Honest Wines

The wine industry is a funny business.  Most wineries (the 99% if you will) aren’t necessarily in it to make a profit.  Sure, a profit is nice, and likely is a goal of most wineries, but think about all the startup costs for a winery.  Land.  Machinery.  Labor.  Time.  That’s a big investment for any would be wine entrepreneur.  I got to thinking about this after meeting the marketing and hospitality director of Ladera Wines the other day.  At dinner we began talking about the wine business and my parents mentioned a tiny winery they had once visited and voiced the question: how do they make ends meet?
The answer that we received from our industry insider surprised me slightly, but it also gave me hope for the industry.  He said that most people don’t open wineries seeking profit.  Most people open wineries because they want to make wine the way they believe it should be made.  I’m paraphrasing him here, but this caught my attention.  Most people open wineries because they want to make wine the way they believe it should be made.  An answer like this wouldn’t fly with the big boys of the industry that are out there to make a profit.  I also doubt that this answer would fly with the Robert Parkers of the world.  But, for me, your average enthusiast, I loved this answer and it immediately made think differently about the wine I was drinking.
I liked the thought that I was drinking a product that the winemaker designed for me based on his or her relationship with the grapes.  To me, this answer was a simple way of defining terroir and describing the winemaker’s relationship with all aspects of the wine making process.  From the land to the weather to the winemaker’s personal style and everything in between, making an honest wine so people can taste a winery’s personality is what wine making should be about.  These days where the mass produced wines are out there strive to be the same year in and year out, honest wines are hard to find.  I wish this weren’t the case, but since winemaking is still a business and because people like predictability, more and more wineries are making seemingly generic wine and losing some of that personality.
With my new goal of taking notes on each wine that I drink, I hope to be able to find some more honest wines so that I don’t find myself writing the same description each time I drink a Cabernet.  So, just a few weeks into my new mission, I have new ideas about how I will try to find honest wines.  I am going to strive to try multiple wines made by the same winemaker to see how his or her influence on wines varies from varietal to varietal.  I am also going to try to sample the same varietal from the same region made by several different winemakers in hopes of discerning style and trying to learn more about the terroir of a region.  I hope that taking these two steps will help me think about the process more and will help make me a more educated wine connoisseur.  I expect this to be difficult and I expect it to take some practice, but I also expect it to be more rewarding than the random approach to sampling wine that I have been taking.
My first test with my new approach will probably come in a few weeks when I make a visit to several wineries in northern California.  I also hope that I’ll get to try this approach out when I make it up to Napa again and visit Ladera for myself.  The wine we had the other night would have put Ladera on my list of places to visit by itself, but the insights into wine I received from our guest made it a must visit.
If anyone wants to take on this new approach to tasting with me, let me know and we will figure out ways to try different wines made by the same winemaker or we’ll start focusing on a region and see where that takes us.

New Year, New Goals

So, one of my goals for 2011 was to write 100 blog posts.  I started off strong, but wasn’t able to keep up the torrid pace that I set in February and March.  I got close but work got in the way and I had to scale back my writing in order to keep up with my job.  Another contributory factor in my falling off last summer and at the end of last year was the fact that I went through a phase where I just didn’t drink that much wine.  Sure, I had those times when I went up to the Malibu winery and tasted and had those meals with friends where we tried several different wines, but I just didn’t have any of those wine experiences that made me want to write about the stuff.  I’m still trying to figure out how to consistently find “post worthy” topics on the world of wine, so any ideas along those lines would be appreciated.

I’m writing this post because I’ve obviously found one such post worthy topic to write about, and that comes in the form of one of my goals for 2012: making tasting notes on all the wine I drink.  It sounds really easy, kinda lame, but I’m hoping that once I work at it a bit, it’ll turn into a valuable source of information for me.  I did something like this a while back but it didn’t gain any traction so hopefully this attempt goes better.  I’ve bought myself 100 note cards, and each time I try a wine, I am going to make my own tasting notes on that note card and file it away so that hopefully that card will help me remember what I like, what I don’t, and what I need to/want to try more of.

Here’s how I’m going to do this.  On the top of each card, I’m going to write the name of the producer (ex. Gallo Family Vineyard).  Line 2 will have the varietal, the region, and the vintage (Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley, 2008).  Line 3 will have the date on which I tried the wine and the format in which I tasted it (1/6/12, standard 750ml bottle).  Lines 3- the end will have my tasting notes (Ripe fruit and spice smell, tannic taste that overpowers everything else, might need to breathe more, but a decent wine with a meal and a decent value when on sale).

I hope that once I start writing down my impressions of each wine, I’ll become a better taster and better writer on the subject.  I expect my initial attempts at creating my own notes to be generic and kinda lame, but am hoping that this practice will help me become more specific and discerning when it comes to assessing, writing about, and ultimately enjoying wine.  I’d recommend anyone that enjoys wine but struggles when it comes to figuring out why or what they like in it to try this out for a while.  In this day in age of smart phones, pretty much everyone can make these notes on their phones rather than by carrying around note cards, so it should be a somewhat painless task.  I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.  It is said that Robert Parker tries 10,000 wines a year and while I know that I’ll only be able to taste a fraction of that number, I’m hoping that this new practice of mine survives until I make my next trip to a wine region so that I can really begin to learn characteristics of regions and wines for myself rather than just reading about them and then occasionally trying them.

This may not be your typical new year’s resolution, but it should be more enjoyable than most that I’ve made because after all, that’s the whole point when it comes to drinking wine.

I was serious when I asked for ideas on potential post topics, but for now, I think I have the next few figured out.  Later this week, I’m going to take a look at advertising in the wine industry and how/why it lags far behind advertising for the beers/tequilas/etc. of the adult beverage world.