It is always a great pleasure to connect with people that are able to provide illumination about wine on a deep level, what their experiences have been, both common and unique, and compare that information with our own experience and knowledge. With many of the people I am so privileged to share wine with, I can’t help but feel my knowledge is derisory by comparison but I personally like it that way. I wouldn’t learn much new if I didn’t have people with greater experience and knowledge around to learn from so this arrangement works fine for me.

In this series I interview Susan Thomas, whose knowledge and depth can be thought of as a roundabout in city like Rome or Paris: a large and busy intersection that comes at you from all directions, surrounds you, but always makes perfect sense. Susan is a successful business executive with a degree in engineering that doesn’t really relate to what she does, but rather amplifies her own diversity and understanding of many things in the world. She is well traveled throughout the globe, is a collector of fine art, fine cars, and fine wine, amongst other things.

She is gifted in her knowledge of wine but she also did the work to become such an accomplished oenophile – such expertise does not, of course, just get handed to people. Susan is impressive and as effusive as she is generous. Forget about the fact that there are few women that could be her peer because there are just as few men. Susan just shines with down to earth goodness, superior intellect, and a truly great sense of humor. Dear readers, this is Susan Thomas:

You were born and raised in Texas, yes?

Houston.

Were you around any kind of wine influence in your younger years?

Not a chance. I spent part of my life in West Houston, the ritzy Memorial Drive area, and then part of my life on a ranch near Corsicana Texas so I had this kind of dual background. My summers were spent ranching, driving tractors, and stuff like that. The exposure I had to alcohol was from my mom having martinis and my dad having brandy milk punch.

Brandy milk punch. Is that a Texas thing?

I think it’s a New Orleans or at least a southern thing and it’s strictly a cocktail. No one in my family drank wine. My first wine was Cold Duck at the Oklahoma - Texas game. And that was not a good experience. And then wine coolers – it’s kind of a gateway thing where you start to inch your way in. But I have a friend, Kyle Britt, that was very precocious with wine. He’s worked in the profession for a long, long time, representing smaller distributers that were bringing in a lot of quality wines from smaller producers as opposed to the big guys.  Then, wouldn’t you know it, the big guys bought out his company - I love lobbying – anyway he was into quality wine when he was in college. Shortly after that we each got married, we all started hanging out together, and he would always bring really good wine. I remember saying, ‘Wow! This is really excellent!’

Also there were a couple of restaurants in Houston that were ahead of their time, haut cuisine French restaurants, and they had wonderful wine lists and the wine was so cheap then. You could drink First Growth Bordeaux for $35 a bottle. So I started buying a little bit and the first things I bought were Bordeaux and Sauternes – straight to that.

So you started buying these wines because you had tasted them and knew that was what you wanted to buy?

Yeah. I didn’t have the other experience of tasting all the California wines. I wish I had tasted Inglenook or other early classics then but thanks to our generous friends we still get to taste some of those. But I just went straight to Bordeaux. I remember going to a restaurant in Albuquerque and they had ’66 Lafite [Rothschild, First Growth Bordeaux] and ’75 d’Yquem [Premier First Growth Sauternes] and the Lafite was $40 and the d’Yquem was $50. Everybody else was asking, ‘what are you doing? Are you crazy?’ That was a lot of money for wine at that time but pretty much, that’s the way I live my life. I might go for a week and not spend really any money on anything, and then go out spend whatever to get the experience.

Bordeaux went really well with food and I was experimenting. You know I was at a certain age, making some money, life was good, Houston was not a tiny place, and people were making a ton of money in the oil business so some of these bigger restaurants came in and opened up these fancy places. Suddenly you’re eating all kinds of different food, not just steak with a big California wine. As for Burgundy, until 2001 or 2002, I couldn’t even go there – the region was too difficult but my last ten years have been pretty much about that.

There’s a whole back-story: I got married in ’73 and in the early ‘80’s I realized my ex was having personal issues with handling alcohol so I kind of stopped drinking much wine. I had a wine cellar that had a lot of First Growths and other good stuff but it was a tumultuous few years.  When it was time to go through my divorce settlement process and I went to the storage locker that cellared my wine – it was all gone! So my ex had drunk Sainte Genevieve white wine out of gallon jugs and then apparently ’61 Lafite. So the thing is that I didn’t drink much wine, I didn’t drink much of anything, until about 2000.

That was when a client flew a bunch of us out to Las Vegas and I’m not really a gambler so I had a lot of time to kill. I heard about this restaurant in the Venetian and I ordered Bordeaux, I think it was a ’90 Clinet, and I’m thinking ‘hey, I’m not spending any money at the tables so I may as well enjoy something’ and sitting out there with the canals, the gondolas going by, and the Vegas lights, that’s when I started to think, ‘okay, let’s start enjoying life again’. This wine was unbelievable and in that same week I went to Areole and I bought this wine there, Masseto, and it was Merlot, and I just fell in love with this wine. It was spectacular! I couldn’t drink it all so I took it back to the room and drank it out of a cup that comes with the room, even two days later. It was like in the movie “Sideways” only the Merlot was better.

So I’m saying, ‘okay, okay,’ giving in to these great wines, but the problem was that the wines I originally loved were, by then, very expensive and getting difficult to find. So my friend Kyle started bringing me wines that he distributed and I started to relearn wine through him - I owe him really for everything. Then I also started going to The Austin Wine Merchant and I would meet people there and we’d start hanging together. Whatever it is that you like, you kind of find other people that like the same things and that’s certainly true of wine too. 

I took about a dozen years off from drinking and a lot happened during that time. A lot of my friends would say, ‘Oh the ’86 Groth Reserve or ’91 Dalla Valle Maya (or whatever) was so spectacular!’ and I would act enthused - but I’m really thinking to myself  ‘oh great, I missed it!’

Well, so many of those wines can still be found if you wanted to find them.

Exactly, and that’s one of the things I’m spending a little money on right now. I have a lot of wine but they’re not quite ready to drink. In maybe five years I’ll be able to start trying all this stuff.

You have a lot of wine knowledge Susan. Did you acquire it experientially, immerse yourself into reading, get formal education, or what?

I was interested in wine a long time ago and I learned a little about it then. But I’d say that most of the wine knowledge I have was acquired from the last ten years, and yes, I read about it, I go to events, and I go to the wine country and try a lot of wines, so mainly experiential. But I read something about wine every day. 

One of the real eye opening things for me was going to the Wine Spectator Experience in Chicago – it’s a wonderful event. I haven’t been to one in years but there are hundreds of producers there all pouring some of their best wines. One pouring was a vertical of Shafer Hillside Select going back to 1978 and it was interesting because John and Doug Shafer were both there [father and son] explaining how the style has evolved over the years and you got to taste what they were talking about.

And then Corinne Mentzelopoulos from Château Margaux [First Growth Bordeaux] and her winemaker were there and we had a vertical of ’82, ’83, ’88, ’89, ‘90, ‘95, ’96, and 2000, so wow! Those are the kinds of things worth going there for. But then you taste the Spectator’s Top 10 wines of the year and they’re of course all super young. Because prices have increased a lot since then, I’m not sure they pour up such expensive wines as they did before but there’s some equivalent for it so I’d say it’s really a worthwhile experience. When I was there, I had this leather jacket on because it was cold but I ended up draping it on the chair next to me. When they came by and poured wine, they thought there was someone sitting there so they poured up Margaux for this empty chair (laughing) and we all were like, ‘yeah she’ll be right back, don’t’ worry’. They kept pouring.

Amazing! Some people are just lucky that way. What sources do you use for information?

I go to the usual websites like CellarTracker, Wine Spectator, Stephen Tanzer, Allen Meadows [Burghound], John Gilman, not Parker anymore, but a lot of blogs too. When I see a wine I’m interested in, I Google it and look at a lot of different opinions to see what they think. Tanzer doesn’t try to predict a drinking window, which is good because everyone’s predictions can be really off. I bought some small production Shiraz from this Australian winery named Hill of Grace, and on their website the winemaker actually made a statement that the perfect year to drink this wine is 2011. I’m, thinking how in the world can he say that? But CellarTracker is the only thing I know of, and it’s highly imperfect, but people there are always making notes on wine they open. There is enough of a range there for me to determine if it’s too early to be drinking any particular wine. That’s what I’m looking for – is it too early to open this bottle? In all of it, there is a lot of ego to deal with, whether it’s James Laube and Parker, or someone posting tasting notes on CellarTracker.

I think it’s a tough job to be a wine critic but these guys that hold up their reviews and scores as the ultimate professional opinion and insist they’re right, even if no one else thinks so, well, that’s just unsupportable.

I have this theory about Parker. When someone drinks a whole lot of wine over a period of many years, they can lose taste perception and it desensitizes everything so one needs bigger, stronger flavors, plus one can’t pick up on the alcohol as much. If you consider his physiological palate between 1985 and now, I’ll bet they’re very different. There are a number of scientific papers and studies about this but now I’m thinking that I probably should have consulted an attorney before going off on Parker.  

I think you have to be young to train to be a sommelier. I admire all these young people that are going after their Master of Wine and they can pick up a glass, taste it blind and identify it, but I have no interest in doing that, nor the ability. We’re fortunate enough to have a lot of sharing people around us so that we know good wine from not good wine, and we understand QPR, and we generally really know what we like. You’ll see people that are into Burgundy and someone will say, ‘I like Gevrey-Chambertin but I don’t like Chambolle-Musigny’ or someone else will say, ‘I like Beaune’ or, ‘I like Nuits’ and they’re very specific and clearly know how to express what they like.

I love that there are so many different possibilities and it’s what make the world go ‘round but I’m able to stretch out to almost any wine region or appellation these days.

I think that’s where I am now too. Besides Burgundy, which I think is a region that no one will ever be able to master completely, I just want to try anything from everywhere. Like that Pinot Noir class that Mark Patterson and I did, I wanted to try what Pinot Noir from Spain tasted like and it was a bizarre wine but that’s how you learn.

Brian Owens’ Wine Salon is an amazing forum and it really does so much for the wine community and sommeliers. Like he so eloquently puts it, ‘it gives back to the sommeliers that would never otherwise have a chance to taste some of the world’s greatest wines’. We’re able to bring in wines that are difficult to find, they’re older, and usually expensive so it really does educate people in the trade.  For me I love going to Wine Salon and it’s interesting to taste the wines but I’m not able to linger over them and figure out exactly what is great about a wine. It’s just too much for me. I might remember something about some of them or what I really liked, but what I would prefer to do is try it on a smaller scale with maybe six people or so. Each event would have its own theme so you might have something like ‘top Italian Merlot’ and we’d bring in six or eight of the finest Italian Merlot to this tasting. Everything would be tasted blind first, everybody writes their notes, then you un-bag the wines and talk about it and leave it at that, rather than move on to another group of wines. So it’s kind of like a wine graduate school. We have enough friends to do unbelievable events like that.

I really enjoy those kinds of things. You and I have been to a few of them, one of them that you very graciously hosted, and we all go to these things for the same reason: we say ‘hi’ and it’s the only personal thing we say to each other for the next five hours. It’s all about the wine.

Yeah. And we really talk about it in depth and I really like that. I don’t go to as many public wine events as I used to because often people just get plastered and it’s no longer about the wine or learning about wine at that point.

Were there any other mentors that helped your wine knowledge other than Kyle?

Well I’d have to start with John Roenigk and Greg Soechting [co-owners of The Austin Wine Merchant]. Also Mark Patterson, Brian Owens and Gary Glass were a part of my wine education too. Getting invited to tastings was important, plus there were probably another twenty very generous people along the way. And back in the 80s I used to go to Dan’s [in Austin - no longer in business] and he was kind of a mentor for a lot of people; he had the best selection of European wine. But honestly, tasting a lot of wine and doing a lot of reading contributed extensively to my base of knowledge.

Part 2 of 3 coming soon!

David Boyer