Nurse the Hate: Wine Tasting Magic + Divisional Round Day 2

I have played in a rock band for a long time.  As a result, there are a number of people in my life that ask me about the band when they see me as their fall-back conversation topic.  I run into someone at a restaurant or grocery store or whatever, and very quickly it becomes “How’s the band?”.  It’s my “thing” to them.  It’s important to note that 95% of the time, these questions are not sincere, they are simply the way to fulfill the social contract of feigning interest in an acquaintance.  It’s like asking, “How are the kids?”, when, in fact, you couldn’t identify their kids in a police lineup.  In the case of either question being asked, the required answer is “Great!”.  No one really wants to strap in to hear about how your kids got arrested in a fentanyl sting operation, is considering joining a cult or in my case the difficulty of securing studio time for our kazillioneth record that the person asking me will never under any circumstances listen to.

I now also get a fair amount of questions about when my next wine exam is in this Master of Wine quest.  The MW is a very small little dork subculture, not that different in being Master of Cheese or a Dungeon Master really, so the protocols of test taking and the required tasks are murky to outsiders.  I’m finally at the last exam.  When people ask me about the “test”, what they generally want to know about is the Practical Exam.  This is the tasting part, where you get 12 wines poured into glasses, and you are expected to be able to identify the wine and discuss the inherent quality level in context of its place of origin.  Day 1 is a white wine flight.  Day 2 is red.  Day 3 is the dreaded “mixed bag” where it can be anything but is usually sparkling, rose, sweet and fortified wines like port, sherry, and madeira. 

The first time people see you correctly identify a wine “blind”, meaning it is sitting in a glass in front of you without any other clues, they think you are a witch.  It’s a great parlor trick.  What most people don’t understand is that it isn’t some innate ability, but rather a learned skill.  I could teach you too, if you had the patience.  Anybody can do it.  It’s referred to as the “deductive tasting method” or as I like to say, “figuring shit out by paying attention”.  I’ll show you how it works.

Let’s say you have a red wine in front of you.  It is not a deep almost black color, but rather more of a light ruby.  If you hold the glass up, you can see through it.  This suggests that it was made from a light skinned grape, not a thick skinned one as wine gets the color from the skins of the grapes.  So, this means I am already thinking about light skinned grapes like grenache, Nebbiolo, sangiovese and pinot noir as being distinct possibilities.  Now you smell the wine. 

The biggest obstacle for most people at this point is that usually no one spends the time to pay attention to details in life.  Slow down.  Concentrate for a second.  What does that liquid in the glass smell like to you?  Good wine tends to smell like multiple things at once.  Smells are usually personal too.  For example, Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joes usually smells like the gum that was in packs of baseball cards to me.  White wine from the Rhone Valley in France often smells like the juice at the bottom of a fruit bowl when you are the last one to get a crack at it at the Cancun resort breakfast buffet.  In the case of the wine in the glass, it smells like cherries, mushrooms, and the cedar closet I had in my old house.  Grenache tends to smell like strawberries, so I am beginning to suspect it’s not grenache at this point, but I’m still not going to rule it out.

Let’s taste the wine.  What I look to do first is to figure out the structure of the wine.  OK, what the hell does that mean?  Food tends to have flavors and textures that work together to make it taste good.  Like a McDonald’s cheeseburger has the fat of the beef mixed with cheese.  The pickles provide a tart lift.  The ketchup gives sweetness as does the bun.  The onions give a textural crunch.  It all works together.  Wine is the same thing.  The acid in the wine has to balance the lushness of the fruit.  Just like a good glass of orange juice should have equal parts sweet fruit and mouth watering acid, wine should have the same idea.  Red wine also has tannins, which is like the skeleton to support the flavors.  Tannins are what you feel in your gums, that drying sensation that you get in things like wine and black tea.  I want to get an idea of not only the levels of these three components but also the nature of them.  I am looking for clues.

In this case the wine has slightly elevated acid, which suggests that this wine came from a cool climate that wasn’t able to ripen the fruit to the point where the sugars in the grapes were able to overtake the acids.  This has too much acid to be grenache, so that grape is out of consideration.  The tannins are soft and it is hard to notice them at first because they have a silky quality to them instead of a fierce grip.  They really blend into the wine.  This eliminates Nebbiolo and Sangiovese because those grapes tend to be very high acid and tannins that rip your face off.  This wine gracefully moves across your palate.  There is a finesse to it, something that used to be called “feminine” but I’m not sure if you’re allowed to say that in 2024 without consulting with HR first.  I’ll have to check.  Anyway, this is probably pinot noir. 

This is when I dial into what the wine actually tastes like.  The fruit is very fresh, like fresh picked cherries, but it also has a little raspberry vibe to it.  If you pay attention, after that initial cherry taste hits you, it recedes and turns into a "savory mushroom, cedar and dried leaves on an autumn day" thing.  This also suggests a cooler climate from where the grapes came from because the nature of the fruit wasn’t black cherry, cherry cola, or baked cherries like in a pie.  The fruit doesn’t finish with a sweet sensation like a candy or soda.  This is pointing me to a cool climate in Europe somewhere because pinot noir from places like the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Chile are usually more fruit dominated instead of the finish of secondary flavors like mushrooms and leaves. 

The wine is really good.  What’s the difference between a “good” and an “ok” wine?  An “OK” wine would be a short little taste of cherry dominated fruit and then the taste would be gone pretty quickly.  Yellow Tail chardonnay has a little burst of apple candy flavor and then it's gone.  It's fine.  It's pleasant.  Then, poof!  This isn’t like that.  It’s giving complex flavors.  It tastes like one thing, and then it turns into something else, and then it is three things at once.  It’s like that candy on the Willie Wonka movie that kept changing flavors.  It is perfectly balanced between the acid, tannin and fruit.  At this point, I figure it has to be pinot noir.  We have ticked most of the boxes for that to be the grape.  This had to come from a place that makes top quality pinot noir in Europe.  That means it is probably from Burgundy in France, but you have to consider places like Baden or Pfalz in Germany, Alsace in France, or Alto Adige in Italy.  This quality is extremely high though.  The wine is concentrated with flavor but at the same time is very light and airy on the palate, a hell of a trick.  There is only one place on the planet that can consistently do that.  It’s got to be Burgundy.

Now at this point in the Master of Wine program I’m expected to be able to tell you what little village it came from in the Burgundy region, which is really splitting hairs.  This task is just a matter of immersing yourself into great tasting expensive wines, and I’m just the man for the job.  It's not magic though.  Basically, it’s like getting a fast food burger and saying, “This has that fake charcoal grill taste on it, so I know it’s Burger King.  The ketchup tastes a little weird, so I bet it’s not Heinz, so that means it’s probably from East 30^th and Carnegie because the guy that owns that franchise is always trying to cut costs by using cut rate condiments.”  In this case the wine I'm identifying is a $475 retail Domaine Faiveley Latricieres Chambertin Grand Cru 2014, a wine I could easily mistake for a Volnay Premier Cru, sort of like saying you thought it was from a very desirable street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, not a Central Park penthouse condo on the Eastside.  

I drill at least once a week to identify wines blind.  Sometimes I do better than others.  The most important thing for you to remember is when you ask me how the MW program study is going, I am going to launch into the character of the tannins of an obscure wine from a tiny village in France while you are thinking "My God.  Why did I make the mistake to ask him that?".  What you should have asked me was about the games today.

A number of football gambling degenerates I respect love the Chiefs today.  They do not buy into the narrative that Buffalo has fixed their issues they had when they were 6-6, and that Kansas City with two extra days of rest is going to crush their dreams yet again.  I think that this is the year the Bills finally slay the dragon.  They're at home, the fanbase will be out of their minds, and Kansas City just isn't very good.  Let's go Bills.  Buffalo -2.5 

Current Record:  32-26-2