Red Wine with Fish

Riedel tells us that we need a dozen different wine glasses; one for each type of wine and each region. The question is, do we believe them. They have glasses to sell so of course they want us to buy as many as possible, so they probably do not provide a particularly unbiased point of view.

Personal experience tells me that the glass does matter, to a point. For example, the other day, I was at a Pinot Noir tasting with a friend of mine. He was carrying the standard Riedel “Red Wine” glass that you so often find in restaurants. I was using the Riedel Oregon Pinot Noir glass. I commented how earthy the wine showed and he looked at me like I was insane. He said that he was about to say how full-fruited the aromatics were. We switched glasses and both immediately saw what was causing the difference in our perceptions.

So, in short, glass does matter. The volume of air to wine, the ability to swirl, the size of the opening, I think all profoundly influence the aromatics of a wine. I don’t necessarily think the difference between the standard Burgundy glass and the Oregon Pinot glass is that dramatic. Nor do I believe the taste of wine is much influenced by glass shape.

I can tell you one thing for sure. I am going to standardize the glass I use. I don’t believe that I can make accurate or useful comparisons of aromatics without doing so. I will have to do some testing to see what glass to standardize on. The small one is certainly more portable and is the most commonly used.

More testing is definitely necessary.

Generally, people underestimate how well Oregon Pinot Noirs can age. I am often asked at Chehalem how long to cellar a wine for and I generally give a monologue on ageability rather than a pat answer. You can all it copping out if you want, but the question is a tough one. My experience has shown that Oregon does the most ageable Pinot in the country. But that assumes you like what becomes of our Pinot Noir when it has been in the bottle for a while. If you like the big, juicy berry fruit, drink them in the first couple years, because that isn’t going to get any better. But for my palate, the fruitiness is replaced by something lovely and interesting.

Case in point: the 2000 Medici East Vineyard Pinot. Not a fruit bomb by any stretch. The fruit was pretty, but staid. The color was red-orange with definite brick-color developing. The nose had that distinctive funk of old Pinot and oak which smells a bit like BBQ sauce and maraschino cherry… (wait for it)… but in a good way. The wine was light-bodied with earth and red fruit and a bit of a tart bite, which I liked very much. It finished with flavors of coffee and cherry, with still a touch of tannin after all these years.

It was fantastic and worked perfectly with the grilled Copper River sockeye I made.

Interest Factor: ***+
Yum Factor: **
Value: **

Beautiful wine. If you are ever in Newberg, Oregon, visit them at the Dark Horse tasting room.

In addition to contributing to the Chehalem posting this month, I opened a bottle of my own for a personal entry. I purchased it at Square Deal Wine in NW Portland.

The 2004 Barmes-Buecher was somewhat petrolly on the nose (which I like very much) with stone fruit and an “almost orange” quality that made me wonder about botrytis. It was very dry, very, very, almost too dry with a touch of marmalade and a touch of sweetness on the finish which was very long with hints of peach and grapefruit rind. And where is where it falls apart. It was fairly nice but went a little out of wack on the finish. The bitterness, which I sometimes like in a Riesling was too much because it overwhelmed the positive qualities.

It didn’t pair particularly well with the souffle I made and it started to fall apart after a bit in the glass. Not something I would cellar and not, I think, something I would buy again, particularly considering all the great options out there for delicious dry Riesling.

No, it’s not done… not even close. Eventually, I would like to insulate the walls, finish the floor, drywall in the ceiling and figure out a way to make the wine-racks a little more earthquake-resistant, oh, and add a lot more wine… BUT, the wine cellar is getting there. For a while all the wine was on palettes in the middle of the floor. No longer.

Sydney’s late Grandfather made those racks and her Grandmother was nice enough to give them to us as a wedding gift (plus another one that is yet to arrive). They are rustic, solid and extremely cool. The octagonal “racks” on top of the wood rack are Chehalem / RR winery shipping boxes which are solid, cool looking and work great as wine storage.

The organizational scheme needs some work, but the left rack is Oregon, the far rack is Old World, then Washington, then California, which you can’t really see. Definitely need to work on that Old World section; it’s looking a little sparse.

I think I need a third job…

I am not really in the habit of writing about technology these days, well, not unless it applies to wine or food, but Paul Murphy’s posting at ZDNet which I stumbled across got me sufficiently annoyed to bring my tech-side out of hibernation.

Here is the gist of Paul’s article:

“To continue the discussion about development languages, I want to ask a potentially embarrassing question: has the whole object orientation business been both a functional and a conceptual failure?”

He then goes on to argue that since 1950s-era COBOL MOVE is “a classic OO-widget” and has gone instinct that “the fundamental underpinnings for the OO movement simply don’t hold up.”

While historically interesting, I don’t think these conclusions makes any sense. It’s like saying that flying is a dead-end since the pterodactyl is extinct. I don’t buy it and think Paul is trading in logical fallacies.

I, personally, do not believe that OO is a dead-end, although perhaps a case could be made. Paul doesn’t make it. Much more than the threadbare argument or the actual question of OO relevence, I was compelled by the structure and the fallacies upon which the argument was built. So I looked them up.

There are a number of catalogs of common fallacies online. So far, my favorite is The Nizkor Project, the source of the definitions below. While he didn’t managed to use all the fallacies, Paul certainly made good use of the catalog:

• Straw-man
  1. Person A has position X.
  2. Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
  3. Person B attacks position Y.
  4. Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.

  “One of the odd things about the OO movement is that no two proponents understand it to mean the same things.”

• Genetic Fallacy
  1. The origin of a claim or thing is presented.
  2. The claim is true(or false) or the thing is supported (or discredited).

  “Imagine, however, what would happen to the claims of modernity and the one right way associated with the OO movement if it could be shown that something as archaic as the original 1957 COBOL MOVE statement and syntax meets the definition?”

  “…what you have left is 1960s programming by functional decomposition.”

• Appeal to Ridicule (plus a little “Strawman”)
  1. X, which is some form of ridicule is presented (typically directed at the claim).
  2. Therefore claim C is false.

  “…once you remove the hand waving, the mumbo jumbo, and the modeling religions invoked in any OO application…”

• Composition
  1. Individual F things have characteristics A, B, C, etc.
  2. Therefore, the (whole) class of F things has characteristics A, B, C, etc.

  Basically the entire article

Leaving aside the fact that Paul seems to have forgotten what year it is (”it’s only because this is 2007″–oops, indulging in a little bit of “Appeal to Ridicule” myself there), his interesting, distracting (”Red Herring“, anybody?) and, I expect, accurate account of MOVE, has little relevance to the question at hand. Whether right or wrong, this article just doesn’t make its case.

I can’t claim to be an expert at writing tasting notes. I haven’t been doing it for terribly long and I have a lot to learn both about wine in general and the specifics of technical tasting. However, I spend a fair amount of time reading and writing tasting notes at this point, both in my capacity as a wine-sales-guy and in my amateur capacity as a wine nut.

I write tasting notes firstly to help me remember and secondly to convey the quality of a wine to other people who might be interested. So when I use the decidedly non-standard “burning rubber tire” note that I occasionally find in Rhone wines, I am referring to a smokey, petrol-like and perhaps a bit reduced (smokey, sometimes to the point of sulfur-like) quality. “BRT”, as it often exists in my notes, is a good reminder for me, but also seems to convey something to people who don’t know my shorthand and may have never found this quality in a wine before.

I think it’s great when someone writes a tasting note that deviates from the aroma-wheel but still manages to capture the essence of a wine. Sure he or she could have said “petrol” rather than “Atari 2600″ or “inflatable raft” and kept it on the wheel, but, dammit, they smell the Atari from their youth and, you know what, that smell means something distinct and specific to me, too.

On the other hand, there are a couple of notes that drive me a little batty. “Burgundian” is one of them. I know (or think I know) what someone is implying when they claim an Oregon or California Pinot Noir maker is making “Burgundian”-style wines.  Perhaps it means something to the writer, but to say a wine tastes or smells “Burgundian” is not a useful note to me–it neither conveys any specific quality of the wine, nor does it acknowledge the breadth of characteristics of Pinot that are actually from Burgundy.

I also don’t like the term “complex” when used in isolation like, “the wine smells complex”. Complex how? What qualities make it complex? Nor do I particularly like “smooth” which is one I hear a lot in tastings and don’t really understand what it means–could be that the tannins are soft, or the alcohol isn’t over the top; perhaps it just means the wine is in balance and no single quality is overwhelming the others.

I think a tasting note should be specific–saying something smells like red-fruit is good, saying it smells like raspberries is better–and it should be evocative, particularly when the note is going to be shared. Saying something smells like the undercarriage of a 1922 Chrysler Six is certainly specific, but will not mean much to very many people. By all means, use the note, but then explain it.

The same can be said for comparisons with particular wines, since most people reading the note, other than you, probably won’t have had the wine to which you are making the comparison. For example: I think the 2004 White Rose Pinot Noir Quiotee’s Lair tastes like a Gevrey-Chambertin, or at least like the 2005 Domaine René Leclerc Gevrey-Chambertin that I tasted a few weeks ago. What does that mean? Both wines had big, somewhat sappy red and black fruit and an interesting brambly quality, sort of like sticking your face in a blackberry bush.

See? Specific. Evocative. I could probably have done better with the “red and black” fruit, but I don’t have my notes on me and I am doing this from memory. Someone who has had the Gevrey would probably understand specifically the quality I am talking about. Someone who hasn’t will most likely get the blackberry bush reference.

I definitely have work to do on how I taste wine and write notes, but I know what I am shooting for and that is a good start.

Alder is just plain annoyed. The thoughtful (and rarely shrill) writer of Vinography has clearly had enough of the media-noise on the increased booziness in modern-day wines. Unfortunately some of his more salient points get a little lost in the diatribe. I, too, think the obsession with alcohol level (compared with balance) is a little-bit out-of-proportion with the problem.

In general, his argument amounts to the fact that some people don’t care about food-friendliness and like the way high-alcohol wines taste. This is, of course, true, but I think it misses the point a little bit. A majority of people like the way a Big Mac tastes too and while I don’t (usually) feel like we require a nation-wide ban on the Big Mac, I think it is worth talking about why a homemade patty is better.

I agree with Alder that it is silly to suggest that there is a magic number above which the alcohol level makes the wine “bad”, and I also agree that there are many factors that come into play to balance a wine, including temperature, but I have had more than my fair share of wines that fall apart in the glass or in the bottle because of an alcohol level that is above what the overall composition of the wine could handle.

This, to me, cuts to the heart of it. The absolute level of alcohol in a wine isn’t terribly important in my view, but the relative level is. Relative to what? To the fruit, the tannin, the acidity; all the components that provide the texture and flavor of the wine.

Warm vintages happen and sometimes the physiological ripeness of the fruit lags behind the sugar. But a winegrower who has a block that produces unbalanced wine most vintages, might want to think about viticultural practices, harvest time, or even choice of variety for that block.

At the end of the day, if people have seen the alternatives and still prefer wines that I think have too much alcohol, relatively speaking, there isn’t much to say. They should buy those wines. I will not.

Yes, we might want to stop thinking of wine booziness as an epidemic, but the role of alcohol in wine is still one worth talking about.

I just heard on NPR, that theatre and film great Paul Scofield died yesterday. He was truly one of the greats. I can’t tell you how deeply I wish I had seen him on stage, but I feel privileged to have been able to see his film work. A Man for All Seasons, for which he won best actor in 1966, is certainly one of my favorites.