I would love any suggestions for places to visit and restaurants to eat at. I will be there on Sunday the 13th and on Monday morning as well. Leave a comment if you want to let me know about anywhere good. I will be staying in Yountville.
I love a good Cab, and I actually do want to see a nice big building with some vineyards. I am a tight bastard though, so please no $40 tastings for me.
When I finished off my bottle of Director’s Cut Shiraz, I noticed that my glass had a huge amount of sediment at the bottom:
I know that some people hate this and think that it is icky, but I have come to love seeing this in a glass. I don’t think that I ever had a wine with huge sediment that I did not like, so normally seeing the chunks of grapey goodness at the bottom of the glass confirms a great bottle of red for me.
I have a picture of the aforementioned display of grape chunks, saved for the lucky readers of my blog (all 6 of you).
Yeah, I realize that this is one of the things that decanting is for. Personally, I enjoy drinking the wine slowly enough to let the sediment stick to the glass so that I don’t end up drinking any of it. Over the years I have gotten bloody good at this, hence my display of 4 chunks at 90 degrees to each other. Besides, I like to think that the chunks are leeching more goodness into the wine right to the end.
Why so much of the stuff? Because some wines are unfiltered. It seems logical to me that filtering the wine would remove bits of grape that could be imparting flavour to the wine as it sits in the fridge, testing my willpower over the years before I give in and open it. Hence I prefer unfiltered wines.
Last Christmas my parents got me a set of Schott Zwiesel glasses (the Forte red wine glasses). At the time I figured I finally needed some nicer glasses, and I decided on the Schott Zwiesel for several reasons:
Since I was liking them so much and my birthday was coming up, my parents got me a 1L Schott Zwiesel Diva decanter and some more glasses from BeverageFactory.com. The prices were very good, and the shipping was prompt with nothing broken (that I have found so far). The decanter was a bit of a worry, but maybe the titanium and styrofoam joined forces to repel the rigour of travels.
I agree with Jeff about drinking wine – no wine glass will make crappy wine taste better, and good shit is good shit even out of a styrofoam cup. But wine glasses are made for the job and they definitely are more enjoyable to drink out of. Personally, I think that the Schott glasses are every bit as good as the Reidels that I see everywhere, but they are priced better and there is no lead to worry about.
When I drink a great bottle of wine I like to keep the bottles around. Not sure why, but I am a bit of a bower bird. A while back my wife started telling me to get rid of the bottles because it looked like an alcoholic was living in the house. I disagreed, because I throw away the bottles that are not teh awesome and that makes me a classy drunk instead.
But I love my wife and I want to make her happy, so I figured that I could take the bottles to work to decorate my office. This was a great idea, because it is nice to occasionally glance at them and remember the nice memories associated with each drink.
From left to right we have (reviews of mine linked where I have them):
Penfolds Bin 707 Cabernet Sauvignon
Penfolds RWT Shiraz (this was drank on New Years eve 6 months ago. No review because I was lazy and busy with family at the time. But the wine was a blast)
Stella’s Garden Lost Highway Project Shiraz
I think that it is a cool picture because it shows a good spread of the kind of stuff I love to drink. Yeah there is not much variety in terms of where it came from, but I only started this thing recently and statistically I am most likely to drink Shiraz 
Recently I have started taking more notice of the shape of bottle that wine is coming in. When I first got into wine I noticed that there were different shapes, but I assumed that this was stylistic on a very simple level. Now I realize that there is a subtle twist to the choice – Bordeaux bottle for a Bordeaux style wine, Rhone bottle for a Rhone style wine and so on. While I can appreciate that this helps to distinguish the style of wine while it sits in the shop, I have some problems with this approach.
For one, I think that this is too much of a shadow of the old world being projected onto the new world of wine. I believe that the new world have some styles all their own, and they manage to have these styles recognized without changing the bottle shape (or at least I argue that they do). I also don’t appreciate the difficulties it creates in wine storage. Some cabinets are optimized to the standard Bordeaux bottle, and having extra tall Bordeaux bottles or Rhone bottles complicates stacking, etc.
Now, given that some winemakers choose one shape over another for whatever reason (Torbreck seems to like the sloping neck and Penfolds likes the Bordeaux, for example) I also wish that there was less variety within a bottle shape. I have many variations on Bordeaux in my collection, which is somewhat strange to me. They are all 750ml bottles, why not standardize like Penfolds did on the standard size to make storage easier? I have often wondered out loud if any bottle that is not a standard Bordeaux is meant to be aged at all (I know that they are, but my point is that you would make it easier for people with many stacking systems if your age-able wine were in a standard size). Was the stack-ability a factor in Penfolds choosing the shape that they did?
P.S. Please take some salt with this post. This is random musings piped straight from my head to the blog. Not a guarantee. Checks will not be honoured. Tongue was in cheek a smidgen.
A comment from Catie made me want to write about a topic that I have been thinking about for a while. She made a good point about how when you visit a wine region you probably want to experience as much as you can in the area (she points out that when she was in Australia the last thing she wanted to taste was a wine from Washington).
Yes, I was trying to be lazy and go back to what I know on that second night. But I think that it is not quite as clear cut as that. To me, there are two kinds of wine drinking when it comes to wine:
I go through both periods from time to time. I recently had a big burst of experimentation (and I am still working through that a little bit. Whenever I pick up a shipment from Garagiste I start going through it again). I view wine travel as largely an exercise in experimentation and learning. You go around, taste whatever sounds interesting and see what sticks.
Tasting wine all day tires me though (I don’t like to spit wine. I just don’t. So I end up a bit tipsy and tired). After a while I find that I am done with it, and I want to drink wine for the enjoyment rather than the learning experience. After you get used to it, it is very natural to open something up for dinner and quite often you want it to be a sure thing.
This brings me to the focus of this post – the local wine phenomenon. It is interesting to me that some restaurants in Washington, even some really good ones, will only have local wines on their wine list (or a large majority). I suppose I see more of this now that I live in Washington state, where they grow wine, as opposed to when I lived in Sydney and neither drank wine often or lived in a wine growing area. Now that I am a bit more of a wine snob the local-only list is something that disappoints me. Not everybody loves the wine grown locally or feels confident in ordering it. And having a good spread of wines from all around the world means that most people can find something that they have high confidence in loving. I am sorry, but most of the time I don’t want an experiment with my meal, I want a sure thing.
This is not a Washington wine hater rant – one of the nicest bottles I have had with a meal was a bottle of DeLille D2 on my last birthday. I love a good Cab or Zin from California too. There are French wines I love and some that I don’t, and one day I will get to be able to choose these better myself rather than have it be pot luck. I have had nice Spanish wine and will try it again. Italian wine does not blow me away but I never find it disgusting either. My favorites are Shiraz or Cabernets from South Australia. This is what I started with and what I crave and I don’t apologize for it.
The thing is that the above is a broad set of wine. And I like a restaurant that has a broad selection too, because it tells me that they selected for quality and taste rather than being local. Not to be rude, but it looks like a tourist gimmick to me to only have local wines. If you make the wine list for a restaurant and you are reading this, remember that tastes are diverse, but the output of most appellations is not.
I just read this post
http://seattlewineblogger.blogspot.com/2007/05/australian-marketing-machine-makes-260.html
again, and I feel that I must respectfully respond. Particularly to the point about Australian wine only being good at the absolute top and bottom ends of the price scale. My experience does not really mesh with this at all – I actually don’t particularly enjoy the cheaper Australian offerings at all. The majority of my drinking is done at the $15 – $30 price point with Australian wine, and occasionally I venture even into the triple digits. The only reason that I don’t drink $50 bottles of Australian wine more often is because I can’t afford to. If I could I would literally be buying cases of the stuff and digging a big hole in the ground to store them in.
There are two reasons why this blogger might have developed this opinion. Perhaps this person does not like the Australian style of wine – I have a co-worker from France who finds Australian wine too strong for his taste (which is funny, because I find most French and Italian stuff to be watery and fruity juice tasting). There is no right or wrong to this, it is a matter of taste.
The other reason may be that this blogger might not have had much *good* Australian wine in these price points. Indeed, even living on the west coast it can be hard to find the fine examples, and I personally think that many wine buyers in supermarkets around here share the opinion that Australian wine is either “value” or “collectible” and don’t stock anything else. There are many small and medium size wineries making great stuff at every price point, you just need to look around somewhere other than a supermarket or anywhere else that stocks “International Wine” without knowing a lot about what to stock.
I think that the easiest way to sample great Australian reds is to sign up at Garagiste, and buy a bottle of anything red that fits into your target price point. They are very good at choosing great stuff and were a boon to me in terms of beefing up the collection. Pete’s wine in Bellevue and Seattle Wine Co in Bellevue also have a great selection of Australian wines. I found a bottle of Yalumba Octavius at Pete’s, and everything I saw in Seattle Wine Co last time I was there looked top notch.
http://www.blueaustral.com/gift/wine-buying-for-the-novice/
There are a lot of good tips here. I like the point about not buying too much too early. I wondered for a minute if I was doing that myself, but then I recalled that most times I have to restrain myself from drinking my wine. Pretty much everything I have is something that I cannot wait to drink, and I hope that it stays that way.
I have found this more than once by forgetting the difference between wordpress and blogspot. It appears that this Ben is Australian (as am I) but does not blog very much at all. I found this well after starting my own blog, so it is mildly curious that somebody else started something almost the same 3 years prior (only mildly, because the planet has 6 billion people after all).
