2/15/2002 » Musings

I had a wonderful time wine tasting yesterday. You can’t visit too many wineries, or you’ll never make it home :) Some wonderful, clear, lucid wine though, not that crap at clubs. It’s lovely being tipsy at two in the afternoon with speakeasy jazz piped in over your left shoulder, gazing out on a classy warmwood patio atop a beautiful valley, drinking a clear, straw-colored chardonnay.

Why is it that oenophiles are perceived as gay? I think it’s because they’re overly technical. I told one guy, ‘The cabernet is basic,’ trying to say it’s alkaline, it’s dry. He went off on how it was a mainstream cab, mainstream taste, no varietals mixed in. Right, dude. Another guy asked how I liked the merlot. ‘It has a full mid-range, but the light notes are unusual. Does it have a lot of varietals mixed in?’ I pick up on this quickly, a bullshitter knows a bullshitter. He whipped out a book with a page on that precise batch of wine, the sugar content, the pH, the %age mixture, all kinds of technical data—trumped.

If being overly technical and hyperverbal is seen as feminine, then why aren’t women seen as technical? They are, they’re super-technical about relationships, cooking, shopping. It just depends on the subject, they lose interest when it comes to machines. Same thing with men, in reverse.

Some interesting biz model stuff. The production areas are quite compact for national operations, all the space is taken up by the vineyard themselves. You have to wonder why they do tours plus tasting for just $5 or $10-- it’s to upsell you on wine at the end, and for the loyalty effect, you’ll stick with a wine you liked while tasting because you don’t know a damn thing about wines otherwise. People drop hundreds of $ on ‘special club wines,’ creating artificial scarcity, the Cabbage Patch Doll mentality.

All kinds of paradoxes: The tasting room up front is chi-chi. But out back, behind the fermentation tanks, all the work is done by poor Mexican workers. The marketing is oh-so-elegant, Renaissance-era classic fonts, brushed metal, burgundy and khaki; the actual work is agriculture, messy, it’s washing mashed grape skins off metal hoppers. The use is seduction, mood; but the production is hypertechnical—the kinds of wood used in the barrels, French maple vs. American, the aging, topping off, mixing, filtering, removing sediment, the shape of the barrels, why you store in caves vs. warehouses, why use a bladder press with a softly crushing balloon. I can easily see engineers retiring here, Jean-Luc Picard with his vineyard in France.

I learned the basic sequence of wine, light to dark: chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, gewurztraminer, zinfandel, merlot, cabernet sauvignon. A pinot grigio is sweet, a dessert wine. Cabs are alkaline, they make you pucker. Didn’t get to the rieslings or port. Sterling makes some awesome wines, you can swish them around and really enjoy the taste. Rutherford Hills isn’t as good.

The wineries are competing for tourist traffic, they differentiate. Rutherford Hills boasts caves with $8M in barrels. Sterling, a ski lift-style tram and Mykonos-style architecture. Mumm Cuvee Napa had an art gallery with an Ansel Adams exhibition of winery photos and black and whites of celebrities from the ‘30s and ‘40s, fantastic. I kept picking out white actors who look like Indian friends of mine, their shadow twins. At this point, anything would amuse me. Your mood improves as tastings progress ;)

The fields themselves are beautiful, hard to express in photos. There are no leaves or grapes on the vines right now, but the space in between is full of bright yellow mustard plants. At some point though there’s an unrelieved monotony among manmade cornrows, vines are split and strung up like Peking duck, it’s unnatural. One breathtaking moment I couldn’t capture: a red tractor in a yellow mustard field below blue sky, simply gorgeous.

Ten kinds of wine, an inexpensive crash course in oenology, and more wine than I’ve ever had in a day.