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Welcome to a new feature on OddBallGrape.com: Wine Class. These are posts dedicated to all those who want to learn more about wine, or even refresh what they already know. Feel free to comment and ask questions.
People ask us all the time what’s the big deal with wine? Why are people so obsessed with this nose or that flavor or this grape or who makes the best and 100-point scores and all that stuff?
So the first thing we want to point out is that you do not have to be “into” wine to enjoy it. If you can’t tell a cabernet sauvignon from a pinot noir, you can still appreciate that this glass of red tastes good.
But there are some very good reasons to learn about wine, not the least being that when that glass of red really tastes good, it’s nice to know why so that you can find other glasses of red that also taste good. Or to be specific, that taste good to you, because we are all different and what tastes great to us might taste rather blah to you and vice versa.
Also, it’s fun to learn about wine.
“It’s one of the great pleasures of life,” said Lisa Rigisich, one of the co-founders of the Pinot Days festivals around the country. “It’s one of the only drinks that takes you somewhere.”
Rigisich went on to point out that learning about wine is one the ultimate mash-ups of intellectual and sensory stimulation. You use at least three of your senses when appreciating wine: Sight for the color, smell for the nose, and of course, taste. We suppose you could add touch, in that you do get some mouth feel. And there are audio components – the sound of the cork leaving the bottle, the sound of the liquid pouring and the clinking of glasses.
Knowing about wine makes it a lot easier to deal with the rows of bottles on shelves when you go into the supermarket to pick up something on the fly for a last minute invitation. Or when you’re at a restaurant and presented with a book the size of War and Peace listing a bazillion wines you’ve never heard of and the sommelier (wine waiter) hasn’t either. These things happen and add to the stress many of us feel about something that really should be pretty low stress.
It’s just fermented grapes, for cripes sakes! Granted fermented grapes that can be pretty freaking transcendent, but you shouldn’t feel like you need a degree in enology just to choose a decent bottle for dinner.
But then you might want to learn more, because wine is a lovely thing to have on a dinner table, because it does slow you down after another insane day at work, because it just plain tastes good. And, again, it can be fun.
There are also a couple reasons why you might not want to learn more about wine, chief among them because you’ve got something to prove. Anne had a colleague once who made a big deal about how much he knew about wine, and framed everything in terms of what “my friend Larry” said. If you’re only interested in how much a bottle cost, or how many points some wine critic gave it, then there’s really not much to learn and if you really need to, you can look that label up on some snooty site and real off what the writer there thought.
Wine is not a label. If you drink labels, you’ll discover that they all taste like the glue on the back of a postage stamp back in the day when postage stamps had to licked. We know. We’ve had to lick a few labels to get them on our bottles.
People ask us all the time where can they go to learn about wine. Well, aside from reading OddBallGrape.com on a regular basis, wine events, such as Grand Tastings and festivals, are a great opportunity to learn. You can taste all sorts of different wines and better yet, at many of these events, you can talk to the winemakers and learn what went into the bottle.
Now that may seem like a lot of work when you just want to taste something. But as we were reminded over the past weekend, the more you learn about wine, the easier it is to figure out what to buy for, say, that snooty boss or disparaging in-law. Or for your own table.
And this is the time of year to do it. Why? Because all this is one of those rare times when there isn’t all that much work to do in the winery. And if your vineyard is pruned, not much to do out there, either. Which means all the winemakers are now out and about trying to sell all that wine they so lovingly made.
A case in point is the Pasadena PinotFest taking place on February 11th at the Pasadena/Altadena Country Club. While it is Pinot-driven, many of the winemakers who will be there also make other wines. Keep in mind, a lot of these producers are small family-farm businesses, so an event like this is another way to get closer to your food and drink, if that appeals to you.
Outside of our Los Angeles area, there is the annual Family Winemakers of California tasting event in Del Mar on March 11th. This is open to the public as well as the trade and this is where several hundred winemakers will be pouring many hundreds of different wines. The common denominator is that all of them are small family-owned businesses making it a way to Occupy the vineyard, as it were.
But for OBG fans, it’s time for the first Webster’s Fine Stationers tasting of 2012! Coming up on Friday, February 10th – note the different day from our traditional third Saturday of the month event – we will be featuring a Valentine’s Day theme, and there may be even more cool surprises, so stay tuned.
 Courtesy Lisa Rigisich We had a great day at the Pinot Days grand tasting in Santa Monica. We caught up with a couple old Faves (big shout out to Wes Hagen of Clos Pepe, who gave us a really great interview).
Boy, were there a lot of different pinot noirs and a lot of very passionate, very intelligent folks out there pouring. And a lot of people were tasting. We don’t have the final numbers, but it sure looked like everyone pretty much poured everything they had. We left relatively early and there were several wineries whose wine was gone.
This was a slightly different tasting for us – we ended up helping to pour for Amalie Robert Estate winery, since their owners/winemakers had to leave to go back to Oregon early. Turns out we weren’t that needed – we poured out just as co-owner Dena Drews was ready to call her taxi to the airport (her partner in life and in winemaking Ernie Pink had already left). But it was an interesting experience.
Aside from the fabulous wine that Pink and Drews make, it was fun talking about how the wine is all estate grown, produced and bottled – and why we needed to mention all three. Wines can be fermented other places than where the grapes are grown – which we well know, since we buy all our grapes for our own humble home winemaking efforts. So if a wine is estate-grown, you know the grapes all came from the owner’s vineyards. But that doesn’t mean the owner didn’t ship them elsewhere to be fermented or bottled. So the fact that Amalie Robert Estate wine is all three means that Pink and Drews are pretty much doing everything.
More on them later, but some other fun things we did included a quick tasting of several New Zealand pinot noirs. Alas, we were not impressed, but it was fun to try.
One sad note, it’s entirely possible that the Barker Hangar, in Santa Monica, where the event was held, may not be there next year. There’s a serious movement afoot to do away with the Santa Monica Airport, which may or may not include the hangar. Lisa Rigisich told Anne last week that they have looked at a couple other sites for the festival, but we do hope the hangar, uh, hangs in there.
Finally, major kudos to Lisa and Steve Rigisich for pulling off another great event. Pinot Days has become a career for them, but it’s also a passion project, and it shows. Things appeared to go really smoothly. Michael, who volunteered with set up the day before, noted that things went really well that day. All in all, a fun day and well worth going.
Courtesy Lisa Rigisich According to Lisa Rigisich, who with her husband Steve, founded the Pinot Days wine festival, there is nothing worse that a pundit spouting off about what a pinot noir wine should and shouldn’t be.
“I think it’s dangerous when pundits do that,” Rigisich said. “Then the winemaker’s not saying what’s best for the grapes in this year on this land.”
The Los Angeles Pinot Days festival starts on Thursday, Jan. 26, with some smaller events around town. But the big one is the Grand Tasting on Saturday, Jan. 28, from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica.
Rigisich wants to make it very clear that just because the festival is all about the pinot noir grape, which comes in for some serious snootiness, the festival is anything but snooty. Geeky, perhaps, but it’s about the joy and the fun of wine.
“Pinot noir has gotten this reputation as being sophisticated and people have gotten intimidated,” Rigisich said. “The wines are very sophisticated… But we’re not about the fancy room and wearing an ascot.”
The whole point of the festival is bring every day people out to try and find which pinot noirs they like and to meet the winemakers, most of whom will be pouring.
The Grand Tasting is $60 per person, but when you consider how much you might spend on tastings, driving all over the Carneros Valley or even the Santa Rita Hills, it’s not so bad, especially considering how many wineries you’ll be able to connect with. Also, you’ll have the rare chance to actually talk to a lot of the winemakers, themselves, which is insanely cool.
If you’ve never done a tasting event like this, or even if you have, here are some things you may want to keep in mind:
- Dress comfortably – you’ll be on your feet for a long time, and this is not a fancy dress affair. You may want to wear dark clothes, though. Red wine stains are a pain to get out.
- There will be bread and cheese and water at the event – consume those liberally. In fact, you may want to eat a hearty lunch before you even get there.
- This is a great opportunity to try something new. If you think you only like red wines and there’s a rosé there, give it a whirl. It’s not going to cost you any more and you might find something you really, really like.
- It’s okay to spit the wine out after you taste it. In fact, it’s encouraged. The winemakers are not going to think you don’t like their wine. We promise. If you grimace and go blech as you spit, that’s different. But if you’re going to maximize your tasting, you’ll have to spit just to stay standing. There are usually plastic cups around for just this purpose. Nor should you feel obligated to taste all the wine that’s in your glass – that’s what the dump buckets are for. Use them.
- Have fun. Yes, there’s a lot of geeky talk about clones going on. You can either listen to it and expand your knowledge or blow it off. It’s all about the wine and how it tastes to you.
Seriously, Rigisich doesn’t want people put off by all the fancy schmancy talk. Nor should you be. An event like this is about educating yourself – exploring what you like and don’t like. So give it a whirl.
Better yet, Rigisich gave us a coupon code you can use when you go to the site to order tickets: GRAPESC12. This will get you a 10 percent discount on your tickets to the Grand Tasting, and we’d love it if you used it.
 David Hornsby, courtesy Fox When we talk about actors, we generally think of whichever project they were last seen in. However, David Hornsby is not seen in his current project because he’s not only the producer, but voicing the character of Joel on FX’s new animated comedy Unsupervised, airing at 10:30 p.m. on Thursdays.
We caught up with Hornsby last July, where he confessed that he’s not a big wine drinker.
“I’m a beer man,” he said. “I like a cold beer at the end of the day.”
But while he has nothing against wine, per se, he does have difficulty drinking red wine.
“Why does red wine give me heartburn?” he asked for his wine FAQ. ” The second it goes down my pipe, oh man!”
Well, we did some checking with WebMD, and that site said that if wine gives you heartburn, it could be an indication of GERD, which can be a serious problem. Or it could just be a personal sensitivity. These things happen.
Hornsby did ask a second question: “Why are there so many blogs about wine? Aren’t they just fermented grapes? Am I crazy?”
No, Mr. Hornsby, you are not crazy. Wine is simply fermented grapes and sometimes other fruits. But something that tastes this good and that can be this complex can be a lot of fun to talk about. And people who love wine often love talking about it, and writing about it, in the case of we bloggers.
Admittedly here at OddBallGrape.com, we’re on a mission. We want to make wine more fun for everyone, not just the swirl, sip and snark crowd. So hopefully, your tummy issues will clear up. Or maybe you’ll find a nice white wine that you can enjoy. You might even try a bubbly, if you can drink beer okay.
 It’s holiday gift giving time and one of the biggest problems with all the elitism and snobbery surrounding the world of wine is that it makes the simple gesture of offering a gift of wine so fraught with terror. And it’s so very unfair and unnecessary.
Wine geeks that we are, we have gotten our fair share of kindly-meant white zinfandel (and if you’re not a wine person and don’t know why this is not a good thing to do, relax, you’ve hit the right page). Yet we have not mocked anyone who has ever done so, nor have we cut said people off or thought less of them. But then, we try to be nice and accept the gift as an attempt to respect who we are.
At the same time, we recognize that there might be a boss, a future in-law or just somebody you would like to know better and you’d like to please and/or impress said person and you know this person likes wine. And the sad truth is, this person may also be a wine snob.
The problem is, there are wines that are pretty “safe,” in that almost anybody who likes wine will be reasonably impressed with a bottle of, say, a cabernet sauvignon from Silver Oak winery. But you’re talking $100 for a bottle of their 2006 cab sauv and that can get pretty pricey. And, truth be told, there are those who think Silver Oak is trading on its label, so you’re still not safe, as it were.
So the first thing to do, if you’re not a wine drinker or know much about wines, is give up on the notion that you’re going to be able to convince a real wine snob that you “know” wines. Because no one knows wine like a wine snob does, unless that person happens to agree with said snob often enough. And that includes people like us who make wine and know what “fine” wine tastes like. That’s what a snob is and why we generally don’t cater to such people. We get that said snob may have a son you’re planning on marrying or may be the manager you’re hoping will promote you. We’re just pointing out that you’re not likely to get on said snob’s good side by trying to impress this person with knowledge you don’t have (and you can’t have it because the only knowledge this person counts as valid is his or her own).
That doesn’t mean you can’t give this person a gift of wine that shows some thought and care in the giving. After all, it’s the thought that counts and while you don’t want to send the message that you weren’t thinking, the vast majority of people out there, including wine snobs, are willing to accept that you made an effort on their behalf. As long as it’s clear that you made the effort. Again, we recognize that there are some people willing to attribute the worst motives to you no matter what you do, and at that point you may want to start looking for another job or settle in for a rocky relationship with the in-laws or re-think the potential relationship. But the following tips should help you with the vast majority of folks.
So when you don’t have knowledge, sometimes the easiest thing to do is ask. If you really, really want to keep it a surprise, you can try framing the question as a request for another friend who likes wine. But simply saying you don’t really know that much about wine and want to learn will generally warm the cockles of even the grinchiest of hearts because there are few things wine snobs love to do more than pontificate about their preferences. You might try asking where a good place to get wine is or what’s a good wine for someone who’s really into wine.
Now, if said snob responds with several different preferred wine shops and asks about budget, or asks what your friend likes, then you’re probably not dealing with a true wine snob. Which means you can go to yet another wine store and ask the person behind the counter to guide you to a good bottle of something unusual. If said snob says things, “Well, the only place to go is…” or “Obviously, your friend will only want….” then you are, in fact, dealing with a snob, and it might be time to check out that tie or purse.
You can also respond with the “Gee, I’m not sure what my friend likes. What do you like?” Listen carefully, because your target snob will give you plenty to go on. As soon as you feasibly can, write down anything you remember. Then you’ve got two options. If your budget is wide open, then you can got to said snob’s preferred store and ask the sales person to help you. Most are pretty cool and get it. Sometimes you’ll run into a fellow snob, but then you can walk and shop elsewhere.
Any decent wine store will have someone willing to help a newbie purchase a bottle for someone else. And the good ones won’t make the noob feel like an idiot. Because you’re not an idiot. You’re trying to please someone with a bottle of wine and it really shouldn’t be this complicated. And it shouldn’t break the bank, either, because there are lots and lots of great wines for under $20 and several under $10. If you get a really obscure label from a truly tiny producer, you can also proclaim it a boutique wine, which might forestall some lip curling.
Now, you’ll note we’re not recommending any specific wines here. Why? Because there are far, far too many to list and every time we read one of these lists, we find we have a heck of a time finding a given label – which doesn’t help when you’re looking at the rows and rows of bottles without a clue what to buy.
So worse case scenario? You don’t know what the target snob likes, just that he or she likes wine. Go with a Bordeaux red, if the person tends toward stuffiness, go with a premium California cab sauv if the person loves labels and status, go with a red made from something unusual, such as negrette or tempranillo, if your giftee likes taking chances and adventure. And, again, try and ask your friendly wine store employee for suggestions. They can offer you ideas even we haven’t thought of.
The only hard and fast rule (unless you know for a fact otherwise) is never, never buy white zinfandel for a wine snob. As a wine, it tends to be just dreadful, sick sweet stuff, which is why we don’t like it. There may be good ones out there and you might even like it, which is cool. But most people who like wine don’t tend to like white zin.
Oh, and for the record, there’s a reason we’re the OddBallGrape. We love trying stuff we’ve never heard of.
2011 BEAUJOLAIS NOUVEAU TASTING AT WEBSTER’S FINE STATIONERS
Welcome to the site! If you’re here because you were at the tasting this afternoon, here’s your chance to compare what you tasted with what we tasted and {drum roll, please} find out which wine was what. And let us know what you think in the comments. If you just want to check out some tasting notes on this year’s Beaujolais Nouveaux, please feel free to join the conversation, because we’ve got a real controversial offering below.
As many of you already know, ‘cuz you were at the tasting or you read yesterday’s post, Beaujolais Nouveau is a special bottling of new wine that comes out every November. Now, Beaujolais is a place name for the region in France where this light, fruity wine is made, and the Nouveau is not to be confused with the often age-worthy Beaujolais Villages and Grand Cru wines from the region.
While a lot of wine snobs love looking down their long, bony noses at it because it is generally light, fruity, young and inexpensive, we also happen to think it’s one of the best bottles you can get for your Thanksgiving table.
We did a blind tasting of three Nouveaux, but threw in a ringer – one that is not Beaujolais. It’s just a new red from here in California, but it’s still pretty tasty. All of these are dry red wines, which go with a variety of foods. As always, our notes are here for calibration purposes so that if you tasted melon and we said peach, you’ll know that when we write peach, you’ll taste melon.
BOTTLE #1
Georges DuBoeuf Nouveau
This is your classic Beaujolais Nouveau, although it has a slightly darker color than some years. The nose is kind of closed at first, but it opens up to a very fruity scent, almost candy-like, called tutti frutti (Italian for all fruits). The mouth feel is still classically light with just a little acid and dry, but very light, tannins (that drying sensation in your mouth).
By they way, this one seems to be everywhere, so have fun.
BOTTLE #2
Georges DuBoeuf Nouveau Villages
The Villages Beaujolais are traditionally the mid-tier pretty good stuff, with the Grand Crus being the high end wines. We’ve never seen a Villages Nouveau before, so either this is a rare shipment to the U.S. or a rare bottling. We found this one at BevMo.
This one also has the dark color and tutti-frutti nose on it, but Michael also caught a hint of banana, as well. This one’s flavor is a tad more tart, however, and the tannins are softer.
BOTTLE #3
Charles Shaw Nouveau
Surprised? Yeah, we were, too. We’ve always said that if you didn’t know you were drinking the infamous Two-Buck Chuck, you’d probably like it a lot more than you would if you knew what you were drinking. That being said, we’ve also had some pretty dreadful bottles from this label. The most consistently good ones, we’ve found are the chardonnay, which is the one that has won all the medals, and the cabernet sauvignon.
So we weren’t counting on much when we tasted this one. Anne tasted the three wines blind (not knowing which was which) and actually thought she had one of the DuBoeufs when she sniffed because she caught a hint of what we call French Funk – an eensy, tiny hint of sulphur in the nose of the wine, to which Anne is particularly sensitive. Michael said he actually liked this one a bit better than the French ones – and he was not expecting that.
But it has the same dark color the other two have. The nose isn’t quite as obviously fruity as the other two, but it still has the same light mouthfeel. It, too, has the tartness of good acid and a hint of fizz. Michael thought the flavor was slightly sweet, but Anne didn’t think it was sweet at all. The bottom line was that it compared quite favorably to its two French cousins, though Anne didn’t think it was quite as good.
And, yes, it’s only available at Trader Joe’s.
BTW, the unofficial results of the blind tasting this afternoon – when we asked you which of the three wines were your favorites – are listed below:
Nouveau = 7 favorites
Villages = 5 favorites
Two Buck = 11 favorites
There you have it. But the continuing lesson of OBG is whatever tastes good to you is what you should be drinking. Scores and labels be damned!
 Bottle #1  Bottle #2  Bottle #3
 We always love it when some wine snob sniffs in disdain at the Beaujolais Nouveau release. Let’s be real – all the hype and hullabaloo about the annual release of this brand, spanking new wine is just that. And, no, it is not the kind of fine wine you save up for that perfect occasion with a special menu designed around it.
But, we ask, so what?
Beaujolais Nouveau is the first wine harvested in the Beaujolais region of France and is not to be confused with the much nicer Beaujolais Villages or Beaujolais Grand Cru. It is very young wine, meant to be drunk young. If you see a bottle with the words Beaujolais Nouveau on it and the year is older than the year you’re in (okay, you can make an exception if you’re buying in January), you’ve got a bottle that’s probably too old.
It’s always released on the third Thursday of November with big parties in Paris and a certain amount of press, etc., which is probably part of the reason why the snobs love looking down their long, bony noses at it. The other part is that it does tend to be very light and fruity. It’s not a complicated wine that you’re going to spend an hour analyzing.
There are two things we love especially about Beaujolais Nouveau and it’s timely November arrival. The first is that it is a lovely way to celebrate the end of another harvest. As home winemakers, we’re finally winding down the crazed slog that usually starts sometime in August, with the first white grape harvests, then the extended “will we, won’t we?” wondering if and where we’ll be picking grapes on any given weekend. Not to mention all the various tasks that go on with crushing, pressing, racking (siphoning the wine off the leftover skin and stuff left in the container), and other stuff that goes on until the new wines are ready to rest quietly over the winter.
With the Nouveau arriving just when all that work is finished, it’s a great way to toast surviving another harvest – and we have no doubt that’s part of it in France, as well.
But there’s a second part that we discovered long before we starting making our own wine. Beaujolais Nouveau is pretty much your perfect wine for Thanksgiving Dinner. Not only does the light, fruity profile match well with all the different flavors in the traditional feast, including those sweet potatoes with (blech) marshmallows, it’s also a great beginner wine for those members of your extended family who are either new to wine or suspicious of red wines, in general. This is an important point to remember, because while you do want your wine to match your food, you also want your wine to match the people at your table.
We find that almost every year, we have a couple wine newbies at our table, even if some of them aren’t all that new. They just don’t like red wine – or think they don’t. And we have gotten a few converts with Beaujolais Nouveau.
So give this year’s vintage a try with your turkey and let us know how it went.
 Type: Off dry white wine
What makes it special: Hand-picked grapes from the Santa Barbara region
Plays well with: Spicy foods, including Indian and Mexican
The Outlier is made of gewurtraminer grapes grown in Santa Barbara County. Larry Schaffer, the winemaker and owner of Tercero, said that he’d worked with the grower and insisted that the grapes be picked by hand. He was going to let the grower pick them by machine this year, only after all the bad weather they had last spring, the grower didn’t have any. Well, so much for that experiment.
Gewurztraminer is a German grape and a lot of the California intrepretations of this grape end up too sweet, thick and cloying – think cough or pancake syrup instead of a white wine. Blech.
But this one gets it right. It’s got a good clean nose without heavy florals, along with a lighter mouthfeel and good acids. The taste is the best part – some spicy notes and just off-dry enough to let the fruit come through. This is as close to a perfect food wine as we’ve seen in a long time, just right for some really gooey, cheesy enchiladas.
Tercero does have a small tasting room in Los Olivos, California, but you can buy the wine at the website, www.tercerowines.com.
The Garagiste Festival happened this past weekend – and not only were we going to go, we were going to do an advance post on the event, just in case some of you would want to go.
Alas, Michael’s grandmother passed away the week before, so not only were we in Arizona for the funeral when the festival was on, we kinda got distracted.
But perhaps more important is letting people know about the movement, which is dedicated to supporting small, artisanal winemakers in the Central Coast region. In fact, we were delighted to see that one of our recent featured wineries, Tercero Wines, showed up on the Garagiste member list.
“They don’t have a lot of money for marketing,” said Stewart McLennan, one of the co-founders of Paso Garagiste, about the member wineries. “They don’t have tasting rooms, well, the majority of them don’t.”
McLennan explained that the term Garagiste is the term the winemakers in Bordeaux use when they want to look down their noses at a small producer. But he decided he wanted to put a more positive spin on the term. He and his co-founders Doug Minnick, Dan Erland Andersen, all make wine at home and also work either writing about or helping to market wineries.
McLennan, a former actor, said that he’d been looking for a larger winery to work for, but came to really appreciate the smaller outfits, producing under 2,000 cases (Paso Garagiste wineries make 1,200 or fewer cases).
“We could take care of being a conduit for all of the people with various amounts of wine,” he said.
The Festival was part of that, but there were also seminars and their website, pasogaragiste.com, will eventually feature wine making videos from various winemakers.
A word about artisan wines – they do tend to cost more than wines from larger wineries simply because these folks are in the business of making a profit – maybe not a large one, but they do want to stay in the black. And because of their size, they can’t take advantage of the economies of scale. But McLennan says that gives the artisanal winemaker more control over the final product. Plus you can make a special connection with the artisanal winemaker that you usually can’t with larger wineries.
“I think what people are getting back to is artisanal stuff,” McLennan said. “If they want to make a luxury purchase, they want to know that it’s really unique. If you know the story behind the wine and you’ve met the winemaker, it makes the whole experience just that much better and it becomes a really unique thing.”
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