Winophilia

Vintage port, made in Portugal’s Douro Valley, has been one of the world’s great collectible wines for literally hundreds of years. A vintage port is only “declared” three or four years out of ten, when a producer believes that that year’s harvest has yielded an outstanding wine. The decision to declare a vintage also has an economic component, as most houses hesitate to declare if the world market does not appear ready to accept another vintage. READ MORE »

First, some background on the world’s greatest sparkling wine. Champagne-making is the highly refined art of blending base wines into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. These component wines come from different grape varieties (the white grape chardonnay and the red varieties pinot noir and pinot meunier) and from different villages and vineyards (grand crus, premier crus, and a host of lesser sites).

And because only four or five harvests per decade in this marginal climate northeast of Paris provide the raw materials to make balanced, complete wines—that is, vintage-designated Champagnes, which must be entirely from the year indicated on the label—most Champagnes also combine juice from two or more vintages. For example, a relatively lean, high-acid vintage can be softened by the addition of some mellower, riper wine. Or, wine from a hot, sunny growing season can be given needed backbone and vibrancy through the judicious introduction of some “greener” juice. READ MORE »

This is a very Zen question, involving the emotional states of the participants, the room, and the bottle at a given moment in time. Most wine lovers at some point have gone nose to nose with a formidable captain—or at least held the coat of a braver soul who has. These face-offs are usually avoidable.  Restaurants should offer to replace a bottle of young wine if it is (1) corked (smells like wet cardboard), (2) oxidized (smells like Madeira or vinegar), or (3) spoiled (smells like the nocturnal animal house at the zoo). Unfortunately, many people can’t tell the difference between a slightly musty wine that needs only to be decanted and aerated and one whose cork has been afflicted with the mold known affectionately as 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole. A competent wine steward will convince the diner to let the wine breathe; if the cork is sound, the funky aromas will normally dissipate. READ MORE »

Pardon my dose of history, but some brief background information is necessary to explain the jigsaw puzzle that is the typical Burgundy cru, or growth. Following the French Revolution, vineyards previously owned by the Church and the aristocracy were confiscated and auctioned off, mostly to wealthy speculators who in turn subdivided and resold them. The parceling of vineyards was accelerated by the French laws of inheritance established by the Napoleonic code, which ended primogeniture and required property to be equally divided among all heirs. 

The result is that today’s typical vineyard is carved up among multiple owners. Thus there’s really no single wine called Vosne-Romanée Les Suchots:  two dozen or more growers and négociants (i.e., merchants) offer a wine labeled Vosne-Romanée Les Suchots every year. And these many bottlings normally vary in quality from supernal to downright mediocre.  Knowing the grower (or the name of the estate) is job #1 for the wino seeking to get his or her money’s worth from this generally pricey category. READ MORE »