The Poor Wine Collector

One week ago, I traded in my shared bedroom in an apartment less than a mile from the beach for an empty house in Suburbia, USA.  Suburbia, USA is still just 10 miles or so from the beach, but the difference between my new home and my old ones couldn’t be more drastic.  Most notably, the average temperature during July at my old house would be less than 80 degrees on a hot day.  New home: over 100.  Sadly, my new home doesn’t have an air conditioner so I’ve been sweating my way through the late afternoons, praying that the sun will set faster so the cooling night will come to my rescue.  I’ve managed to survive thus far but today I realized that my wine collection might not be so lucky.

I was trying to select a bottle to open with dinner tonight when I realized that several bottles in my collection showed the unmistakable signs of heat fatigue.  Extreme heat can cause corks to dry up and wine to seep through them, leaving the top of the bottles a bit sticky.  Luckily, I only have 8 bottles from the collection here with me.  Unluckily, they are 8 of the best I own.  These bottles will now likely have to be opened in the very near future so I’ll get to actually enjoy them before they prematurely age and turn to vinegar. 

This unfortunate event made me realize one thing: it sucks to be a poor wine collector.  I have no temperature controlled cellar to house my wine, even though I’ve got several bottles that deserve that degree of attention.  All I can manage is the bottom of a closet and all the cooling that the shade can provide.    So, instead of the temperature and humidity controlled environment that cellars provide, all I can offer wine for a home is a rugged environment that is unstable, frequently hot, dry, and overall unfriendly.  The environment I can offer is one that would be nice if I were growing wine but one that is horrible for aging it. 

So, what’s a poor person to do?  And, by poor, I mean the 99% of us that cannot afford a temperature controlled wine cellar.  Well, there are mini fridges built especially for wine that control the temperature and humidity for 8-20 bottles of your favorite wine.  Bad news here is the limited space that they offer and the cost of the power it takes to operate them.  Still, I may have to invest in one of these little units to protect the prizes of my collection.  Ideally, a poor wine collector would live in an air conditioned house in a moderate climate that will provide a stable condition for wine storage.  I used to live in such an environment and have crashed back to reality since moving away from it.  It just isn’t fun to see your prizes, prizes that you might have been saving for special occasions in the future, take a turn for the worse just because of the climate.  Such is the nature of wine.  Old wine can be an incredible asset (both in terms of taste and monetary value), but it is a fickle one.  Wine is only as valuable as the life it’s lived.  Most of us cannot provide wine the life of luxury that it requires to age gracefully so we are ill suited to be collectors.  Those poor wine collectors among us must evolve into consumers.  99% of wine is meant to be consumed within a year of bottling.  What I now realize is that the 99% of us are too poor to have a wine cellar of our own, so we should buy the 99% of the wine not meant to be aged 99% of the time.  Did I lose you?  If so, ready that over again. 

Faced with my current situation, I’ve decided to buy a little refrigerator that will house 10 bottles of my age-worthy wine, I will fill said refrigerator with my 10 bottles and will only buy bottles meant for immediate consumption from thenceforth.  If I stick to my 99-99-99 theory, my little 10 bottle cellar will be able to last me 1,000 bottles, or more than 5 years (that’s a conservative estimate).  While I don’t like my situation, I’m glad that I now accept it and have a plan that I can move forward with.  I think that most of us hold onto wine longer than we should so I would encourage all of my readers that store wine to really think about what they are saving and why.  Without a doubt, we all buy wine to drink and enjoy, not to see it turn into undrinkable vinegar, so we might as well err on the side of caution when it comes to aging wine and drink it when it is too young rather than risk it turning into an undrinkable bottle of expensive vinegar.

I hope that no one else has the same experience that I have just had.  Remember, it is easy to want to hold onto wine and amass an impressive collection, but that collection is worthless unless you can enjoy it.  Wine is meant to be enjoyed.  Luckily, 99% of us are poor enough to be buying wine that we can immediately enjoy.

Contest Winner!

There was some stiff competition among the 3 entrants in my guest post contest, but FAUribe and his car-blog buddies emerged victorious.  I kinda thought that ERA or REW and their well-read blogs might pull it out but I was dead wrong.

FAUribe, I’ll get you your prize next time I see you.  You might want to thank your car buddies for all their help.  Also, as promised, you are welcome to write another post anytime you want. 

I think that I’m going to have to do something like this again, I had a good time reading what others had to say, and I hope that you guys did too.  That being said, I’m glad to be done with this contest so I can get back to writing posts that no one reads.

One last congratulation to FAUribe!  You wrote a great post arguing that Merlot isn’t a loser (something I don’t think I’d have ever done).  I hope you enjoy your prize.

Entry # 3- REW

Due to a weekend trip to the Bay Area, it’s been a few days since I posted an entry, but now that I’m back home, here is REW’s entry into my contest.  Because of a few last minute back outs, this is the last entry I’ve got, so next Monday will be the end of this contest.  REW has a successful blog of his own, has written a book, and recently appeared in the New York Times, so he’s a good writer, but will he be able to get the support needed to win this contest?  Let’s find out.

“You want some cheese with that whine?” By: REW

I’ve heard a lot of great lines uttered—or, more than occasionally, screamed—by baseball players, coaches, umpires and fans.  Very few of them had anything at all to do with the subject of this blog.  Some of them wouldn’t be fit to print here, knowing the delicate sensibilities of the readership.  But one line (although not a great line) did bring baseball and wine together—sort of.

The coach of the Malibu Red Sox, a local Little League team, had a favorite expression to use with his eight-year-old players.  (Older and less cultured readers may be interested to know that this particular coach had non-starring roles in Dude, Where’s My Car? and Baseketball.)  Whenever a player would complain—about anything—the coach would say, “You want some cheese with that whine?”  No doubt the predominant message was supposed to be “stop complaining,” but the secondary message, delivered thirteen years before the players on the team would be able to appreciate it legally in most jurisdictions of the United States, was “wine and cheese are commonly paired together to admirable effect.”

Thus we come, at last, to the subject of this post:  wine and cheese (not, as you may have been thinking, the promotion of under-age drinking).  The two do go together very well.

For reasons that probably have a lot to do with long histories of agricultural experimentation, cultures that produce a wide variety of wines also generally produce a wide variety of cheeses.  Think of France.  Charles de Gaulle, the first president of France’s Fifth Republic, famously said, “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?”  He almost certainly underestimated—the number of varieties of cheese, that is, not the difficulty of governing France.  Everyone knows Brie.  Some know Boursin and Chevres.  But what about—just for starters—Fougerus, Livarot, Mimolette, Pas de l’Escalette, Raclette, Saint-Nectaire, Saint-Paulin, Taupiniere, and Vignotte?  Then there’s Italy, which has not only Mozzarella, Gorgonzola, Parmigiano, and Ricotta, but Ragusano, Taleggio, Caciotta, Ubriaco, and hundreds more.  (Yes, “ubriaco” means “drunk” in Italian.  Formaggio ubriaco is soaked in wine and then covered in the crushed grape skins left from making wine.)

In a culture with many wines and just as many cheeses, the possibilities for pairings are almost endless.  (As I heard as least one member of the Malibu Red Sox say in response to his coach’s memorable line, “Why, yes, I would like some cheese with my wine.”)  My own favorite pairings involve full-bodied red wines with full-flavored cheeses, like the ones I’m enjoying at the moment:  pecorino cheese with Cabernet Sauvignon.  (I’d prefer an Italian wine—maybe a Rosso de Montepulciano—with this distinctively Italian cheese, but my very domestic Cabernet works just fine.)

At the risk of putting the cheese before the wine in a wine blog, I need to say more about pecorino.  As the name implies—at least to Italians—pecorino cheese is made with sheep’s milk.  It takes on different characteristics—including flavors—depending in part on the length of time it is aged.  Fresh pecorino is softer and milder.  Aged pecorino (stagionato) is harder and more pungent; sometimes it is grated as a topping for pasta dishes, much like Parmigiano is.  Either way, fresco or stagionato, pecorino is great with a bold red wine.  One of my favorite antipasti is pecorino cheese cut into small rectangles (think two bites) and topped with a few drops of honey, a few pine nuts, and a few short stalks of fresh chives.  (The honey complements the pecorino perfectly—and keeps the pine nuts and chives from falling off.)  Open a bottle of Sangiovese or Nero d’Avola (or, if possible, Brunello) and it may be hard to think about moving beyond the antipasti.  (I must thank the incomparable Elizabeth Whatley for this wonderful, and very simple, pecorino recipe.)

One of the best things about food and wine is the way our senses of taste and smell stimulate memory.  Particular foods and wines often make us think of special times.  A bottle of Brunello, for example, makes me think of a wonderful meal in a restaurant called Il Grappolo Blu in Montalcino.  Putting wine and cheese together is good—and maybe even necessary—in part because it reminds us of times when dinner was a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine, and a hunk of cheese.  And that dinner, for most of us who’ve had the experience, was always a special one because it was enjoyed with special people in special places:  on a hillside in Tuscany, beside a canal in Provence, at an open-air concert at Wolftrap or Tanglewood, or on a trail in Yosemite.

A bottle of wine, a wedge of cheese, and maybe a baguette or a piece of foccaccia:  the combination leaves no reason to whine.

Entry # 2- e.r.a.

Here is the second entry in my guest post contest.  The author, e.r.a. has a blog of her own: twenty-something.  You can visit it at http://www.elizabethabend.blogspot.com/

Without further ado, here is her post...

twenty-something on wine by e.r.a.

I grew up in a sad, wine-less town. Thank goodness my dad is a wine hoarder. He has more wine in his wine cellar* than all of the stores** in Blackfoot, Idaho combined.

*After my older brother moved out, my dad took the furniture out of his room and started stacking cases of wine in there.

**Wal-Mart and Albertsons.

Last time we were all at home (probably drinking wine) my dad gathered my brothers, my mom, and me in the kitchen. I thought he was going to make a toast.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about your piles of shit,” he said.

“Oh, Chris!” my mom scolded. The offspring laughed.

My dad was referring to the coats and purses and phone chargers and shoes and books and computers and mugs*** that we left haphazardly around the house. After my dad’s speech, we all went out of our way to keep our piles of shit contained to our rooms and out of my dad’s kingdom.

***I admit they were all mine.

One day, I went to the wine cellar (see first asterisk) to find myself a nicely aged beverage. What I found was a giant pile of shit. “Busted!” I thought as I gazed over the wreckage of half-opened case after case of wine, empty boxes, golf clubs, Mother’s Day wrapping paper, and a hunting rifle.**** Packing material densely populated the room and the whole place reeked of Tommy Bahama.

****No one hunts.

I walked into the kitchen with some mad swagger. “Dad, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about your pile of shit,” I boasted triumphantly.

“That’s not shit, that’s good wine,” my dad said, which, to his credit, was entirely true. I know I must have broken him, though, because the next time I visited home there were homemade shelves in the wine cellar. The rifle was gone.

I’m not sure how my dad found the time to organize the pile of shit in the wine cellar because Blackfoot opened a new bar called The Wine Garden where he now apparently spends most of his evenings with his friends.

My friends like wine, too. Many of us drank our sophomore year of college through Italy where wine is cheaper***** than water. We weren’t technically of age according to our American university even though we were in Europe, so we learned how to hide bottles of wine in a free deposit box at an Italian bank and to drink wine from soda cans and to-go coffee cups when it needed to be concealed. Americans are classy that way.

*****And more delicious.

We continued the tradition when we got back home the next year and even spent Spring Break in a rented RV touring Napa Valley. Even though one friend****** wrecked the RV in a parking lot and another******* fell asleep on the counter at a tasting, I would venture to say that our outlook on wine is more sophisticated and complex because of that trip.

******Brenden. 

*******West.

Wine continues to be a part of everyday life for my friends and family. Last night my fiancé and I were home drinking a bottle of Cabernet. Every so often, I get kind of a sulfite reaction that makes my neck all red and blotchy. The wine made my teeth purple and gave me a dark stain across my lips. I also spilled on my white shirt.

“You look just terrible,” Alex said to me. “You probably shouldn’t drink red wine at our wedding.”

“Yum. Wine!” I said to him before passing out and snoring loudly.

And that, my friends, is the moral of the story:

Yum. Wine!

4th of July: An Intro to Wine vs. Beer vs. Hard Alcohol

I know that in my last post I was pushing the theme “drink American” for the 4^th weekend.  I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t really keep to this.  It’s not that I had loads of French wine to intentionally rub it in America’s face on her birthday.  I didn’t have wine at all this weekend.  It was too damn hot.  Readers of this blog know that I’m mostly a red wine kinda guy and red wine isn’t generally something that you think of as being thirst quenching on a hot day.  So, did I drink white wine chilled?  No.  I was eating BBQ and was sitting on the beach so I turned to a simpler beverage, beer.  Ice cold beer.  I’ve got to say, when Coors Light is “super cold” on a hot day at the beach, it just sounds a lot better than a spicy glass of heavy Syrah.  I feel comfortable admitting that even though I pretend to be a wine writer.  And, with it being the 4^th of July, I had Sam Adams Summer Ale (he was a brewer and a patriot, it says so on the bottle), and even had one of those Budweisers in the American flag can just to be patriotic.  So, while I didn’t follow my advice by celebrating American wine this weekend, I think I did a good job in sticking to my general theme of drinking American.

My choices in beverages this weekend made me think about the beer vs. wine vs. hard alcohol debate and why some people prefer one poison over the other.  Beer is refreshing, it’s simple, and it’s cheap.  It’s a college favorite for those reasons (and drinking game reasons, but that’s another story).  Hard alcohol is just poison.  I like it in drinks every now and then but don’t understand shots and don’t like the fact that most people drink it to get drunk instead of actually enjoying what they are drinking.  Then there is wine.  It is complex, varied, mostly more expensive, and a good bridge between the two.  Wine is 2-3 times the strength of beer and about 1/3 the alcohol content of the hard stuff.  It’s a good middle ground and perfect for enjoying with a meal- it compliments food (unlike hard alcohol) and doesn’t fill you up (like beer).

Sometimes one drink just sounds better than another.  Some people have favorite drinks.  Some people like to dabble and try out all they can.  I fall into this last group and it is for this reason that I prefer wine when given the choice of these 3 types of drink.  As I’ve mentioned many times, there are more different varieties of wine than anyone could ever possibly try.  Wine is more of an adventure drink.  It’s a more complex drink.  It’s a more balanced drink and is just more pleasant in general.  When I have a minute to breathe, I’m going to do a bit of research to further explore beer vs. wine vs. hard alcohol, but my choices this weekend started to make me think about the differences in these 3 families of drinks that are all (somewhat) similar.  If anyone has thoughts or angles of this discussion they would like me to look into, let me know and I’ll be sure to add it to the list for a future post.

Tomorrow, we are back to my little competition.  One of my friends, E.R.A., a successful blogger in her own right will be taking center stage when I post her entry.  Be sure to come check it out, it’s a good one!

Entry # 1- FAUribe

Well, it’s July 5^th and that means it’s time to start putting up our entries in my little contest.  I’m thinking that I’ll space out the entries a bit rather than just doing them all on back to back days.  I wrote some stuff this weekend and I still want to be a writer on this blog so I think I’ll post some of my stuff in between each entry.  This first entry is from my roommate, FAUribe.  He has a nice little story for us about his intro into the world of wine.  Hope you guys enjoy.  Remember, if you like his entry, be sure to write comments, telling us that, join the site, and tell your friends to check his post out.  Hope you like it!

Merlot – My Father’s Stepping Stone by FAUribe

Quick: name a varietal!  It’s probably your favorite that you immediately think of, and I can almost guarantee you it’s one of the first wine varietals you ever tried.  It might be Chardonnay,  Syrah, Zinfandel, or Cab Sauv, but I generally not surprised when the answer to the question is not Merlot.  It’s a simple, relatively inexpensive, and, most importantly, a polarizing wine.  It can be bitter, dry, and unsophisticated – traits which hopefully do not also describe Merlot aficionados.

But for me, the answer has always been Merlot.  And when I say always, I mean ALWAYS.  I come from a Latin family – a culture famous for its love of alcohol and drunkenness.  When people think of Mexican drinking, they think of tequila (and sombreros thanks to “brilliant” advertizing in the 80s) or Corona, but rarely do they think of them as a wine-drinking peoples.  My great-grandfather had his own vineyard in Spain that produced Rioja good enough to be served at all my aunts’ and my parents’ weddings, but at the end of the day, all my immediate family members would say that Merlot is their favorite.  This has 100% to do with my father.

My parents came to the US in 1984 (legally), with nothing but the American Dream in their pocket.  Sure, they came from well-to-do families in Mexico, but thankfully, no one in America cares what your father’s last name is.  For my parents, it’s been an upstream swim for the last 27 years, but I know that they would not have it any other way. 

My father, always the classy man, is a wine snob, but of a different kind.  He bets everyone he knows that he can pick out a bottle for $25 or less that would taste better than any $100+ bottle you can throw his way – a bold claim to be sure.  So what kind of wine does a man of such bravado drink?  Merlot.  And not just any Merlot, Chilean Merlot.

Who would have the nerve to drink Merlot on a NIGHTLY basis, and let alone from a non-established wine country like Chile?  That guy.  Whenever I ask him why he likes Merlot, he always starts with some story about how in the 80s Chilean Merlot got a bad rap because of pesticides or something (probably similar to the reputation of Gewürztraminer in the US after that whole anti-freeze (yes, that anti-freeze) fiasco) and that special restrictions are placed on Chilean Merlot that keep prices deflated.  I don’t have the time or the interest to find out if that’s true, but I’ll take him at his word.  But, since as far back as I can remember (and I have a great memory), he has drank Chilean Merlot almost exclusively.  And, as I mentioned before, Mexican families are more “liberal” with drinking ages for their children.  I won’t tell you that I got drunk at 11 years old, but I definitely recall having one of those mini (maybe 2 oz.) cups with just enough wine in it to get some good sips when I was still a young teenager.  That is where my viticulture started.  With a glass of simple, unsophisticated, underrated, cheap Merlot.  For me, that will always be the perfect foundation, one that I hope to repeat with my own children someday.

From there, it was easy.  Chianti was the next step (for some reason), then going down to lighter wines, up to more full bodied wines, over to whites, up to champagnes – all possible thanks to the strong foundation as a kid with Merlot.  I don’t want to get all cheesy, but almost all of my childhood memories involve Merlot in some way, shape, or form.  Whether it was watching my dad drink a glass of wine while playing songs that he wrote for movies and cartoons on the piano, watching soccer or baseball games together, going to the Hollywood Bowl to see John Williams, or the Looney Tunes, or Amy Grant (still not a Country fan), or family events, Merlot was there.  And so was my father.  And in 3 weeks, when we go to the Hollywood Bowl once more to see Lang Lang and Dudamel, my father, my mother, my older sister, my younger sister, my younger brother who just turned 21 last week, and I will pass around the bottle of Merlot to each other, pouring from the same proverbial bottle.