wine tonight!

Here are 7 whites that are handy to have around, from the lightest to the heaviest in weight:

Vinho verde is a light, refreshing, slightly effervescent albariño blend from Portugal. Serve it with light green vegetables, salads, oily fish, and fiery  Mexican or Indian foods. It is also friendly to many cheeses and makes a good wine to serve with a cheese platter or as summer aperitif wine. Like muscadet from France’s Loire Valley, it’s a great value in a light, refreshing wine.

Gruner veltliner is a light-bodied Austrian white that works well with modern spicy appetites. A great choice with light, spicy dishes that might have a bit of sweetness: teriyaki, guacamole, mulligatawny, fish tacos or gumbo for example. It often comes in 1-liter bottles, making it a good deal.

Verdicchio from central-eastern Italy is light, dry, and reasonably priced. Have it with fish and chips, Caesar salad, vegetarian pasta, clam chowder, pasta with smoked salmon, pizza with anchovies.

Pinot gris and pinot grigio are the same grape. Labeled ‘pinot grigio’, it’s a light rather neutral wine; labeled ‘pinot gris’, it’s a medium-bodied wine with more spice and honey. It is widely available but not often paired well with food. Serve with ham, cheeses, (fondue!), Chinese food, dim-sum, mushroom pasta and pumpkin or squash dishes.

Torrontes is an unusual white, almost exclusively grown in Argentina. Medium-bodied and veeeery aromatic, it’s a bit similar to viognier. Pair with cheeses, smoked meats and seafood or drink it alone.

Chenin blanc is widely available from the U.S. and South Africa, in a range of prices. French chenin blanc from the Loire Valley is called Vouvray and other village names. It’s a wine to serve with light, delicately-flavored foods:—sole cooked in butter, trout with almonds, tilapia in cream sauce, chicken curry, or chicken salad with apples and almonds, and pumpkin or squash dishes.

Viognier is aromatic and a bit sharp in flavor. From France it can be pricey, but there are some value-priced examples from Washington and California. Like chardonnay, it’s rather full-bodied and can stand up to chicken and light pork dishes. It is excellent with lobster, crab, scallops or shrimp (especially served with saffron mayonnaise), mild curries such as chicken korma, and Mediterranian herbs (rosemary chicken, halibut with lemon-thyme butter or Provencal fish stew.

Pay a little attention to matching weight and sweetness to the foods you’re serving, always serve dry whites chilled, and they will add a lot to your spring and summer table.

Cheers!

Archive

February 2010:

10 Things Everyday Wine-Drinkers Should Know about Vintage

Buying wine is always a gamble. It could be corked, it could have been stored badly, or it could simply be a wine that everybody else loves and you hate. Vintage is one of the clues you can use to raise your success rate.

Vintage is more than just a subject for wine connoisseurs comparing first-growth bordeaux. Unlike food and drugs, wine doesn’t come with a use-by date stamp on it. When you walk down the shelves of a supermarket, it’s buyer-beware*.  It’s up to the consumer to judge if the wine is still in its prime. Here are a few things to watch for:

1.   Most whites are meant to be drunk young. Chardonnay and riesling can age.

2.   Rosés (rosados, rosato, etc.) are not made for keeping. I wouldn’t buy a rosé that was more than a year old, with the exception of a Cotes-de-Provence or maybe a Tavel.

3.   Some reds can’t age either. Zinfandel will lose all that fabulous fruit and have nothing left within 2 years. So will gamays (such as Beaujolais).

4.   Beware of non-vintage wines, which includes many sparkling wines. Ask how long it’s been in the store. Most everyday sparkling wines are best with a year or two.

5.   Wines priced under, say, $15 (i.e. most of the wine sold) aren’t meant for long aging. There are some cheap European wines that will age well. (see no. 7)

6.   Wines with more tannins can and often should age for 5 years or more: cabernet sauvignon (including Bordeaux and meritage blends), nebbiolo, tannat-based wines (madiran and some other wines from far southern France).

7.   Brooaaadly speaking, American wines are made to be drunk in the next 4 years. Even most cabs.

8.   Brooaaadly speaking, European wines are made to last awhile. In 2001 I bought a very cheap red in Corsica (probably nieluccio) which I kept meaning to drink, and as time went by it looked scarier and scarier. A few months ago I finally I uncorked it at a party and –surprise! – it tasted very nice.

9.   If you decide to hold the wine for a while, store it in a cool dark place, away from vibration. (Not in the kitchen!) If it gets overheated, open it and hope for the best.

10.        Wine is constantly changing. This means that if you taste a wine and like it enough to buy, go ahead and drink it over the next few months. In another 6 months you might not care for it. Now if you’re a person who buys a case of one particular wine (which I’ve never done as a private individual) this all becomes easier. You can open a bottle periodically and when it hits perfect pitch – zing! – you know to drink it over the next few months. When in doubt about whether to drink or hold…drink it!

*A good wine shop will pull or mark down wines that are past their prime. But many supermarkets will hold zinfandels and whites until they sell. If it’s marked down, check the vintage!

January 15, 2010

Last month I bought some Ventana 2007 chardonnay ‘Gold Stripe’ from Arroyo Seco. Afterwards I did some idle googling to see what kind of press it was getting. The first comment I came across was a consumer review at www.epinions.com from a fellow I’ll call Mr. Crankypants. “I recently purchased a bottle of the Ventana Monterey County ‘Gold Stripe’ Chardonnay”, he writes, “and sadly report that this is, perhaps, the most awful tasting wine I've tried all year.” He describes the aromas as “rotting fig pulp, rubber, cheese” and characterizes the palate as “over-ripe fruit, fig”. And he was incensed that the winery was selling this wine for $20.98. “I recently purchased a bottle of this wine for 99¢ at a local discount store. This same bottle of wine is being marketed for $20.98 ($14 plus 7% sales tax, plus $6 shipping) by its producer. That's a $20 price differential. What's going on?”, says Crankypants. “Is this a good wine? Why is there such a price difference?”

What’s going on is that “Is this a good wine” isn’t the straightforward question it seems to be.

Wine is an agricultural product, dependent on weather. And it’s dependent on time. No one would expect a head of lettuce to taste the same 3 months after harvest as it did the day it was picked. Some wines will taste better 3 months later, worse 3 months later, better a year later, and better still in 2 years. Or it could develop in exactly the opposite way. It changes constantly in the bottle, sometimes dramatically.

Most products that change character and quality over time have use-by dates. Medicines, for example. Or foods. But wines do not. A store can legally sell a wine that has passed its recommended drink-by date. It isn’t unusual to see a 5-year-old zinfandel or rosé on a grocery store shelf even though the poor shopper who buys those wines will complain as bitterly as Mr. Crankypants about the quality of the wine. (Obviously a good wine retailer will remove those wines from the shelves.) Despite the cliché of drinking fabulous 30-year-old wines, most American wine isn’t made for aging (unlike, say, Bordeaux, or Burgundy).

A few years ago a big wine store in Seattle offered a lot of premium Australian wines at deep discounts, some marked down $20-$30 or more. I’m a sucker for really good Australian wines, so I bought a few things. A couple of the wines were just stupendous, but others had passed their prime. They didn’t taste bad, just weak, and undeserving of even the sale price I paid. But when you buy knocked-down goods, that a risk you take.

Wine is also a fragile product. It’s vulnerable to poor storage. Heat, vibration, light and fumes can damage wine. (How many restaurants store wine above an espresso machine or a toaster oven?) Wine makes a lot of stops between the winery and the eventual store shelf or restaurant, so if it happens to be left out in the heat or stored in a warehouse with paint or insecticide fumes, that can impact the wine.

Now let’s reconsider that Ventana chardonnay. My 2007 Ventana chardonnay  was a favorite at a holiday tasting I had a few weeks back. I like it very much. (I don’t know what vintage of Ventana Chardonnay ‘Gold Stripe’ Mr. Crankypants bought for 99 cents—he didn’t say.) The nose is clean apple and lemon, the palate is lush with flavorful fruit and lightly oaked. So...either Mr. Cranky bought a vintage that was dramatically worse than the one I’ve been drinking, or – and this is more likely –- he bought wine that was marked-down to 99 cents because it had been damaged through being stored in high heat, light, fumes or other bad conditions.

The moral of this story (yes there’s a moral!) is that the wine the winemaker tasted in the winery, the wine tasted and reviewed by Wine Spectator, the wine tasted by the wine buyer at your local retailer, and the wine you eventually taste at home are all different wines, even though the label may be identical on all those wines.

And the answer to Mr. Crankypants’ question “Is this a good wine?” is “Maybe your bottle was bad, but mine was pretty darned good.” (And BTW only $10.)