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Those Pesky Wine Scores That Just Won’t Go Away

2012-05-12T23:22:33Z

In recent months there has been a concerted and even somewhat organized effort to petition critics, retailers, and wine buyers to stop using wine scores. The argument essentially is that scores demean good wine because people that use them don’t read the actual tasting notes, which is allegedly where the ‘real’ information lies. In other words you should rely on tasting notes and not scores. Of course I have a number of issues with this position.

Like for every season, I recently received my spring 2012 catalog from Sherry-Lehmann in New York and this retailer, by the way, is truly one of the several best and trusted wine merchants in the country. In the catalog are printed comments from major critics (Parker, Wine Spectator, Tanzer, Suckling, Meadows) but presumably in an effort to not ruffle feathers of the opponents of wine scores, they do not publish scores but only excerpts from critic’s tasting notes. I can respect their position and find my own scores. Here are two examples of their excerpts from this catalog, both from the ubiquitous Wine Advocate (Robert Parker and friends):

“Plenty of sweet fruitcake, blackcurrant, kirsch, forest floor and earthy characteristics"

Pretty specific tasting note, yes? But honestly, how many times have you actually tasted more than one or two of those elements described above in the one wine, any wine?

“a Mediterranean sea-breeze-like character that is difficult to articulate”

Wow, a third grader could have written that, assuming she knew what the word ‘articulate’ means. Anyone could write that a wine is difficult to articulate, and mean it. But is this really helpful? Does a reader really get a sense of what this wine is or what its quality is? Or only what the tasting profile is according to Mr. Parker et al? Such tasting notes go on, and on and on, not just here but everywhere with prose so mind-bendingly whacky that it simply seems like a game of thrones anymore.

One of the biggest problems with tasting notes today is that rather than use mundane, repetitive notes (let’s face it, wine can only vary so much) critics are running out of adjectives so often it just seems that they’re making stuff up on the fly with as many obscure descriptors as they can pull out of their, um . . . hats. There are a huge number of seriously convoluted, completely risible tasting notes that have not a thing to do with the wine or wine borne flavors but rather, a competitive attempt to sound more intelligent and cultured than other critics writing about the same wine. It’s a contest of sorts but the looser is always you and I, the reader.

Are tasting notes helpful to us? Does it really matter if my nose takes in aromas of pain grillé (toasted bread) if the quality of the wine doesn’t meet my expectation? Except for sharing descriptions with other people that are sitting at a table with me drinking the same wine at that moment, I generally could care less about what someone else tastes or what aromas are observed because I’m probably not going to taste or describe it the same way anyone else would.

It’s not that I lack descriptors or imagination but I guess I have never tasted stewed black cherry and only blue Fruit Loops with a hint of East Hoboken mint and brown shoe polish, all finishing with layers of charred and boiled mystery meat poured over lava rocks crushed in a blender. It seems to me like tasting notes have become this extreme and obtuse. There are far too many variables for published tasting notes to be considered trustworthy information, not the least of which, most fine wine continually evolves and can be at a different stage of development by the time you or I drink it. In other words there is a complete disconnect between a critic that is trying to out-write his colleagues and what you and I actually taste or observe. More than anything tasting notes to me are personal (but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share them) because no one else will experience the same wine (or food, or music, or fill in the blank) exactly the way you do. It’s how we’re wired.

What matters to me: does this wine exact the quality that I expected? Does it measure up to my standards compared to the critic that assessed its quality? I can determine what it tastes like for myself, which may be similar or may be very different from a critic’s taste. But the number is where the value is for me. In fact it’s certainly possible to have similar taste and aroma profiles (read: tasting notes) for a wine that’s 82 points and another wine that’s 94 points, obviously because there are so many common elements found in wine. However, any number gives me instant qualitative data and granted, it still comes back to the person that issued the score, but professional critics are truly in a great position to compare quality. It doesn’t matter if it’s a cool guy in New Hampshire critiquing wine or an internationally recognized critic. To me, there is value in the score as long as I understand how a particular critic scores wine and I can assimilate that critic’s scores with my own experience. I don’t deny that there’s room for improvement in the 100 point scoring system but it’s still the best we have.

It’s easy, popular, and possibly even fun to play ‘punch-the-critic’ but ask yourself how many wines you taste in a year? 50? 100? 365? These men and women with renown (along with the uncelebrated) taste thousands of wines each year and have for decades, and you and I can’t even get close to those numbers. I can tell you from experience that when you have a wall of wine to taste through for days, weeks, or months at a time, even the least experienced palate will eventually be able to pick out the best wines. Critics have a very difficult job and then get bashed for it.

But like it or not, I don’t see them going by the wayside, regardless of attempts to overthrow the kingdoms that move markets. They may change and become much more electronic-media savvy but there will always be a place for someone to educate and provide a source of reliable information. Sites like CellarTracker certainly have their place and can sometimes provide useable information but that’s assuming you can find people whose palates and experience you trust, out of 200,000 + bona fide wine critic wannabes. Although the internet gives some modicum of power to the people, and I’m all for it, often such socially-driven websites have extremes of love/hate that when averaged, it all ultimately falls or ascends to the middle. To me this is not useful information, whether it’s about hotels, restaurants, wine, music, or whatever.

Wine collectors use scores, investors use them, retailers love them because scores sell wine, wineries that receive good scores love them, and it seems the faction that whines the most about scores are estates that don’t produce very good wine, as estimated by people that tastes thousands of wines critically each year. I don’t see this scoring system ending anytime soon and in terms of reliable and useful information, scores really have measured up to its potential.

David Boyer

Photo: cover of the Sherry-Lehmann Spring Catalog, which is copyrighted, which means maybe I'll get a ‘take-down’ order.

Château Latour Takes Charge of Its Own Future

2012-04-29T21:58:15Z

With the sharpness of a French sabre, in one swift groundbreaking move, Bordeaux First Growth Château Latour obliterates decades of tradition. And I for one am extremely pleased, while others are clearly not. What’s the big deal?

First of all I should let you in on the issue if you haven’t already heard. A few weeks ago before the 2011 vintage futures prices were to be released, Château Latour announced that 2011 will be the last vintage they will sell en primeur (as a future). Wine futures is wine that is purchased by, and allocated to, buyers before the wine is even bottled and for red wine it can be generally three years or more into the future before this wine begins to appear on store shelves. When conditions are favorable, buying futures in wine is like buying futures in oil, pork bellies, or any other commodity and there is money to be made. If the demand goes up, so will prices, and with wine we know there is a finite amount of it produced each year so supply is a known factor. Conversely, if wine is bought en primeur and market demand is not there later to support it, the buyer of course looses money on the deal. Contrary to what many believe, this practice of selling wine futures has only been going on in Bordeaux since the early ‘70s but is definitely considered a tradition nonetheless.

One of the most valuable wine estates in the world, Latour, expanded its intent even further. Not only would it discontinue the practice of selling wine futures but it also will not sell or release any of its wine until the château deems it to be ready to drink. This is a radical and bold move for any château to make and a number of parties are not at all buoyant about the announcement, most of which consist of those who will lose the most, to wit, Bordeaux négociants and merchants.

At the center of the issue for Château Latour is this single fact: their wines are sold and consumed too young, which makes for a less than pleasant wine experience for the consumer and that in turn, tarnishes Latour’s image. I can’t argue with that. All too often I see wine appear on upscale restaurant wine lists offering newly released First Growth Bordeaux. Not only are the prices jacked through the roof but also the wines are very far away from entering their window of drinkability. It’s actually offensive and appalling to me to see any restaurant offer and serve these wines that they know full well shouldn’t generally be touched for at least fifteen years from its vintage date. Not everyone knows better or knows wine, and when someone has a bad experience with it, it's easy to imagine that person telling many others about the disappointment they experienced, especially with a $1000+ bottle that is supposed to be fantastic.

The château has every right, and even a responsibility, to protect its image and its own future. The entities that may feel some pain financially are not just the négociants that sell these wines but those that engage in the practice of buying up large allocations of these coveted wines en primeur, and then warehousing them for years to release them to the secondary market years later. The wines are properly stored over the years and cost significant amounts to support such an operation (most of these merchants are UK based) but when you look at the most extreme examples, profits can be stratospheric. With Latour pulling the plug on this possibility, well, that’s just how it goes. How can anyone not support a business that wants to control its own future?

Detractors are saying that it is the château that will make handsome profits by releasing wines when they want, effectively controlling supply based on market demand. So what? They made the wine and they are entitled to the profits generated. Is this not the goal of any business? Why should Latour have to share the huge gains in the secondary markets when it adds to the bottom line and they can control the wines themselves? Plus the fact that secondary gains for the producer in this case, do not ring true anyhow – look at this example:

1982 $1500 99 points WS*

1990 $750 100 points WS

2009 $1600 99 points WS

* scores from Wine Spectator

These are current prices for two great vintages of Château Latour and the en primeur price for the great ’09 vintage. I can buy a great wine today that doesn’t require any wait time, for less than I can buy a current release that needs at least fifteen years of bottle age before I can drink it. In 1982 this wine probably was released at around $35 per bottle but if the château had stored the wine in perfect condition for thirty years without ever getting paid for it, they should receive whatever the market is willing to pay for it; it’s just how free enterprise works.

Yes, the château could create a shortage in supply by releasing only small quantities into the market, thereby increasing demand and cost for their wine but what would be the point? To delay getting paid for their product just to earn a few more dollars? It doesn’t make sense. I don’t think the intent is for Château Latour to alienate their base of loyal customers whatsoever but rather to ensure they will have a better wine experience. I acknowledge that this issue could certainly be explored and discussed on a much deeper level but it’s outside the purview of this post. Ultimately though, it is my position that Latour is certainly entitled to control their products just like any company, in any other industry.

It would be great if every wine producer did the same but few have the pockets deep enough to pull this off. Latour says depending on the vintage, it expects to release its First Growth within ten to twelve years, its second label, Les Forts de Latour, around seven years, and third label Pauillac de Château Latour, will be released several years after the vintage. When they are released, it is expected that négociants will be selling these wines, just as they have been. In the meantime it is contemplated that the estate will release more of their older vintages into the market that they have been storing for some years.

I don’t see how the remaining four First Growths cannot do the same. After all, in 2027 would you rather pay $3000 for a bottle of Lafite that you have to wait fifteen years to drink, or for about the same price, a bottle of Château Latour that comes with guaranteed perfect provenance and is ready to drink the same day you buy it? Not since Château Haut Brion opened its own tavern in mid-seventeenth century London has a First Growth château seized such an innovative and game-changing opportunity. Huge admiration and esteem must be awarded to Château Latour, whose wines will always be sought out and loved the world over.

David Boyer

Photo: a photo I snapped last June of the iconic tower watching over the vineyards of the superlative Château Latour

Susan Thomas - Part 3, Real People Series

2012-04-15T19:11:54Z

In our final installment, Susan Thomas reveals what wines light her fire and other germane thoughts about the industry. Considering her demanding business and travel schedule, I feel fortunate to have had time with her and appreciate her generosity in sharing her wisdom about a subject we collectively so love.

Tell me about your favorite wine regions.

I like Côte de Nuits. I like red Burgundy from Chambertin, Chambolle-Musigny, Vosne-Romanée, and Morey Saint-Denis. So that’s number one. Burgundy is a challenging region to navigate so I think Gary Glass is right when it comes to figuring out what’s best: go with producer, vineyard, and vintage, in that order. I pretty much think every Grand Cru vineyard deserves to be a Grand Cru. For reds there are 28 Grand Cru vineyards and over 500 Premier Cru vineyards.

Okay - second region. I like the very greatest Piemonte [known as Piedmont in America, located in the northwest area of Italy] and I much prefer Barolo to Barbaresco.

What about Barolo compared to Brunello [di Montalcino]?

I don’t like Sangiovese as much compared to Nebbiolo. For me, Piemonte Barolo and Barbaresco are the closest thing in the world to really great Burgundy.

What’s the connection between Piemonte and Burgundy?

They are both very terroir driven and they soften and give all these secondary flavors and aromas with age. But like Château Pavie in Bordeaux, there are some producers in Piemonte that have realized that they can’t sell their wine that well if it’s not going to be drinkable for 30 years, so they fatten them up. And then it’s wrong because when you fatten Nebbiolo it still has tannins so there’s this big fight between all this fruit and the tannins and it’s just not very good. But really great and old Barolo is fantastic from producers going back to the 60s and 70s. They mellow out and get more like Burgundy [we also discussed a 1947 Barolo that we both drank at a Brian Owens wine event – amazing and drinking so well even today]. I used to like Super Tuscan and Brunello the best but in the pantheon of grapes, now I wouldn’t put Sangiovese in the top group.

And I like Chardonnay from everywhere. To me, a really great Marcassin Chardonnay is one of the best wines in the world even though they’re totally different than Burgundy. And there’s the Leeuwin Art Series Chardonnay [Margaret River Australia], which is great – there’s a lot of terrific Chardonnay. But there are a lot of really bad ones too. I also like some categories of white wines from Venezia Gialla north of Venice, and things like Tocai and Malvasia; some of those wines are really, really cool. Italian Merlot at the top end like, Le Macchiole Messorio, Masseto, and Redigaffi, those are my favorite Merlots and honestly I’d rather drink those than Château Pétrus.

Well some wines like Pétrus might get hyped a lot by critics and then there are some that just have such small production and availability that they’re difficult to find and very expensive, like Château Le Pin or DRC/DRC [Burgundy’s Domaine de la Romanée-Conti from its monopole vineyard of the same name].

But there are certainly wine estates with smaller output than DRC/DRC. Leroy Richebourg and Romanée St Vivant have tiny production and are much harder to get. If you wanted Leroy Richebourg in a certain vintage, it can be almost impossible to find. So they have a certain amount of ‘Hermes Birkin Bag’ in them, like DRC, right?

And then there’s Champagne. I didn’t always like Champagne and only started to like it in the last couple of years. Now I think it’s good with so much food and there’s a lot to it. I generally like the Blanc de Blanc [made with 100% Chardonnay] better than Pinot Noir based or Rosé Champagne and I probably should get more into it as a collector.

I guess that’s it . . .Pinot Noir, Nebbiolo, and Chardonnay are my three favorite grapes.

There are a number of women in wine that have made contributions to winemaking. Do you find anything influential there or do you particularly seek out wine made by women?

Well in general, I’ve noticed there aren’t very many women into collecting wine the way I am. However women love wine just as much as men and there are certainly a lot of fantastic female wine makers.

I think between men and women there is something biological about the ability to detect or prefer different chemicals in different quantities. Women hear higher frequencies better than men so why not analogous differences with olfactory senses? There are some great women winemakers but I don’t think women will eclipse men in winemaking just because I think literally, men and women don’t exactly like the same kinds of wine. I think women will make the kind of wine they like best and will intellectually say, ‘I know I need to make it a little less soft and a little more robust’ and men will say, ‘I can’t push these bass notes so much, I need to move it over here’ and that’s sort of the magic about it. Still I don’t think of them as being rock stars.

Is food an important element to have with wine?

Sometimes you can sit and drink wine like we are now and they’re really great by themselves but of course when you hit the right combination of food and wine, it brings it all up to another level. What’s interesting is, let’s take foie gras – it’s a food I’ve had that’s exceptionally awesome with a relatively non-fruity Pinot Noir. And then you can have foie gras with Sauternes and it’s just over the top. What’s so interesting is that wines with such different characteristics can bring out different positive aspects of food.

Honestly, I start with wine and then add food around it; I don’t start with food and see what I have that might go with it. We are so blessed that we have this confluence of people that like wine and all of these incredible chefs in Austin, and many are friends of ours. We’re very lucky.

Is there any one thing you would fix about the wine industry if you could wave a wand?

Oh lord! First and foremost I would fix the problem of wine distributors making a bunch of money and giving it to politicians, just so they can protect and preserve their market with all sorts of restrictions to everyone else. That’s criminal. It’s a joke! If you don’t think we have a plutocracy or an oligarchy in America you’re kidding yourself. What we really need is to have access to all wine, and to have different people that make different wine in different places be able to get it to us at a reasonable price. But that’s not how it is. So that’s number one.

Number two is wine critics. There’s too much reliance on them.

What do we replace that with?

We are gradually replacing reliance on “experts” with the social networking “I like it” approach. I’m not sure how this will evolve but kids these days that are brought up in the social networking environment are hard wired differently. It’s natural selection and the tempo has really picked up but we’ll see how it goes. CellarTracker is a good start down the path of “group criticism” but I still think that there is a place, albeit a diminished one, for qualified people that are really good at looking at something and narrowing down what’s quality and what’s not. Humans are extraordinarily subjective and also we can’t be on our game all the time. Furthermore, wine critics can be likened to athletes in the sense that they have only a window of competency.

There are so many wine choices today and how do you cut through it all to find good wine? It used to be you could go to your neighborhood shop and the guy there would tell you what was really good. Now, when you or I walk into a shop the person giving us advice doesn’t have a fraction of the knowledge needed so we go elsewhere. Additionally, because wine has become so popular in our culture there’s just way too much wine that’s the same, so do you want there to be a winnowing out process?

Yes I do. Right now it’s estimated that there are over 200,000 wines available to buy in the world at any given moment and that’s a conservative estimate. The wine wall is so huge these days and I have no idea why anyone would want to make even larger by opening a winery.

Ego?!?! ‘Hi. I’m Joe Montana. I’m a famous quarterback. I like wine. I have the money. What the hell? People love me - they’ll buy my wine.’ (laughing).

Last question. Three people living or not, and you could have dinner with them. Who would it be?

Well, I think I would choose Edward O. Wilson. He’s an expert in natural selection and a socio-biologist. He’s basically an entomologist but his studies and work have looked at how we got to where we are from an evolutionary point of view. Then I’d have to choose some religious figure to come at the question another way like Gautama, the Buddha.

So you want to start a fight at your dinner?

No! I think science is also a kind of religion. Put another way, all of science is built on mathematics and all mathematics is based on us using our brains to help figure out some model or metaphor for the way things work. Religion creates a metaphor, so do philosophy and science. In my opinion we have no idea what’s going on. Okay number three . . . Teddy Roosevelt. Back in his day people had a whole different way of approaching the world. He seemed capable of doing anything, and what was it that drove him to be an incredible naturalist and a military leader and then President? What makes somebody have that amount of energy?

**********

Thank you Susan, for letting us have a glimpse into your life and for sharing your wealth of wine knowledge and experience. These interviews are very valuable to me because they can often illuminate things I hadn’t thought of, or provide a substantive case for thinking about something in a different way. Ultimately learning wine, I would argue, is probably more about experience than book knowledge although I certainly don’t want to denigrate the value of understanding wine from an academic perspective. During the great journey though, it is experience that counts.

Photo: Susan Thomas at Austin Wine Salon event

Susan Thomas - Part 2, Real People Series

2012-03-10T00:42:45Z

We can read all of the textbooks and access a plethora of resources but the experience of collectors provides a remarkable and essential backdrop for deepening our understanding of wine. Collectors don’t just fall from the sky of course, but rather like most of us, we develop our interests, usually alone, until we have occasion to find like-minded comrades. If we stay with it, then over time we naturally gravitate toward experiencing wine on a profound level to eventually become learned. I think most collectors agree with the now thinly worn adage: So much wine, so little time! Indeed, we are surrounded by a huge sea of wine.

It is my hope to introduce you to wine connoisseurs that have something to offer all of us with their astute insights and experiences, people that generously provide us with an expanded sphere of knowledge and a reliable core of expertise. Susan Thomas is surely one such person so, without further chatter, Susan Thomas, Part 2:

Do you remember the very first wine that cemented the deal between you and wine, where you said to yourself, ‘Okay, I’m in, I want to move forward with this’?

It was ’64 Lafite Rothschild, it wasn’t that great of a year, but even then they were trumping the vintage as being better than ’63 or ‘62. On and on right [referring to almost every year being ‘the best vintage ever’]? And I had I think six bottles of ’61 Lafite [truly one of the greatest vintages of the century] and I wasn’t going to drink them because I wanted to hold on to them for a while but they disappeared during the tumultuous years.

You’re a world traveler and it seems that you’ve been almost everywhere. I know you’ve been to Italy and I haven’t, but what I understand is that even Italian house wines or simple table wines are almost always excellent. Has that been your experience?

Well, I have traveled a lot to the Far East recently but haven’t been traveling to Old World wine regions for a long time. Back in the day I went to Europe a lot but not recently. Back then they would have table wine everywhere. I remember being in Orvieto up in the hills, sitting outside, and it’s gorgeous and the food is terrific, and they brought the house wine out in a fish shaped pitcher and the wine comes out of the fish’s mouth when they pour it (laughing). But the reason I got so deeply into Italian wine is first, I really, really like Masseto [Tenuta Dell’Ornellaia, Toscana – very, very expensive Merlot] and so I started drinking Italian wine from all of the appellations. And then I did that Italian white wine project where I wanted to find as many interesting whites as possible and a lot of them are unknown here or are impossible to get locally. When I started that, I really began to learn all about the different regions and their food, wine, and geography.

When I was twenty, my parents took my sister and me to Italy, we spent a month there, and we drove all the way up to Switzerland and all the way down to Campania, south of Naples. We covered just about the whole country, ate at all these different places and it was fantastic. So I got to see that the food is really great everywhere and that was such a contrast to the US at that time.

In terms of other wine regions, what experiences have you had?

I’ve made a lot of trips to the west coast of the US, and one other trip was a cruise from Istanbul to Venice and that’s what turned me on to Greek wines. There are some very good Greek wines that don’t get exposed much here like white wines from Santorini, or from Cypress or Crete. Even Eastern Europe, Georgia, Bulgaria, and nearby regions produce some very good wines.

But you really can’t find much of it here right?

Some of them you can. For example from Santorini there’s this grape called Assyrtiko and you would love it – it’s very minerally, full-bodied, with a long finish and you can get them here in the US. Gaia [not the winery in downtown Indianapolis but the one in Greece] and Sigalas both make great Assyrtiko and they’re not expensive.

You always have great wines and bring something interesting to the table.

Well you have to try stuff. I was in Vancouver this summer and discovered that we can’t really get a lot of Canadian wine here and I think it has something to do with taxation or some sort of import restrictions. They have some great Chenin Banc and especially Chardonnay and because of where they are, they’re a lot more Burgundian in style than US wines. Their Pinot Noir is terrific and they also have Bordeaux blends.

I went to a restaurant that’s supposed to have one of the best British Columbia wine lists in town and we ordered up three different bottles to try them and it was like ‘Wow, these are awesome! Tell me where I can buy these’. So I found a couple of stores and I fully knew I’d have to pack them in my suitcase but I couldn’t fit them all in. My friend went off to look at killer whales and I decided to walk around Vancouver so I stuck one of those bottles in my purse and just walked around town drinking (laughter). It was good. But that’s the most fun, when you unexpectedly find great wines.

Do you consider yourself New World or Old World wine it comes to wine?

Old World, not even a close contest, although I’ll drink wine from New World regions if they’re made in the Old World style.

I have a theory: when you sit down in front of four glasses of wine, you’re tasting them and talking about them at a table with a bunch of people, invariably things become subconscious and you might intellectually say, ‘This is the wine I like best’ but if you look at what you’ve drunk, the glass with the lowest level of wine left is the one you really like. People don’t generally drink the wines they like the least and save the best for last. We might think we can do that easily but I generally fail. It’s very revealing. Likewise when you look at your own wine collection and you see that you own X number of French wines and Italy is maybe a smaller number and the rest of the world is even a much smaller number, it just tells you everything you need to know about your own taste in wine. Duh!

Oregon Pinot Noir keeps trying to be like Burgundy and they’re not there yet but they’re getting closer. When I look at California Pinot Noir versus Oregon Pinot Noir, California Pinot is just a freak-bomb – I don’t like it. There is so much more California Pinot available but I have a lot more Oregon. And I like Oregon and Washington Chardonnay.

So you like the cooler climate wines that aren’t as ripe, extracted, and alcoholic?

All of the above. I’d like to collect more German wine because I don’t have that much of it and I haven’t studied the region enough to know what’s good to buy, plus I don’t really eat much food that goes with German wine. But when you taste some of the great ones, you realize they’re really profound. Then thinking turns into, ‘okay, I’ll find something I can eat with this, maybe schnitzel, because I should be able to find a lot of dishes I could eat with German Riesling.’

Then, the next frontier is Alsace and Austria. What’s happening with global warming is that some of these grapes that are now great in France are getting much better further north so Switzerland, Austria, and even Germany are starting to make some decent Pinot Noir, and I think that is going to continue. And I don’t think I’d buy real estate in Napa. I think everything is starting to move north a bit. I bought a bottle of Pinot Noir from Egly-Ouriet, do you know who that is?

No.

They’re a small producer of ‘grower Champagne’ and some people really like them but to me they’re somewhat dry for the most part. They started making a still Pinot Noir, way up there in Champagne, and they’re starting to show everyone that it can be done and be high quality.

So Old World is definitely for you.

They’ve been doing it a long time; they know where the vineyards are and what should be planted there. The quality has won out, instead of some dot com person coming in and buying up a property, setting up a winery, and labeling it eponymously, just to end up with a smaller bank account. Instead, in 1311 someone said, ‘that is a really good bunch of grapes that are growing over there. Let’s develop it to its best potential’ – it’s an entirely different thing than being strictly motivated by profit or ego like so many are today.

It seems that the more experience we have with wine, the more difficult it is to discover new wines that please us. How difficult is it for you to find a wine that makes you ask ‘ where have you been all my life? – I love this!’

It’s exceedingly difficult because you might find other wines from other places and they’re surprisingly good, and they’re interesting and different, but they’re still not as good as the great wines we know and love. The only reason you go out and try to discover new wine is because you get tired of the same thing, no matter how great it is. It’s like if you have an original Rembrandt drawing hanging in your bedroom, after a while you wouldn’t really notice it. We have an inherent need to search for something new and different. The hunt is fun but no, you don’t go back to Central Otago or some other place in New Zealand and find this super producer of Pinot Noir and think, ‘Wow, this is better than Chambertin’. You don’t do that!

What happens when you hit the wall and there’s nothing great left to discover?

It’s hard isn’t it? But let me be clear: there’s a lot of great wine in the world I haven’t had. It isn’t like you can span the globe and claim to know everything. For example, there’s a Pinot Noir produced by the Australian winery, Bass Phillip and it sells for $250 to $300 a bottle. They have these tastings in Hong Kong where Bass Philip often beats La Tache and some of the other greats Burgundies and I went online and tried to find it but it’s not available here in the US. So there are some of these legendary wines that are outliers and few persons here have ever had them. It can be hard to find new things.

As a collector, I know you collect numerous things other than just wine, but did you intend to collect wine by design or did it just happen organically?

Yeah, well I think it’s probably genetic. My dad collects cars, my mom collects jewelry, and I collect a lot of stuff. But it’s the learning that comes with collecting. There are very few people that are experts in whatever genre, that don’t collect whatever they’re experts in. They have a love of the object and they’re after the learning experience, right? So people that love cars have garages built for them and rooms with all of the operational manuals and decals and accessories. My friends that are art museum curators have collections of art. It’s curiosity and wanting to learn something about it. For me, there’s a button that got pushed, where really wanting to learn about it and get deep into it, being attracted to it, and collecting it, all go together. And that’s an expensive neural-connection that I wish I had less of.

So the goal with collecting wine was for you to gain knowledge?

Yes, and I have enjoyed the experience but now I mainly buy Grand Cru Burgundy. I don’t buy any more Bordeaux; the last that I bought was 2005. And really the main reason I’m still buying Burgundy is for the extra financial hedge. Quite bluntly, the Chinese are beginning to come around to Burgundy now and the supply is relatively low.

So it’s an investment for you.

Well, that’s my rationale. But it’s nice to have them.

NOTE: As we took a break, Susan opens the third wine of the evening, the first being an Egon Müller Spätlese Riesling, a gorgeous high-end and delicious wine, the second a white Bordeaux (Graves) and then, a 1970 Château Gruaud Larose (there was leftover wine, of course, as we did not pound down three bottles between us but, I suppose given enough time the wines were certainly good enough to enjoy to the last drop). We just put the glass of Gruaud Larose to our nose . . .

Okay, this is what wine is about – we open up a 1970 Bordeaux, you have no idea what it’s going to be like, the cork is ‘iffy’, you finally get it open and the nose hits you and you say, ‘Okay, this is why I do this!’

This is remarkably good wine, which is even more amazing because it comes from a very difficult vintage.

I know. I bought a 1970 Château Latour [First Growth Bordeaux] at a charity auction so I put into this thing for a wine dinner and it ended up getting selected. The sommeliers are saying, ‘I don’t know about this, ’70 wasn’t a great year’ and it ended up being exquisite, I mean stunning [and Susan of all people knows stunning and exquisite wine]! It just shows you about how predictions can be about certain years; you can’t always hold on to what critics say.

So maybe a vintage was difficult because the weather was unkind to the vineyard that year and, especially back then, there was much less intervention in winemaking and fewer things that a winemaker could do to fix it. However, generations of winemakers at Classified Bordeaux estates have been at it for centuries and they know how to do it. It’s not like they suddenly had a bad year in the vineyard – they have them all the time because weather is so completely unpredictable.

You look through the list of Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Growth Bordeaux and some of them honestly I’ve never heard of, or ever seen for sale. Like Kodak or Pan Am - it’s hard to stay on top but some of these chateaus have been there for hundreds of years.

Yes, sadly some of the Classified Bordeaux châteaux have changed hands over the years, some have been bought by insurance companies or other types of investors and they don’t really care about the history or the property that much. Once it leaves the family . . .

But some of them have been bought with the idea of resurrecting them and bringing them back to their former glory and there have been some really great success stories with that.

Speaking of great estates, have you ever considered owning a winery?

You know, we have a family ranch in Fredericksburg [part of the AVA in the Texas wine country] and it’s at a high altitude, close to the highest point in Gillespie County, and we have soil surveys and all sorts of different possibilities for sun exposure. I talked with John Roenigk seriously about putting a vineyard in there but the more wines I tasted from Fredericksburg and Texas and the hotter our weather has become led me to just nix the whole idea. I don’t think it cools down enough after the sun goes down to produce anything great. So that’s the closest I got. And I’d rather go taste everything in the wine world; I’m much more of a lazy dilettante and I wouldn’t want to get locked into having a role where I had to hawk my wines constantly, ‘Look, try this! It’s really good and I have to get rid of it’. I just can’t do it.

I was in Oregon in 2009 and 2010 and we went to this restaurant that I’ve been to before where they have verticals of older Oregon wines and they’re very expensive. If you want like a 1998 Beaux Frères, it would be over a hundred dollars. There was a wine named Thomas and it was expensive so I asked them to tell me about the wine. They said, ‘This guy’s crazy! He only makes a tiny bit of wine and he’s trying to make a Musigny or Chambolle-Musigny type of wine [Grand Cru and Premier Cru Burgundy respectively] and every year he drops off whatever he allocates to the restaurant, like a case or something, and then he’s gone and they don’t see him until a year later’. So I tried this wine and was fantastic. Fortunately there are places that still support people that are craftsmen and artisans. They don’t have that much money but they have a piece of property and just obsess over it.

I loved this wine (you know it’s got my last name on it so there’s some kinship there too) and I asked the restaurant where I could buy it and they sent me to the sommelier at the hotel where I was staying. I talked to this guy and he said, ‘Oh no way, I can’t get this wine but try this retailer in Portland’. I went to that place and said I really love this wine and he said, ‘Okay, here’s one bottle’ and I got on his mailing list and I’d buy some wine from him here and there and one day he said, ‘I’m going to get you some of the Thomas’ so now I have a case of it coming. You’ll have to try it and judge for yourself but there are people in the New World that are making facsimiles of Old World wine and sometimes they get pretty close.

But even if they’re close, they won’t be exact, so there is something about terroir that’s just undeniable, do you agree?

Absolutely. You can only do so much with what you have to work with. But there is surprisingly little scientific evidence that the roots of vines take up and deliver minerals from the soil to manifest them into the flavor of the wine. It’s very interesting. And then there’s biodynamic and organic viticulture. There are two sides to it: one is that it’s a good idea to be green and not use tons of pesticides or run tractors all the time that compact the soil around the vines. But the other side of it is, it’s like yoga. Or voodoo. There’s no evidence that some of that stuff makes sense but the wine estates swear that it makes better wine. There are some scientific aspects to it that indicate it could be working but not all of it - it’s hard to say.

In the end though the wonderful thing is, and this is coming from my experience on the ranch, that there’s just some sort of mysterious aspect to it where you just can’t control everything, we don’t understand everything that’s going on, and there can be this magical thing that happens, and that’s what makes it so fun. There’s this Bordeaux estate, Château Beauséjour Duffau-Lagarosse, that traditionally doesn’t make great wine, but in 1990 they just hit the mark with like a 100 points from everybody and it’s just sensational. Sometimes the planets just align.

There is indeed mystery to all of this in some sense. I’m struck by how relatively little we know about the whole grape growing and winemaking process. It seems that only within the last twenty-five years or so, we’re beginning to understand.

Yes, but then you have Parker. Think about how many people have wasted so much money and have these wines sitting in their cellars that have these big Parker scores because that’s one way you think you’re going to learn about wine when you’re going through stages of development and you defer to the expert, ‘it must be good, let me try it’, and . . . not so much.

That’s true. I think Parker is at the end of an era.

Well it’s the whole social network thing. People aren’t going to tune into the nightly news on a television network or listen so much to some big wine critic. People get information from wherever they want and listen to people they trust.

Part 3 of 3 coming soon. Don’t miss it!

David Boyer

Photo: Susan Thomas

Susan Thomas - Part 1, Real People Series

2012-02-15T00:23:12Z

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

Photo: Not surprisingly, Susan Thomas

Plus le Français!

2011-10-28T00:14:39Z

Those of you that know me or read this blog on occasion know that I am all about French wine. I really do appreciate wines from every wine region in the world but appreciation doesn’t always extend to fondness. It’s difficult to imagine a world without French wine because virtually every other region on the planet, at one time or another, attempted to emulate French wine and even today winemakers from many ‘new world’ regions do their best to create wines that have the same qualities and profiles as their French counterparts.

At a recent trade tasting for Loire Valley wines, I was again reminded of why this is the case and fell in love with Loire wines all over again. I have always enjoyed these wines but in my life they have often taken a back seat to Bordeaux, Rhone, and to a much lesser extent, Burgundy (I love Burgundy but have intentionally kept the region at arms length). This back seat thing has come to a sudden end.

Apart from being host to many of France’s most spectacular castles, the Loire River runs some 300 miles from approximately the center of the country all the way out to the Atlantic, with vineyards planted on both banks of this beautiful estuary. Some of the more important appellations of Loire whites include Vouvray, Anjou, Sancerre, Pouilly-Fumé, Muscadet, and Quarts de Chaume. Although you may like Loire reds they’re not my personal favorites but I do have to admit that some of them would make very good everyday table wines to have with a meal, especially Cabernet Franc from Touraine.

In terms of wine styles, almost anything goes from crisp, dry, thirst-quenching whites to multi-dimensional mind-blowing dessert wines, from still to sparkling, and earthy reds to dry and off-dry rosé. Really something for everyone! In terms of grape varieties whites tend to be predominantly Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc, which I consider to be amongst the best expression of these grapes anywhere, with Muscadet being made with Melon de Bourgogne (considered generally to be of lower quality by some, but I still think they’re very good). Red grapes consist mostly of Cabernet Franc and Pinot Noir with a bit of Gamay and a few other obscure varietals planted.

A couple of things really came to light from this tasting. First and foremost, these wines are just downright delicious, have great character and expression without being necessarily complex. As with great music, great wine demands your attention, meaning that if you are going to have a conversation, it better be about the wine you’re drinking and hopefully sharing. Otherwise you’ll miss all of the greatness the wine is serving up to you. In other words it would be tragic to be drinking First Growth mature Bordeaux and have to talk about sport scores, the weather, how work is going, or virtually anything other than how great the wine is. All of the wine’s complexity would be lost if the senses are not allowed to focus. With Loire wines, I can take a sip, acknowledge, if only to myself, how good it is and carry on normally. It likes your attention but doesn’t demand it.

Secondly, these wines are honest. They are made with human care and attention, often with little technology or intervention. If the region has a bad vintage, they just hope the next one will be better rather than bring in reverse osmosis, micro-oxygenation, spinning cones and other technical ploys commonly used to manipulate wine. And you know what? You can taste a difference. There is more purity of fruit, greater expression of terroir, that sense of place, and flavors that are more natural and not always found in new world wine.

Beyond this is the remarkable value. Everyone complains about French wine being too expensive but pretty much only a few percent of France’s wine output qualifies as ‘expensive’. There are some amazing wines from the Loire region that are under $30 retail, many of which can be found for less. Here are a few to look for with appellations noted in bold:

Château de Montfort Vouvray Old Vine 2009 - $12
Vincent Vatan Pouilly-Fumé Silex 2009 - $17
Château de l’Oiseliniere Muscadet Sévre-et-Maine 2009 - $10
Jean Vincent Sancerre 2009 - $18
Domaine Cherrier Sancerre 2010 - $20
Domaine Pichot Vouvray 2010 - $12
Domaines Guy Saget Pouilly-Fumé 2009 - $12
Domaine François Cazin Cour-Cheverny 2009 - $20
Château de la Roulerie Coteaux du Layon 2010 - $20 (dessert wine)
Domaine Huet Vouvray Sec Le Haut-Lieu 2010 -$26 (might benefit with a couple years in the cellar)

About the multi-dimensional mind-blowing dessert wine? Domain des Baumard Quarts de Chaume 2005 - $70 (also at about $35 per half bottle) is probably one of the most expensive wines from the whole Loire region but is truly a great wine (Wine Spectator rated it 98 points) with comparable quality rarely to be found at this price. Made in a tiny appellation where botrytis occurs, just like in the Sauternes region of Bordeaux, this dessert wine is made with Chenin Blanc and from good vintages will age for 25 to 30 years easily, all the while developing complexity with bottle age. At a small fraction of the price of Château d’Yquem, you’d be surprised how close these wines are to that level of quality, although grapes and styles between them are different.

There is much more depth of information at this website, which I encourage you to check out at www.loirevalleywine.com. This post has barely even scratched the surface of this grand region but it’s worth noting that Loire wine is what the French drink. These are on every table, in every restaurant, in every home, in every cellar. Everyday fantastic wines: expressive, dimensional, beautiful, honest. That’s what I mean by title: More French!

David Boyer

Illustration: Loire Valley Wine Region, used with implied permission but not real permission.

Brian Owens and Austin Wine Salon - Part 2, Real People Series

2011-10-04T23:30:06Z

In Part 1 of the Brian Owens interview, we introduced this savant oenophile who has contributed so much depth to the outstanding wine community in Austin Texas and beyond. As mentioned, one of his greatest contributions to wine was his creation of the Austin Wine Salon, where each month collectors, sommeliers, restaurateurs, and wine industry people get together to share great, important, and interesting bottles of wine, compare notes, and generally propagate wine knowledge in a planned and organized format. I have had the pleasure to contribute wine to and attend these great events for about the past two years or so and I can say, there’s just no better way to learn about wine than to do it with a group like this!

So lets talk about Wine Salon . . .

Wine Salon is unique in that there are wine professionals and there are collectors and it’s very rare that wine professionals actually have the wine experience that collectors have. So if we have sommeliers that have learned about Lafite but never tasted it, the question becomes, ‘is it really useful for them to have tasted Lafite? Is it really necessary?’ In a way it is important. It’s like being a rock and roll musician and asking if you should really understand Beethoven? Well, you probably should at some point and most musicians, and especially jazz musicians, learned Bach and Mozart but they didn’t do it until they wanted to go to the next step.

With Wine Salon I sometimes worry though that I have opened Pandora’s Box because I take someone that’s doing their job really well, maybe studying for their sommelier exam, they can identify Pinot Noir and Grenache and then they come into Wine Salon and pour up something that’s 25 years old and it’s great but in some ways it throws them off because tasting Grenache and then tasting a 25 year old Vacqueyras or Gigondas would completely throw anybody off. Is it helpful? Maybe not always but when a sommelier pours a glass of wine from their maybe limited menu, it gives them the experience to say, “By the way, this grape can do all sorts of things from different regions, different soils, and different winemakers so don’t limit yourself by thinking it can only taste like this. And that has value.”

Wine Salon opens up wine professionals in a way that says, ‘I’m not just in the everyday business of serving wine or selling wine but there really is this grand art to it all and it’s so much bigger than I imagined.’ Wine Salon implies that the professionals that attend are not just into wine as a career, but they attend because there’s something bigger and more important about wine. We can pull collectors in to donate the wine each month and provide wines that a lot of people wouldn’t otherwise have had an opportunity to drink. We’ve had Lafite, Mouton, Margaux, Haut Brion; we’ve had d’Yquem so I can’t tell you how many people said, “Thank you! I really always wanted to know what d’Yquem tasted like and now I know, but I can’t afford a $400 or $800 bottle.” So I get a lot of thanks, some for what they know and some for what they didn’t know. There’s a lot of discovery of wine and even self-discovery – I’d like to think it’s helpful and even motivating in some way.

But Brian, you look at Mark Sayre, Bill Esley, and so many more, and Wine Salon really has an impressive alumni . . . [Mark Sayre is the Wine Director and sommelier at the Austin Four Seasons Hotel, named ‘Best Sommelier in Texas’ in ’07 and named one of the ‘7 Best New Sommeliers in 2010’ by Wine & Spirits Magazine. Bill Esley is a sommelier at Duchman Family Winery and named ‘Best Sommelier in Texas’ in ’11.]

Marco passed his test, Dirk and Paul just passed their sommelier test; we have about a dozen sommeliers now. And Austin has a group of young people studying wine as well as anywhere in the country, including New York and San Francisco. The proof is in the pudding: five people just got their MS in the entire United States and two of them are from Austin, Craig Collins and Devon Broglie, both of which came to Wine Salons. Craig came to the early ones and Devon came until he had to study so much he couldn’t come anymore. And they still come back when they can. And Mark (Sayre) will take his MS test in another four or five months and June is doing really well, and I’m really impressed with Lauren and Paula, but it’s just a matter of them having the time to come to Wine Salon.

We have a lot of talent here . . .

And they’re feeding each other. They’re all very supportive of each other. We can say that Austin may be the Live Music Capital but it’s actually kind of a sommelier capital too. We do have a very strong and knowledgeable base of wine people here. If you go to Uchiko, Fino, or Wink, the wait people really know wines. I spent a lot of time in San Francisco this summer and I was amazed at how many wait staff didn’t know their wines or wine service so I think we have many more sophisticated wait people here. Restaurants in Austin that have a sommelier or are working on a wine program are committed to good wines with excellent wine service and it shows.

So when you came up with the whole Wine Salon idea, how did that come about?

I had been on the board of the Texas Wine and Food Foundation for about six or seven years and was giving a lot of wine to the Foundation for their auctions to help bring in money [the Texas Wine and Food Foundation is a non-profit organization] plus, around the holidays I was taking bottles of wine to my favorite waiters and restaurant staff. So it kind of hit me after a while, “why not just drink with them?” and I started inviting them to my house. I had been a part of salons in the 70s, which were kind of intellectual, we would have food, discussion . . . it was the kind of salon Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein had - it was that whole idea of getting a bunch of people together on a Sunday afternoon and hanging out. Well, this became the same thing except that wine was the central focus.

So we started it at my house with about six to eight people, which consisted of wait staff, cooks, and restaurant owners, as well as with four or five friends who had cellars, and it just expanded from there. It was a way to thank the wait people, who as you know, a lot of times would let us bring in our own bottles for free and these restaurants and people would actually appreciate that we were bringing in good wine. The restaurant owners and managers get that they’re not making much money from us because they’re not selling us wine from their list, but they come to understand that we believe their food is that much better and we’re celebrating it by bringing in really good wines. We’re the ones that really appreciate good food and put it on a pedestal like art or something.

I had Wine Salon at my house until it grew too large and I couldn’t handle more than 24 people. We started going to restaurants on Sundays because about three quarters of the good restaurants are closed then, and we had the very people that worked at those restaurants coming to Wine Salon anyway so they gave us access to these places. It becomes a shared experience and I like that idea.

The Salon started almost as a seminar. The first one we did was Pinot Noir from Burgundy. We talked about the wines and presented them in a way that went through the grapes, here’s the Côte de Beaune versus the Côte de Nuits, here’s their appellation system where you have village wine, the Premier Cru, the Grand Cru, and then here’s what old wines taste like. Then we did the same thing for Bordeaux and the Rhone. The seminar format was interesting but at some point, I think that people already knew about 2/3 of the information being imparted. We were learning about the regions and tasting the wines but the next stage was to go into a kind of laboratory setting and really understand why Barolo tastes different than Barbaresco. The best way to go in to a lab is to just start writing tasting notes about these wines and comparing notes. We eventually expanded the format and started doing things like blind tastings or pairings with cheese, so we keep throwing in different things, which is how we learn instead of just always doing the same format all the time.

We’ve done 30 Wine Salons to date. We’ve tasted more than 1200 bottles, we’ve posted tasting notes for about 450 wines on CellarTracker, [posted as events under “Austin Wine Salon”], and many of these were what we called ‘Definitive’ like Definitive Bordeaux, Definitive Rhone, and we can’t taste them all but we bring the most important ones into these events. About a third of the people that come to Wine Salon own cellars and out of the remaining two thirds, about half are sommeliers and the other half are people in the wine business or very close to it - maybe chefs or restaurant owners or some that work for a wine distributor. So we have about 70 people on a list but I can only get about 36 people into a Wine Salon at any given time.

Do you have a vision for the future of Wine Salon or do you want to keep the status quo?

If I were younger I’d be doing a blog and maybe even more Wine Salons. They could be replicated and done in other cities - that would be fun! People with cellars like sharing and after some years of sharing with your friends it’s actually thrilling to share them with younger people and, at times, see how wide their eyes get tasting some of these wines that they may not otherwise have had an opportunity to taste. But for now, I like the idea of just continuing it the way it is and let it evolve and just enjoy it. Maybe someday it will become an adjunct to some other program but there’s never a lack of topics. In fact sometimes the wines may not always be the greatest in the world, but it’s the topic that keeps me interested.

What are your views about wine critics?

I like scores in a lot of ways because we go through life with scores. We took tests and wrote term papers and had a sense of where we stood, so it’s a cultural thing that we grew up with. If you’re going to buy a car you look at Consumer Reports and you check out what Car & Driver thinks, so am I really going to go out and buy a car without checking in on what the experts think? I know scores make it easier than reading a whole page of tasting notes. But it’s interesting that at Wine Salon I tell everyone as they’re tasting that if they want to enter scores, please do because I’ll enter them on CellarTracker, but half the people write down scores and half don’t. I think some people don’t feel comfortable scoring wine.

What is useful are the wines that are scored. If I’m going to drink a Pichon-Lalande and I can choose between a 1990 or an ’89, I’m going to look it up. Maybe this one scored a 93 and the other one scored a 96 so which one am I going to drink? The very people that say they don’t believe in wine scores are the same people that go to CellarTracker to find out what the best vintage of Pichon-Lalande is from those years. They use it, but they don’t want to score wine. At Wine Salon scores might come from ten or more people that are pretty sophisticated and I’ll average them out and use them because I trust them.

The important thing for me in wine reviews isn’t always the score, but more importantly is, when do I drink it? I don’t like drinking wine that isn’t ready to drink because it’s a waste of money and so is drinking them too late. So the first reason for me reading reviews is so that I can drink wines when they’re at their best. And then it goes into value, quality and cost, and then if you read a little more you might find out it has two grapes in it that you haven’t had before or it will tell you what the blend is.

I wish all reviewers were more flexible though. It’s very difficult for Parker to explain why one year he rates all these Australian wines at 97 or 98 points and four years later they’re 90 or 91. As a critic, you owe it to a lot of people that spend a lot of money, to explain what was going on with your palate. A great example is, day in and day out Parker will say the 1990 Pichon-Lalande is a 79 point wine. He said it fifteen years ago and he’ll say it today but it’s never been a 79 point wine! It might be an 86 or 88 but it’s not a 79. And Spectator gave it a 97, which it’s also not, so why are they so different?

They’re different because they insist that their palates discern something the other does not and I’ve had that wine enough to know that they’re just making their own point of view. They need to loosen up and start explaining more and be able to say, “I made a mistake, I was wrong about this, and this is what I think now,” and to always understand that it’s not the absolute final word on the subject. But I’ve sat next to Parker a couple of times at dinner and he’s a nice guy, down to earth.

What about ordering wines at restaurants?

Well almost all restaurants sell their good wine too young so I don’t order expensive wines at restaurants. And I also get served wines too cold or vise versa. From experience, I’ll order rosé because they’re good when served cold or I’ll order a German wine because they don’t need to be warmed up that much. Often I’ll order wine based on temperature!

I went to a restaurant two weeks ago and ordered a half bottle of Meursault, a really nice wine. I was sitting outside in 60 degree weather in San Francisco and I had to wrap my hands around it for an hour to warm it up, otherwise it would have been a waste of money. It was so sharp and minerally and I thought it was just off, except finally the last three sips were great. But why in the world would they pull this out of a refrigerator and serve it at 40 degrees? There’s still a lot of work that restaurants need to do but it’s really fun to go to a place that does it right – they have the right wines and serve them in the right glass at the right temperature.

The biggest jump in the US and in Austin has been with food and wine pairings so restaurants are more and more carrying the wines that pair with their food, or they’re more often preparing their foods that go with their wines. It’s admirably noticeable. It’s interesting that many chefs are beer drinkers because they work in hot kitchens, and the end of the day beer cools them off a bit, but a lot of chefs have been making a big effort to understand wine better, so we’re seeing a big change from five years ago.

How important is it to have food with wine?

I think it’s totally important. Except for maybe Champagne or rosé to start with, I can’t imagine drinking any wine without food. A good example is drinking a Chianti on its own and then drinking it with food, it almost doesn’t matter what the food is, and the wine is so much better. Chianti is not a very pleasurable drink on its own but it’s a completely different experience with food. I don’t think you can taste wine real well with food but if you have some food and go back and taste wine, it’s a lot better.

But if I’m academic and drinking a great wine, one of my favorite wines is a ’90 St Emilion or a La Tache, no, I’ll go straight, I won’t insist on food because I really want to understand those wines. I can jump over that need for food. If I’m drinking a great d’Yquem though, and pair it with Roquefort or foie gras, I think it actually gets better. I’m amazed at those pairings; they’re almost mystical. But Italian wines almost always need food. I think Burgundy and Bordeaux lend themselves to drinking better on their own, especially when they get older and do stand on their own. Even some old American Cabernet Sauvignon can do that. Last night I drank an ’86 Cornas and is was beautiful on its own but I think that most wine historically came about to be vinified to have with food so when I’m drinking Côte Rôtie or something like that, I find that drinking it with food is a better experience.

Are there any particular wines or wine regions you tend to favor? I know you’re really diverse . . .

Well, I’m kind of encyclopedic when it comes to enjoying wine, as are most of us, but I prefer French and Italian and within France, it’s typical with the three regions [referring to Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Rhone in no particular order]. I love old Bordeaux, I can’t imagine not loving old Bordeaux, because they are just tremendous when they’re ready to drink and with a tremendous nose. Sometimes I think with older Bordeaux or Burgundy I don’t even need to drink them – the aromas are just so fascinating that I just want to smell them. Sometimes it’s like, okay I’ll drink it but I don’t have to, and in fact, sometimes I don’t want to be disappointed by drinking it. And sometimes these aromas are not taking me back to childhood memories of smells, but instead they’re taking me back to the first time I had Pauillac or understood it. So I like that. And I prefer France versus Italy.

Any predictions about where the wine industry is going?

Well wine as a whole has never been better than it is today. I think global warming is helping wine, sadly enough, due to more regions that can now make better wine because they can grow riper grapes. Burgundy is a good example: it used to be that there would be maybe two out of ten vintages that were good because the climate was just so cool, same with Germany, and now it’s warmed up enough that most years are pretty good. So I think wine is very exciting today. There’s so much choice and it’s never been as good.

On the other hand, what’s going on in business is that business itself is being driven by not having inventory, like if you want a Dell computer, they’ll build it for you. So we don’t have wine aging and it’s more focused on immediate gratification, which is why we have so many wines that are ready to drink as soon as they are released. That’s kind of disappointing. The best example is California Cabernet Sauvignon, where some of them from the 60s are absolutely wonderful, a lot of times better than their Bordeaux counterparts, and I’m not sure that’s happening much anymore. I’m not sure there are any California winemakers that are making wine that will drink well forty years from now.

With all the technology being used in winemaking today, that leads to the question of intervention. How far can we go with this before we end up with wine that’s as non-expressive or is as homogenized as Coca-Cola?

I’m always amazed. Take the number of vintages, times the number of grape varieties, times the number of winemakers and what do you have? Let’s just throw out a number of a million different wines out there. And yet I can drink a wine and tell you this is a 1985 La Tache [Domaine de la Romanée-Conti] or a 1985 Silver Oak, Napa Valley, or I’ll know it’s a 1995 Ornelia, and even with a billion different tastes, there are wines you just know. Some people don’t care. They want the same thing every night like Budweiser or they want Kendall Jackson Chardonnay, and there’s nothing wrong with this. But then there are other people that just want the larger experience – they want to read different books and see different kinds of movies, take in independent films. So with wine there will be people that drink the same Kendall Jackson forever that’s been manufactured for twenty years, then you have others that love the Paolo Bea di Montefalco Sagrantino and if you started screwing around with Sagrantino and made it in a different style, they wouldn’t like it.

So I think there are a lot of us that appreciate differences. I think there is more differentiation happening today with Oregon Pinot Noir than there was ten years ago, I think for California Pinot Noir and Chardonnay too, so there is more individualization and it shows. But people need to find those wines because there’s so much clutter that even if you make the greatest wine, if people can’t find it, you’ll go out of business. But there has never been so many wine bars, wine classes, or wine tastings. Today there are probably more people going to wine tastings than going to book clubs – it’s a social phenomena.

Last question. Any three people, living or not, that you could have dinner with, who would they be?

Well a lot of people I like are rascals so I don’t think I’d like to have dinner with them (laughs). I like Krishnamurti who was an Indian philosopher, an anti-religion, but spiritual person, and then I could deal with anybody because he can deal with anybody (more laughter). Maybe James Joyce but I probably wouldn’t enjoy having dinner with him.

Sorry, I don’t know who that is Brian.

He an Irish writer that wrote ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, ‘Ulysses’, and ‘Dubliners.’ There are so many musicians . . . I’ve got a philosopher, a writer . . . and then John Lennon. Lennon would love to have dinner with Krishnamurti and he’d actually love to have dinner with James Joyce too. ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ is kind of like ‘A Day in the Life’. That’s only one dinner – I’m sure I could think of a lot more!

Awesome interview Brian. You have been very generous with your time and I really appreciate this interview. Thank you again – I look forward to seeing you at Wine Salon and other wine events soon.

Photo by George Edwards, presumably used with permission: Brian Owens at Austin Wine Salon (Great French Wines – May 2010).

Brian Owens and Austin Wine Salon - Part 1, Real People Series

2011-09-21T02:22:37Z

Let’s face it. As fascinating as the subject of wine is per se, there would be no wine without actual people (at least so far) so the nexus of this series of interviews takes on the greater subject of influencers, whether they be winemakers, collectors, chefs and foodies, educators, or benefactors whose path has somehow conveyed intrinsic value to the world of wine. It was my distinct pleasure to interview Brian Owens, an Austin Texas wine collector and educator that has had a profound effect on many professionals in the wine industry and countless others that have had the good fortune to know him.

Due to his father’s US Air Force pilot career Brian lived in a lot of places, like kids do that come from a military family, and from the age of sixteen his dad was stationed in London. At seventeen Brian was shuttling from the US to Europe and back and after high school he started traveling through Europe. Brian traveled mostly throughout France and Italy at the time, thus wine became the order of the day. His early introduction was mostly focused on Spanish and Italian wines, somewhere around wino grade, but at that age quality is not the first thing on anyone’s mind.

After a couple years of graduate school Brian came back to the US but not before traveling around Europe with his best friends, who once back, opened Jeffery’s (consistently one of Austin’s best fine dining restaurants). Acquiring a taste for European wines at a young age paved the way for Brian to become who he is today: a highly esteemed and respected wine collector and wine educator with a great palate, knowledge, and passion that he willingly shares with most anyone who’s interested in learning more about wine.

Amongst his many formidable accomplishments, Brian first created and now plans and presides over a wine event known as the Austin Wine Salon. Each month at Wine Salon collectors, sommeliers, restaurateurs, and wine industry people get together to share great and interesting bottles of wine, compare notes, and generally propagate wine knowledge in a planned and organized format. A typical Wine Salon will pour anywhere from 36 to 40 bottles and each event has a theme such as ‘Definitive Bordeaux’, ‘Blind Is More Fun’ or ‘Definitive Burgundy’. Wine Salon usually is host to 32 to 36 people and the waiting list to be a part of this coveted function is long and in high demand.

Brian is very well spoken and eloquent and has a wonderful ability to make complex subjects easy to understand without ever being condescending or intimidating. Like many of us, he embraces the opportunity to be around people that love wine as much as he does and he shines brightly in this environment. Without further ado, I give you Brian Owens:

So when you came back to the US you landed where?

I started working in television in Washington DC for the National Cable Television Association and I was traveling a lot and later I was in California a lot, so what do you do? You start visiting wineries. So when I was 24 or 25 I discovered California wineries. I was going to Napa and Sonoma and drinking Zinfandel, which were all of $2 or $3 dollars a bottle. Zinfandel was very misunderstood at that time but I got hooked beyond the European wines.

It’s interesting that you lived in DC. They had great food and wine in that town.

Washington was very French oriented, it was designed by a Frenchman, I lived in a neighborhood that had great wine stores and great restaurants, and good wine was really cheap. Robert Parker was around the area then before he started Wine Advocate and was going to the same places. It was so amazing that even in ’73 or ’74 you could buy a Clos Vougeot Grand Cru Burgundy for $5. I don’t even know who produced most of these wines because it was often a négociant but they’d slap the same label on the bottle. It might be a Clos Vougeot or a Gevery-Chambertin or Bonnes Mares. One might be $3 and another might be $9 - there were some good and some bad vintages. From ’67 through ’70, some were awful vintages but the price was right.

It’s interesting that traipsing around Europe for as long as you did, that you came back and actually found an appreciation for California wine, especially at a time when California was still trying to find itself as a wine region.

Well, I think I got into California because I was working in the cable TV trade association. I was had just gotten through graduate school in film production and the industry was in the early stages of cable TV, just starting Home Box Office (HBO) - my job was programming. But HBO started a lobbying effort and they wanted to do wine and cheese tastings for Congressmen so they gave me the job because they knew I liked wine and that I knew something about it. So suddenly I had to go out, like ten different times, and buy four cases of wine each time and the cheese too. I was 23 or 24. I would buy different California wines and that’s what really got me into the region. They didn’t want to serve European wines to United States Congress members so I had to buy American wines and American cheese. I was buying a lot of Oakville and Beaulieu Vineyards [BV] and that’s how I learned those wines.

So this was influential in your decision to start collecting wine at this point?

Yes, I started collecting wine at that point. I’d go into the wine shop and say, “If I buy four cases would you give me a discount on some European wine?” Sure! So that’s how I got into collecting Burgundy.

But you knew what you were buying at this point?

No, not really. I remember the first nice wine I got was Beychevelle, then I got Clos Fourtet, then I remember buying a Margaux and being so excited that I had a Margaux, only to learn that what I bought was a Margaux from the appellation, not a bottle of Château Margaux. So I’m sitting on a bottle of wine for about a year and a half until I realize I didn’t buy Château Margaux, and you learn that way.

Do you remember a moment that went off in your head where you said to yourself, “Wine is really awesome, I want to learn more” or was it kind of a gradual process?

Well, I think almost everybody that’s into wine has an experience with a bottle and it’s in a situation, and it may or may not be with food, but we have a situation where we drink this wine and think it’s perfect. There’s something that comes over our bodies and we think, “I’m at one with what I’m drinking.” It’s almost an out-of-body experience with a bottle of wine and then what happens is that we want to replicate that experience! So we come back and try to experience it again and it’s elusive. So then the questions: ‘why did that happen? Was it the wine? Was it the vintage? Was it the food?’ And we’re kind of caught and we had this experience but had trouble replicating it and then eventually we replicate it at some point again – we have another experience with another wine and we just want to do more of that. And it’s not just purely a sensatory experience about tasting a wine. It comes in context because we’re probably with somebody; one person or three people and we’re all going, “Wow!” So you have this whole dynamic of sharing going on too, this complex experience of wine.

And to jump to the sensory part of it, smell is a very, very deep sense and it can bring back very important stuff, even memories from childhood, and if you smell wine sometimes it will take you back thirty years ago. So when you have that sensory experience with the complex aromas of wine, maybe even subconsciously, you sometimes have an indefinable experience that delivers you back into some kind of pleasure moment. And secondly, taste is a very strong sense. So you can have some kind of experience that is more than, say, just looking at the Grand Canyon. We can be amazed by the view and size of the Grand Canyon but to smell something that takes you into a different time is a so much larger experience. So I think when you do that and try to replicate it and start to go down that road, you just subscribe to it – you just become a believer.

Some people actually don’t get it and, this is weird, but maybe it’s because some people just don’t have a sense of smell that’s developed. I do find that people that like wine actually do have a sense of smell that is developed really well and they taste very well. They have very good olfactory senses and that’s probably why they’re involved in wine. It’s kind of like musicians. The great one’s naturally have an ear that they were born with. There are a lot of people that want to be musicians but lack the natural talent to actually do it well. Same with wine people.

What is it about wine that makes it such a social vehicle?

Well, it is just by its nature. I go up and get an éclair or a cup of coffee, I’m probably not going to split it with you. I go up and get a bottle of wine, I’m not going to drink the whole thing by myself - I’m going to share it with you. I’m not going to have a bottle of my wine and you’re not going to have a bottle of your wine without us sharing what we have.

So you think it’s about quantity?

No, it’s about the bottle immediately. You can see it with beer: you get this beer, and I’ll get this other beer. We may not share a glass of wine but the bottle has a lot to do with sharing and it’s part and parcel of the beast. It forces you into sharing. When a bunch of us go out for barbeque it forces us into sharing too. Should we get some brisket, some pork, some beef? It’s a different experience than going to a traditional restaurant when you go out to a place like this with people, and you get a whole bunch of stuff on butcher paper and then everybody digs in. Right away conversation begins, “How is that?” Do like that? Is this good?”

But wine seems to be different socially than drinking beer together or cocktails.

Yes, a good example, you get a cocktail, I get a cocktail, and we’ll say we like our cocktails and we might even make a few comments about them but it won’t go much further than that. But when you get a bottle of wine you’ve made a joint decision and ultimately you have to ask, was it a good decision or a bad decision because you’ve got this whole bottle you have to get through. Even at a basic level people will start talking. They order a bottle of Pinot Grigio and one of us asks, “Should we have ordered the Chardonnay?” and the conversation begins. And wine people definitely share more about what they’re drinking, especially with other wine people. Wine gives us this sensory experience on a deeper level and can transport us to a different world, so-to-speak. I don’t think I can do that with a beer.

When you first started collecting wine, did you have a specific goal or strategy in mind?

I think not. Most of what I started buying was because of value and if the value was from Argentina, even though I like Bordeaux, I’d buy it if it was really priced right. So early on it was really about value but as you get into value you eventually get suckered into reading reviews about wine and wine scores. Then it moves to, “Wow, I can buy this 95 point wine for $10 or I can buy a 90 point wine for $20.” Even if the $20 wine is the one I like, I’m going to walk away from it and buy the 95 point wine.

So your collection was initially more about value?

Yeah, when you’re young, you don’t have a lot of money and you’re still learning but you don’t mind because you’ve got the whole world at your palate. You don’t mind buying something from the Languedoc or Minervois or some strange region you’ve never heard of. And you find a Côte du Rhône for $4 that Parker rated 90 points, and you explore it and pretty soon you learn what Grenache is. It’s all learning. And almost everybody I know started collecting on value and you work your way up. And then you start learning about vintages – some of it’s good, some bad, but I think you expand your horizon more by starting with value than you would if you just decided to learn everything there is about Bordeaux or a single region, which is the second act.

Do you have any formal education in wine - did you ever want to go down that road?

Well, a lot of it is time and when you’re working hard, you just don’t have the time to do it. The other thing is that I wasn’t in the profession so I really didn’t have a need to become a sommelier, for instance. So with me, I have substituted experience for sitting in a classroom learning about wine. The sad thing to discover in wine is that sommeliers, and even winemakers, have very small worlds. Sommeliers are in the world of consumers/restaurants and more and more restaurants cannot afford to acquire older vintages so the wine list is limited to the last several years of releases. That’s the scope of their world. And winemakers are often the same. They’re basically farmers, out in the country, and know a lot about farming but not so much about wine. So experience can certainly be a substitute for formal education, which at some point will segue this conversation into Wine Salon.

Part 2 will be posted soon. Don’t miss this because there is so much to gain from Brian’s wisdom, experience and depth of knowledge; more about Wine Salon, restaurants, wine critics in Part 2!

David Boyer

Photo: Brian Owens

Vinexpo 2011 – Part 3: The Other Bordeaux

2011-08-13T18:46:03Z

It’s pretty easy to taste and write about great wine from a great vintage, especially if it’s from a great château like those in Part 2. All of those wines mentioned from the appellations of Pauillac, Margaux, St Julien, and St Estèphe in Part 2 are produced by châteaux from the Classification of 1855, which are located on the Left Bank and are considered some of the most esteemed and famous wine estates in the world.

Think about this for a minute though: there are over 10,000 châteaux in Bordeaux, producing some 14,000 different labels (brands). That is an enormous number of wine producers by any measure! In 2005 Bordeaux produced 950,000,000 bottles of wine, a slightly higher than average number per year. But the world’s most recognizable Bordeaux comes from the 61 châteaux that were listed in the Classification of 1855, the few upper echelon estates in St Émilion and Pomerol, along with a smattering of others. And I mean smattering.

Does it not make sense that other châteaux in the region would be capable of making reasonably good wine too? I know there are lots of issues such as terroir, financial resources to produce good quality, winemaking skills and so on. But after tasting numerous Bordeaux that were previously unknown to me, I can’t begin to tell you how badly America is missing out and I’m talking about everyday types of wine that would be priced at under $30 if we could only get them here. All of these wines were from small family châteaux that are all around the ‘big and famous’ châteaux, growing the same grapes and using the same techniques as the big guys.

I would like for American wine lovers to understand that:

Just because a particular wine from Bordeaux is not classified doesn’t mean it is low quality, especially in good vintages such as ’03 ’05, ’09 and 2010
Just because you have a bad experience with one bottle of Bordeaux doesn’t mean that all Bordeaux is bad – often the grocery store wines are made in huge quantities much like the jug wines from California to satisfy distribution channels, so take the time to explore finding some better bottles with your local retailer and you will be rewarded
Often Americans drink Bordeaux too young when it was made to age (and with proper storage and age comes complexity that cannot be obtained by any other means). Some vintages like 2005 and 2010 will be approachable at a much younger age than say the ’03 so don’t expect great things from a wine that’s too young to drink. Either buy older wines or age them properly for the best results unless it is a vintage that can be enjoyed very young.
Bordeaux is far bigger than just a few dozen châteaux; these brands do not have an exclusive on the quality of wine
Lower priced Bordeaux does not necessarily translate into to poor quality Bordeaux; many wines from Médoc and Haut Médoc (the larger region surrounding many of the smaller more illustrious appellations) were truly delicious, well-made, beautiful wines that would sell in the US for $20 to $30 per bottle at retail – if we could only get them here
Compared to many New World wines, these wines are made with modern tools but with Old World values, which means far less intervention during the winemaking process. Winemakers in France are far less likely to add things or subtract things just to gain market share, which is more of a New World tactic that begins to taste a lot like so much homogenized soda after a while. Here, you can still taste a wine’s grapes, region, and style and it’s far more interesting and better tasting too.

The problem is that many of these wines are difficult to find because they don’t have distribution here. The only way to change this is to create demand for them at the retail level by asking your retailer to find the best one’s and stock them. At some point a savvy retailer will begin to demand these wines from its distributors who will then look for them from importers. There’s a whole long chain to accomplish the feat of getting ‘non-household name’ Bordeaux into the US but it’s seriously worth the effort. Many of these smaller châteaux are producing 50,000 to 200,000+ bottles a year so they’re certainly large enough to be distributed here.

Once you have great Bordeaux, whether it’s a $1500 First Growth or a good quality $25 Cru Bourgeois Superieur, your whole outlook will be changed about wine. This is truly some of the very best wine on the planet and in a vintage like Bordeaux had in 2010 you almost can’t go wrong. We as consumers need to be insistent with our local wine shop owners or we’ll continue to be left out from enjoying some of the best wine in the world. If you would like to receive a list of some of these wines I tasted personally, please drop me an email at david.classof1855.com and I’ll be happy to send it to you. Let the hunt begin!

David Boyer

Photo: My visit to Château Lafite-Rothschild, maker of one of the most prominent wines in the world.

Vinexpo 2011 – Part 2: The 2010 Bordeaux Vintage

2011-07-27T23:30:24Z

As I mentioned in Part 1, the 2010 Bordeaux tasting was the highlight of Vinexpo for me and really one of the main reasons I went to the event. I have enjoyed fine wine from every region of the world and it doesn’t matter if it’s great Burgundy, Syrah/Shiraz, Brunello, or Riesling, I always come back to Bordeaux.

The tasting itself was filled with exuberance from châteaux serving their wines, as well as those tasting the wines. It had a joyous party-like feel to it and somewhere around 130 châteaux were present. Not many of the wines being served were actually bottled yet but were served from bottles with handwritten labels so most of what was poured into our glasses were actually barrel tastings. That’s really what blew me away: the fact that these wines were so young but drinking so well already, with such balance, purity, and complexity was a remarkable achievement to me!

Standouts for me from the 2010 vintage:

Château Lynch-Bages was the best vintage I have ever tasted from this estate and I’ve enjoyed a considerable amount of them. Here was spectacular depth and purity of fruit as if I could taste all the separate elements of the Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Petite Verdot (the typical Left Bank Bordeaux varieties). Beautiful tannins and a long and layered finish were just frosting on the cake so to speak. I’m positive this will come together over the years and be one of the best ever from this estate.
Château Pichon-Longueville Baron was a huge mouthful of gorgeous black fruit and polish but with enough acidity to keep it all framed and in balance; too often this much ripe fruit makes a wine flabby but not so in this case. I have had many vintages of both Pichon Baron and Pichon-Comtesse de Lalande and usually find the Lalande to be the better of the two, but for ’10, the Baron to me was clearly better. By the way the Lalande is not shabby either.
Wines from Pauillac led the way in terms of flavor, complexity, polish, and finish, to wit: Châteaux Lynch-Bages and Pichon-Longueville Baron
Wines from Margaux exhibited the classic and remarkable aromatics that only Margaux can produce – one of the standouts was Château Rauzan-Ségla, which had a higher blend of Merlot (35%) than many Left Bank wines, and was one of the best ever this château
Wines from St Julien (Château Gruaud Larose and Châteaux Léoville Barton and Léoville Poyferré were standouts for me) and St Estèphe were also very fine and kind of in between the wines from Pauillac and Margaux in terms of flavor, nose, complexity and finish; nearly all were great quality, very delicious and balanced for being so young but also have enough stuffing to age well
Pessac-Léognon and Graves were very structured and were much more like barrel tastings than the other appellations I tasted that day. I am very fond of this appellation and although they didn’t show as well at that moment, I think they will age better than many 2010 wines from the other Bordeaux appellations unless the alcohol levels of finished wine goes beyond 15%. The standout here for me was Château Latour-Martillac (and their whites are truly sensational too)
The Right Bank’s St Emilion wines were spectacular showstoppers with rich ripe fruit, finesse, and depth of flavor, all with great precision and balance. There were too many standouts here to list but Château Angélus was perhaps the most memorable. Pomerol wines too were great with Château La Conseillante being the standout for me. Not surprisingly Château Pétrus and Château Le Pin were not present. Why? Because they don’t have to be.
Not to be forgotten for a second are the wines of Sauternes and Barsac. I believe the 2010 vintage will produce some of the best ever from these appellations. These wines were almost across the board stunning in their depth, complexity, balance, and finish. Botrytis was kind to the fruit in this vintage and all the right weather conditions converged to produce some amazing wine, even though much of the fruit was not able to be picked until late October. With the excellent acidity and sugar balance, these wines should age very well and develop into something very special. Outstanding for me was Château Sigalas Rabaud, which is a First Growth Sauternes that I had never tasted before, possibly due to limited US distribution. I found upon my return that what little there is in the US is priced so low, it’s like stealing. This wine was very pure and had a phenomenal nose of apricot, pear, pineapple, and almonds with a long and ever-changing finish. Wow!

These are but a few of the wines that really knocked me out but there is a lot more to get into on the next segment of this journey. Specifically, I’ll share some important information about the Mèdoc and Haut Mèdoc because America is missing out on some real treasures that are actually affordable. More soon!

David Boyer

Photo: I snapped this photo standing in front of Château Pichon-Longuville Baron. Really, how lucky can a person get?

Vinexpo 2011 – Part 1

2011-07-17T00:02:59Z

I had heard about Vinexpo several years ago from wine industry friends that told me Vinexpo is the largest and most premier wine event in the world. It sounded great to me but the one caveat is that it’s for the trade only. Still I inquired, thinking maybe a wine blogger would be enough to get me in and sent an email off to some address in France. Although I didn’t really forget about Vinexpo, I did well to manage my own expectations about ever hearing back from anyone.

So imagine my surprise when in May, the following invitation lands in my in box: The President and Members of the Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux request the pleasure of your company at a tasting of the 2010 vintage organized during Vinexpo on June 20th and 21st 2011. I was surprised and of course excited but to top it off, the event was to take place in Bordeaux. My understanding is that Vinexpo takes place in Bordeaux in odd years with even years being distributed in other exotic locales such as Hong Kong or London. The perfect storm – Vinexpo, Grand Cru, in Bordeaux.

By the way, even though I had been invited, in order to receive my entry badge I had to prove to Vinexpo that I am in the trade and that process took a couple of days. Because the invitation was so close to the event (about three weeks out), I’m pretty sure they must have had some cancellations, which explains why the doors suddenly opened for me. It was risible to think I could even secure a hotel room on such short notice and my exhaustive search verified that not a single travel site had even one room available at any price. Being a glass-half-full kind of person, I booked my flight anyhow and set my sites on finding accommodations. Fortunately Vinexpo has its own army of travel agents coordinating this massive decent of wine trade people (50,000) upon its city and I was able to find a modest room for a not modest price, again due to cancellation. With so much to do in Bordeaux I knew I wouldn’t lounge around in my room much so I didn’t care. The Grands Crus de Bordeaux tasting was invitation only, limited to a relatively small number of people and I was not going to miss it if humanly possible.

Despite a truly grueling, hellish flight thanks to the remarkable incompetence of Delta and Air France, Vinexpo did not disappoint. The first event I went to was the tasting of the Grands Crus and I went into it wondering if the ’10 vintage was just more hype, especially after Bordeaux just coming off the 2009 vintage that is being touted as perhaps the ‘best ever’ by major wine critics. I tasted through about 130 wines at this event and I can say categorically that the 2010 Bordeaux vintage was not hyped at all, but it was indeed spectacular. I never imagined tasting Bordeaux this young that would be so balanced, with deep and delicious fruit, very fine tannins, yet retaining fine acidity. Such finesse and complexity is really unheard of for wine this age; many of these wines have not even been bottled yet so they were put into hand-labeled bottles from the barrel for this tasting.

There’s no doubt that that these wines will decline in a year or so and go ‘dumb’ for another perhaps three to five years but this initial tasting provided a glimpse of what will develop with bottle age. I think ’10 will be approachable for many Bordeaux at a younger age in a similar way that the ’05 vintage is. And I think this vintage will spark controversy for many years to come about which vintage is better, the ’09 or the ’10, similar to the current disagreement about ’89 or ’90, or the ’95 or ’96. It really doesn’t matter because both vintages are great although different.

In terms of fruit set and flowering, the ’09 vintage was very even across the board and the ’10 was very uneven which resulted in lower yields and uneven grape sizes within the same bunch, which of creates uneven ripeness. The ’09 grapes being very even made it easy to make excellent wine but the decisions about when to pick the grapes and the grape selection process from the ’10 vintage had to be undertaken with much more care to produce good results. There are a lot more technical details about the differences in the two vintages and not surprisingly, there are differences in structure, tannins, and acidity that are major contributing factors in how these wines will age. At the moment, the consensus is that the ‘09s will be more approachable at a younger age and the ‘10s will be generally more age worthy, which of course is what creates the great complexity that Bordeaux is so capable of producing.

During the tasting, I spoke with Oz Clarke a few times as we wandered from bottle to bottle throughout the tasting. I know that Oz is a famous British wine writer but I was not aware of the depth of his work until I wandered into ‘The Library’ at Vinexpo. This was a room set up with thousands of volumes written on wine and I could have stayed there for weeks and been very happy. Nearly one whole wall was filled with books written by Mr. Clarke, almost all of them on Bordeaux. Wow! To say this guy is intimately familiar with Bordeaux is an acute understatement. Anyhow, Oz expressed concern about the ’09 and ’10 vintages and told me he has grave concerns about winemakers moving in the direction of New World wines.

Of course with the huge, highly alcoholic, very extracted wines being served up at the tasting, his point was not lost on me. I do indeed hope that, despite the high heat that produces huge bodied very ripe wines, winemakers don’t forget about finesse and elegance, terroir and honesty in their wines. I believe in general that the Bordelais probably imposes the least amount of manipulation in their winemaking techniques compared to any other wine regions in the world, although Burgundy also is very non-intervention minded as well. Oz is a cool guy, really knows his subject, and I have a lot of respect for him so it’s difficult to not listen when he speaks.

With over 2400 wineries from 44 countries, needless to say that in the course of the event’s three full days, it’s like trying to see everything in Smithsonian in a week – impossible to even scratch the surface. I could have spent months there easily but I’m sure the next time I go, I will be more organized.

I have much more to write about so stay tuned.

David Boyer

Photo: I took this standing in front of famed Château Palmer, Margaux, Bordeaux, France

Better Wine Guide

2011-06-04T21:23:53Z

The experience of tasting nearly 2000 wines in the course of about 65 flights seems daunting to me even now but that is exactly what I did for Better Wine Guide. I’m fairly caught up with this project and I’m ready to get back to writing. As challenging as this was for me, I am really happy I had such an opportunity because it certainly puts things squarely into perspective, not the least of which, I must acknowledge that I am completely spoiled by the trappings of fine wine. But fine wine, or at least good wine does not have to cost $200+ per bottle.

Better Wine Guide is an iPhone app developed for people that do not have the desire or the time to learn all about fine wine. And if you are knowledgeable about fine wine, you know that the learning curve is pretty bloody steep and can take years of study and tens of thousands of dollars to eventually ‘come to an understanding’. It takes a protracted amount of time and commitment to learn wine on a reasonably deep level so, who can blame anyone for not doing it? It’s really like learning a foreign language and one must have that kind of commitment and resources of both time and money to bring themselves up to par with other wine experts in the world.

How did this Better Wine Guide project get started anyway? It started with my neighbors, all of whom are dear to me. Everyone knew I was a wine collector or as I am called more often, a ‘wine snob’ (I do not take offense to the description). So during frequent neighborhood get-togethers I would often ask people about their wine choices of Woodbridge, Yellow Tail, and the like. Truly I was fascinated about the selections that would show up in wine bottles. This lead to the question of, “How do you buy wine? When you’re shopping, why would you choose one bottle (brand) over another?” Almost every response was either, “I’ve had it before and I’m okay with it”, or more often “I like how the label looks.” Wow! How the label looks has never been an accurate indicator of quality as far as I know. This lead to more questions.

So I started researching this and it turns out that even though I have numerous brilliant people all around me, this wine-buying logic is not indigenous to my neighborhood. And further research revealed this mind-numbing information: last year in the US 330 million cases of wine were sold and more than 90% of that wine was priced at less than $25 per bottle. Those numbers were almost inconceivable to me. But the thing is that anyone that buys wine at a grocery store, or at a liquor store not specializing in fine wine, has no information available whatsoever about what they’re buying and no wine critic has ever reviewed these wine because they are not taken seriously! But if we revisit the number about these wines representing over 90% of the market, how can this be? I was stunned, really, when I started looking into this. But it hit me that I’ve never seen any major critic rate the wines that most Americans buy.

Thus, the idea of Better Wine Guide was born. As I’ve always shared with you, few things give me greater pleasure than turning people on to a bottle of wine that lights their fire. And the fact that these wines (almost all of them) have never been critically rated is what created Better Wine Guide, with the hope that people will discover a world of better of wine out there. I don’t want to compete with Wine Spectator, Robert Parker, Steve Heimoff, Stephen Tanzer, Jancis Robinson, or especially James Suckling (a rock star of sorts to me). These guys know what they’re doing, so who am I? I’m the guy that reviewed all of the wines they have disregarded, kicked to the curb, and would probably consider plonk. But the reality is, these are wines that most people drink and there deserves to be unbiased, critical information available about them.

The app’s design is easy to use with a barcode scanner so while in the store, scanning the barcode brings up a score and tasting notes for that particular wine. I wanted to write tasting notes that would be accessible without being condescending to people, avoiding the dumb-down approach; I would rather have people ask what ‘tannin’ means than intentionally sidestep the use of an extremely important term. With powerful search features and the ability to rate every wine purchased and contribute to community scores, the app seems well rounded for millions of wine consumers. All wine are under $25 per bottle and the user can search within her or his own price range in $5 increments.

My intent in the wine world is to turn people on to the best wine at a price that’s comfortable for them, whether that’s $6.99 or $1699. And I believe that regardless of price, if people have a good experience discovering good wine, they will at some point want to expand their horizons into better wine as their wine knowledge also expands. If you are a collector, oenophile, connoisseur, or otherwise a wine expert, the only reason you might want this app is to provide an answer when someone asks you to recommend a good wine, and you know they’re not going to spend more than $25 to buy it. But for people buying over 90% of the wine sold in America, this is for you.

So without further prose or fuss, I present to you Better Wine Guide - now available on Apple’s iTune Store.

David Boyer

Better Wine Guide fab logo: Blase Design, Austin

First To Know . . .

2011-02-04T01:43:00Z

To my dear readers: I know I’ve gone off the grid for a couple of months or so. I haven’t wanted to stay away but, like you, I’m subject to that dumb allocation of ‘you only get 24 hours a day’ rule. If I could have managed to stretch it or bend that unforgiving mandate somehow, I would have been posting on this blog a lot more and I wouldn’t be feeling so execrable about being away for so long.

For more than two months Monday through Friday, I have tasted, scored, and written tasting notes for 30 wines each evening. I did not taste wine on weekends or around the holidays to give my palate a break but nonetheless I have managed to get through over 1500 wines, a formidable task to say the least and the photos above and below illustrate how much my kitchen has been torn up. You’re the first to know - I’ve been engaged with this activity for the soon to be up-and-coming company, Better Wine Guide.

Although I can’t yet reveal all the details, Better Wine Guide is unlike anything that exists in this world so far and I believe it will contribute deeply to the discovery and enjoyment of wine for millions of people. Just in case you haven’t come to know me by now, that’s really what I’m about. If I could, I would make it my mission to turn everyone on to great wine because most often the people that say they don’t like wine are people that have never had good wine. And what are the chances of finding good wine when you’re in a store and swimming in a sea of bottles? The fact is that most people buy a wine based on how the label looks, which is definitely not an indicator of quality.

The experience of blind tasting thirty wines each evening is jarring physically and humbling cerebrally. Each morning I carried 30 bottles of wine into the kitchen and put the whites in the refrigerator to cool, leaving the reds on the counter. I wanted to taste these wines based on how most people will taste them, a white from the fridge and a red at room temperature, no matter what that happened to be. Even if serving temperatures were incorrect (and they were), it’s the real world.

At about 4:30 each afternoon, my stellar Tasting Assistant Deanna showed up. Her job probably wasn’t real great now that I think about it but she did it without fail or complaint. She dragged all the white wines out of the refrigerator and sorted them by varietal from presumably lightest to heaviest, entered in all of the wine label information into our database, put each bottle in a numbered brown bag that corresponded to the tasting order of wines that day, and returned them to the refrigerator. Each day typically consisted of 15 whites and 15 reds with sparkling and rosés included. She then sorted the reds and entered all of the information into the database, bagged them in numbered bags and set them up. Deanna would let me know when she was far enough ahead of me to begin tasting for the day but everything was in a numbered bag by then.

When I walked in to begin my daily tasting episode, she was opening and pouring white wine into the glasses, having about eight or ten glasses poured already. I picked up number one and took it to my tasting area with a computer set up. The computer had the database already opened but the screen was set so I couldn’t see any details about the wine. The only functions I could perform consisted virtually of entering a score and writing my notes. After tasting each evening, I had hours of running the dishwasher (no soap or heat) to clean the glasses and dry them by hand each night. I finished usually by 10:00 or 10:30 PM; the wine glasses I used are fantastic and have held up beyond belief.

I am always excited to find something good and even more so, something great. And I always feel bad about trashing a winery or giving low scores – as if I could make great wine? But I know what great wine tastes like and having no experience as a winemaker I found it challenging to be harshly judgmental. But I got over it and put the judgment thing into perspective. If I made lousy wine and I was the only one to drink it, who cares? But if I’m trying to sell it to the public (with a great label created by genius designers and marketers) and I know it sucks, well that’s another matter entirely. And ultimately, that’s the case with probably most wineries that are trying to sell ‘dumpster wine’ to us wine drinkers and they don’t deserve good scores but they do deserve to be uncovered. Like I said, I got over it.

Wow! Throughout this tasting experience, which is far from over, I have to say what really came into my consciousness (in a very deep way) was the concept of terroir. Terroir (pronounced tehr-WAH) is a French term that expresses a sense of place and typicity and is what makes a wine unique based on grape varietal characteristics, weather, microclimate, soil, sun, terrain, rain and exposure to all of the aforementioned. There are certainly descriptors that define wines from different regions and even from different vineyards within a few yards of each other, especially in France. Throughout this tasting experience the lack of terroir came front and center, as I tasted so many wines that are similar. These wines lacked character or expression because it has all been squeezed out of the winemaker’s equation by some enormous corporation in order to be competitive in the market. Sad. And I pounded them for it because ‘sameness’ is not anything good in wine – distinctiveness is.

As I wrote earlier, this is an eye-opening experience and I feel much better rounded because of it. There were good wines, and great wines too and I was surprised by quite a few wineries that I would not have imagined as making good wine, which gives reason to tasting wine blind. I have biases about wine because admittedly I tend to be a wine snob in the traditional sense, but I have to say that I’m impressed with a surprisingly large number of wines I would have never considered to be of quality. Surprise, in fact, is the word of the day on this subject. I really have to tell you that there has never in the history of the planet been more really good wine available at every price point. Yes, there’s some plonk out there and with so many wines available (some experts believe that 200,000 labels are available worldwide at any given time and that it is a conservative number) there’s a lot of it. Regardless, there really is a tremendous amount of drinkable wines (like for an everyday wine) and a pretty good amount of very good wines, and of course a handful of really incredible wines.

Although there is no end in sight to this assignment, I must say that I feel very lucky to have had the experience of tasting wine critically. It smacks down old prejudices, opens new doors for me, and ultimately humbles me to know that there are so many great wines out there. In the end, would I trade good Bordeaux for a good Yellow Tail? I’ll answer the question but if you know me at all, you probably already know my answer.

David Boyer

Photos: Sad, unusable kitchen. Take out anyone?

Scent of a Woman

2010-12-11T17:23:00Z

Sensuous, feminine, artful, gorgeous, deep, rich, smart, and seductive – all of those things and more are conjured up directly to the forefront by a woman’s scent. The creation of such aromas can be none other than simply sensational. Again, the French have a lock on the world of perfumes and all things that smell amazing, just like with their wines. No one has beat what France’s products can do to your olfaction.

I am reminded of a time that I was locked in a recording studio with Dolly – truly a fabulous work experience on every level. She was wearing a simply exquisite perfume and I’m not exaggerating, not even a little. I asked her what it was, she smiled and coyly said, “It’s a perfume I had made for me in France”. I have no question about the authenticity of her statement but I have to tell you, after getting her comfortable in the studio, I fairly reeled back into the control room to record her. Seriously, serious perfume.

The problem these days is that I have been to a number of wine events or even just hanging in a wine bar where someone walks through the door (men are certainly not less guilty) wearing perfume, cologne, or scented soap, or some otherwise wonderfully generated aroma that completely debilitates my ability to take in the essence of wine. So powerful is our sense of smell that we would taste very little without it. If you drink wine much, you have undoubtedly experienced just this somewhere along the way and know how frustrating it can be. On too many occasions I have been compelled to depart early from an otherwise nice event.

This came up for me again recently when I was sitting in Whole Foods eating a fabulous Cesar Salad with shrimp, along with a glass of ice cold Sauvignon Blanc from Burgundy no less (it never occurred to me that anyone would grow Sauv Blanc in Burgundy, and I certainly never imagined it would be available stateside if they did)! It was really great on its own but with the salad this wine sang like Kathleen Battle was just rehired at the Met. Sadly though a young man sat down at the counter next to me dripping with cologne and though I can’t fault a person in this instance (it’s a food counter, not a wine bar) it completely decimated any pleasure derived from the wine and reminded me of the numerous occasions when people would walk into a wine event with such scents and lack of sense.

As we get out this holiday season and participate in the festivities, please be mindful of how unpleasant your, no doubt, pleasant perfume or cologne can be to others – especially at wine events or wine bars. This issue became a problem in the workplace in the last five years or so due to coworker’s possible allergic reactions. Their being subject to other people’s scents has even been cause for legal action that resulted in many companies banning workers from wearing or applying scented anything in the workplace and although it is a typical overreaction, I do understand how it can be annoying to take in someone else’s interpretation of what smells good. Good hygiene is good enough, really.

So before you go out to any place that is likely to serve wine, please be considerate of others that enjoy wine and are trying to take in one of the most important elements of wine – its aromas. The scent of a woman is a fabulous thing in the proper context. I hope everyone has a great and enjoyable holiday season!

David Boyer

What Turkey?

2010-11-24T02:15:00Z

I love turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, and all of the traditional Thanksgiving dishes but sadly, I wear those dishes for quite a while, post-gorge. I especially enjoy family, loved ones, and dear friends over the holidays. But when it comes down to it, I could entirely forget the holiday meal and just enjoy some great wine. I could dispense with the turkey but not the meaningful social experience of sharing good wine and, the season is upon us already so let the sharing begin.

Hanging with my wonderful wife, my great brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew give me a lot to be thankful for. We four adults have had numerous and very memorable wine experiences together and although this year may not be as grandiose as other wine explorations, it will be decent. Sharing good wine is always rewarding to me, as is the ensuing and deep conversation about wine.

So here’s what’s on deck this Thanksgiving:

- LaSirena Muscat, 2006

This is Heidi Barrett’s label and of course Heidi was responsible for making all of the great vintages of the very famous (and incredibly expensive) Screaming Eagle. This is vinified bone dry so there are fabulous tropical fruit and grapefruit notes as I recall, very nice complexity, and a long, clean finish thanks to its crisp acidity. It really drinks perfect with turkey.

- Louis Latour Volnay En Chevret Premier Cru, 2005

This red Burgundy is young and on the more muscular side but the vintage was so good and the fruit so ripe that it was drinkable and enjoyable almost upon release. It should compliment nicely the bolder flavored dishes that will be passed around the table. I’ll be happy to have another go at this because, as I remember it, the wine was very deep and rich with a powerfully long and flavorful finish and it’s been three years or more since I’ve cracked one open so it should be even better this year.

- Château Doisy-Védrines, 1988

Second Growth Bordeaux from the Barsac appellation, this dessert wine should be in its perfect drinking window right now. The color is fairly deep amber at this time, which indicates that it is aging as expected - these great wines are somewhat pale upon release and darken with age and become ever more complex. We’ll serve it up with the classic pairing of fresh bleu cheese – this is a dessert to savor.

- Château Gruaud Larose, 1989

Second Growth Bordeaux from the St Julien appellation, this wine is one of my all-time favorites in many vintages and is still a very reasonable bargain, I believe, because it never made it on the list of Robert Parker’s so-called ‘Super-Seconds’. That list made superstars out of a few Second Growth Bordeaux and drove their prices higher and although I very much enjoy the Super-Seconds, Gruaud Larose offers nothing less than any other Second Growth. This will be for later in the evening I suspect, but will likely deliver smoky, beautiful black fruit with a gorgeous bouquet, palate, and finish. Really there’s nothing left to ask for in a fine wine – I’m a huge fan of this châtaux.

These wines may be considered modest by the great trophy-wine standards of the world but I don’t have to drink First Growth Bordeaux, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Burgundy, or a Château d’Yqum to be happy or enjoy wine. I am truly grateful to my family, and friends (which certainly includes my wine friends) and have every reason to give thanks to many, including you, dear readers.

I’d like to know what everyone else is drinking for the all-important feast this year – please send me your lineup. I wish you a great and safe Thanksgiving holiday filled with wine and loved ones.

David Boyer

Aging Whites

2010-10-28T00:58:00Z

Sounds like some nefarious White House report on Baby Boomers. At the ripe old age of sixteen, I was introduced to wine by way of Chablis and, although for me it was an acquired taste, I hung in there and began to really appreciate and enjoy it. Boone’s Farm was quite popular then, which was fairly unpleasant for me by the time I was going to high school drinking parties (I managed anyhow). But I later went through a phase of putting white wine on the back burner for a number of years and I think it was due mostly to the difficulty of finding good Chablis at a reasonable price. As California wine emerged in the sixties and seventies, Japan was busy buying up much of the notoriously small vineyards in France’s Burgundy region of which Chablis is a part, and making anything from Burgundy more difficult to find.

Having never forgotten my early inauguration into wine, when Brian Owens’ Wine Salon event for great French white wine was announced in the middle of summer, I was thrilled! I would guess with all of the Grand Cru and Premier Cru Burgundy alone, this probably was one of the most valuable collections of wine to be assembled by Austin’s formidable and most respected wine collectors for a tasting event like this. Some of the Grand Cru vineyards present, to name a few, included:

Corton-Charlemagne

Bâtard-Montrachet

Bienvenues-Bâtard-Montrachet

Chevalier-Montrachet

Criots-Bâtard-Montrachet

Thirty-six in all, these very fine wines went back as far as the 1976 vintage, which is truly amazing considering they were all white wines. Sauternes (dessert wines from Bordeaux) certainly considered amongst great French white wine was conspicuously missing from the lineup and understandably so – these wines are so big and long they would have significantly interfered with tasting the more delicate and nuanced wines. As it was, there was a wonderful ’89 Baumard Quarts de Chaume (Loire) that challenged us in this tasting because it has many of the characteristics of Sauternes: sweet, big, mouth-coating, and a long finish with fabulous fruit; it wasn’t easy to recalibrate the palate back to dry whites.

Other regions represented just as well as Burgundy with the Rhone’s Condrieu (the world's best Viognier - no argument, except for people from California that haven't had this grape variety from this region) and Hermitage appellations; Alsace weighed in with fantastic Pinot Gris and Gewürztraminer by famed wine estate, Zind Humbrecht. Not to be left out, the Loire region showed its strengths with excellent Pouilly Fumé and some of the world’s best Sauvignon Blanc from famed producers Didier Dagueneau and Domaine des Baumard.

The difficulty, however, can sometimes be predicting the life of a great white wine, especially relative to reds. In my opinion, there were more than a few of the wines at this event that were quickly approaching the end of their drinkability window, and a few that even exceeded it. Even though I love many white wines, my red to white ratio has to be probably 10 to 1 so, I can taste a red and have a pretty good understanding of what needs to happen next: drink, hold, or either, and for approximately how long.

Aging whites can be less intuitive, and requires knowledge about the producer, region, vineyard, and historical performance, plus the vintage, which can trump all of the foregoing. Tasting them as they age is also a good way to keep ahead of the old age curve, which provides a strong argument for buying a case, or at least multiple bottles. White wine does not have but a miniscule amount, if any, tannin to protect it from oxidation because white wine does not make contact with the grape’s skin, nor does it cold soak for days with grape seeds or even stalks, during the winemaking process that provide the tannins in red wine.

White wine however relies almost completely on acidity to protect the wine from oxidation while aging. Some white wines, especially those recently released, might have excessively high acidity that will strip the enamel off your teeth (a highly exaggerated and baseless claim thrown in for effect), meaning that the wine needs more time to age before it can be enjoyed. Other wine that may have the same pH can be deceiving such as a Sauternes that spreads beautifully across your palate, but its acidity can be nearly entirely covered up with fruit. Aging Sauternes is however almost a no-brainer because we know that the best of them can develop complexity with bottle age for decades or even hundreds of years, due to its anti-oxidant acidity hidden beneath the fruit and residual sugar.

This brings me back to the subject at hand. The aromas and tastes of a wine that is oxidizing due to excessive age are quite apparent and there’s certainly no turning back when a wine hits that wall. I was sitting next to one of Austin’s most renowned collectors, Larry Peel, at this event and he told me that as of that moment, he had someone going through his cellar pouring out hundreds of bottles of wine that had expired beyond drinkability, and anything Larry has in his cellar is likely to be some of the finest. He told me not surprisingly that mostly whites were being laid to rest somewhere in his drainpipes. I asked him how he managed his cellar data and he feigned a smile, pointing a finger to his head; perhaps not the best strategy but certainly a common one.

Here’s what I know about all of this - almost all whites should be consumed within a few years of being released unless they are: dessert wines like Sauternes or Tokaji, most white Burgundy from Grand Cru or some Premier Cru vineyards and from a vintage considered at least very good, Quarts de Chaume from the Loire, and less than a handful of wines from Alsace. Whites from a number of other French appellations can generally be stored for up to five years or so without too much risk such as Premier Cru Chablis, Pouilly-Fuissé, and dry Vouvray.

Even then, as these wines age, many will be an acquired taste. For me I’d rather drink a younger more vibrant Condrieu, a younger, fresher Grand Cru, or even a younger Quarts de Chaume, but like so much in the world of wine, it is ultimately a personal choice. The big issue is to know your wines, store them minimally in a temperature-controlled environment at 55-56 degrees (with 70% humidity is even better for long term storage), and keep track of each wine’s drinkability window.

Regardless of what style of wine you like, there is a truly incredible world of white wine that offers up as much enjoyment and complexity as red wine, just waiting to be discovered and embraced, which I am doing much more of these days.

David Boyer

Photo: a few of the empties relegated to the mantle at Austin’s premier French restaurant, Aquarelle.

The Genius of Michael Vilim - Part 2

2010-09-21T23:46:00Z

Michael Vilim is an iconic and exemplary Austin restaurateur and wine genius. Part 2 will really provide you with a deeper understanding of how he thinks, what drives him and, besides his obvious talent, what makes him great. Part 1 was merely a prelude – read on:

What came first for you? Food or wine?

My mother cooked badly. She was valedictorian at her university but she hated to cook. She associated cooking with farming and she didn’t want to go back to the farm so she didn’t like to cook. She burned meat all the time so I never developed a taste for meat. But then I’d go to my grandmother’s (she was Czech) and I’d have chicken and dumplings and her scrumptious meals that were so incredible that you were just happy to be there. So there was some really nice cooking going on, but at home, we pretty much ended up cooking for ourselves. My mother cooked but not with any enthusiasm. We would go to these different places and family affairs and all of a sudden you’d see these bounties of great food. So actually food came along first naturally, because of course you have to have food before you’re old enough to drink.

But drink happened when we won the city basketball championship in 10^th grade and I drank Cold Duck when we celebrated. Everyone else drank beer but I had wine, and I don’t really know how exactly that happened. At seventeen or eighteen I was drinking Mateus from Portugal, the red, not the rosé. I never liked beer but that’s what everybody had and I never liked liquor that much either. I was a big jock and you just couldn’t drink hard liquor – it would mess you up too much. Plus girls like wine so that’s the deal . . . [chuckles]

Besides home cooking, the food part came from working in Mexican and Italian restaurants that were really good at serving up family types of meals and just being exposed to that world. Back then San Antonio was 25 times better as a restaurant city than Austin was. Having a major military base there meant that all of these GIs were bringing back brides from Vietnam and all sorts of places so you had this ethnic food that was extraordinary. Plus the Mexican influence is substantial in San Antonio. And then you had just old school money there and a couple of extraordinary French restaurants and I went to them and knew waiters from both of them. The Greeks ran the restaurant world as they do in a lot of communities and I hung out with the Greeks so I learned about Greek food. They started the original Sea Island behind Northland mall, which is not so far from the concept of StrEat and was the largest retail outlet for seafood in the state of Texas.

What is it that get’s you up in the morning and drives you so hard? You’re a really busy guy.

Well once you get the ball in the air you’ve got to keep in the air. There is that. But you know, there is a social element in the restaurant and wine industry that’s very important and we really enjoy turning people on and making them happy. Food is the way I like to do it. I’m moving away from wine a little but only because I can’t taste 50 wines a day like I used to. Leslie helps me and I have sommeliers help taste wines too because I can’t get to all of them anymore. But it’s about doing something special, doing it well, and in a format that’s going to allow us to continue doing it – you have to be successful to keep doing what you want to do.

I look at Starbucks as an example and I look at what is at the core of their success. Starbucks took an artisan product, espresso and cappuccino, and turned it into a commercial product. They’re very, very consistent in what they do in all their stores so that’s sort of what I’m thinking about doing with StEat.

So you’re thinking about expanding StrEat or franchising it?

Well we have to get it down first. It’s not a given. It’s hard. You know we make a great kolache but that isn’t a system. A system is if I have four or five people in this process, somebody has to make the batter, we can freeze the batter to store it, take it out of the freezer, let it thaw, cook the sausage and roll it, let it proof overnight, and make them in the morning and keep them warm until they’re sold. That’s a process. So okay, I can make a great kolache but can I make it work in a commercial institution? That’s the question. That’s a beautiful example of a challenge: I have five people involved in making a sort of simple dish and just making them and selling them in a shop would be easy but I sell them to eat. They have to be hot and fresh. To get all the moving parts right and then get all of the people to understand when those parts are right is the real challenge. And that’s only one of fifty items.

I’m very clear to my staff about the challenges. There’s a name for it - it’s called clipboard management. I have a clipboard in the kitchen and every day I write notes on it. Up goes the notes, 25 or 30 notes, and everyone has to sign off on them. You have to do this if you want to do it right. These guys can put up the food and it can be mediocre but because of the interesting nature and exotic flavor profile of ethnic food, there is sort of that cover I could take [with mediocre food] but I don’t want to. My rule is I have to like it. That rule has always been a part of Mirabelle, with all of my food, all of my wine: I have to like it. If I like it, then it’s okay to serve it. It’s my method of quality assurance.

The system itself is exciting to me too and you have to have a system to make these things work. As I look at the guys, I tell them to start backwards. Get the end result where you want it to be and work backwards because the most important perspective in the restaurant business is from the chair of the person who is just about to eat. They’re paying the bill and they have to be satisfied. So put yourself in that chair and ask if yourself if you want to eat it, do you find it inviting, interesting, delicious, hot, and appropriate? You have to have all of those things.

I always say that I don’t want to cook. I know how to cook but I don’t know how to cook like my chefs cook. But I’ll work backwards until I get it right. And I tell all of my chefs over and over again that the customer’s seat is the most important perspective to understand. I don’t care what the food is. If you can’t cook it right, it’s garbage and it’s amazing how much food is turned into garbage by bad cooking. There’s a lot of it and it’s a crime. You don’t throw food away. You make it into a stock or a salad but you don’t throw it away unless bad cooking ruins it.

I always tell people in my wine classes that one of the unrecognized changes in the wine industry is that today’s winemakers grew up drinking great wine. This applies to chefs too – they grew up eating great food. Fifty to a hundred years ago winemakers were farmers, but today they are hardly considered farmers, they’re educated scientists and viticulturists. They grew up drinking great wine. What does that mean? It means that they know the end result of what they’re looking for. They’re trying to make a new world Chablis, they’re trying to make a new world Côte-Rôtie or they’re trying to make a new world Hermitage, which is what I think Shiraz [Syrah grown and produced in Australia] tries to do. Shiraz is not Côte-Rôtie, it’s Syrah with power, whereas Côte-Rôtie is feminine and aromatic. Hermitage is in your face. So what are you trying to make?

Winemakers now, have to have an idea of where they’re going. They have an end result and they work backwards to achieve it. From the condition of their vineyards to the elements they have at their disposal, they have to work with what they have and work backwards. Sometime a vintage won’t allow them to do what they want and they end up somewhere else. Bob Dylan used to say he wanted to sing real pretty like Woodie Guthrie but he just couldn’t – he had to work with what he had. So that kind of thing happens in the wine business too.

I probably make that remark more than any other to chefs. I explain to them what I’m looking for. I have a food memory; I have insight into something and I’ll be very careful about how I’ll explain it. Sometimes they don’t want to do it, they don’t get it, or whatever, and it’s tough but I’m lending them my food knowledge oftentimes. So that’s a real good perspective. It’s kind of like drinking a First Growth – once you have that food or taste memory you never forget it.

Michael is there ever a time you could imagine drinking wine without have food there too?

Ahhh . . . yeah, I mean as an aperitif, Champagne or sparkling wine when you start the evening . .

But if you had a ’61 Latour sitting in front of you – you’re such a food guy you’d know what to do with it, but the rest of us, maybe not so much. I would have an idea but wouldn’t want to take a chance and be wrong unless I had a case of it; I wouldn’t attempt to ruin a bottle of wine like that with food. I’d be too afraid that I wouldn’t get the right match for the wine.

You’re talking about staying out of the way. If you have an extraordinary bottle, you don’t want to get in the way with food. My rule is, ‘the better the bottle, the more simple the food’. You don’t want tons of complexity but you know, if that’s the show, if ’61 Latour is the show, then you don’t really need anything else. But if you’re having it for dinner and let’s say you have a hundred of those bottles in your cellar, well then you’re going to have some of them with dinner because it’s not your only special bottle. So it depends a little bit on that. You know people like Gary Glass and Brian Owens [well respected Austin wine collectors] really don’t drink wine without other people being there and they really don’t bring wine without food. Because of my business I taste a lot of wine and I’m constantly tasting wine on the fly so if I’m just enjoying a really good bottle of wine, to be frank, if we were sitting somewhere, we’d probably have a little nibble of something and focus on the really great bottle of wine, then we’d have something else with dinner. If you’re going to have something really, really special, then you’d focus on it alone. Now in Italy and Germany and even France, rarely do they drink wine without food – it’s almost unheard of.

You and I are in the minority on that issue. For me when I bust out a bottle of Mouton or something, I don’t want food in the way.

One time I took a mature Château Margaux home for Thanksgiving and not everyone in the family appreciates wine but I opened up this bottle and they say, “well this isn’t so bad” and the bottle is drinking beautifully. But the focus didn’t last long and they went on to eat and the two weren’t really working together. I was sort of focused on the wine and I kind of went on to the food but it wasn’t an experience where I was matching the food and wine together. You know food and wine pairing is only a recent phenomenon of thirty or forty years. Before the sixties there was none of this food and wine pairing – you drank your favorite wine with your favorite food and there you are. There was a regional synergy that you got between the food and the wine and they tended to go together.

You know the French tended to like stuff a little more earthy and bitter, the Italians tended to like it lighter because it was hotter there, and of course the Germans liked their Rieslings, and the English tend to like bigger wines because of the cool climate. So it really has something to do with where you are but you can pretty much count on the region’s cuisines and wine to be similar or complimentary.

The French drink simple wines, their table wines, Vin de Pays, their AOC wines, and even sometimes their Premier Crus, but they don’t drink their Grand Crus. They preserve them. They have special occasion wines too but they don’t drink the kind of wines America drinks.

Sitting at a wine dinner with Jacques Lardiere, the winemaker from Maison Louis Jadot, he was just stunned that there were so many Grand Cru wines on the table. We had twenty Premier and Grand Crus on the table and we were tasting through them and he was in shock. He told us that he has never seen this many of his wines in one place, at one time, unless his winery was putting on the tasting.

I put together that tasting specifically because we had a lot of collectors of Jadot and we might never see him again because this was the last time he was going to travel. There were two tables with ten people each and he was in the center. Monsieur Lardiere has a pretty heavy accent and he doesn’t talk very loud, but he started talking and it was like that old EF Hutton commercial – ‘when Lardiere speaks, people listen’. Everybody was concentrating on what he was saying. Very much that day, the food was sort of incidental - there were twelve Grand Crus on the table.

I remember talking with Jean-Michel Cazes at Aquarelle and he was getting ready to pass Chåteau Lynch Bages on to his son, and I consider him a legend so, yes it’s very cool to listen to these guys.

Guys like that are really special. But Lardiere didn’t talk about theory. He was giving us the low down, the facts, from forty vintages. It was a different tone, a different point of view; ‘this is how it is’ without being arrogant about it. The maturity of his remarks and the insights he had was like someone just lifted the darkness. It was that kind of experience and you were just sure that you were hearing the way that it really was. You had the best collectors in Central Texas, hanging on every word.

I‘ve heard that you sometimes start with a bottle of wine and create food to go with it, as opposed to most restaurants, that start with the food and try to find a bottle to go with it.

Not sometimes – I start with the wine always. I almost can’t write a menu without tasting the wine and knowing how it’s going to work. After doing about 400 wine dinners, we have created a lot of different foods to go with those wines and we try not to repeat ourselves. The second thing is that the wine is bottled so fundamentally the wine can’t change. It can evolve but it is what it is. You can always change food though. We start with the wine and build the dish. So wine is made and it’s pretty much done, but food can change.

Why does everyone else do it backwards?

Well because the food is already made. It like the chefs at Four Season used to tell me, ‘this is the dish we’re doing, so find a wine to go with it.’ The dish is done so I don’t have a choice, I have to go scramble to find something that will work. And there were times when I would pull three or four bottles and it would take sometimes that many or more to find the right match.

Doesn’t everyone recognize that you can’t change the wine?

Well it’s the nature of restaurants. Food is ready to go, the wine is made, you make the pairing and because you’ve tasted the food, you have an idea of what will go with it. I call it: the revenge of the sommelier. For the first ten or fifteen years of my career, Chef would tell me, “I’m making this. Find a wine to match it”. So okay, I can do that. But now these are our wines, I can create around them, and that way I can really get the pairing right. Like with German wine, we do famous Riesling dinners. We had a couple where Gary Glass and a few other collectors brought in older Riesling from their cellars. Some were fifty years old so we did a five-decade tasting dinner. Of course a fifth decade Riesling tastes very different from a new Riesling so the dish has got to be a lot different. So I’ve done fifteen or twenty German dinners, which is probably far more than anyone else in town has done and I’m able to do those because I understand the wine and I understand the food.

A long time ago I had one dinner where there was older wine and younger wine and so I served a ’92 and a 2004 and I made a dish for both of them. But the dish only worked with the younger wine and there was no way it could work with the older wine. It was a really eye-opening experience about how a wine changes, how they age. That day even though I sort of messed up the pairings I began to understand how Rieslings change with time. It was a great lesson for me.

I have a lot of people ask me to do dinners like this and I don’t have a lot of time to research everything so I have folders with recipes that I collect from reading and I can use those as I go along. I collect German recipes so I have a lot of resources for German wine – I have a folder for that. German wine is a lot of fun. Especially when they’re old – I don’t really like them when they’re young. They don’t taste the same. The good ones you get a lot of cloves and spices and it’s so unusual. There’s this herbal and mineral component and there’s no sweetness – they’re dry wines.

I bought some Quarts de Chaume [from France’s Loire Valley] recently and honestly I didn’t know that botrytised Chenin Blanc even existed but this blew my mind. It was incredible.

Yea, it’s really one of the great wines in the world. I bought a case of Baumard one year because I though it was going to be the number one wine of the year. I bought it for like $45 a bottle and these were 750s [ml]. I probably gave away eight of them for charity auction. They made 1500 or 2000 cases that year and to make the Spectator Top 100 you have to produce at least a thousand cases and score at least 96 or 97 points. So we put together packages of wine lots based on our guesses about what wines would be included in Spectators Top 100 wines of the year for the Wine and Food Foundation. I wish I still had some!

That brings me to a question I’ve wanted to ask you. You quietly and behind the scenes do a lot of things for the community in terms of charitable work. Where did that come from? How was that instilled in you?

Well both my mother and father did a lot of charitable work. She graduated from the University in San Antonio and they had this church that was built 180 years ago. There was a fire and they had needed to raise 3 million dollars of the 5 million needed to rebuild it. She volunteered to head the committee and they told her they needed some famous people to be on the committee to raise that kind of money and they didn’t have those people. She raised the money. My father did a lot of those things too. I know he was on important councils with the Chamber of Commerce and he was always teaching people English as a second language. Every Sunday we had strangers at our house for dinner and he would bring four or five people home and they would stay the day.

Also working at the Four Seasons for eight years exposed me to the benefits of doing charity work. There is a matter of marketing, and they would do a lot because mostly wealthy people and philanthropists were Four Seasons kind of clientele. So we would get involved as a company with the idea that we would help them with their charitable cause and they would in turn do business with us. So we did a lot of that type of thing and I was very aware of the relationships that were developed.

Like Larry Peel [well respected Austin wine collector] does a lot of his entertaining at the Four Seasons and the Four Seasons is always doing things for him. They’re always providing things for his Wine and Food Foundation of Texas auction and the chef always puts on a dinner in his wine cellar every year so that relationship is very give and take. And behind the board meeting doors, it was very apparent that that was going on and acknowledged as a business strategy. So if you take those principles you can apply them to your own restaurant. I have a lot of events coming up and having been past president of the Wine and Food Foundation, and I’m still a board member.

With established business like Mirabelle you don’t have to do that much because people know who you are. But when you have a new business you want to get in front of people at every opportunity. It’s a way to grow. But also I do these things because I love the cause. At the end of the day it doesn’t really justify the charitable contribution in terms of dollars returned, but I do it because I enjoy it. We’re hit up at least ten times a week from various charities and we have to say no much of the time just because we couldn’t possibly do all of it.

One last question: It’s kind of an old cliché but it’s always interesting to me. If you could have dinner with three people, living or not, who would it be?

I don’t know . . . there’s a lot of people out there. Ummmmm . . . John Wooden, the UCLA coach that just died recently, because I admired him so much. I learned a lot as a basketball player – I played in college and even though I’m not too tall, I really liked basketball. He’s considered by many to be the greatest coach ever; even coaches called him ‘coach’. I’ve been using his phrase, ‘be quick but don’t hurry’, which is a beautiful phrase in basketball but it also applies to cooking. I say it a lot to these guys in my kitchens because there’s a false economy to precooking food so they don’t get caught behind but it can destroy the food. You want to be quick but you don’t want to hurry to the point of ruining things. So he would be one, and if you read anything about him, you’d find that he was an extraordinary human being. He had three rules. One was show up on time, don’t complain about your teammates, and dress nice - every one of his players talked about him with reverence. So he’d be one.

Gore Vidal. He’s crazy but he writes so amazingly well. “Lincoln” is a book that is so special and of all the books I’ve read, and I read a lot - I was a philosophy and theatre major with an English minor - he would be one to have dinner with just because his life has been so flamboyant. But his writing is just at a different level - he’s a genius.

The third one would be the longshoreman philosopher, Eric Hoffer. Very interesting fellow - he never went to college and was blind in his formative years - wrote a classic book, “The True Believer”. He once made a remark that he only reads an author’s 1^st book, which sums up everything he or she wants to say in an abbreviated length; any books after that are mostly just elaborations on their favorite themes, in longer and longer formats.

I also would enjoy simply being in the same room with Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, and maybe George Clooney. I would love to just witness their charisma . . .

Michael, you have been so very generous with your time and to share a part of yourself with everyone – thank you very much.

Well (chuckling), you definitely have your work cut out for you to edit all of this. I hope I gave you enough to work with. Thanks.

David Boyer

The Genius of Michael Vilim

2010-08-24T23:30:00Z

Part 1 of 2

It sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.

- Eric Hoffer

Austin has, maybe surprisingly to some, many excellent wine resources in terms of wine collectors, wine erudition, wine bars, retailers, wine trade people, and wine friendly restaurants. There are probably few people from the preceding list that haven’t been to Mirabelle Restaurant to enjoy its fine food, its excellent wine menu, and its great wine dinners with some of the world’s most celebrated winemakers and winery owners. Although there are many things that could be said about Mr. Vilim, what I hear most often is that he is a genius when it comes to pairing wine and food; he is widely regarded as Austin’s best source for combining the elements on your plate with the elements in your glass to create magic on your palate.

Having experienced this for myself on numerous occasions, I set out to interview Michael to get more information about what makes him tick and why he’s so good at what he does. Michael is at once a firestorm of energy, intelligent, confident, charming, and ever passionate about wine and food. He has twenty-five years of serious tasting experience and a photographic memory, so to speak, when it comes to wine tasting recall. In his usual generous nature, he gave me two hours of interview time and then chuckled on his way out the door with, “Good luck editing all of that into a useable story.” Did I mention also that he’s media savvy and hilarious too? Little did I know how much work it would take to get this done, which partially explains my long absence from the blog; I expect this interview to be in two or three segments.

Some background is in order: Michael Vilim has been in the business for pretty much his whole adult life beginning with a restaurant on the River Walk in San Antonio while he was in college, along with his formidable eight year tenure at The Four Seasons as a sommelier. He is past President and a long-time member of the Board of the Wine and Food Foundation of Texas, a non-profit statewide organization whose mission is to enhance the quality of culinary and viticultural arts through education and scholarships. He has owned Mirabelle Restaurant for years and recently opened StrEat, both in Austin. While Mirabelle is about upscale dinning, StrEat puts forth a very extensive and diversified offering of street food from many regions around the world and, being close to the University of Texas campus, caters to a younger crowd but is easily worth going to if you’re any kind of foodie at all.

We met at a Starbucks because meeting anywhere at either of his restaurants would mean constant interruption. Here’s what I came away with:

So tell me about your newest addition, StrEat. I love the food there.

I didn’t initially expect to create so complicated of a restaurant. A big part of the StrEat concept was to function on multiple levels with the idea that you can get ethnic regional food that is served fast. We’re also a coffee shop and a secret bakery, much to my surprise! I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, happy hour, I have take out, I have delivery, we have grab and go – we have it all. It’s a lot more complicated than I thought it would be, but for better or worse . . .

Then there’s the street food concept, which is an interesting twist from tradition for food lovers, and then there’s the street food for college kids. I mean there’s nothing in their fridge except beer and water. So we function on that level and being close to campus is great - the whole area is in development. These days dining is such a casual, quick fare, especially being around the university. Some kids came in bought their food and walked down to the bus stop. They sat on the bench eating their food, waiting for the bus. I relate to that. When I was young and working at the River Walk in San Antonio I’d be eating after work and waiting for the bus, and when it pulled up I’d get on the bus and go – I always paid for my food first.

What is the connection to San Antonio for you?

I was born there.

So when you first started out in the industry you worked in San Antonio?

Yes, I worked on the River Walk. The River Walk wasn’t quite so pretty in the early days and they had some clubs with dancers and things – it was a little seedy and back then the barges would take away all of the trash from downtown buildings, which was one of the functions of the river. It was an attraction of sorts but is also functioned as way to move things. There was a club next to where I worked and dancers would come into the restaurant and eat before they went to work. But I was young and it was fun.

I have a true story about one of my experiences there. I was the wine buyer for the restaurant. Back then we were known as a margarita place. What happened was that I bought the wine for the place because I liked wine – I’ve never been big on beer or liquor, I have always liked wine. So I was the wine ‘expert’ just because I knew anything about it. We only had one brand: Robert Mondavi. We had the Chardonnay, we had the White Zinfandel, Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot and we had what I thought was a Burgundy. And we sold a fair amount of it, it being the only brand we had.

One day these guys come in and sit down and they ask if I can come out and talk to them so of course I go out and talk to them. They asked, “what kinda of wine ‘ya got?” So I tell them we’ve got all of this Robert Mondovi wine and I mentioned the Burgundy. This guy looks up and says Robert Mondavi doesn’t make Burgundy and I say, “I think they do.” Then I remember the wine and say, “I’m so sorry. I was thinking of a Cabernet Sauvignon”, and the guy says, “Right! I’m Robert Mondavi”. Needless to say I was pretty embarrassed.

Wow, what a great story! Give me a year approximately when this happened. Of course Robert Mondavi is the undisputed icon of American wine.

Early 80s – probably ’81 or 82’ somewhere around there. I was in college. The reason they were there was that we were one of the top accounts, selling more Robert Mondavi than anyone else on the River Walk, so they came in to see the place. The next week I got a case of Cabernet Sauvignon delivered to me from the winery. Talk about sealing a deal, I’ll never forget that so I always had some sort of Mondavi on my wine lists until they sold the winery.

Well Tim Mondavi is still making great wine with his Continuum label.

Yes, and Michael is too with his Folio Wine Partners. They’re all doing something. I mean they got a billion dollars when they sold the winery – you sure can’t feel sad about that. So that’s kind of how it happened, I just loved wine and learned about it.

But you got formally educated and you’re a sommelier, yes?

Well not exactly. Back then there wasn’t that kind of formal education available. I competed in a lot of competitions across the country. Like Larry Stone the world famous Master Sommelier that in Paris, won the French title of International Best Sommelier in French Wines and Spirits and is the only American ever to have earned the title of French Maitre Sommelier from France. I knew him when I worked at the Four Seasons in Chicago and he’s now at one of the finest restaurants in San Francisco and making wine.

He was never formally trained but he is considered to be one of the best in the world - there just wasn’t a program then. There were only about 20 or 25 Master Sommeliers in the country in 1990 and a lot of them got their MS around 1988 through 1994 – all old school people and mostly in Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. But formal training only kicked in about the early ‘90s.

So most of them received the Master Sommelier designation in London back then?

No most of them received their MS here in the US and now there are about 150 people here that are Master Sommeliers. But when I competed in all of those competitions I had to go to Los Angeles and New York. There just weren’t really any other venues for it.

So wine competition then was mostly about blind tasting wine?

Usually it was four stages. It was wine theory, writing, blind tasting, and a wine service test. I went to five or six of them and it was a lot of fun. But back then you really learned by hanging out with the old guys. I hung out with this famous guy here, Cliff Alsup, and he’s the one that introduced my generation to a lot of wine, inviting us to tastings and teaching us about great wine. My friend Brian Owens, he does the Austin Wine Salon events, and what we’re doing with that is kind of the same thing – we have the old guys and the young guys getting together to taste wine and learn about it.

Certainly the Wine Salon is a very worthy pursuit, especially when it comes to young sommeliers that have the book knowledge but have never actually tasted some of the great wines of the world. You can talk about First Growth Bordeaux, for example, but your world doesn’t change until you actually taste them.

Well part of the issue is that it’s gotten so expensive. When I competed I used to have all five First Growths lined up at my house for a week and every day I tasted them – they’re as different as your children and once you taste them, especially next to each other, there’s no way you can get them wrong. They’re that easy because they are so distinctive but until you’ve had one, you wouldn’t know any better. So that’s the way it got done, we had all these guys that would share wine with us and that’s what we’re doing with the Wine Salon.

The Wine and Food Foundation of Texas has this charity wine auction at the Four Seasons every year and Donald Patz who is the operating partner at Patz and Hall donated a six liter bottle of their Patz & Hall Pisoni one year – a beautiful bottle of wine. I had a ’91 Richebourg, Domaine Leroy, a very special bottle, and ’91 was a somewhat maligned year that emerged as a great year, especially with wine from some of the better houses. This bottle was worth $2000 dollars but I had bought it a long time ago for $150, which was still expensive back then. But I bought it a long time ago and I’m thinking, “Who am I going to drink it with?” So he donated this six liter to the auction and he came, we put him at a special table, and I brought him the bottle and said, ”I have a bottle for you to drink tonight”, and he was so excited – this is a wine he loves and it seemed worth it to me to do this. I didn’t say anything about getting a taste of the wine or anything. So an hour or so later one of the sommeliers came running up to the stage at the auction saying, “You gotta try this! This is Richebourg, Leroy from ’91!” So I gave him a great bottle of wine and he shared it with a bunch of people, and then the sommelier wanted to share it with me. It was like this big circle!

But these bottles are meant to be shared and it was great to watch someone really enjoying this Leroy. That’s as big of a pay off as drinking it yourself! It’s just that kind of generosity and sharing of the treasures that makes the wine experience great. And restaurants too. We want to make you happy. Mirabelle is at a certain continental level and StrEat is real casual but no less valid.

Are your wine lists the same?

Not at all. The wine list at StrEat is about 22 to 28 selections, all of them regional wines of the world. I want wines that are representative of a particular place, just like the food is representative, which is the theme of the place. So I have very little California wine at StrEat. Mirabelle’s concept is the most value oriented, ‘best-of-type’ kind of wine list regardless of where the wine is from. The wine list has the best of its type and from California we have Lewis, Shafer, and wines like that.

I have never tasted a bad wine in your restaurant.

We taste them all of the time. We do something a lot of people and even many retailers don’t do: we pour out wine that is on its way out, or if it’s still somewhat usable, we might cook with it or use it in sangria or a spirit fortified wine punch. But you can’t just put it on the bottom shelf and try to sell it. When wines start getting dumb or fading they end up in the closeout bin and they get moved out but you have to taste these wines all of the time to know where they’re at. That’s why good wine guys stay around. Jack Daniels doesn’t change but wine does so you find a lot of the same people as wine buyers for various places. They’ve been buying wine for twenty years for places all over town. If you have the talent and palate to buy wine, you’ll always have a job. I mean it’s not always a great job in terms of pay but you can always work.

How many bottles do you go through to find one good one?

I’d say ten to one. For every ten bottles of wine we taste, only one will be good enough to make it through to our wine list. But the detail is you have to taste if you’re going to find the values and the wines that are drinking well now.

Do you consider yourself a new world or old world aficionado or are you kind of in the middle on that?

Ahhh . . . probably my personal taste runs old world. I’ve bought about $40 million dollars worth of wine so what I buy and what I like don’t necessarily go together hand-in-hand.

What are some of your personal favorites?

My personal favorite is probably Côte-Rôtie [red wine from France’s Northern Rhone region made with Syrah but as much as 20% Viognier can also be added]. I won a blind tasting at one of these sommelier competitions – I picked it up and said, “It’s my favorite wine.” I knew it like I would know my own sister if she walked into the room. So how could I not recognize it?

But I really like all kinds of things. I like old Cabernet [Sauvignon], I like Bordeaux, I love Burgundy, I love all sorts of Pinot Noir from California – they all have their places. I love Zinfandel, I love Syrah in the old world and I love Shiraz in the new world if they’re not overdone. Ojai is a good example of making a great new world Syrah, so is Manfred Krankl’s cuvee [Sine Qua Non], and Washington is doing a good job with their Syrah. It’s been said that Syrah is the ultimate grape that will emerge from Washington. I don’t know if that will be true; you know their Cab and Merlot are pretty good too, but it could be. A number of people are saying Syrah is the grape to watch.

But Syrah is still not getting the respect it deserves at retail. If you look at the Cabernet Sauvignon and even Merlot sections in a wine store, Syrah is still kind of underground by comparison – it hasn’t hit the mainstream.

Well you have some Côte-Rôtie like the La Las [E. Guigal’s La Mouline, La Turque, and La Landonne, often referred to as the La Las] selling for $700 to $1000 or so, and then you have the Shiraz in Australia of that certain rank which pulls in $250 to $700 per bottle and then you have California.

I’m talking mainstream kind of wines though, you know the under $50 wines?

Well Syrah needs to be treated like Pinot Noir, not like Zinfandel or Cab. In California they get Syrah too ripe, too tarry, too bitter and the cooler climate in Washington prevents that, so that’s part of it. And then you have a few California guys [Rhone Rangers] and Manfred Krankl doing amazing stuff with this grape. So they’re there in the marketplace but the great ones are expensive.

If you have a Syrah from southern France you have primarily a Côte du Rhone or you go to like St. Joseph and have a 100% Syrah, which is a baby Côte-Rôtie, then you’re going to find something where the climate works with the grape. When you talk about a noble grape variety, that’s a term that has never appeared in any wine dictionary related to Syrah, but it’s a wine that improves with age - that’s the best way of defining it. And Syrah is one of those. But Syrah, like Pinot Noir doesn’t perform well easily – it needs particular climates and soils to perform well. So Cabernet Sauvignon is a little more ‘user friendly’, as is Chardonnay, as is Sauvignon Blanc; they are much easier to grow so a wine estate gets a much more prolific return. If you understand the difficulty of Pinot Noir and apply that to Syrah, you get a better understanding.

Check back for Part 2!

David Boyer

Visit Mirabelle at: http://www.mirabellerestaurant.com/

Visit StrEat at: http://www.eatatstreat.com/

Photo: Michael Vilim while relaxing

Wine Smackdowns

2010-07-21T23:08:00Z

You see them all the time. In my attempt to get out more often (to other wine blogs) I came across a recent post on Steve Heimoff’s blog entitled “When David Slays Goliath”, which despite the Biblical citation, is like World Wide Wrestling - may be entertaining to some but certainly not real. The story can be found here. The post discusses a particular wine competition that not surprisingly pits famous and expensive wines against the underdog, cheap wines in blind tastings to see which wines fare better. I always bristle at these so-called ‘showdowns’ because, like with so many sets of data, the results can be, and most often are, twisted completely out of context to serve a single purpose for one party or another. As they say, “follow the money” and you will find the truth.

The event referenced in Mr. Heimoff’s blog post lined up wines that were utter nonsense and its organizer should be sentenced to a lifetime of drinking beer, or something worse: drinking American beer. The tasters (judges) were described as 20 non-wine professionals representing a broad array of nationalities. Although there is no right or wrong when it comes to taste, it’s logical that American tastes probably are different than what would be found in many foreign groups of tasters – let’s face it, it was less than five years ago that Chinese wine drinkers were still mixing First Growth Bordeaux with ice and Coke. All tasters are reported to be well traveled (personally I don’t think traveling has much to do with wine - if French wine sucks for you and you travel to France, I don’t think you will be swayed by French wine in any case), and relatively wine-savvy (what does that even mean?), with open-minded palates (and doubly, what does that even mean??). If I asked a bunch of people, “Hey if I lay out a couple thousand dollars worth of wine for you to taste, do you promise me you’ll keep an open palate?” How really stupid is that?

The wine lineup was crazy and it really was reasonably expensive, I guess to prove that the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Here’s what was tasted:

$65 New Zealand Chardonnay, 2006 vs. a $240 well known Puligny-Montrachet Les Pucelles 2006 (white Burgundy, which is also made from the Chardonnay grape
$100 Pinot Noir again from New Zealand, 2006, vs a $390 Grand Cru Burgundy (also red Burgundy is always made from Pinot Noir) with no vintage specified
$95 Fontodi Chianti, 2004 (Tuscany of course) vs. $560 Château Mouton-Rothschild, 2004 (First Growth Bordeaux)
$35 Shiraz 2006 (of course Australian) vs. a $148 Châteauneuf-du-Pape 2006 (a Syrah, the same grape as Shiraz, from France’s southern Rhone region)
$59 half bottle of Austrian Trockenbeerenauslese, 2004 vs. $388 Château d’Yquem, 2004 (Premier Cru Supérieur Bordeaux)

First, these wines are not only grown in vastly different regions with very different terrior (climate, soil, sunshine, rainfall, etc), but they are also made in very different ways. Some of these don’t even come close to lining up in terms of apples to apples like number 3, which is the most bizarre comparison. They compare Chianti (Sangiovese grape) with a Bordeaux blend (Left Bank Bordeaux, as is Château Mouton-Rothschild, and in order of descending blend percentages typically consists of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and finally a little Petite Verdot thrown in to add color and some structure)? This is so far out of context as to be laughable.

Secondly these wines are way off in terms of drinkability. Often the French intentionally make wine to age because with age, it will develop complexity over time, but only if it is an age worthy wine to begin with. There is no technology (so far) that can replace the effects of bottle age. When you drink a great and perfectly mature wine from anywhere that unfolds its multidimensional bouquet and reveals its multi-layered palate to you, it is an awesome and powerful experience. I can guarantee that the lesser expensive wines mentioned above will never develop this profile. What will happen however is that any wine that is meant to be aged but is opened too early will shred your palate with tannins and/or acidity (mostly tannins with red wine, which is what protects it from oxidation during the bottle aging process). Or maybe it will be completely ‘dumb’ – many wines go through that stage, kind of like having a teenager around before they develop any wisdom, except in the wine context all of the flavors and aromas disappear for a while. Most ‘new world’ wines are made to be enjoyed upon release, which is to say that these will never improve with age and should be consumed within a few years of their arrival on shelves.

Not only is this competition insulting, it is downright misleading. How many people caught the fact that number 5 compared a $59 bottle with a $388 bottle? Okay, how many caught that the $59 bottle was a half bottle, which would actually bring a real price comparison to $120 vs. $388, not $59 vs. $388? See, the smoke and mirrors attempt to compare really inexpensive wine to expensive wine so the half bottle/full bottle trick is outright duplicitous. These type of tactics contribute to the kind of deception that is pounded into the public and is just plain unethical. Bottles of Château d’Yquem are still being consumed and enjoyed from the mid 1800s! Is a bottle of Austrian Trockenbeerenauslese going to last that long? No chance, although this particular bottle may last for ten years or so. Without age there is no complexity, just instant gratification that falls well short of what great wines ultimately offer.

The point I’m trying to make is this: stick with the classics and go out to the edge with other wines to see what’s good and what’s not. If you’re adventurous like me you will find alternatives but I always come back to the great wines because there is simply no replacement for them. Do NOT allow yourself to be influenced by competitions, especially by competitions that give out gold medals and such – these are 'pay to play' events that hoodwink the unsuspecting public and should be outlawed like adjustable mortgage teaser rates should have been outlawed years ago.

Use your palate and forget about the press you read concerning competitions. Also don’t fall for ridiculous claims like Domaine Serene (a very good Oregon Pinot Noir actually) that in its advertisements continually beat the firetruck out of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC) in blind tastings. Those claims would not be true if the competing DRC was ready to be consumed and if it’s judges knew wine well enough to know the amazing depth, power, and nuance that can be savored from truly great mature wine. You can do better with your wine buying dollars at any level if you don't buy into wine competition results.

David Boyer

Photo: Nice little 2006 Valli, Gibbston Vineyard, Otago, New Zealand Pinot Noir, 92 points Wine Spectator, average price today $41, drinking great right now, next to 2003 Richebourg Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Grand Cru Burgundy (also Pinot Noir), 97 points Robert Parker, average price today $1478, which I will enjoy in about 2018. Same grape – different wine.