The Thrill of Disappointment

Tonight I experienced one of the many things that can happen when you open a bottle of wine.  Instead of being met with the scent of something exciting and new, I was met with something that smelled old and tired.  Sometimes a bottle is full of wine that has become less than pleasant.   Whether it is from 'cork taint' (aka 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA)), oxidation or any other various wine maladies, a bottle of wine can sometimes be far from perfect just on a technical perspective.  We are not talking about wine that is subjectively good or bad.  We are talking about wine that has a fault the size of the San Andreas Fault (aka largest fault in the World) and is not good on any level.  

To me thought it is this chance that gives wine a certain I don't know what, (aka je ne sais quoi) that makes it a bit more beguiling than other beverages.  If you want to be rewarded when you open a bottle of a wine with a something much better and/or interesting than you had originally thought or hoped, you must also be willing to suffer the disappointment of  a promising bottle gone bad.  To know the thrill of victory is to know the sting of defeat.  With wine sometimes you end up with a freshly opened bottle of wine and empty glasses as the wine in the bottle has ceased to be and will offer up none of its intended promise. Then sometimes you open a bottle of wine you have never had before or an older wine you know and you are swept off your feet by a wine that could bring a tear to your eye and a heavy relaxing sigh after each sip.  If you are going to drink wine and hope to have new and different experiences you must be willing to understand that you take the good, you take the bad (aka The Facts of Life).  

Little Green Bottle

Sometimes you don't finish a bottle of wine.  Sometimes you even plan to not finish a bottle you open.  Then sometimes you finish more wine than you should.  The solution for the latter is for another time.  The solution for what to do with left over wine is our topic for today.  

The best, most cost effective and simple way to preserve an opened wine is to remove it from its current bottle home and put it into a smaller bottle home.  Like empty nesters selling their four bedroom colonial for a two bedroom rancher.  When I know I am not going to finish a bottle of wine when I open it i break out my mini green bottles first thing.  (This happens more often than not, as the Mrs. and I disagree on wine choices.)  I use the litte 8oz green bottles (pictured above) that were previously ginger ale bottles.  These small green bottle are perfect because they prevent wine deterioration and make for a handy single serving size.  Fill each of the 8oz green bottles as close to the very top of the bottle as you can, at least up to the small neck of the bottle.  Now only the smallest portion of wine is exposed to oxygen as possible.  Oxygen and wine's relationship is like the friend who comes to visit for a few days that turns into a few weeks..  At first oxygen makes wine seem bigger and better than it was, until it has been around too long, then it becomes the wine's mortal enemy.  So keeping oxygen away from wine until you want them to cohabitate is essential in preserving wine.  The fridge is the place for all unfinished wine regardless of color and creed.  The cool air temperature in the fridge also helps to reduce the wines proclivity to self destruction much like it does for any and/or all meat, produce and cheese.  

So in review:

1 Fill small green (8oz) bottle with extra wine to the tippy top of the glass jar. (Put the top on the small green bottle.

2 Refrigerate said jar.

3 When you get home pour yourself a glass out of the well preserved wine.

4 Say hi to the family and change your clothes

5 Drink well preserved wine.  

Enjoy.  

A Necessary Option

Sometimes necessity is the mother of unusual choices.  After a long day, sometimes a glass of wine and something to eat is a necessity more than an option or choice.    

Thusly tonight I had the pleasure of a pot of Amy's Organic Mac N' Cheese and a glass of Barefoot Chardonnay.   As you can see by the awesome golf ball stopper, the Chardonnay had already been opened prior to my arrival and drinking.  (It was used for a pork shoulder recipe.)  You can also see, if you look closely, that a spoon is the preferred utensil for mac n' cheese.  Mac n' cheese is best eaten out of the vessel it is cooked in so as not to miss a morsel of cheese. 

Sometimes wine is just for drinking with no further thought than that.  Sometimes you drink a wine because it is cold, has some alcohol in it and provides a certain amount of refreshment.  In those circumstances the Barefoot Chardonnay was exactly what the doctor ordered.  Fresh fruit of apricots and pineapple with a little bit of vanilla cream.  The wine was as refreshing as a yellow Gatorade after a mile run on a summer Virginia day.  That's it.  That's all the wine was designed to, and so it did.    

Drink whatever the hell you like when ever you like.  If for some crazy reason you don't finish it, use a fun bottle stopper and put the wine in the fridge (Yes red wines as well.  The fridge works its preserving magic on red wine just as it does red meat.) until tomorrow.  

A Forgotten Vineyard

There are few things more depressing than a forgotten vineyard.  All that hard work going into planting the vines in perfectly straight rows, training them and then carefully harvesting the bounty of grapes.  To then just leave it and walk away is a sad a sad thing.  Almost like starting a blog and semi-diligently logging posts, then leaving it fallow for so many months with no new attention paid.  

Well we are here to reclaim our lost blog.  We will hack out all the underbrush, retrain the vines and began anew.  So please have patience as we begin our process of reclamation and regrouping to produce a better and more well maintained product. 

 

Name Calling

There is a job in the wine world that requires an individual to examine, analyze, research and pass judgement.  No, not wine critic, but ampelographer.  An ampelographer is a person who's job is to be concerned with the proper identification and classification of grapevines.   The word ampelographry comes from two Greek words: ampelos for vine and graph for description.  

These ampelographers examine the various physical characteristics of a grapevine, then attempt to give the vine a proper name that represents the vine's lineage and individual characteristics, chardonnay or syrah for example.  Until the 1940s ampelography was considered an art.  Then Pierre Galet created systematic criteria for the identification of vines and the science of ampelography was born. 

It is important to know what variety of vine is growing in certain vineyard so this particular vine can be raised right and cared for appropriately.  Plus people like to know what it is they have in the bottle of red wine.  Some grapevines require more water and less sun, and some require just the opposite.  If you didn't know what kind of vine you were caring for it would be like trying to raise your son or daughter by always saying “hey you.”  Somewhat effective, but certainly not optimal.  People and grapevines like when you know who they are.

Most of the time, name calling is juvenile and silly and sometimes, your an ampleographer, and it's your job.  

The Chance for Opportunity

When wine makers spend countless hours tending to a vineyard or mind numbingly meticulously cleaning the wine making equipment in the winery, they are creating their chance for opportunity. Winemakers put all their energy into creating just the right conditions to produce a wine they can be proud of and most importantly, customers will want to drink. All of the hard work and sleepless nights only create the chance for greatness. Mother nature could, at any minute, completely wipe out a vineyard whose grapes were just days away from being perfect for harvesting. Even if the grapes are harvested at the perfect time and gently pressed to create beautiful juice, the vagaries and unpredictable nature of winemaking can create something more akin to vinegar than first class wine before the winemaker even has a chance.

If the winemakers plans go off without a hitch. The timing was perfect, the grapes behaved just the way they hoped and now they feel the juice is the best it could be. So they put all of what they have worked so hard to create into a $1,500 new French Oak barrel. Then sit and wait. Maybe taste the wine at different intervals. But they will not know if their efforts have been a success until the wine has run its full course in the barrel and is ready for bottling. Even then, how long will their wine take once it is in the bottle to finally reveal its true character? Two years? 12 years? Only time and patience will tell.

All any good/sane winemaker can hope to do, is create the chance for opportunity. Working so hard for something, just so you can put it a bottle, wait for a few years, then find out what anyone and everyone thinks about your work, is a tough way to make a living. It's like taking some silly computer test for work, school or at the DMV. You have taken the test and you push the “Done” button and cringe as you wait for the computer to spit out your score. Take that feeling and multiply it by about a factor of 100 and you will have some idea how cringe worthy making wine can be. But there must be something magically alluring about making wine, because people have been drawn to making wine for thousands of years.
Maybe it is the very thing that makes winemaking so maddening and difficult that also draws people to it – the great chance for great opportunity.

When 1 + 1 = more than 2

Some things in life are much greater than the sum of their individual parts.  A symphony produces much bigger and richer sound than any and all of its instruments played alone.  A great team, in any sport, is always better than the sum of its individual talents.  A peanut butter and jelly sandwich trumps a plain old peanut butter sandwich or simple jelly sandwich every time.  Freshly popped popcorn, an ice cold fountain cherry coke and a great midday movie theater trip is at least 10X better than the sum of all of those individual things.  Point being, sometimes a special combination of different things add up to more than they should.

The perfect pairing of wine and food is just such an occasion where 1 + 1 = >2.  We discovered a perfect example of this at tonight's WK Wild Game dinner.  We had a 2005 Chianti Classico ("Classico" in this sense means it comes from a sub-region within Chianti which contains the original Chianti area as outlined in 1716.) Riserva ("Riserva" in Chianti means the wine was aged at least 28 months.) from Savignola Paolina.  With the Chianti we served a wild boar ragout with house made parpadelle noodles.  

The rich gaminess of the ragout was a perfect match for the robust and tangy cherry flavors of the Chianti.  The Chianti and wild boar, a traditional paring in Tuscany, created an experience as much as they did a meal.  

Even cold ragout in a takeout container, eaten with a plastic fork while standing up and looking over TPS reports at 1am  becomes a culinary delight with a generous glass of the Savignola Paolina Chianti Classico Riserva  2005. 

Try something new with something new - it may just be the next big thing.  

Dynamite and Wine

Join us this Wednesday (Feb. 11) as Tarara Winery in association with Flavor Magazine wil be tasting some of their delicious wines with us from 5:30 to 7:30.  The event will be complimentary and promises to be a great opportunity to taste wines from one of the most well known wineries in Virginia.  

Founded in 1989 by Ralph J. "Whitie" Hubert and wife Margaret.    One of Whitie's first things he did was create a cave to put his winery in.  Anyone who starts making wine with dynamite is alright by us.  

Sunshine and Rain

Every wine ever made comes from grapes that must have two things, sunshine and rain.  Approximately 1300 - 1500 hours of sunshine during the growing season and 27 inches of rain throughout the year to be approximately exact.  Although it is not impossible to have both sunshine and rain, (Any wealthy leprechaun knows that.) it is most unlikely to have them both at the same time.  Cloudy and rainy aren't the ideas one conjures up when they think about "wine country" anywhere.  There is a larger point to be made here with regard to sliver linings and gray clouds, but that would be hackie. So let's just say this, everything good that wine represents has a few gloomy rainy days all bundled up inside.