I used to enjoy wine, but then it got too complicated

by YankeeJim | February 24, 2011 at 06:19 am

66 views | 0 Recommendations | 0 comments

I still enjoy it, in moderation.

After living in wine country in California for many years, I pretty much know what wines I like and what I don’t. Yet wine is a variable product.

The best wine that I have had in my lifetime was when I lived in Chicago in the 1980s and participated in a wine tasting club. We discovered Trefethen cabernet sauvignon and merlot and declared nothing could top it. I bought it by the caseload.

Then, when I moved to California, I visited the Trefethen winery. http://www.trefethen.com/

http://www.facebook.com/trefethenfamilyvineyards

It remains a family-owned operation and that’s why they continue to produce #1 products. OMG.

The flavor is multilayered that you enjoy from the moment it graces your pallet to the velvety finish. This is YankeeJim’s favorite wine.

“Velvety Chocolate With a Silky Ruby Finish. Pair With Shellfish.

Ridiculous wine descriptors may reveal more about a bottle's price than its flavor.

By Coco KrummePosted Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2011, at 10:08 AM ET

Earthy and relaxed wines. Or are they noisy and ephemeral?The seventh edition of Robert Parker's Wine Buyers' Guide is 1,513 pages. It weighs 4.1 pounds, more than a magnum worth of wine, and even carries an oversized electronic price ($24.95 on the Kindle). The heft is due, in large part, to over-the-top descriptions of the world's wines. If you're in the market for an "indispensible" bottle, you might check out the 1998 Chateau La Lagune. More "inimitable" than "indispensible" is the 2006 Chateau Malescot St. Exupery, which contains "notes of graphite, black currant liqueur, incense, and camphor."

Graphite. Black currant. Incense. And camphor? It sounds like something out of a Bollywood take on Hansel and Gretel. Never mind that graphite contains no aromatics, or that incense could mean any of a dozen flavors. Can a simple Bordeaux let loose such a witches' brew of fragrant notions?

George Taber, the reporter who covered the Judgment of Paris tasting, in which California first beat France in a wine tête-à-tête, is skeptical. "Wine critics want to be Zeus on a mountaintop," he says, but there's little objective basis to their declarations. The economist Richard Quandt, riffing on Henry Frankfurt in a missive titled "On Wine Bullshit," is less delicate. He declares the wine industry "intrinsically bullshit prone," one that "therefore attracts bullshit artists." Quandt puzzles over the term "spicy earth," from Parker's glossary: "I could go into my backyard and sprinkle some cumin, cardamom, turmeric and fenugreek; but how would I know that those are the right choices, rather than coriander, chili powder, caraway seeds and cayenne?"

Of course Parker is not the only culprit—he's just the most famous; impossible descriptions plague many reviews. Take Antonio Galloni's physics-defying phrase: "The 2005 Brunello di Montalcino is a model of weightless finesse." The review continues by conjuring up "dark wild cherries, minerals, menthol and spices."”