Tips & Tricks: Wine’s Building Blocks and How To Detect Them

22 04 2011

For those loyal PnP readers (if such a thing exists), some of this will cover ground trekked out before in previous posts, but I thought it would be useful to get all of this info in one place.  Describing the smells and flavours of wine is inevitably a subjective experience, since we all process aromas and tastes differently, but that doesn’t mean that every description about wine is solely in the eye of the beholder.  Every wine has a number of objectively-discernable components that form the architecture of the overall wine; even if reasonable minds can differ about a wine’s flavour profile, they should generally come to common ground when discussing these vinicultural building blocks.  Here are the key components of a wine and how to pick them out of your glass: Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2008 Enzo B–…Er, How to Tell Your Wine is Corked

18 04 2011

This was totally not Enzo's fault.

I had what I’m sure would have been a great wine to share with you tonight:  the 2008 Enzo Boglietti Dolcetto d’Alba from the Piedmont wine region in northwest Italy.  Boglietti is a renowned producer, and Dolcetto (literally, “little sweet one” in Italian) is a grape varietal that probably gets less attention than it should, one that routinely churns out fruity, rustic, soft, food-friendly, value-driven comfort wines.  I had the kind of day that cried out for that kind of armchair-by-the-fireplace wine, and when I poured the first glass, the juicy, vibrant purple colour of the Dolcetto instantly reaffirmed my selection.  I swirled the glass, took a few deep sniffs, and smelled…

Garbage?

It was flat out bad.  Rotting meat, sulphur, a mildewy, musty odour like a full can of garbage that’s been sitting in your garage for a week.  Rest assured, the wine was not supposed to smell like that; it had definitely gone off somehow.  In the interests of science and blog journalism, I had a taste (though it took some internal convincing to drink something that smelled that horrible) and found much less compost-esque flavours but no life at all in the wine.  It was flat, thin and bitter, with faded fruit and significant levels of acid.  For an ultra-fruity varetial like Dolcetto from a vintage as recent as 2008, the wine doesn’t taste like that unless something went wrong.  So what did? Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: How To Preserve Opened Wine

12 04 2011

I am the only wine drinker in my household.  My wife is tragically allergic to wine, and my infant son is, well, an infant, so I’m on my own in terms of wine consumption.  Since I’m not falling down drunk at the end of every night, this inevitably means that I deal with a lot of half-full opened wine bottles which I have to try and preserve somehow…after all, there’s no point spending $30 on a bottle of wine to drink half of it when it’s showing well and the other half when it’s stale and faded.  Here are a few things to think about to make your wine last a little longer once you pop and pour. Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: What Wine Pairs With Spicy Food?

31 03 2011

There are a million and a half rules about food and wine pairing.  Some of them are good, common sense (i.e. match the body of the wine with the heaviness of the food); others are simply worn out dogma from times gone by (i.e. red with meat, white with fish).  I think there is a ton of flexibility built into putting the right bottle of wine with the right meal — there are a few clearly wrong choices in most situations (no Pinot Grigio with steak, unless you want the taste experience of drinking $23/bottle water with your T-bone) but multiple different routes to a successful food/wine match…in most cases, anyway.  When it comes to spicy foods, your options get a lot more limited. Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: Don’t Drink Your Reds Too Warm!

27 03 2011

This fridge wants to see your reds for a few minutes.

One of the most insidious falsehoods about wine that still gets passed around like fortune-cookie wisdom is that red wines should be served and drunk at room temperature.  If your “room temperature” is the thermostat reading inside a one-room stone cottage in the 1600s, you may be on to something, but otherwise you are doing your reds more harm than good if you follow this “standard” rule.  In my opinion (and that of every wine author whose book I’ve read), there is no dinner wine that shows best when served at 20-21 degrees Celsius (70-72 Fahrenheit)…and yet every time I go to a restaurant or a wine tasting and am presented with a glass of red, it tastes like it’s been stored in the furnace room or directly above the kitchen range (in a couple of places in town, it literally is!).  This, if you haven’t gathered already, is a huge pet peeve of mine. Read the rest of this entry »


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Tips & Tricks: How to Decipher a German Wine Label

18 03 2011

In preparation for a special celebratory edition of PnP tomorrow, I thought that tonight I would run over the finer points of wrestling with German wine labels.  German wine is often a struggle for people, either because they often think that every German white on the shelves will be sickly sweet (totally untrue) or because they don’t feel like wending their way through 16-letter words with two vowels on the label (go figure).  I’m actually a huge fan of German wine labels because they provide what so few other Old World labels do:  information.  Once you learn how to decode them, you can tell a lot about your Teutonic wine before you even open it. Read the rest of this entry »


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