Warren's Wine World a 100% rating free zone

WELCOME TO MY WORLD

Welcome to the world of Wine! It’s a big place. Wine has been an integral part of western culture and its a big part of my life. I'm a sommelier and writer/teacher in Wineworld. There are a lot of great things to say about wine, a more than a lot of great wines to enjoy. That's the key; ENJOY YOUR WINE!

I really enjoy talking to people about wine. But, there are a couple of constants in Wineworld that I will not take part in.
You will not find scores or ratings of any kind, they are useless to you
There will be no lyrical adjective-laden descriptions of individual wines
No sales pitches or marketing mumbo-jumbo.
No elitist judgments of quality.
No rules for when and how to enjoy wine

In the Wineworld you will find
Logical, fact-based descriptions of grape types and individual wines that - to me - exemplify their type, their region or style.
Notes on the typical, commonly expected qualities of wines from around the world.
Tips to decide what wines you like, what additional wines you might want to try and what wines might offer you something completely different.
Tips to overcoming the rules of “what to drink with what and when to drink it” (which is just bulllsh*t anyway)

You can read more of my on-line published articles on buying, serving and enjoying wines from around the world. Find them at www.ezinearticles.com/?expert=Warren_Gregory




Wine can stand on its own but the best, the most charming, the most lasting in the affections of (this) drinker are those that are refreshing, subtle, expressive, lively and taut. Leaving one with the impression that they have more to give, another sip will be rewarding and they appreciate the trouble you went to in cooking food to accompany them at the table.

Blaufrankisch - an Austrian red grape to know

Austria ... easily associated with Germany, although from a wine making perspective sharing very little in common. Riesling, yes. Gruner Veltliner, the white grape that established Austria's post-wine scandal industry, yes. But Austrian Gruner is nearly always spicy and very dry. And Austria is much warmer generally than Germany with hot winds blowing off the Hungarian plain. 

And, what about red wine from Austria? There actually is quite a bit. And very good although not big, alcoholic, tannic and rich. If you're addicted to Napa Cabernet you will frankly find it laking but, if you enjoy elegant, accessible, food worthy wines listen up.

Blaufrankisch (pronounced just the way it's spelled) is thought by some to be the same as Gamay and, in Germany is called Lemberger. There is a bit grown these days in Washington (Shooting Star Blue Franc), California and New York state (Fox Run). It is a rare grape that can ripen in these places and withstand the sometimes harsh winter weather to ripen again. They call Blaufrankisch "Kekfrankos" in Hungary where its used to make the notorious, sluggish, sappy Bull's Blood wine. 

Blaufrankisch produces a medium-bodied  wine with food-friendly soft tannins and pleasing acidity. Cherries and red berries strung to smoke, spice and black pepper aromas and flavors can turn toward gaminess. That makes the wine a natural with game and strongly flavored meats, cheeses and sausages. As RP says, pair simple wines with powerful foods, powerful wines with straight-forward foods. 

Several to try; Neckenmarkt 2005, Umathum 2005 or the Zantho 2006 (very nice price) are all from the Burgendland region south of Vienna in Austria where those warm breezes blow and the grapes ripen. 

Chinon - red wine from the Loire Valley

Chinon is a village that was once a country retreat for French royalty. South of the Loire River, east of Saumur, west of Tours with slopes of tufa (chalk) soil that shelter the best vineyards. 

Chinon is a delicate, medium bodied red that is nevertheless dark in the glass, silky and yet somehow weighty with acidity and edges of tannin to hold a grip and show an elegant/earthy finish. Cabernet Franc is the grape, all on its own. OK, maybe 10% Cabernet Sauvignon. It is bone dry, not heavy and not too alcoholic. A fine companion to good cooking. 

Next door neighbor, across the river to the north, Bourgueil is also Cab Franc with that 10% of Cabernet being more commonly included. Darker and more in need of some time in the bottle. Maybe more appealing to some but I prefer the elegant reserve of a well made Chinon. Try something from Couly-Dutheil. Don't be afraid of some age, these wines mature into truly intriguing and sensuous red wines.  

Passetoutgrain

an odd wine from France's Burgundy region, a rare wine. 

Made in fairly large amounts - more passtoutgrain than Premier and Grand Cru combined - yet very rarely exported. An "every day" drinking red wine of Burgundy found on many bistro and cafe wine boards. The word translates "nothing in particular." It is a blend of at least 33% Pinot Noir with as much as all the rest being Gamay. Green grapes (Chardonnay) can make up as much as 15% of the mix but rarely do. Although its legally produced in any village level zone anywhere in the region, the majority is made in the cote Chaolonaise where Gamay begins to take over from Pinot Noir and granite sub soils take over from limestone ... connection? 

A good passetoutgrain is light to medium in body, translucent with fresh aromas, red berry-fruit flavors and innocent, thirst quenching acidity. Although it's characterized easily as a country wine of little real stature, a good producer using Pinot Noir grapes from a good village can make a very pleasing, rambunctious and spirited red Burgundy. It should be drunk young but that means within three or four years of vintage. Many are made with more than a third Pinot Noir and thus have the ability to progress a bit over time.

Passtoutgrain wines accompany simple foods with great charm, all the foods associated with Burgundy and the earthy, homey restaurants and cafe's of the little villages. 

Try the Henri Jouan Bourgogne Passtoutgrain 2007. Very good producer from Morey St Denis. Expect to pay $20 to $25. 

2010 trend : wine critics don't determine, they confirm

The modern wine industry is a conundrum. 

    Here you have a product that has always been most esteemed for its subtle, individual characteristics. Every tool of marketing is utilized to emphasize the qualities that set one wine apart from all the rest. But wine is a global commodity. To be successful a wine has to appeal to broad taste.     

So, you read all about the care of production and the expression of individuality on the bottle and you taste, more and more often, a wine that is generally appealing. The characteristics that have made wine fascinating and enjoyable for centuries are giving way to a competitive pressure to appeal to ever expanding markets. 

    

Consumers who actually prefer, and have developed their tastes by drinking mass-produced soft drinks, bottled waters, juices , dairy drinks, lager beers and distilled spirits are being pursued by the wine industry with big production, industrial products. One cannot fault them for doing this. It’s business. But the paradigms of wine quality are refuted by large production. The marketing arm of the wine industry continues to sell artisan individualism. The ‘story’ of wine is used to sell the reality, even as the story grows more estranged from reality. 

    

Thus: conundrum “a riddle”, a “puzzle.”  

   

 Thus, I say wine journalism has a responsibility to peel back the story and tell the truth. Difference may be more important than scores, as Hugh Johnson the English wine writer has asserted but, the reality is that difference is fading, categories are broadening and idiosyncratic individuality is losing its cachet. A wine that few understand is a useless anachronism. Understanding modern wine is not as complicated as it used to be. 

    

Human perception is every bit as complex as it has always been and that’s part of what must be emphasized. Wine journalism has to encourage people to go back to their perceptions , to reverse the polarity of wine discourse from 

           wine - critic- consumer

to

wine-consumer-critic

Use the critic or the writer to confirm assumptions and clarify perceptions not to set tastes. 

wine list organization as a model for retail wine

In working on a way to organize the displays at a wine shop it seems that most shops adopt a combination of varietal and regional organization. So, they'll have sections for Chardonnay, Cabernet, Pinot Noir etc. as well as sections for France, Italy, Spain, Germany and so-on.  

The goal of every retail set-up is to promote and sell across the entire range of products selected. In the typical set-up, if a customer is looking for Pinot Noir it's very difficult to lead them over to the part of the French section that has the red Burgundy (Pinot Noir) displayed. If someone asks about Malbec, it's tough to lead them to a related wine like Cabernet or Cabernet Franc. I hear from my retail customers all the time, "My South African wines don't sell at all," or "I can't sell French wine to save my life." Part of this is certainly that the customer service staff are not clear on the varietal links of familiar grape types and European regions. It is also the result of dividing varietals across sections while maintaining varietal sections that look complete to the average customer. They're not seeing the full selection but they think they are.

So I advocate a scheme of organization that riffs off wine list organization. Use varietal signs to identify where all the wines of a given varietal can be found together. Given that price points will merge and offer choice, it then becomes less of stretch for a customer looking for Pinot Noir to try a red Burgundy, for a customer looking for a German Riesling to try one from Washington state or for a customer asking about a Cote du Rhone to be informed that other Grenache based wines, from other places might offer pleasing alternatives. 

This kind of scheme has built in challenges but they are all good for the store's purchasing disciplines, for sales, for staff involvement and for customer satisfaction. It's still necessary to find strategic spots to keep most of a region's wines shelved together; so, the Italian whites could be shelved alongside the "Pinot Grigio" section, the Spanish reds could be next to the "Tempranillo/Garnacha" section and so on. The varietal signage can be arranged in such a way as to accommodate the most common blends. Thus Bordeaux wines, Claret and Meritage wines would fall between the "Cabernet" and "Merlot" signs. 

The wines of the world are varied and there is literally no system that can make it entirely simple. I know of several retailers and restaurant owners who are so concerned with seeming stuffy or high-minded that they choose to be satisfied with leaving out important categories or allowing them to languish, lost to staff knowledge and customer awareness.

A trend in the next decade is the re-emergence of helpful/knowledgeable retail sales ... and I would add restaurant sales. Consumers realize that ratings and recommendations from national publications are of limited practical use. This opens the door for people with passion to reinvent customer service and set up an organizational plan that will gently encourage exploration and product movement. Consumers still want and need guidance but they are finding it more in friendly face-to-face interaction. Price sensitivity occupies center stage with the consumer but there is a large segment, larger among consumers under 35, that wants to find the new and the different. I believe a scheme that integrates varietal and regional organization is the way of the future. 

a critic attempts ...

 I have always held on to a quote from Baudelaire concerning criticism, that the critic’s job is to “understand the intention “ of the artists and to “communicate this understanding to the reader” while attempting to “evaluate if possible the artist’s success or failure in achieving their stated goals.” In other words, don’t judge an artistic work by your own standards, try to look at it through the eyes of the artist. This protects the validity of aesthetic individualism but not at the expense of internal logic and rational vision.  

    

The only quote from Baudelaire I can find that relates to criticism is, “To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.” This quote asserts the critic’s right to be subjective but it retains the inherent duty to open the reader to the “widest horizon” possible, to give an opinion that is passionate and thoughtful but to elucidate the intention of the work as well. 

    

Then, I see words like violence, ugliness and aggressiveness applied to the painting of Matisse and Picasso in the early years of the Twentieth Century. Although these words were applied by contemporaries, I wonder if we can understand that perspective fully? Pre-WW1 Paris had not witnessed the overwhelming violence and ugliness that was to come and even the most aggressive paintings of those years seem exuberant, adventurous and perhaps jarring to some sensibilities, but ugly?   

    

If you look at two pictures from 1906-07. you get an idea of the point-counter-point that Matisse and Picasso were taking part in and you can see the clear contrast between two intentions. Matisse did his bucolic and sensuous painting Le Bonheur de vivre (the goodness of life) in 1906 and showed it at the Salon des Independants in March of that year. It was fundamentally, apparently, received as a summation and a repudiation of painterly tradition, mocked and howled at by the crowds that attended the salon (as Matisse’ picture of his wife in a large colorful hat had been mocked the year before) and noted for its clashing of colors and tension of line, figure and space. What Matisse did in this painting very successfully and for the first time was to make color the equivalent of light rather than a description of it.     

    

Contrast Le Bonnheur with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon which was done the following year as a sort of response to Matisse .… or, at any rate the two paintings have been juxtaposed by critical tradition. There are enough similarities between these two large canvases to make comparison fruitful yet they are clearly from two different creative universes.  

Vedanā

This little word means something like "raw sensation" in Pali, an ancient Indian language. It is only through observing physical sensation that a person can observe one's self and one's emotions and mind. And it is only through the observation of body, emotion and mind that one can understand the truth of things.

this is fundamentally what artists do. Observe. And I like to think this word captures everything that makes up what we call "art" along with our conceptions of it and the world .. which is everything. Sort of.

“Evil is done without effort. It is natural and the working of fate. Good is always the product of an art.”

    “Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation”

    “The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find”. 

    “The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated”. 

    “We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose”.

    “Champagne, with its amber hue, its éclat, its sparkle and its perfume, arouses the senses and produces a cheerfullness which flashes through the company like a spark of electricity. At the magic word "Champagne", the guests, dull and torpid with good feeling,awake at once. This lively, ethereal and charming beverage sets in motion the spirits of all; the phlegmatic, the grave and the philosophic are surprised to find themselves amiable; in the wink of an eye (or the pop of a cork) the whole banquet has changed its physiognomy”.

     Charles Baudelaire

Why does the industry, and professional wines sales so downgrade wines that are sweet or have an element of sweetness? There are many (... millions) of wine consumers who prefer some sweetness and a lot of legitimate styles that deliver.