Grain Snobs In Grapeland
Irradiated by LabRat
So, as I think I’ve mentioned before, Stingray and I are pretty enthusiastic about beer, with a pretty wide range of styles and individual brews sampled. We’ve had enough to get picky about it, and to have developed very specific ideas on what we like and how to put those kinds of flavors into our own brew. We know what kind of beer to pick to go with food when we’re dining out, should the restaurant have any kind of beer selection, and in general we think fermented grains belong pretty much right alongside other fermented products when it comes to the range and sophistication of flavor you can get out of them.
Wine, however, we have always been less enthused about. I came to the general conclusion a long time ago that I just flat don’t like fermented grapes very much, and while I tested this assumption multiple times in multiple contexts- usually at some high-end restaurant or another- it pretty much always bore out that while I like champagne all right, wine ranges from “meh” to “BLEH!” for me no matter how much it costs and whose wine list it was on.
Time passed, and on some lark picking through Netflix or Hulu looking for afternoon entertainment, Stingray happened across John Cleese’s Wine For the Confused. Cleese is amusing in just about any context, so he felt blowing an hour of his afternoon with a cigar, a beer, and Cleese was worth sitting through potential wine snobbery. I was off amusing myself in some other context- probably gaming- so I was left out for the time being.
At least, until wine bottles started appearing on the kitchen counter and glasses of various dark red substances started appearing next to his mousepad on weekend evenings in place of the usual IPA, Manhattan, or gin and tonic. I mostly ignored this until invited to share the Pinot he was opening, which I drank a glass of and conceded was inoffensive. At which point I was also invited to hear the message of the Cleese, which boiled down to “wine often tastes good, what you will like will depend on what tastes you like rather than its source or price tag, and anyone who tries to sell you wine based on those characteristics is shitting you”. The rest outlined the basic families of wine and their likeliest characteristics so as to give an idea of how to look for something that tastes like things you like.
Fair enough, I conceded. Reasonable enough endeavor- find cheap with at least some approximation of cheap and tasty, try various things based on educated guessing, see if we can’t develop some sort of a palate for the stuff.
Here’s what we’ve learned so far:
- Wine snobs still drive us insane and make us want to punch them in the face. No change there. But of course not everyone who likes wine is an insufferable snot about it.
- Wine tastings in which perfectly good wine winds up spit somewhere baffle us utterly. Okay, we get that the point is to avoid being smashed, but if you’re spitting out something good, fer Chrissakes either turn in your car keys or taste fewer things! You don’t see beer people go around spitting perfectly good brew into buckets at parties.
- The reason I had so strongly disliked just about every spendy wine I’d been served in a restaurant is partly because I had no idea what I was ordering beyond “white or red, if it costs that much it’s got to be as good as the food”, partly because Stingray was usually doing the choosing and our preferences are extremely different, and partly because between the two of us we’d been managing to go after French reds that were roughly 60% Cabernet Sauvignon and 40% tannins.
- So far we have discovered a complete non-relationship between how much something costs and how much either of us will like it. Zero, no correlation at all. This was at least a mild surprise. There does seem to be some relationship between the cost and the complexity of the flavor, however. Much to our chagrin, one of the best bets for a glass of plonk at dinner that will please both of us seems to be known as “Two-buck Chuck”. Much worse, Trader Joe’s seems to be one of the best places to scout out good bets. Wading through Santa Fe hippie nests every month is making us grouchy, at least until we open the results.
-However, we HAVE discovered that some wines not only pair well with food, they actually require food to be tasty. One bottle went from obnoxious to thoroughly likeable just by bringing out something with a bit of fat in it to snack on. No wonder wine and cheese are such a die-hard pairing. Beer is just not this picky.
- Naturally we have nearly opposite tastes. I like sharply tart whites with a slightly sweet finish, he only seems to like very dry whites. He likes big, aggressive reds that taste like someone’s been soaking their cigar in it; I only tend to like much mellower, fruitier reds. Probably not a surprise given our respective tastes in beer.
- The whole experience thus far has made this series an exercise in hilarious schadenfreude. (There seems to be a trend in British television for demystifying wine. I wonder which winery is donating to the BBC?)
April 18th, 2011 at 5:28 pm
I think it is more of a British thing, since it’s also where laithwaites started.
After WFTC myself, I gave the laithwaites thing a try. You pick either white, red or mixed, and they ship you a case every three months. It’s all off-label stuff, which is fine for this snob-hater. I get decent vino at about $10 a bottle and I don’t have to think about it. The reds tend to be big and dark, so ray’s tastes probably run similar to mine.
The whole Columbia wine club thing works for me. If it doesn’t work for you, you’re only out $100 on the first case.
April 18th, 2011 at 5:59 pm
Off the subject of wine, but on the subject of John Cleese documentaries: John Cleese has a thing for lemur preservation, and he has a fabulous documentary on lemurs that was made for PBS in the late nineties. A search for John Cleese lemurs will turn up the Google video version. If you liked Wine for the Confused, In the Wild with John Cleese is worth watching!
April 18th, 2011 at 6:24 pm
The big wine adventure is good, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oz_and_James_Drink_to_Britain is even better.
April 18th, 2011 at 8:10 pm
I would’ve figured the same thing about “expensive? Must be good, then” at restaurants until I saw a bottle of sutter home at a gas station for less than olive garden charges for a glass of the same thing.
That’s also right around the time I realized olive garden straight up sucks.
April 18th, 2011 at 8:23 pm
“Wine tastings in which perfectly good wine winds up spit somewhere baffle us utterly.”
but…but…palate-dulling!
April 18th, 2011 at 9:11 pm
Something you may want to consider is box wine - alot of is pretty good, especially at the higher end of the price scale, but even then it’s a fair bit cheaper that quality wine in a bottle. A nice advantage is that because of Bag in Box(a technology, originally invented to transport battery acid of all things), you can leave the whole thing either on either the counter or in the Fridge, and drink it one glass at a time. It’s getting more popular with consumers for this reason, and more winemakers are starting to offer it to meet demand.
There are a coupla websites selling wine at steep discounts in Flash Sale setup(IE like woot, who also sells wine). Keep in mind that these places tend to sell mid and upper price wine - check out Lot 18, Wine Till Sold Out, and the Wine Spies.
April 19th, 2011 at 6:15 am
I’ve pretty much been a beer drinker, except for a glass of wine with Italian food. Then last fall my wife and I spent two weeks in Italy celebrating her (mumble)th birthday, and I had wine every day. I stuck with house red for the most part, and it ranged from really good to outstanding. The Italians know how to make wine, and they’re not at all snobby about it (coughFrancecough). Only problem is that they keep the best stuff for themselves, so you have to go there if you want it.
I agree with you about wine snobs too. Not long ago I saw next to a trio of them while I was having a beer. The snobbiest one was a guy who, a few minutes before his friends arrived and they ordered a bottle of wine, was drinking Coronas and having shots of Jameson. Honestly, that red stuff in your glass could have been pig blood for all you could taste after THAT.
April 19th, 2011 at 6:39 am
Looks like NetFlix doesn’t have the Big Adventure series. Damn. I like James May on Top Gear.
Welcome to the not-snob wine world. We found a huge wine club that meets once a month or so around us. Because of its 200+ size the snobs don’t dominate, though it does get a bit noisy for our taste. With the size we draw good guest speakers, 12-15 bottles to taste, a lot of good information and 20-25% off case orders. We don’t spit out the samples either.
April 19th, 2011 at 6:53 am
Too bad we don’t live closer. My other half is a wine snob wannabe who comes off as likeable dork (so maybe more of a wine nerd?). His obsession with wine means that even if he hasn’t tasted it himself, he has a very good idea what a 2008 Pinot Griogio from a specific part of CA will taste like and, given their tastes, whether a specific person will like it.
He says if you’re looking for a white that both you and Stingray will like (though neither may love) try The Conundrum.
April 19th, 2011 at 10:12 am
I tend to like wines that are similar to the beers I like. Paint scorching IPAs and Cabernets, both.
April 19th, 2011 at 12:26 pm
SmartDogs- will do, thanks for the tip. We’ve so far found more red we can more-or-less agree on than white.
Perl- Yeah, that’s Stingray. He’s got his tarlike IPAs and thick stouts, whereas I tend to like lagers that will give you a quick punch in the snout with hops and then scamper off your palate just as quickly.
April 19th, 2011 at 1:42 pm
I’m thinking most wines are 2% palatable and 98% hype. My maxim is that if you like it, drink it and don’t waste your time finding something else, unless you like spitting.
April 19th, 2011 at 5:28 pm
With Bag in a Box, you can also run it through a modern restaurant carbonation machine … carbonated cheap wine on tap!
April 19th, 2011 at 6:08 pm
You have found the secret, drink what you LIKE, and price really has nothing to do with taste…
And Merlot is nice with a good steak 
April 20th, 2011 at 6:46 am
I love good wine and beer.
I love that my shift partner and I can get fascinated by a good bottle of wine (invariably red; he can’t get excited about whites for some reason), and we don’t give a good goddam how ghey it looks. (Despite how our wives snicker.)
I love this blog.
I’m not completely impartial to the bottle of cheap-ass Sutter Home Riesling that I unscrewed a few minutes ago.
April 20th, 2011 at 9:56 am
Wine in a box is also useful in backpacking/zombie apocalypse/bug-out/survival/etc. bag. The bag inside the box serves as an excellent bladder stand-in and is much lighter than carrying a glass bottle around.
May 6th, 2011 at 9:05 am
Try Valpolicella; it’s bold, yet very approachable for teh win3 n00bz. Bolla brand can be found for about $16 for a magnum. Also, Montepulciano di Abruzzo is great, and the Farnese brand can be had for $7-9 a bottle.
Then, if you desire, you can move up to Amarone di Valpolicella and Brunello from the same areas (Veneto and Tuscany - specifically Montalcino, respectively) as your taste becomes more intricate. If you can taste good beer, then you can taste good wine. Just don’t get caught up on price and remember FOOD + WINE is almost always better than just WINE.