because its cellar is so large. Glenn Vogt, the general manager and wine director, has bottles he admits he has lost track of—and happily, he seems to have lost track of the pricing as well. I had an excellent 10-year-old Chablis there last year that cost $25 a bottle. But even ownership of a cellar doesn’t mean some people won’t drink their wines young. Mr. Dalton told me that he has some clients who fly to Napa every year in private planes, buy up dozens of bottles of cult Cabernets—and drink them soon after they return home to Texas. This may be one reason so many Napa Cabernets are styled differently these days, made with riper fruit and more upfront appeal. Bordeaux-trained Philippe Melka, who makes some of the most sought-after Cabernets in the Valley (Vineyard 29, Dana Estates), says he is making wines that are more approachable than they were a decade ago. Age-worthy wine may not (yet) be obsolete, but its biggest challenge—beyond money, time and proper storage—may be the belief of a buyer in a bottle, the conviction that something truly transformative can take place. Aging wine is, above all else, an act of faith. This article originally ran on Feb. 11, 2012, under the headline “Does Good Wine Come to Those Who Wait?”

Understanding Wine Auctions and How They Work

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

Although most wine drinkers think of fall in terms of harvest and vintage, the big news—or at least the big money—isn’t in grapes, but in bottles. And right now, the entire wine-auction world seems to be full of good news—at least for the sellers and the auction houses. Ben Nelson, president of the Chicago-based auction house Hart Davis Hart Wine Co., says that sales at his house this year are over $25 million—more than 33% higher than last year—with two more big auctions to take place in the next couple of months. He estimates that total fine-wine auction sales in 2012 exceeded $300 million. No wonder news releases from major houses announcing sale results all seem to contain phrases like “exceeded all expectations” or “exceeded

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estimates.” The figures cited are inevitably large—often five and six figures. Perhaps that’s why every auction director I spoke with sounded quite pleased—even those who have yet to hold a single sale. Michael Jessen, president and CEO of the newly-launched Wally’s Auctions, characterized the market as “incredibly vibrant.” Wally’s, which is based in Los Angeles, will hold its first auction next month in New York. One lot that Mr. Jessen is particularly excited about is six bottles of 1993 Henri Jayer Cros Parantoux, Vosne Romanée. The lot is estimated to sell for $20,000 to $30,000. So who are the buyers and who are the sellers in this gilded scenario? Where do they come from? The answer was inevitably “all over the globe.” In my conversations with the auction house heads, the word “global” came up almost as often as the phrase “exceeded all expectations.” The market may be global, but the biggest auctions take place in three major cities—New York, London and Hong Kong (and to a lesser extent, Chicago, thanks to Hart Davis Hart). With the majority of the purchasers scattered about the globe, most of the bidding takes place online. This makes the market “much more efficient,” as Mr. Nelson said, though it might make it a little less exciting for spectators, too. Still, wine auctions can be pretty good theater, at least for wine lovers who like to see big numbers flashed on screens and listen to the auctioneer’s loving (if very brief) descriptions of the lots. Many major auction houses hold their live auctions in first-rate restaurants, offering lunch or dinner and sometimes tastes of a few auction wines.

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That’s as close as you’ll get to the actual bottles, which otherwise only appear in the auction catalogs. And what a pleasure those catalogs are to behold. The thick, glossy paper is flush with notes about wines and vintages accompanied by beguilingly lit bottles of Bordeaux and Burgundy. It’s all seemingly calculated to tempt bidders to abandon fiscal good sense. Even though many sales are taking place online, the catalog still matters. “Many customers still want to see the catalog before placing their bids,” Mr. Nelson wrote in an email. In fact, he added, many buyers would actually wait for the catalog to arrive before placing a bid. Auction catalogs may be the most significant constant in the everchanging auction world, which has seen two very big shifts in the past 20 years. The first took place in 1994, when wine auctions were legalized in New York. As Jamie Ritchie, CEO and president of wine Americas & Asia at Sotheby’s noted, this changed wine from something that was the province of a small community of collectors to a commodity that could be bought and sold the same way as a work of art. The second big shift took place in 2008, when the 80% wine import tax in Hong Kong was stripped away. This change in law brought a flood of wine brokers and auction houses to Hong Kong, where buyers seemed to have an inexhaustible amount of money and an equally inexhaustible appetite for Bordeaux. One Bordeaux was of particular interest to Asian buyers: Château Lafite Rothschild. At a 2010 Hong Kong auction, three bottles of 1869 Lafite Rothschild were expected to sell for $8,000 apiece; the

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wine went for $232,692 a bottle instead. Two years later, 12 bottles of a much younger (1982) Lafite sold at another Hong Kong auction for an impressive $42,350. Today’s Hong Kong auction market is smaller and much less flashy than it used to be. Take, for example, the recent history of Sotheby’s. The house sold $53 million worth of wine in Hong Kong in 2010, $45 million in 2011 and about half that amount ($27 million) in 2012. This year is shaping up to be a bit stronger than last, with total sales of $25 million so far. There is also much less emphasis on Lafite and Bordeaux in the Hong Kong market. Zachys president Jeff Zacharia, who travels to Hong Kong quite often, described the market as more “wellrounded” than it was in those heady days—the same words that John Kapon, CEO of Acker Merrall & Condit auction house, used to describe the auction world overall. And yet even in this “well rounded” market, one wine reigns supreme: Burgundy. Buyers and sellers alike are all looking for wine from this hallowed region. As Jamie Pollack, North American managing director of Zachys put it: “Burgundy is hot, hot, hot.” Some wines warrant such praise—especially any Burgundy produced by Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (aka DRC). At a recent Sotheby’s auction, a single case of 1999 Domaine de la RomanéeConti sold for $159,250. Needless to say, this “exceeded all estimates.” Other Burgundy domaines have racked up impressive, if somewhat less meteoric numbers—like the case of 1990 Clos de la Roche Domaine Dujac that sold last month at a Hart Davis Hart auction for $23,900.

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Of course, numbers like these have a way of attracting the attention of wine thieves. The auction world has been rife with fraud. Burgundy, of course, is a big target Just last week, an Italian father and son were arrested in France on suspicion of making $2.7 million worth of what they tried to pass off as DRC. While those wines—which were said to be lousy—may or may not have made it to auction, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t many more fraudsters whose work has yet to be found. The most famous example of a fraudulent wine at auction was a lot supposedly of Burgundy producer Domaine Ponsot, which was nearly sold at Acker Merrall & Condit in 2008. The auction was stopped when Mr. Ponsot himself showed up and denounced the bottles as frauds. Beyond Burgundy, other auction-house best sellers include mature Bordeaux and cult Cabs from Napa Valley producers like Screaming Eagle, Harlan and Dana Estates (two bottles of 2007 Dana sold for $1,792 at a recent HDH auction), but they seem like bargains compared with Burgundy. Are there any real bargains in the auction world today? Mr. Kapon named “Classic California wines” like Dunn and Montelena as overlooked and underpriced, while Ms. Pollack cited older Riojas. “You can get Riojas from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s and the value is exceptional,” she said. (Three bottles of 1920 R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia sold for $980 at a recent Zachys auction; the sale’s other Riojas sold in the low four figures.) So what does this all mean to a collector thinking of selling or a buyer who might want to enter the market now? Sellers should know that certain auction houses set minimum prices on the wines they

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accept. Sotheby’s, for example, won’t look at any collection worth less than $20,000. Some houses are a little more flexible. “We decide on a case-by-case basis,” said Ms. Pollack, who offered the example of a man who asked if Zachys would accept a double magnum of 1982 Château Latour for auction. Although the wine was only worth a few thousand dollars, Zachys agreed to sell the wine at auction. It turned out the man had a multimillion-dollar cellar, which he later sold at auction with Zachys. Each auction house has a different commission policy, too. This may vary from a few percent points of the total to nothing at all (as at Acker Merrall & Condit), though no auction director would give me an exact number. Finally, a seller should know how each auction house comes up with their estimates—the price range where they expect the sale price to fall. Some auction houses offer unrealistically high estimates hoping to attract would-be sellers—like real estate brokers who overprice a house just to get the listing—and then hope the wine will sell. It’s useful to check a few final sales. The most important number for buyers to know is the buyer’s premium—the not-inconsiderable sum that’s tacked onto every lot sold (and for which the buyer is responsible). Premiums vary by house: At Hart Davis Hart, the premium is 19.5% while Zachys and Sothebys ring in 22.5% (no one knows where the half-percent business started). Acker Merrall tops out at 23%. The final hammer price plus the buyer’s premium is referred to as the “aggregate” amount. Successful selling or buying at auction means doing research. In fact, the word that auction directors invoked almost as often as they did “global” was “homework.” A good deal on either end is virtually

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impossible without a lot of study. And perhaps the cultivation of a taste for (very) old Rioja. This article originally ran on Oct. 25, 2013, under the headline “The State of Fine-Wine Auction Houses: Less Flash, More Fire.”

Go Inside the World’s Largest Wine Storage Facility

BY WILL LYONS

It’s a still, warm, late-summer day as the taxi driver weaves his way through a maze of narrow country lanes deep in England’s rural landscape. Flanked either side by lush green hedgerows, the road veers to the right up a short drive beyond which acres of gently rolling, arable farmland stretch as far as the eye can see. “I know the way,” nods the driver in his soft West Country accent. “My brother works here,” he adds. “They have plenty of bottles all right; some of them he tells me are worth up to £3,000.” He’s not wrong. Lying 30 meters below us is the wine world’s answer to Fort Knox, an enormous subterranean cavern holding more than £1 billion worth of fine wine. If you are storing your wine through a reputed U.K. merchant, then the chances are it is probably stacked

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here alongside the other 680,000 cases, in one of the largest underground storage facilities in Europe. No wonder security is tight. “They won’t let me in,” says the driver as we pull up at an anonymous looking steel gate, alongside a security hut. So I get out, and as he speeds away I take a look around at the picturesque English countryside. One hundred miles west of London and I am in the middle of nowhere. Which is just how cellar master Laurie Greer likes it—with precious bottles of wine dating back to 1869, discretion is paramount. Welcome to Eastlays mine deep in Wiltshire. First quarried in the 19th century, it is now known as Corsham Cellars, owned by Cert Octavian, one of the U.K.’s largest private wine-storage facilities. When the first tunnels were excavated, much of the honey-colored sandstone was used to build the Georgian town houses in the nearby towns of Bath and Corsham. In the late 1930s, when war looked imminent, the Ministry of Defence requisitioned it and transformed the place into a giant ammunition store, replete with lighting, whitewashed walls and concrete floors. Since 1989, following its purchase by businessman Nigel Jagger, its labyrinthine corridors have been stacked not with TNT but wine, belonging to collectors such as composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, financier Guy Hands and restaurateur Michel Roux Sr. “It’s rather like an underground vault,” says Mr. Greer, who has overseen the mine since it was converted into a wine cellar. He says it now contains wine belonging to more than 130 wine merchants, various wine investment funds, restaurants, as well as around 2,500 private clients from as far afield as continental Europe, the U.S. and the Far East.

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“The biggest change we have seen is that clients who own fine wine have become much more knowledgeable,” says Mr. Greer. “They want to know where their wine has been stored, what condition it is in, even how it is looking. For some, the cases down below are their pride and joy.” It isn’t unusual for private clients to pay a visit to Corsham Cellars, where from above ground they can watch their cases of wine loaded onto the industrial goods train as it makes its way down one of the main shafts, nine meters below ground, into an area the size of 20 football pitches. In fact, such is the attention to detail that the company has installed three photographic studios to meet the demand of clients wanting to see emailed photographs of their stored bottles of wine. If this all sounds a little unnecessary, then one has to understand the context. Fine wine’s remarkable bull run—which has seen Bordeaux châteaux wines, such as Lafite Rothschild 2000, increase in price by more than sevenfold in the past seven years—has focused collectors’ attention on storage. Cases of wine that were once squirreled away in an old garden shed or below the stairs, now have to be kept in optimum storage conditions if they are to retain their market value. Most collectors know that wine stored in direct sunlight or in a room that is too hot can damage the liquid, as can dramatic temperature swings. An average temperature of between 10 and 15 degrees Celsius is preferable. But with the value of wine soaring, there is also the very real threat of security. “One of the great advantages of having an underground storage facility as opposed to an above-ground warehouse,” says Mr. Greer,

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“is that a thief can’t just take a large vehicle and smash their way in.” Breaking into Corsham Cellars would require the sort of elaborate heist fictionalized in “The Thomas Crown Affair.” Descending the 157 steps, I can see security is watertight. For the record, anyone looking to break in would have to negotiate the above ground CCTV cameras, before dodging the movement detectors placed at the top of the mine. Once past these two obstacles, there is the small matter of starting up the goods train that transports the wine into the cellar—either that or it’s a steep climb down. Once underground, the thief would have to locate a fork lift and then find the rarest and most precious wine amid more than 10,000 bottles. By which time, a separate alarm would have alerted the police. Eastlays mine is one of a number of underground bunkers, converted from former stone quarries, that were used as massive ammunition depots in Wiltshire in World War II. Mr. Greer says the mine was also used as a set for the filming of the early episodes of “Doctor Who.” Nearby is Burlington, a 14-hectare site that was converted to a subterranean Cold War City, which could house up to 4,000 government personnel in the event of a nuclear strike on the U.K. With the ending of the Cold War, the site has since been decommissioned. Back at Eastlays mine, there is a reminder of World War II with some graffiti depicting the war leaders etched on the wall and various humorous rhymes and vignettes. Wandering through the passages of this cavernous cellar one wonders what the many men who spent hours underground stacking ammunition while Europe was at war would have thought of the fact that 50 years later it has become a giant depository of fine wine. Judg-

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ing by some of the graffiti scrawled on the walls, they would have smiled. This article originally ran on Sept. 16, 2011, under the headline “The Wine Connoisseur’s Underground Vault.”

Why Wine Collectors Love Magnums

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

A magnum of wine pretty much means one of two things: twice as much Yellow Tail on the table or a $2,000 grand cru Burgundy. There aren’t many options between the super-cheap and the superlative in this two-bottle-size bottle. Or so I discovered when I went shopping recently for wines to share with my friends. I was hoping for something between those two poles (price-wise, not palate-wise) in a magnum size and was surprised at how few wines I found. Why were “middle class” magnums in such short supply? With the holidays close at hand, I had figured it would be easy. Magnums are the perfect size for large dinners and parties—they contain about 12 glasses of wine. They’re also the best format for aging wine. As most collectors agree, a wine ages more slowly and gracefully in a magnum, owing to a much greater proportion of wine to

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air. That’s one reason that magnums of great wines are particularly prized. Magnums are also much more festive than regular bottles; their proportions alone suggest a party in progress, a bounteous, bottomless good time. They can also serve as a restaurant’s floor show. According Michael Madrigale, wine director at New York’s Bar Boulud, when he pours his wines by the glass from a magnum, it captures the collective attention of the place. “It’s theatrical,” he said. “People stare.” He compared the sight of a magnum to that of a well-endowed woman. (Though in the case of a magnum, the contents are always real.) Even magnums of lowly Muscadet provoke similar shows of appreciation, according to Joe Campanele, the owner of New York’s Anfora wine bar, who pours magnums of Clos de la Pépière “Le Gras Mouton” Muscadet by the glass ($12). “People get really excited when they see a magnum,” Mr. Campanele said. But many wine directors shy away from buying magnums. Andrew Green, wine director of Spruce in San Francisco, says it’s hard to find a good supply. Often, they aren’t included in importers’ and distributors’ catalogs, and need to be requested personally. Plus, he said, “a lot of sommeliers are afraid of magnums. You have to have a real bravado to sell a magnum.” Perhaps that’s why magnums are scarce in restaurants, but why are they also often missing from stores? “People may think of magnums as ostentatious,” said Jeff Zacharia, president of Zachys in Scarsdale, N.Y., where I found about a dozen magnums priced for less than $100 each.

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Gerald Weisl of Weimax Wines in Burlingame, Calif., blamed a limited audience for his lack of magnums. “Women never buy magnums,” Mr. Weisl said. “Men buy them occasionally as trophies.” (As if to underscore that fact, his magnum section is adorned with a picture of that very manly 1980s man, Tom Selleck, aka Magnum, P.I.) Bear Dalton, the wine buyer for Spec’s, an 80-store Texas chain, said he has tried offering magnums of good wines, including a midprice Château de Saint Cosme Gigondas. His regular bottles of the wine flew out the door, but the magnums didn’t move. Furthermore, he said, sellers don’t really like dealing with the bigger bottles. “There aren’t really any easy ways to display magnums. You can’t put them on shelves, so they usually end up standing up somewhere in the back of the store.” That was exactly where I found my magnums at Zachys—next to the emergency exit and a dusty display of kosher wines. But at least I found a few promising bottles: a 2007 Calendal Côtes du Rhône by genius French winemaking consultant Philippe Cambie ($68), a 2007 Chinon by Catherine and Pierre Breton ($72) and a cru Bourgeois Bordeaux, Château d’Agassac ($65). I acquired more bottles by shopping online. I found the Chevalier de Grenelle, a sparkling Samur from the Loire Valley that sported a party-perfect silverplate label ($40), from Sherry Lehmann, and from Crush Wines I found a gorgeous saber-shaped magnum of German Riesling from the great 2009 vintage by producer A.J. Adam ($55). I found a great Gamay from Oregon on the Brick House winery website and a surprising number of Muscadets from various places (notably Chambers Wine) that were cheap. Once I’d accumulated a

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sufficient quantity of bottles, I set about my true magnum mission: sharing the wines with friends. I soon discovered that aside from wine collectors, almost no one I knew drank from magnums, let alone purchased them, especially women (reinforcing Mr. Weisl’s claim). In fact, three female friends looked quite surprised when I showed up with my big bottle of sparkling Samur. “A magnum!” they said with collective delight. “I would have loved to serve something like this at my birthday,” said my friend Monica. Why didn’t she? “It just never occurred to me,” she said. The wine was lovely—creamy with a bright acidity. Another group of friends expressed more skepticism. “It’s one of those big bottles,” said Mary rather dubiously when she saw the bottle of 2005 Château d’Agassac Haut-Médoc Bordeaux ($65) in my hand. In fact, Mary had recently dined with a friend who had chided the waiter not to try to “fool” her by trying to sell them a big bottle of wine. Although she’d been led to believe big bottles were always cheap, Mary was pleased with the Bordeaux I brought—”It’s much better than I thought it would be,” she said. We both agreed, though, that the wine wasn’t quite as impressive as the bottle itself. The magnums of Clos de la Pépière Muscadet Clos des Briords and the 2007 Calendal Côtes du Rhône that I brought to a dinner party of six were both very big hits and, characteristically, seemed to be bottomless bottles. The Calendal was big, lush and deliciously ripe, while the pleasingly minerally Muscadet inspired my friend Allison to say she’d actually consider buying a magnum. “Thirty-five dollars? I could do that,” she said. There is one big downside to a magnum, however, which I dis-

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covered firsthand with the magnum of Chinon that I brought to a BYO restaurant in New Jersey. I presented the bottle with a great flourish and my friends made all the appropriate expressions of awe. I poured four glasses. The wine seemed dull, the fruit diminished. I tasted it again. There was no question: the bottle was corked. In effect, we had not just one bad bottle but two. A flawed magnum, after all, is a problem compounded. I was almost afraid to point it out, since everyone had been so excited by the sight of the bottle. This doesn’t taste like it should,” I ventured. “Why don’t we have something else instead?” I opened a bottle of 2008 Williams Selyem Hirsch Vineyard Pinot Noir (in a regular-size bottle) that I just happened to have brought along. It was delicious—full of ripe, gorgeous fruit and marked by heady aromas of cherry and spice. And the magnum sat in the middle of the table, a still-splendid centerpiece. Then as we were getting ready to leave it behind, my friend’s wife grabbed the wine. “I love this bottle,” she said, clutching it to her chest. “I’m taking it home.” What could I say? The allure of a magnum can be beyond common sense. This article originally ran on Nov. 13, 2010, under the headline “Magnum Force: Big Bottles for Big Bashes.”

On Obsessing Over Wine

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

Are wine lovers obsessive by nature? Or does wine make them obsessed? It’s an oenophile’s version of the chicken and the egg: It’s hard to tell which comes first. What’s clear is that wine can provoke passion and excess, even among the most self-possessed. An obsession with wine evolves over time and in several stages. It often begins with a single, memorable bottle. Soon enough, the wine lover will want more and more and will begin to collect. He or she may start with just a few bottles, but soon enough a cellar is amassed. Entire sections of the wine lover’s house may be devoted to wine and wine memorabilia—and they may want to speak of nothing else over dinner. (Wine lovers can become rather single-minded conversationalists.) The particularly obsessed oenophile may try his or her hand at pro-

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ducing some wine. He or she might take a few classes in winemaking too—perhaps even viticulture. (A truly obsessed wine lover is a welleducated oenophile.) The most well-heeled among the obsessed go one step further: They will buy a winery, vineyard or both. (California’s Napa Valley is frequently the most-desired address.) Those stories can have unhappy endings, but they also work out: My visit with a happy man whose wine is selling well is chronicled here. Ideally, a wine obsession should leave the lover with good memories and a steady supply, but without massive debt. Finally, what of the dreaded-term “wine snob”? Is it a line not to be crossed, a description to be avoided at all costs? I’m convinced it is not, and that a true wine lover can wear the badge proudly. Hopefully, by the end of this book, you’ll agree.

What Happens at Winemaking School

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

Who doesn’t want to be a rocket scientist? A best-selling novelist? Or, for that matter, a winemaker? Certain professions simply sound more glamorous than others. Yet the aerospace industry isn’t exactly thriving, and Amazon can make any book seem like a best seller—at least for a while. Winemaking, too, isn’t nearly as romantic as some people might think. This point was driven home particularly well when I visited the University of California, Davis, a few weeks ago. The UC Davis viticultural and oenology program (or V&E, as it’s called) isn’t only one of the oldest winemaking programs in the country, but arguably the most prestigious. Some of the most famous winemakers in this country are Davis grads; I’ve even heard people call Davis the Harvard of winemaking schools. Located just west of Sacramento and about an hour east of Napa Valley, the school is one of the largest universities in the state’s sys-

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tem, with more than 30,000 graduate and undergraduate students. The wine program, however, is quite small, with fewer than 100 graduates each year. Created in 1880 by an act of the state legislature, the Davis oenology program became famous for its rigorous scientific training and the expertise of its faculty members. The winemaking facilities, though, were never quite as impressive. “Remedial” was the word that famed winemaker and UC Davis grad (class of ’79) David Ramey used to describe the old Davis winery, which he likened to an animal husbandry shed. That changed for the better almost three years ago, when a 12.5-acre vineyard was planted next to a new winery. Every piece of equipment was the latest model, often more sophisticated than those owned by most commercial wineries. The winery is one of the five new buildings that comprise today’s oenology campus. (The various buildings opened between 2008 and 2013.) Robert Mondavi, the late pioneering vintner, contributed a considerable amount of the building cost of what is now called the Robert Mondavi Institute of Food and Wine Science. The college has benefited from the generosity of many other winemakers and wineries—Jess Jackson, Jerry Lohr and Silver Oak, to name a few. It’s hard to forget any of them, as their names are on plaques all over the school’s winery. The August Busch family even donated funds for a new state-of-the-art brewery, and their name looms on a rather large plaque outside the facility. Even individual fermentation tanks in the school winery will bear plaques. The aforementioned Mr. Ramey, for example, will have his name on a tank that will eventually hold some student’s wine project.

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(Keith Negley)

Mr. Ramey, like many Davis graduate students, came to winemaking after pursuing other interests. In Mr. Ramey’s case, he was an American studies major at UC Santa Cruz. Of course some career-

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changers are better prepared than others. One 28-year-old graduate student I met during my recent oenology immersion had graduated from college with a degree in mathematics. He left a lucrative banking career in New York after deciding that his life would be better, if poorer, spent making wine. His math background wouldn’t go to waste. In addition to a good palate and a certain degree of artistry, a winemaker must be able to read and interpret data to make informed decisions (e.g., when to add sulfur to the fermenting must, and just how much). In fact, this skill might be even more important than the artistry—as I learned in an Analysis of Musts and Wines class, where the professor taught his students all about soluble solids and hydrometers (instruments used to measure sugar in juice). The school’s undergraduate and graduate curricula share many of the same requirements, including organic chemistry, microbiology and plant science, as well as viticulture and oenology. It’s a rigorous program, and graduate students who didn’t bulk up on science as undergrads are required to take extra courses to enter the graduate program. Some UC Davis courses are rigorous in other respects—requiring students to stand in the sun for long periods of time, for instance, while examining leaves for identifying characteristics or marks. The Viticultural Practices lab that I attended was held a few miles from campus, in the old Davis teaching vineyard. Professor Andy Walker was teaching 30 or so students how to identify various grapes by their leaves and fruit. This task was complicated by the fact that the vineyard was “full of diseased vines,” according to Mr. Walker.

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Some leaves afflicted with leaf roll virus, for example, were covered with spots. The leaves on the shady side of the row were also harder to identify, said Mr. Walker, but he wanted to avoid the sun—and perhaps sunstroke. There had been “a couple of faintings in the vineyard” in the past, he said. The class seemed unfazed by the twin facts of heat and old vines, and eagerly followed the professor as he strode down the rows, pulling out one leaf after another and pointing out their differing traits—the hairy leaves of the Pinot Meunier, the waxy leaves of Grenache and the ruffled, wavy leaves of the Sauvignon Blanc. I couldn’t imagine identifying so many varieties by their leaves alone but the students seemed quite enthused. I asked a student named Russell his opinion of the class. “It’s awesome,” he said. “I get to hang outside and eat grapes.” Mr. Walker recommended that the students return to the vineyard for between four and 20 hours a week to study the vines. “The vineyard is always open,” he said. It was only with repeated visits that they would understand what the professor called “the gestalt of the vine.” My next class, Wine Production, was a much smaller gathering. Professor Linda Bisson’s class was assembled around a sorting table filled with just-picked Grenache grapes from the school’s new vineyard. Some students were picking out damaged fruit, sticks and rocks before the grapes went into the crusher, while others manned the nearby hose and tank. The school’s winemaker, Chik Brenneman, hovered nearby, cautioning students to watch for out black widow spiders, and not to stand too close to the must if they were allergic to sulfur. A student had almost fainted from this, he said. (Fainting

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is, apparently, a hazard at wine school.) Meanwhile, Ms. Bisson reminisced about the time her students missed a rock during the sorting, and it blew the hose apart. This type of hands-on instruction is one of the big changes from the “old” to the “new” Davis, according to the professors, and the new facilities have brought a big improvement, in the way the classes are taught. I’d heard a saying about Davis over the years—”Davis grads don’t know how to run a pump”—meaning that its graduates were better with theoretical than practical stuff. When I mentioned this to Ms. Bisson’s teaching assistant, Scott Frost, he dismissed it, saying that Davis offered something much better: “It teaches you how to think about wine and the science of wine.” The strength of the school’s science program was something else I heard about again and again. A scientific understanding gave students confidence in their decisions—and an ability to fix things straight away if they didn’t go right. As Mr. Ramey put it: “If you have an oenology background, you know what you can change—and how to experiment. It enables you to make better wine.” An ability to make good wine is what it’s all about, after all. But what about great wine? Of all the Davis students I’d met, who would turn out to be the next David Ramey, Aaron Pott, Helen Keplinger or John Kongsgaard (all of whom attended Davis)? And what were the traits of a future great winemaker? Self-sufficiency was key, said Roger Boulton, who has taught for several decades at the university and is one of the most esteemed professors at Davis. A great winemaker was “someone you could pick up and put in the desert,” he added. (An odd place to propose putting a

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wine professional.) He or she was also “someone who had a healthy respect for science and the scientific method. And someone who wants the lifestyle of a farmer, of being outside.” I thought of Russell, the student I had met during Mr. Walker’s class in the vineyard. He would need to know a lot of organic chemistry, statistics and food science to earn his degree. But to be a great winemaker, he would also have to be the kind of guy who was happy just to stand in a vineyard, eating grapes. This article originally ran on Oct. 18, 2013, under the headline “So You Want to Go to Winemaking School?”

How to Buy a Vineyard

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

The dream of owning a winery is one that many may harbor but few are actually able to fulfill. The expense is considerable and the odds of success are incredibly long. Yet the list of actors and athletes, financiers and film directors who aspire to see their name on a label simply goes on and on. After a recession-related pause, the number of would-be vintners has been growing of late, according to real-estate brokers who specialize in the market. And some recent high-profile sales, such as the purchase of cult-Cabernet producer Araujo Estate in Napa Valley, Calif., have given prospective buyers greater confidence, according to Napa broker Katie Somple. But what inspires the dream itself? It’s often driven by a desire to “return to the land” (preferably inside a $10 million house), or to create a legacy for the next generation. Sometimes it’s simply a matter

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of loving wine, and sometimes it’s about having something (more) to own. The country’s most sought-after winemaking address is California’s Napa Valley, followed, in no particular order, by the state’s Sonoma, Santa Barbara and Mendocino counties. The Willamette Valley in Oregon and Washington state’s Walla Walla are also desirable locations. New York state has seen some action of late, in the Finger Lakes district and Long Island’s North Fork. Even though Manuel Pires was born in Portugal’s Douro Valley wine region, he aspired to own a winery in Napa Valley from his very first visit, many years ago. Why not in the Douro? “Because I am an American,” replied Mr. Pires, whose family emigrated to the U.S. when he was 15. He went on to build a large fortune in the security business. (His security-key system, Morse Watchmans, is used in prisons and casinos all over the world.) Anyone looking to get into the wine business basically has two options: Buy raw land and start from scratch, or purchase an existing vineyard. The former is cheaper, but more difficult in terms of obtaining all the necessary permits and planting the right rootstock. And there is always the chance that the land is no good. Finding a great vineyard is the best, if most expensive, option. Yet it isn’t easy either. The story of how Mr. Pires, a 56-year-old self-made Connecticut millionaire, came to acquire one of the most storied vineyards in Napa is a tale of persistence, timing and luck. Perhaps the greatest advantage Mr. Pires had—besides his wealth—was a formidable determination. I learned a great deal about Mr. Pires and his particular brand of perseverance in the two days that

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I spent in his company at his winery atop Pritchard Hill. (Pritchard Hill is a prestigious address in Napa Valley; some of the region’s most famous names grow grapes there.) Mr. Pires had hoped to call his estate Pritchard Hill, except the name was trademarked by the Chappellet family, longtime Pritchard Hill residents. Mr. Pires decided to call his winery Gandona, which means “humble man” in Portuguese. Gandona was the nickname given to Mr. Pires’s grandfather when, at age 36, he returned from America to Portugal. It became Mr. Pires’s nickname, too. Although he had visited Napa many times over the years, it wasn’t until 2005 that Mr. Pires decided to invest in his dream. The first step was highly unusual: He simply walked into a real-estate office and asked to see some properties. No one who actually has $10 million to spend does that, according to Holly Shackford, the real-estate agent who became Mr. Pires’s tireless companion and guide. “Someone in Manny’s position normally has a contact or an agent,” she said. A person interested in buying a winery usually calls in advance, especially as the potential buyer has to be vetted by the realtor to ensure she or he has sufficient cash before a single property will be shown. Ms. Shackford found that, unlike many buyers, Mr. Pires had a pretty good idea of what he was looking for. For example, he knew that he wanted a hillside vineyard. “I got a map out and we started talking about appellations,” Ms. Shackford recalled. And thus began one of many eight- and 10-hour drives in her car. The pair drove all around Napa, but nothing Ms. Shackford showed Mr. Pires appealed to him. There was a winery for sale right on Highway 29 that was a turnkey operation, with a winery, brand

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and staff in place. It wasn’t about building a dream but buying a business, and, as Mr. Pires pointed out, he already had a business in Connecticut. There was a remote hillside property near Angwin that Mr. Pires found interesting, but his wife, Cristina, rejected it on account of all the Spanish moss hanging from the trees. It looked “like Halloween,” said Ms. Pires. And so Mr. Pires and Ms. Shackford continued looking month after month. They ventured to Sonoma a couple of times, but Mr. Pires’s heart was set on Napa. It was a pretty bleak time, Mr. Pires recalled. He was in the process of getting his hip replaced. He couldn’t walk and his dream seemed like it would go unfulfilled. It had been almost a year, after all. Just before Christmas, in 2005, Ms. Shackford asked her husband, John, a real estate appraiser, to make some calls. Mr. Shackford had many contacts in the industry, including local lawyers, one of whom told him about a property that wasn’t listed. It was a prime offering on Pritchard Hill. Ms. Shackford called Mr. Pires and told him about it. Though Mr. Pires—who was living in Connecticut—was just a few weeks out of surgery, he got on a plane again. He purchased the 116-acre parcel from the Longs, an established grape-growing family, for $9.2 million, in April 2006. Gandona Estate is over a mile straight up a hill, and it was three years before anyone even knew that he’d bought it, said Mr. Pires. It only became public knowledge when he filed for a larger winery use permit. (The property had come with a 5,000-gallon use permit, which Mr. Pires increased to 20,000 gallons.) A winery with a use permit is a great advantage, according to Ms. Somple. This permit can be hard to obtain, and quite expensive—as

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much as $2 million for a commercial winery with a tasting room on the main thoroughfare, Highway 29. (Given the modest size of his winery, Mr. Pires’s permit cost much less.) A different permit, an Agricultural Erosion Control Plan, is required to plant a vineyard. “Anything with over a 5% slope, you will need a permit, and anything over 30% isn’t going to happen,” said Ms. Somple. (It’s almost impossible to obtain a permit for a new vineyard whose slope is greater than 30%.) Most of the Gandona vineyards are on slopes much steeper than 30%, but they were planted in the 1960s and 1970s when there were no such regulations, and are grandfathered in. Mr. Pires could rip out the existing Chardonnay vines and replant the vineyard to much more valuable Cabernet Sauvignon without requiring a new permit. Mr. Pires had to obtain a permit to enable his vineyard manager, Jim Barbour, to plant 2½ additional acres of vineyards two years ago—at a cost of about $100,000 an acre. Once a permit is obtained, planting comes with its own significant costs. It’s much more expensive to plant in the hills in Napa. Almost all hillside properties are rocky, and, according to Mr. Pires, the rocks he removed from his vineyard site had to remain on the property because of a local regulation. As a result, Mr. Pires’s rocks surround his vineyard as a rather dramatic wall. There is much to attend to in the vineyard—even with a manager and several full-time staff members. Mr. Pires spends a great deal of time out of doors, looking after his grapes. During my visit, the owner and manager met over a few vines to discuss red blotch—a dis-

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ease that is affecting a good many Napa vineyards right now, including a few vines in Mr. Pires’s property. Mr. Pires hired Mr. Barbour, one of Napa’s most sought-after vineyard managers, right after buying the property. He also hired superstar winemaker Philippe Melka, even though he was years away from making a wine. A Melka-made wine commands attention—and a good price. The first vintage (2009) of Gandona made its debut at $190 a bottle, and the 2011 was one of the top five wines in this year’s Premiere Napa Valley auction. It’s cost Mr. Pires about $15 million so far to realize his dream—that includes building a winery, digging underground tunnels for wine storage and building a new house, which is almost finished. He’s not sure his three children have any desire to follow in his footsteps. But that wasn’t the point, said Mr. Pires. “It’s no longer a property, and it’s not just a place to live. It’s my soul.” That may not be how most vintners in Napa talk, but it’s what a man with a fulfilled dream believes. DOS AND DON’TS

Few fantasies are readily realized, and becoming a producer of great wine is especially hard. The following are a few tips compiled from conversations with Napa Valley real-estate agents Katie Somple and Holly Shackford. Do decide how much you can spend. If all you have is the purchase price, then you shouldn’t get into the wine business. Don’t think the wine business is about making money. It’s (almost) never about making money. It’s about not losing money.

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Do understand that it will take time to find the right property. Many properties are privately listed with an individual agent. Very few appear on multiple listings. Wineries often do not want their names mentioned at all; a winery that is for sale risks losing its winemaker or distributor. Do work with local consultants—engineers, planners and lawyers, once you’ve found the property that you want. It will save money and time. But make sure the local is a popular local. Don’t believe an agent who tells you that a piece of land is ‘plantable’ without an ECP (Erosion Control Plan). Plantable land means a vineyard already has an ECP. Planting ‘potential’ means it does not have an ECP. Buyers should verify the difference. Do start with the best vineyard that you can buy. A good winemaker or a good vineyard manager won’t work with a bad vineyard. Do figure out what kind of wine lifestyle you want. Is your heart set on an actual working winery? Or maybe you just want a vineyard view? This article originally ran on Dec. 6, 2013, under the headline “So You Want to Buy a Vineyard.”

How to Make Your Own Bordeaux Blend

BY WILL LYONS

A few months ago, in early spring, a group of enthusiastic winelovers gathered in the harvest room of one of Bordeaux’s betterknown Grand Cru châteaux to celebrate the previous vintage. As a 15-liter Nebuchadnezzar of the estate’s 1985 was poured, glasses were raised to a banquet prepared by a two-star Michelin chef. Though 2013 was one of the region’s most challenging seasons on record, the atmosphere was one of jubilation, as each of the guests had enjoyed a firsthand experience in making the vintage. In the list of dream jobs, being a winemaker scores pretty high. My notebook is full of stories of men and women who have either made a fortune and reinvested the proceeds in a vineyard or given up their day jobs and sold the house to follow their desire to make the best wine possible. The 80 or so people seated in the harvesters’ hall of Château Lynch-Bages chose a third option. Without buying a vine-

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yard or giving up their jobs, all have made their very own barrel of Bordeaux wine. “This has been a blast,” says Pete Johnson, a 43-year-old wine enthusiast who has flown in from Los Angeles to take part in the making of the past five vintages. “Honestly, I wish I could spend more time here but, at the moment, with work, it is just impossible.” One day, he says, he will retire to Bordeaux and be part of the whole process. In the meantime, he gets his annual vintner fix by making his own wine with Viniv, a company located in the heart of Pauillac, one of Bordeaux’s grandest appellations. Co-owned by Jean-Michel Cazes of Lynch-Bages and former tech entrepreneur Stephen Bolger, Viniv gives clients the opportunity to produce, under the guidance of Château Lynch-Bages’s winemaking team, 288 bottles (one barrel) of wine for €7,350—or about €25 a bottle. Winemaking with Viniv involves everything from choosing the vineyard plots and taking part in the grape harvest to managing the wine’s fermentation, overseeing the barrel aging (known as élevage) and, most important, deciding on the final blend. “When I first started in Bordeaux, most people thought it would never work,” says Mr. Bolger, a Franco-American who launched Viniv in 2007 after leaving his career in industrial minerals. “One grower said to me: ‘How can you say that someone who has never made wine before is a real winemaker?’ Another asked me to stop demystifying the winemaking process. “My response was simple,” he continues. “If people are so interested in Bordeaux, it is because they want to understand. They want to get

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(Jean-Manuel Duvivier)

on the inside, they want to understand the inner-workings. Hiding the beauty of Bordeaux winemaking is, I think, kind of counterproductive.” We’re standing on the edge of Le Château, a small parcel of vineyards in Bordeaux’s Canon-Fronsac region. It’s damp underfoot and the spring sky threatens rain but, despite the heavy cloud cover, the landscape is spectacular. With its gently rolling hills and lush grass,

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the region is far removed from the gray, flat panoramas of the northern Medoc. Behind us flow the Dordogne and Isle rivers. This is Merlot country, where the south-facing slopes and rich clay-limestone soil produce dark ruby wines with aromatics of red fruit. I’m here to try my own hand at winemaking. It’s been 12 years since I first visited the region professionally. In that time I have tasted thousands of wines and visited numerous châteaux and cellars. It has been my job to evaluate, criticize and describe the wines. But in all those years, I have never had the experience of making my own. When I met Mr. Bolger at an event in London, I jumped at the chance to empathize with the vigneron. So I have taken a few days out of my tasting schedule to see what it’s like on the other side of the fence. I say winemaking but—as it’s early April—the picking, sorting and fermenting have been done and the barrel aging is under way. I’m here to test my taste buds and try putting together a final blend. As Mr. Johnson says: “I like to say that I am a fashion designer for wine. I’m picking out the materials and getting somebody else to sew them up.” I’ve opted to work on the 2012—still challenging, but not as tough as 2013. First, though, I want to see the vines that my grapes have come from. After Canon-Fronsac, we head into St.-Émilion to visit more Merlot grapes before making our way to the other side of the Gironde, where Cabernet Sauvignon thrives on the spectacular gravel plains of St.-Estèphe and Pauillac. Each vineyard produces grapes that impart a different character. For example, Pauillac possesses more power than the tightknit, tough tannins of St.-Estèphe.

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It’s a jigsaw that will hopefully come together in the blending room above Viniv’s winery in Pauillac, where I’m joined by Daniel Llose, who oversees winemaking at Lynch-Bages and has been blending wine since the 1970s. I tell him I want to make something quite refined—what the French refer to as classique. This is predominantly Cabernet Sauvignon, which has more structure than the big fruit of St.-Émilion Merlot. Mr. Llose explains that, first, you have to find the wine’s backbone. But he quickly adds that he’s just there as a sounding board—the makeup of the wine is entirely my choice. I feel a little like I’m back at school having to perform for my schoolmaster. I start off with a straightforward Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot blend, made from vineyards in St.-Estèphe, Pauillac and St.-Émilion. The structure is right, but perhaps a little too Cabernet-dominated. It needs more finesse. So I try Cabernet Franc from a parcel in St.-Émilion—replacing 10% of the Cabernet Sauvignon with Cabernet Franc adds more elegant aromas. I try a third blend with more Merlot. It doesn’t work; there’s too much flesh and the wine loses its bite. The fourth is fresher but a little overcooked. And so we go on, sniffing, tasting and swirling. It’s complicated, but fun. After an hour, we have five blends. Undecided, I sit down and taste them all again. I keep coming back to the second. I love its smell—the Cabernet Franc just adds something. That’s my blend. Sometimes, Mr. Llose says, you get it right early on. With my final wine complete, there is only one thing left to do. Would I like to go ahead and buy a barrel? I look at the wine and envisage myself writing a check. Then I remember the difficult

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growing season … The beauty of wine is that there is always another vintage. Maybe next year. This article originally ran on July 11, 2014.

A Visit to Château Lafite Rothschild

BY WILL LYONS

Crossing the Jalle du Breuil on the southern slopes of Bordeaux’s St. Estèphe commune, the marshland unexpectedly clears. Here, the D2 road straightens from its northern curve, cutting through what many regard as the heart of Bordeaux’s classic Médoc region: the vineyards of Pauillac. For anyone familiar with this magical stretch of road, it isn’t the immaculate carpet of vines that trail down to the banks of the Gironde estuary that catches the eye, but a thin line of weeping willows on its bank. Oenophiles know to slow down. Barely visible through the swaying branches are the manicured gardens and turret of Château Lafite Rothschild—a view little changed since the 18thcentury and one immortalized by its distinctive engraved label. The estate’s 2011 is, as one would expect, reserved. But under the cloak of its youthful tannins, black currant and a delightful, fresh

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suppleness is revealed. For a wine so fine, the tannins are exquisite and its ethereal weight is remarkable. It is reminiscent of a meal in a Michelin-starred restaurant, where the flavors and texture are powerful, but the finish on the palate is light. Despite the obvious quality of Lafite’s wines, some nagging questions remain: Why has this château caught the imagination like no other in Bordeaux? What makes someone pay £43,000 for 12 bottles of the 2009 vintage, as one bidder did at a Hong Kong auction in 2010, redefining the price of youthful fine wine? And, given the recent downturn in the Bordeaux fine-wine market, can it retain its elevated price? Those familiar with this region know there are at least eight wines that can rival Lafite’s immediate charm, including the four other Bordeaux First Growths—Latour, Margaux, Haut-Brion and Mouton Rothschild. On the other side of the Gironde, in Pomerol and St. Émilion, are Le Pin, Pétrus, Ausone and Cheval Blanc. But in terms of investment potential, international recognition and market demand, over the past few years, Lafite has eclipsed them all. Since the 1990s, the estate has been under the careful guidance of Charles Chevallier. Reserved, almost reticent, Mr. Chevallier says he is as perplexed as anyone as to why its price has risen so dramatically. He points to the quality of the wine, which he says comes from a process that involves precisely timing the picking of the grapes, not extracting too hard when drawing the flavor and color out of the skins, and respecting the house style of elegance and finesse over brute power and high alcohol. But above all, he recognizes the

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importance of the soil and its gravel, which in parts of the vineyard stretches down more than four meters. He explains that his winemaking team, oenologist and winemaker Christophe Congé and vineyard manager Regis Porfilet, goes through exactly the same procedures at the Rothchild’s neighboring estate, Château Duhart-Milon. The two properties are less than one kilometer apart, and since 1962 have been managed by a single team. But the definition and style of the wines are different, Mr. Chevallier says. So too is the retail price, with a bottle of 2010 Duhart-Milon priced at around €134, compared with €1,047 for Lafite. “The crucial factor in making great wine is to pick at exactly the right time,” Mr. Chevallier says. “We do this by spending a lot of time in the field…. I taste, then I make a decision. We try to find the right balance between the acidity and the sugar ripeness. From then on, the process of making the wine is quite easy. “At the end of the maceration, we have to control by tasting also,” he adds. “Those are the two main decisions in the life of the wine.” In many ways, though, Lafite has become more than a wine. As with a number of other premium French wines such as Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, its following among wealthy collectors in Asia has driven its price to astronomical levels. Only last week at a Bonhams auction in London, a case of 1982 Lafite sold for £21,850, or £1,820 a bottle. “I always think of Bordeaux as Formula One,” says Jonathan Malthus, owner of Château Teyssier in St. Émilion. “Wherever I go in the world, all winemakers want to show their wines against the

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wines of Bordeaux. It is still the benchmark and, within our lives, will remain so.” The linchpin to that benchmark is the 1855 classification, a list drawn up under the instruction of Napoleon III for the Exposition Universelle de Paris. Compiled by brokers, it ranked the châteaux of the Médoc in five groups of quality. Lafite was ranked at the very top. It is this ranking, some argue, that provides a clue to the château’s popularity in the Far East. Demand in Asia may also be explained by its classical label, which has never changed, its lineage and, in recent years, by the fact that Domains Barons de Rothschild has a presence in eastern China with year-old vineyard plantings. “Bordeaux is still the largest single area of great vineyards that exists,” says British importer Mark Walford. “And it is undoubtedly the first winemaking area to open up any country that is likely to have an interest in wine.” But Château Lafite Rothschild’s history hasn’t always been peppered with success. Yes, the estate supplied wine to Britain’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole, in the 18th century, but throughout much of the 20th century, it struggled. Some critics argued it underperformed against its peers in the 1960s and ’70s. Indeed, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last September, Nat Rothschild, scion of the Rothschild banking dynasty that has owned the château since the late-19th century, quipped that “it was a millstone round the Rothschild family’s neck for 100-plus years.” This changed when the release price for the wine started to rise in the late ’90s, climbing steadily from around €50 a bottle in the mid ’90s to €600 a bottle for the 2011.

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But there is evidence that the fine-wine market, after a tremendous bull run, is experiencing its own downturn. The 2011 en primeur was one of the slowest to sell on record, with many négociants saying it was the hardest to sell in living memory and some arguing that too much wine has been sold to investment funds and the Asian market in the past five years. This is borne out by the recent fall in price. According to Liv-ex, the London-based fine-wine exchange, the 2011 Lafite has lost 18% of its value since it was first offered to the market in April, falling from around £5,500 a case to £4,500 a case. “Has there been a slowdown in terms of increase of price? Yes,” says Richard Harvey, Master of Wine and head of Bonhams wine department. “There is too much wine floating around, and it is not moving out of Hong Kong quickly enough.” Others are more sanguine. “The fundamentals are right,” says Livex director Anthony Maxwell. “There is limited supply, the quality is increasing and demand is increasing—maybe not on a month-bymonth basis or a quarter-by-quarter, but it is increasing.” But away from the auction houses and market indexes, workers at Château Lafite Rothschild are praying for dry weather. The vines need a long, dry growing season for the grapes to ripen fully and for the roots to burrow deep and extract the mineral elements that add to the structure and flavor of the wines. For it is the soil, says Mr. Chevallier, that provides “the magic of Lafite.” This article originally ran on July 12, 2014, under the headline “The Lafite Phenomenon.”

How a Burgundy Wine Domaine Became the World’s Most Exclusive

BY WILL LYONS

At No. 1, Rue Derrière le Four in Vosne-Romanée, the midafternoon sun catches the courtyard, casting a shadow across its white-washed walls, briefly illuminating a small oval-shaped plaque that sits atop a pair of burgundy-colored gates. Against the light one can just make out the letters “RC”—the one clue as to what lies behind. It is here, sandwiched between a stone house and an outbuilding, that one finds the home of what many people regard as the world’s most sought-after and precious wine—Domaine de la RomanéeConti. Walk past and you would miss it. It may not be the world’s grandest architectural frontage, but these initials represent two of the most bewitching names in the world of wine. There are many enchanting addresses in the vinuous landscape—Château Petrus in Bordeaux, Champagne Krug in Reims and

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Château d’Yquem in Sauternes—but few can compete with the mystery and allure of Romanée-Conti. The name itself is that of a 1.8 hectare vineyard that lies just a short walk behind the village of Vosne-Romanée on a southeastern-facing hillside of the Côte d’Or, a thin, 48-kilometer ribbon of land that starts just south of Dijon and ends in the villages south of Santenay. Split into two sections, the Côte d’Or or “Golden Slope” divides into the Côte de Beaune in the south, known for its white Burgundies and delicate red wines, and the much shorter Côte de Nuits in the north, home to Vosne-Romanée. It is in the latter, on a multilayered soil of limestone, red clay, gravel and pebbles, where the Pinot Noir grape finds its most sophisticated and fascinating expression. Take a stroll up to the vineyard of Romanée-Conti at any time and you are more than likely to be met by a crowd of wine enthusiasts stopping to get their photograph taken beside the stone cross that stands on the southern perimeter of the vines. But it is neither the cross, nor the vineyard that has given the name Romanée-Conti such resonance. It is the wines. Not that there are many people who have had the opportunity to taste a glass of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Firstly, there is the hurdle of the price. According to U.K. importers Corney & Barrow, a bottle of 2007 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti will set you back a mere £4,500, which adds up to around £56,000 for a case of 12. If, and it is a very large if, you can source a case. Production of Romanée-Conti is tiny—a better description would be minute—at around 450 cases, or 6,000 bottles a year. Faced with this, it is hardly surprising that some importers only ever sell in mixed cases, in other

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words, to buy one bottle of Romanée-Conti one has to purchase a case that contains the other wines of the domaine as well: La Tâche, Richebourg, Romanée Saint-Vivant, Grands Echézeaux and Echézeaux. But I doubt anyone who received such a case would be complaining, as all of these wines are characterized by a purity, grace and finesse that puts them in many cases on a par with the domaine’s namesake itself. Given its scarcity and the fact that it will only ever be tasted by a handful of billionaires and connoisseurs, why visit? The answer lies in attempting to understand the philosophy and wine-making practices that have earned the domaine its international reputation. And to do this, one has to speak to its winemaker: the thoughtful, donnish 71-year-old Aubert de Villaine, who, along with his co-director Henry-Frédéric Roch, has, for more than a quarter of a century, has been at the forefront of not only restoring the reputation of the wines of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti but also of the wines of Burgundy itself. It is with this in mind that I press the tiny button beside the domaine’s steel gates to announce my arrival for a tasting of the 2009 vintage, a year that, on present evidence, in Vosne-Romanée has produced fresh, supple wines with an abundance of forward fruit. When I am ushered into a small annexe, it is difficult to equate my surroundings with the domaine’s reputation. Unlike châteaux in Bordeaux, there is no grand Palladian mansion, elaborately built cellars or an army of staff. Just a receptionist, a few men working in the winery and, after a short wait, Aubert de Villaine, who, after introducing

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himself, politely asks if we can go to the cellars straight away as it is vintage time in a few weeks and there is a lot to do. “What I have learned is that the talent that makes the wines is not with us,” says Mr. de Villaine, dipping a pipette into a large oak barrel named Richebourg and drawing out a dark, purple wine. “It takes some years to understand that the talent is in the vineyards. The importance of your work adds influence naturally, but, essentially, what really gives the taste to the wine is the plot of land, the terroir. The more you express the character of the land, the more you are doing your job.” In Burgundy, terroir comes first. Unlike Bordeaux, where classifications are ranked by producer, to understand the wines of Burgundy, one has to first think of the vineyard, then its village, then its producer, often written as a tiny footnote on the bottom of the label. In Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s case, the crus the family has acquired through a process that started with Mr. de Villaine’s greatgreat-great-grandfather, Jacques-Marie Duvault-Blochet, are some of the most sought after in the whole of Burgundy. As well as owning the entirety of Romanée-Conti, they also own the larger La Tâche vineyard; 44% of Richebourg, 55% of Romanée Saint-Vivant, 38% of Grands Echézeaux and 12% of Echézeaux. Aubert de Villaine has been working at the domaine for more than 40 years, a period during which he has honed a philosophy that is based on respect and humility for the land he farms: What is taken out of the soil is given back, there are no chemical fertilizers, treatments or many of the modern wine-making gadgets available to the contemporary vigneron. An example is the reintroduction, a few years

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ago, of horses to replace the use of heavy machinery in the vineyard. The gentle action of the horses’ hooves, Mr. de Villaine says, “does not compact the soil as much.” “The more we learn, the more we learn to use less technology,” he says. “In the ’70s and ’80s we were tempted by using mechanization, which was bringing a lot of shortcuts. But now we are going back from this, and we are more manual today then we were 20 years ago.” We are tasting in the maturation cellar, which is a short walk away at another famous Vosne-Romanée estate, Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair. Generously, Mr. de Villaine says that we are not obliged to spit, but such is the scarcity of these wines that after the first sip we have to pour back the remainder of our glass into the barrel. We start with Grands Echézeaux, move onto Richebourg, Romanée Saint-Vivant, finishing with La Tâche, and finally Romanée-Conti. The wines are some of the oldest in the world, dating back to the Romans who first cultivated the vines. The monks of the Priory of St. Vivant had acquired the vineyard, then known as Cros des Clous, from the Dukes of Burgundy in the 13th century. In 1631, ownership passed to the de Croonembourg family who renamed it Romanée. The Conti was added after Louis François de Bourbon, the Prince de Conti and first cousin of Louis XV of France, paid 8000 livres in 1760 for it. After the Revolution, the land was sold to Napoleon’s bankers before being bought in 1869 by Duvault-Blochet, who built up most of the holdings. So how do the wines taste? It is always hard to be completely objective when faced with such iconic wines, especially when tasting from the barrel, as these wines are famously difficult to taste young;

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with age it becomes easier as they develop more complex, tertiary aromas. Over the years, the adjectives used to describe the taste of the wines have ranged from satin and silk to violets, wild cherries, raspberries and game. To which I add licorice, spice, plums and the forest floor. But they are special. To describe these wines simply in terms of taste is to miss the point. Without descending into the incomprehensible, when I taste these wines, they evoke a similar intellectual stimulation that I derive from listening to a piece of challenging classical music or viewing a beautiful work of art . Mr. de Villaine prefers to describe his wines in terms of character, as opposed to taste. “Richebourg is a wine that every year is very masculine and arrogant,” he says. “I often describe it as musketeer, the bodyguard of Romanée-Conti, and a wine that wants to laugh.” “Romanée Saint-Vivant has two faces,” he continues. “One face is very elegant and fine, close to Romanée-Conti in finesse; the other side is more abrupt, monastic even. La Tâche is a wine that is always showing tannins that usually have the character of liquorice. In the center, it is very vertical and sharp, but surrounded by a lot of lace and velvet. Romanée-Conti is a wine that doesn’t want to show off; it doesn’t have lipstick or makeup. It has a hidden elegance.” Those who know him well say Aubert de Villiane is slightly aghast at the prices his wines achieve in the marketplace. A modest, deepthinking intellectual, his world seems a million miles from some of the upscale cities where Romanée-Conti is drunk. “These wines will always need the hand of man and the way they

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are made today requires patience and a long-term vision,” Mr. de Villaine says. And with that, it is time to go. As I emerge from the cellar, the sun is beginning its late-afternoon descent. Leaving the courtyard, I walk to the car, parked casually across the kerb; the silence, punctured by the echo of a distant bell, filling the medieval village with its rhythmic toll. This article originally ran on Oct. 1, 2010, under the headline “Searching for Perfection.”

A Defense of Wine Snobbery

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

America has never been overly fond of its intellectuals. Ralph Waldo Emerson took note of this fact in a speech made at Harvard almost 200 years ago: “The mind of a country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” Even today, anyone with a higher degree or a wellarticulated belief risks being called an “elitist.” The same seems to hold true in the American wine world, where an impassioned and knowledgeable oenophile is—often as not—simply labeled a “snob.” The wine-snob backlash has lately been led by a group of wine populists fond of proclaiming that it’s not only unnecessary but downright undesirable to know too much about wine. Drink what you like and don’t worry about the particulars, they like to say, employing tasting terms like “yummy” and “fun” while comparing wines to cigars and black dresses and even gym socks. A wine snob can talk about wine in terms that encompass history,

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geography and meteorology. Wine snobs know where and why certain grapes are grown and who does the very best work in a particular vineyard. A wine snob also takes notes. Wine snobs are very good at writing things down. A wine snob is also quite good at drinking—albeit in a serious, note-taking sort of way. It almost goes without saying that wine snobs are some of the very best customers in restaurants and stores. Who better to appreciate everything from the fanciest grand cru to the most obscure bottling from the furthest parts of the world? A wine snob can appreciate a winemaker’s noble intentions and subtle artistry and is willing to pay the price for them, too. A wine snob keeps the wheels of wine commerce going around. And yet, the fruits of a snob’s study aren’t always appreciated. Sometimes even a modest display of wine knowledge can provoke accusations of pretentiousness or worse. I’ve been accused of this myself. It happened a few years ago when my friends and I were dining at a bistro in Paris. (Isn’t that where all wine-snob stories start?) We’d ordered a rosé that turned out to be terrible. I (briefly, I promise) cited a few of its flaws and suggested that we might want to try something else. My friend’s husband balked. Why couldn’t we just drink the wine? he asked—a question that was actually closer to a demand. And furthermore, he added, why was it that I had to talk about the wine at all? The fact that I was simply trying to save him from drinking something lousy was seemingly forgotten—along with the fact that there had been many earlier instances when these friends had expressly

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(Marc Rosenthal)

sought my help in wine selection, including the occasion of their wedding. But my friend’s husband is hardly alone. I’ve witnessed similar, though perhaps less vehement, responses by others over the years. Wine talk seems to trigger a particular sort of outrage among non-

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oenophiles. It may be in part because the language of wine is arcane, and the terms employed aren’t the sort that people normally use. There likely aren’t many people outside the wine world who know what garrigue means (underbrush in the Mediterranean—it’s used to describe wines from the Rhône) or who have described something as tasting like “melted tar” or “damp earth” and meant it as a compliment. Perhaps what antisnobs really need is a taste of the wines that the snobs revere. The best way to understand something better is through personal experience, after all. And contrary to what many might believe, the wines that snobs love aren’t always precious and the prices aren’t always three figures and more. A wine snob likes wines with a singular character and taste, wines that are made in a particular place. Take, for example, Chablis. Although it’s made from the Chardonnay grape, it doesn’t taste like Chardonnay from any other part of the world. This is thanks in part to the climate and in part to the soil, a mixture of limestone and clay and thousands of fossilized oyster shells (a wine snob could probably even name the type of oyster). A great Chablis is pure and austere with a shimmering acidity and mineral thread—characteristics that can be found in even the most basic and affordable wines as well. A similar transparency is found in the great Rieslings of Germany, once considered the noblest wines in the world, thought sadly much less fashionable now (except among wine snobs). With their captivating aromas of flowers, fruit and spice, bright minerality and juicy acidity, they’re also wines that last a long time. Wine snobs are also fond of grower Champagnes—sparkling wines

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made by Champagne farmers instead of the large Champagne brands. These men and women, known as récoltants, make Champagne from their own vineyard holdings instead of blending grapes from vineyards all over the region, as is true of the brands. Grower Champagnes are a fairly recent phenomenon—most growers couldn’t afford to make their own wine—but thanks to wine snobs who have championed their cause, they’re now some of the most sought-after Champagnes in the world. A wine snob cherishes wines with a history, from hallowed regions like Rioja in Spain and Piedmont in Italy. The red wines of Rioja are aged in a manner unlike most other wines—a tradition dating back to the 18th century. Some Riojas can be aged more than 10 years in a bottle before they’re released, and the very best achieve a subtle, mellow character unmatched by any other wine in the world. The same is true of Barolo, the Piedmontese wine prized above all by wine snobs for its power and finesse—two seemingly opposite terms that manage to converge in the same wine. A great Barolo is marked by an unmistakable perfume—tar and roses and minerals and earth—and is styled to reveal itself over time, transitioning from forbiddingly tannic to lithe and elegant, almost Burgundian in style. A great Barolo rewards those who will wait, although there are more and more Barolo producers who style their wines to be more accessible sooner. Emerson, the great champion of individualism, was a big proponent of experimentation and change: “Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow,” he said. It could be the motto of every wine snob I know.

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This article originally ran on July 6, 2012, under the headline “Think While You Drink: In Defense of Wine.”

About This Book

“Selecting, Drinking, Collecting & Obsessing: A WSJ Guide to Enjoying Wine” was published in August 2014 by The Wall Street Journal. The art director was Manuel Velez. The front cover poster art was by Susan Burghart. The chapter heading illustrations were by Serge Bloch. The editors were Beth Kracklauer, Fiona Matthias and David Marino-Nachison. For questions about this or other e-books from the Journal, e-mail [email protected]. For more news, information and subscriptions, visit wsj.com. Copyright ©2014 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.