The Omnibibers’ Dilemma

posted by Robert in Snooth, Wine, Guest Bloggers

I have prematurely become an old man in at least one respect, I yell at mass media devices when I am angry or upset. I haven’t crossed the line to where I am screaming at horror movie characters to not enter rooms that are clearly occupied by axe wielding felons, but that is only a matter of time.

Thankfully there is precious little random wine talk in the main stream media – although get ready for some flag waving fun at the movies later this summer – to really rile my inner curmudgeon.

Yet somehow a famous food writer had me boiling while I was getting ready for work one morning.

Cutting to the chase, the radio bit was extolling the virtues of simple summer entertaining. Innocent you say? Hmmm. Like most of these pieces a grain of salt is necessary but usually not offensive. Easy enough to let go the assumption that most New Yorkers have manicured lawns with croquet courses out back and certainly easy to ignore the triple layered confection being extolled – I am sure it is simple for those handy in the kitchen – but impossible to let go the suggestion for summer wine.

The major affront was the presentation and not the wine. The wine was rosé by the way, I know, bold to recommend what I think has become a summer standard in the US with sales rising steadily every year and most major producers, even those outside the typical production zones in the south of France and the Mediterranean, ramping up production using a wider variety of grapes and in a wider variety of styles than ever before. Rosé has long since shaken the misperception that the category is monolithic and composed entirely of thick sweet confections suitable for kids. We used to carry a particular rosé at Vino made from nebbiolo that was impossible to keep in stock from April through September. That’s rosé made from one of Italy’s premier grapes made famous by Barolo often in short supply. Either a sign of the apocalypse or an indication of the acceptance of rosé by a wide swath of the imbibing public who can walk into an all Italian-wine store and walk out with a northern Italian “pinky” from atypical grapes.

What really had me yelling was the contention that the recommendation would be an affront to self styled wine connoisseurs who would surely look down their collective snouts at such a simple wine. I am aware that there exists a cabal of wine snobs – probably hold up in a wood paneled room somewhere in Yorkshire – that is quick to label wines with less than first growth pedigree as plonk. However, my experience is much different from the cultivation of airs this imagined connoisseur affects to establish superiority (an attitude present in many fields by the way, and the adjective for them is the same across the board) and much more akin to the individuals’ voracious search for the new and the interesting. I suggest that people both expert and novice have embraced an attitude that looks not constantly for the affirmation of pedigree and label but seeks balance in choice with a healthy respect for a wine or beer or cocktail’s place in the setting. To suggest that a category of wine is put upon by a large number of expert’s is to miss the evolution of connoisseurship and simply an excuse to spread misinformation to bolster one’s own bona fides – a form of snobbery. This makes my job more difficult and ignores the rise of this class of drinkers I like to call Omnibibers.

Anyway, this wine connoisseur and omnibiber is going to have a bottle of Lambrusco with a bowl of broccoli raabe and pasta tonight, I hope no one is looking.

Robert Scibelli is a lecturer and administrator at New York’s premier wine school, International Wine Center.

I’d like to be, under the sea..

posted by Robert in Wine Industry, Guest Bloggers

In an Octopuses’ wine cellar, you see.

My rhyming skills aside; wine producers have been conducting ongoing experiments into the undersea ageing of wine in bottle. A glimpse into the rationale of one such recent experiment:

“This week one of France’s oldest champagne houses, Louis Roederer, sent divers to place several dozen bottles of its Brut Premier on the seabed of Saint-Malo bay. In a year’s time experts will assess if it has matured with a different or better taste than in the traditional cellars of the Champagne region. In order to prevent the bottles being stolen by underwater thieves, the divers have hidden them. The cellarmaster who thought up the idea has argued that the seabed off the Normandy coast makes an ideal wine cellar, the temperature is a constant 10 degrees, the movement of the current gently rocks the bottles and there is no danger of damage from UV light.” - June 4, 2008, The Guardian, UK

What really struck me about the article was the image of Champagne thieves strapping on scuba gear to plunder the treasure buried beneath. I imagine it might be easier to drop in at the local market, but that would deprive future generations a good story.

It also highlights the lengths that producers are willing to go through to protect their considerable investment and ensure that their wines are in top condition (if not at their peak for drinking) when released to the market. Wines like Champagne may age 3, 5 or more years prior to release and you really can’t have those bottles just sitting on the kitchen counter.

While it will be interesting to see the results of this experiment – cut to image of a school of fish sabering open bubbly and riding the stream of bubbles to the surface – it really does drive home a divide in the quality of preparation in wine for sale on the producer side and how that regard for the wine’s health deteriorates at each step in the distribution chain. From non-climate controlled container ships or trucks to warm distribution warehouses and retail shops to, well, your kitchen counter.

I was reminded of this as I frantically searched the house for all of those wines I had been saving for some occasion or another and piled them in the refrigerator. If you are reading this in the Northeast you know why, record heat and humidity which drove the internal temperature in my apartment to 120 degrees and had very much the same effect on most non-subterranean dwellings.

Every step a wine takes away from its place of origin is an opportunity for disaster. The better importers and retailers go through great pains to protect their wines and make sure the bottles make it to you in as close to the intended condition as possible. But even with the climate control shippers and retail shops chilled down to cellar temperatures you will always lose a step or two.

That is why travelers who try to recreate a wine experience (say a bottle of Chianti at the Tuscan vineyard where the grapes were grown) are almost always disappointed – and not just by the fact that they are no longer at a Tuscan Villa, but by the fact that the wine – even though identically made – is just not quite the same.

What to do? Not much I am afraid, try to store your wine away from light and heat and enjoy it for what it is and not what it was. The best bottle of Barbaresco I have ever had was at the winery in Piedmont. It was twenty years old and tasted and smelled as fresh as a trellis of roses. I was partially humbled by the fact that the wine had traveled probably 20 feet in its 20 years and existed in the perfect conditions of the producer’s cellar for that entire time.

I can never have that bottle again but that is alright, that is what wine is at its best as fluid as the tides in the sea.

Robert Scibelli is a lecturer and administrator at New York’s premier wine school, International Wine Center.