“What is the best Wine Shop…?”

“What is the best Wine Shop around here?” I suppose that was a fair question at the end of a 30+ person private wine event that I had the privilege of getting to co-host, some of attendees being new to our area. I took a moment to answer with: “There are a couple,” then expanded on my answer.

It would be too easy to say that the best shop is “X”. Often to correctly answer a question you must ask a question, so after giving my initial answer I asked: “How do you like to buy wine?” After getting his response I then gave him a brief run down of where I thought he would get the best bottle with the best experience. The last part of that sentence is the key! But before diving in and answering what makes a good wine shop we must define what a wine shop is.

That is actually harder than it sounds. One possible definition is a shop whose merchandise is comprised of 51% or more of wine. Yet that can take several locations out of consideration that could deserve a look. For me, a better way to define a wine shop is based on expertise and experience. Some of the best places can have a small, but unique, wine selection with great knowledge on that selection. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love a big selection, but no one knows everything about every wine. I love being surprised by a recommended wine that turned out to be fantastic, a wine that I would have otherwise not picked on my own. That level of knowledge and expertise often leads to a great experience, both in buying and consuming. Finding a store with huge selection of wine that also has a staff (or just a single staffer) with a vast level of knowledge is very, very rare.

A great example of being suprised by a wine that was a recommendation, one that I would not have bought on my own was Cantine Coppi Core Rosato Negroamaro from Salento, in Puglia Italy that was at Aragon Wine Market. Aragon is small but has a very good selection and a very knowledgeable staff, making my list for one of our area's best wine shops. The Negroamaro was a Rose but very unique with a complexity of flavor and feel that you don't get out of almost every other Rosé, making it a Wine of Note!

So I go back to my question of “How do you like to buy wine?” Do you enjoy going into a big box store and finding your own treasure bottle or do you like a more intimate venue with a staff that can point out something great?  We are blessed to have several good wine shops locally, but we also have a few that I would NOT recommend.  Sorry, I am not going to go over them here.  Ask me at the next wine event if you are curious on my opinion. 

Gosh, I do love the mystery wines!

What is one of the best ways to entertain a wine enthusiast? Have them watch other wine enthusiasts try and guess mystery wines. Some folks claim it is an art, others a type of super power. There is definitely science involved, which can get expensive to learn. Learning to pay attention to what you are actually tasting, and feeling, while you drink wine is the first step. Then remembering all of it is the next.Other than the actual art of frustration that comes with most mystery wine tastings, mystery wines are fun in two ways. The first is the obvious; testing your palate and wine knowledge on the fields of glory. The second is less so; it is in the sharing, which might be the best part. Often the Friday tasting at The Bottle shop involves a mystery wine or two brought by fellow tasters. Want to join in and be invited? Buy a bottle that you like, put it in some kind of covering and share.Tonight featured three mysteries: Two Brunello’s di Montalcino and a Pinot Noir from Niagara New York. The two Brunellos came from vineyards roughly five miles away from each other, both were from 2017, but tasted world’s apart! Crazy. The third wine was from the Niagara Escarpment in upstate New York. The Pinot was soft, pleasantly smooth but different from any Pinot Noir that I have ever had!No one doing a mystery at your wine tasting? Then start the tradition yourself, you will have more fun than you think.

Could the Crowd Favorite not really be the Crowd Favorite?

Our first hot tasting, and it still wasn’t that hot, around 80F. This might sound like a safety announcement, but temperature, mainly heat, can be the leading cause in liking or not liking your wine.Red wine first: Many fellow tasters have heard me saying, repeatedly, that red wine should be served between 66-69F. That’s room temperature in the world of wine. And you can still really enjoy reds into the low 70s. Most wine cellars hover around the upper 50s to low 60s. Bring out your bottle of 58F red wine, open it and set it on the counter or table (not in the Sun!) and let the wine come up to “room” temperature. Doing that will ensure you get the wine experience that the wine maker intended you to get. Don’t have a wine cellar? My favorite technique is to open a bottle of red wine, then put it in my fridge, top open, for somewhere around 30 minutes. Take it out when the bottle feels cool to the touch, NOT COLD! Very big difference there.White wine needs to be colder, mostly around 50F. If I know that I am going to drink a white wine soon I will put it in my 40F fridge for a while before using it, even several days out. Then I take the bottle out, open it and put it on the counter. Just don’t let it sit long, it will be ready to drink very quickly. A white wine bottle SHOULD feel cold to the touch. And with both red and whites; Don’t forget that your wine glass will heat up your wine.My favorite wine tastings are mostly outside, where temperature control becomes very difficult because of our mostly hot year. The temperature will also affect you. It’s hot outside, you drink a cool refreshing sparkling wine that has been a crowd pleaser and you are probably going to enjoy it. The experience of that first cool crisp wine will be elevated even more when the rest of the line up gets too warm. You get to the end of the tasting and what did you like? The first cool refreshing one of course. But, because of the heat, and resulting warm wine, you probably missed one that you would have liked if it were served at the correct temperature.So this was the case at this tasting. Garganega Frizzante has been a previous Crowd Favorite. Most people said that it was their favorite. It is good and a great value. But it was hot outside, and many of the wines very quickly passed into the “too warm” category. So should it have been the Crowd Favorite, again? Maybe, but maybe not.

“This wine has extended maceration. That’s good, right?”

Wow, what a great evening to be outside and have a wine tasting, and our wine tasting crowd agreed, showing up in force! We are currently in the best time of year for outdoor wine drinking. All too soon the heat will be here and the full-pitched battle of drinking wines at the correct temperature will be upon us. Soak it in now!As we get to tonight’s Crowd Favorite we tread into the swamp that is all of the wine jargon written on the back of a wine bottle. This disease does not inflict every wine bottle. For the wine geeks out there; I shared a bottle of 2009 Colares Reserva Velho (old reserve) from Portugal last night with some of my great neighbors. Talk about a niche wine! But one of the best parts was the writing, or rather the lack there of, on the back of the bottle. Printed on the back was the name, where it was from, and that it came from grapes grown near the sea, all written in Portuguese. Absent was an explanation of the “passion” that went into this bottle, pleasantly missing the description of flavors; cherry, black currant, and soft tannins from the extended maceration. Sometimes the stuff printed on the back can be helpful, but most of the time it includes a description that can be slightly off to totally inaccurate. Did you get the black currants, or smell the lilac blossoms?Most back of the bottle descriptions include some level of wine jargon that can be helpful if you know what it means. In this case; maceration. There is extended maceration, carbonic maceration, and cold soaking. All can be printed as maceration. Throw it in google, or actually pull out your copy of “Wine Folly” and you will find that it is part of the wine making process that involves keeping all of the parts of the grape (skins, seeds, etc.) in the wine during and after fermentation. As the sugars in the grape juice turn into alcohol (ferment) the alcohol starts to act as a solvent, extracting even more color, tannins, and a bunch of other flavor compounds. Extended maceration. That’s got to make it better, right? Sometimes. It depends what you are starting with.In the case of tonight’s Crowd Favorite, 2021 Gran Passione Rosso, it probably helped. A 60/40 blend of Merlot and Corvina grapes from the Vento region of Italy, with “some days of maceration,” this wine would make a great, cheap, dinner wine. Want to drive deeper into what that all means, catch me at the next tasting and ask. Cheers until then.

The fun of sharing wine with others. Seville 27 Jan.

What a fun week of wine tastings! Lots of different wine with lots of fun people. Do the people at wine tastings have to be “fun” people to have a good time? Not necessarily. The only hard requisite to have fun at a wine tasting is to be open to all the wines and not be a wine snob. Check out my previous post on how to identify one. If you avoid the wine snob (very easy here, we have very few of them) and show up to a tasting with an open mind then you will probably have a fun time. That is what wine can do, bring people together and get them talking, usually about wine. You might say that talking about wine doesn’t sound fun. Well the wine is the common denominator, that leads to other great conversation. I would also say that talking about wine can be fun in and of itself, but I am a wine geek.There were many of my fellow wine geeks at Seville’s January tasting, along with a good Italian Primitivo and Cabernet Sauvignon. Yet the Crowd Favorite was a Lambrusco, Cleto Chiarli Lambrusco Grasparossa Centenario Amabile from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. There was the option to have wild boar stew at this tasting and the Lambrusco did exceptional when paired with it. It is also the favorite wine, of one of our local wine shop owners, to have with a meat lovers pizza. I am not sure that I would have thought about that, but great conversation, starting with wine, often leads to great ideas. That’s the fun of wine tastings!

How to get to the end of a Wine Tasting and still taste the wine. Anna’s 26 Jan

Are you at a wine tasting to taste wines or to drink wines? There is a big difference. Some people come to taste and end up just drinking. Well if you came to taste how do you keep your palate going past wine 13? Every 3-4 wines get some water, to help reset the palate. Should you eat during a tasting? Depends on a lot of factors. I try to always eat before, and come well hydrated. That way my body and palate are ready for wine 14, or even wine 32.Anna’s monthly wine tastings almost always features 16 wines. They also have a full assortment of all kinds of good food, definitely a local tasting you should get out to. Several people come just to drink wine. Nothing wrong with that, but if you are there to really taste the wines you are going to need have a plan. Otherwise even if you come to be a taster, you will finish as a drinker.Casal di Serra, Verdicchio dei Castelli del Jesi 2020 from Italy was featured early in the tasting line up. Enough people remembered it well enough to be the evening’s Crowd favorite, with a tongue of pear and green melon, medium acidity, and a pleasant finish. What was wine 14? You will never remember without a tasting plan.

Food, wine, and acid. Aragon’s Cru tasting, 19 Jan

There are three types of wines. That is a huge statement but an accurate one. In the massive and complex world of wine there are food wines, drinking wines, and wines that can be both. A big reason for the three broad categories is the amount of acid in the wine, and how that acid hits your palate. From here it gets complicated as you get into tannin and alcohol levels, then dive deeper into the science of how humans taste wine.Let’s go to the part of how the acid hits your palate. Food. Specifically the proteins and fats in that food will drastically alter how that acid hits your palate. A “food” wine generally has a lot of acid and that acid is up front on the palate. If you are eating food, such as a typical charcuterie board, that acid will be mellowed by the fats and washed down by the proteins, marrying just right to give your palate a pleasant experience.There was a good charcuterie board at tonight’s tasting. The two Crowd Favorites came down to the fact of this: did you start eating on that board before tasting Frescolbaldi Terre More 2020, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Franc, Merlot and Syrah from Tuscany Italy? If you ate before, you had a good experience with that wine. Intense but with mellowed red berry and cedar. If you didn’t eat before then it was very acidic and unpleasant, and therefore you probably really enjoyed the next wine in the line up, which was the other Crowd Favorite, Serial Cabernet 2020 from Paso Robles California. This was a “drinking” wine but with the right choice, could be had with food. The strong meat flavors of the standard charcuterie board would knock out some of the deeper notes of red cherry and blackberry. Should you eat/partake in the standard wine snacks that are usually offered during a wine tasting? A great question for a future discussion.

“If you want to impress someone serve a Barolo.” East Hill Bottle Shop 18 Jan.

One of my favorite parts of wine tasting is listening to bold wine statements, said with such passion that it MUST be true. They don’t happen often, but when they do my entertainment factor goes to the next level. There were two “bold” wine statements this evening. The first was from a taster that was innocent yet passionate. The second by one of the employees in an attempt to answer a question. Both were wrong, and can absolutely mislead other tasters.“If you want to impress someone serve a Barolo.” This came from a fellow taster. “Wow,” I said, “Is there one that you go to?” The response was “No, they are all good.” I taste a fair amount of wine, and I have had some very good Barolos, but I have also had others that were so earthy and acidic that I poured them out. Barolo is a Demarcated Wine region in the north of Italy, a DOCG to be exact. Very intrigued I asked a few more questions to my fellow taster and quickly realized that my fellow taster thought Barolo was a grape. Soooo, I brought up some wines that I like to serve to “impress” someone. “Those sound great!” was my fellow taster's response, after realizing that the “bold” statement was not a good one. It was a great conversation, cordial and fun, that ended with a little more knowledge about “bold” wine statements.The second was from an employee. I will preface this with: The rest of the staff is above and beyond in wine knowledge and recommendations. So a bad apple can really be an issue. Also, people do make mistakes and misspeak. Sadly that was not the case with this individual, not the first, or third misspeak that I have witnessed. I asked about the percentage of Cabernet Sauvignon in our Crowd Favorite from tonight. The accepted rule (law in some areas) is that if it has 75% or more of a grape varietal, then the wine maker does not have to put the other varietals on the bottle. A fellow taster on the same wine asked why I asked that. I explained the above information when the employee who poured the wine jumped in very “correctively” and said “No no, it’s 70%.” Well I took several steps back to enjoy the wine and pulled up the California Wine rules and after a few minutes went to the side and showed him. He was a little dismissive but more importantly I showed my fellow taster. Misinformation can really throw off folks sorting through the huge world of wine.So, two Crowd Favorites tonight. Twin Vines Vinho Verde 2020 from Portugal, and Caparzo Sangiovese Toscana 2019 from Italy. Tasting notes? They were good.

East Hill Bottle Shop, 11 January

It is rare to even kind of like all the wines at a tasting. I often finish wine tastings not liking anything that I tasted, but I still try everything. You never know if the wine that you know you will not like actual tastes good. I see that A LOT! “Oh, I don’t drink Chardonnay.” “Why” I ask. “They are too buttery and oaky.” Or “I don’t drink reds.” Those two are very common. Well, there are 1000+ Chardonnays and like a million red wines. And many are not oaky or buttery, and red wine probably does not give you that headache. So I always recommend trying all of the wines.That was an easy recommendation at tonight’s tasting. Almost everyone liked almost everything. Our two Crowd Favorites were Garganega Frizzante (fizzy/sparkling) from Soave Italy, and Route Stock Cabernet Sauvignon 2020 from Napa Valley California. Garganega is the top white grape varietal in this area of Northern Italy. It is a sparkling wine that is “just” under sparkling. The bubbles are more of a strong fizz. The result is a playful wine with hints of pear and apple that has almost a creamy mouth feel while simultaneously being very light. Pretty cool. RouteStock is what I call a Cab Cab. It’s a Cabernet Sauvignon for Cabernet Sauvignon lovers. It has the quintessential deep aroma of black plum and umami with a taste of red cherry and dark chocolate. Yeah, it was good. Hope to see you at the next tasting.