Wine Hack: Wine Education that Starts with Your Mouth Not with Your Head
140
Wine Hack: Wine Education that Starts with Your Mouth Not with Your Head
140Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
"Wine Hack" offers a new way forward. Learn wine like we in the industry learn wine. Spoiler: lots of tasting! This interactive book asks you to taste along with everyday food, drinks, and widely available wines to learn the four attributes that describe all wines, and even learn a few tricks for pairing wine with food.
This is the first book on wine that starts with your mouth, not your head. Teach your mouth wine and you will learn to find wines you love on a regular basis, no matter how snooty that wine shop guy is.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781630476311 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morgan James Publishing |
| Publication date: | 02/09/2016 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 140 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 6.80(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
EL CORAZÓN DEL PROBLEMA
Model: I could listen to you talk about mail all day.
Newman: Anything you wish ... I'll tell you a little secret about zip codes: they're meaningless.
— Seinfeld, 1997
I was studying for an MBA when I first became a willing and eager student of wine. Monetary policy and advanced regression were distilled down into chapters and classes and tests. It was all learnable with an investment of time. Imagine my frustration, perhaps much like yours as a student of wine, when after a year of reading books, I still didn't understand what I was tasting. I spent my days tackling the complexities of money supply, antitrust law, and balance sheets. Surely somewhere in the wine world someone had stumbled upon a simplifying theory, framework, or even cheap tricks to teach you this beverage. Bordeaux, Barolo, Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, American Oak, Brix, acidity — how do I understand everything from the rigid technicalities to the flowery poetry these experts espouse in the vast expanse of wine education?
Every book I found started with information to fill your head. Nobody started with the beverage in your mouth. Most of the educational resources start with lists of the first growths of Bordeaux and varietal descriptions, maps of winegrowing regions, and technical descriptions of the fermentation process — a dog's breakfast. They give you no order, reasoning, or explanation of what it means in regard to the wine you taste. It's not to say the information that they offer isn't fantastic. Don't think for a second that I didn't geek out learning that Rioja's ascension to the winemaking world started when a tiny bug almost wiped out all of Bordeaux's vines in the late 1800s, or that I don't appreciate how archaic Napoleonic inheritance laws still influence the way the great wines of Burgundy are made to this day. All of that book learning is great, but it has an Achilles leg.
Learning wine is very much like learning a foreign language. I was fluent in Spanish after studying throughout high school and college, living nonconsecutive years in Madrid and Buenos Aires, and having a very demanding Nicaraguan girlfriend. With a foreign language, you first have to learn the vocabulary, learning to express yourself without regard for grammar or rules. Then it takes practice to learn the grammar and rules for all situations. Wine is no different in that sense; you have to first learn a vocabulary to express what you're tasting. Then you need lots of practice, learning to apply that vocabulary to all the wines that come your way. Without the vocabulary, however, conversation is difficult. I've pursued a two-year, $10,000 educational program with the Wine & Spirits Educational Trust, which alone has brought me hundreds of hours of tasting. Professionally, I've probably spent over 2,000 hours tasting wine to become fluent. But nobody in the wine world ever really starts their education with "Dónde está la biblioteca?" and "Cómo estás?" They hand you a copy of Don Quixote in Spanish and assume you already have the vocabulary.
To their credit, the major trade publications — such as The Wine Advocate, Wine Enthusiast Magazine, Food & Wine, and Wine Spectator — have done a lot of heavy lifting to get people to where they are today. The 100-point score systems are helpful, as are their lists of recommendations and pairings in monthly issues. But because the number of wines is so great and the distribution of wine so fragmented, people are regularly challenged when wines from a magazine's list of, say, the best summer Chardonnays, aren't available at the restaurant or wine shop of their choice. It's like having a cheat sheet, but to a different test.
Joel McHale, Wine Guru
I get frustrated when reading tasting notes and scores in the major wine publications. These reviews provide little insight into the wine the writers are supposedly sharing with us. Here are two reviews of two different wines from the same issue of one publication. Guess which one was rated 93 points and which one 87 points?
Shows juicy energy, with savory, pomegranate, red currant, iron, and singed anise notes all woven together and backed by a long, iron-tinged finish that lets the sanguine hint echo.
Crisp, focused flavors of black cherry and fresh herbs mingle with light smoke and licorice notes in this lively red. Features a racy energy, with snappy tannins and fresh acidity.
If you were able to choke down the vomit, refrain from scratching out your eyes, and power through the written masturbation of "sanguine hint echo," you probably noticed that these wine descriptions, despite significant differences in score, suggest no other major difference in quality or style. One received 87 points, meaning "very good: a wine with special qualities," and one received 93 points, meaning "outstanding: a wine of superior quality and style." While the explanation of these scores provides some CYA, a 6-point gap on a 100-point scale, when they rarely publish anything about wines that rate below 80, seems material. Were you able to guess which was which?
More importantly, how do these two comparable reviews help you decide which wine to buy? These notes have become the established benchmarks for talking about wine, but they fail to communicate anything worthwhile to the reader, and they definitely don't help you predict whether or not you will like the wine. I imagine many of you have read a spectacularly delicious description of a wine, only to push away the glass with disappointment. Wine lists, handwritten notes posted to the shelves of wine shops, descriptions on winery websites, articles in the newspaper — we in the industry seem content peddling flowery prose as expert advice.
A fair counterargument to my criticizing these publications would be that such reviews are made for those who work in the business, not the wine-drinking public. Fair point, this is mostly true. But guess what? Nobody in the industry uses, much less reads, tasting note nonsense. When working with winemakers, you would never hear me rattle off a list of flavors to communicate the character or quality of a wine. It might be a component of the discussion, but typically we would just note how complex it was, and then talk about other things entirely to find a common understanding of a wine. What are those other things? Keep reading.
Unfortunately, this short-form poetry is the lexicon that inevitably leaks out to laypeople. Those new to the wine industry think this is what wine is about and these geeks proliferate the problem when they interact with everyday humans who only speak Earth languages. On their own, flavor descriptions are like zip codes: meaningless. Veterans of the wine trade know that an esoteric description of flavors will never sum up the experience of a wine.
I read a great interview with comedian Joel McHale in the July 2014 issue of Food & Wine, talking about his life before he blew up on the national stage: "I worked at a wine store in LA when I first moved there. When it got busy, I had to sell the wine even though I didn't really know about it. I would just say, 'dark fruits, blackberries, and cigars.'" Why wouldn't he? Tell people what they want to hear, and move on.
The alternative, of course, is to establish a shared language that allows people to articulate what they like and interact with wine sellers — a common lens through which every wine is judged, a lens that doesn't bend as each wine is examined, and that showcases the material differences among wines.
Happy Places
Why bother with this? First, I'm annoyed with these people in my industry who make wine unnecessarily difficult, if you can't already tell.
Second, and this is at the heart of this book, there's so much more enjoyment for everyday drinkers to unlock from this extraordinary beverage. Just as the difference between well-done and medium-rare affects your satisfaction with a steak, the ratio of olive oil to vinegar changes your opinion of a salad, and the level of complexity of flavors in your pad Thai makes or breaks your Thai dinner, the texture, balance, and complexity of a wine inevitably dictate your experience with it. I want more people to understand and appreciate these factors and ultimately adore all of wine as much as I do.
Third, because wine is almost always accompanied by food, I want to make sure you know some simple rules that will help you pair wine with food and keep you from faulting a perfectly good wine for the effect of some overwhelming cuisine. I will free you from the many silly myths of food and wine pairing. A couple basic principles you already know intuitively just need to be repackaged. You probably already know that there are only five tastes the human mouth can sense (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory). With this book, I promise that you can forge an understanding of how they interact with wine, preventing you from unfairly punishing the lovely wine you are drinking. Call it the Hippocratic Oath of Wine Pairing: first, do no harm. Wine will rarely corrupt the meal you are having, because more of those five tastes, if not all five, are likely at work in your dinner, whereas your wine might only have three, likely only two, of those tastes in the glass. In short, food can overpower the wine and corrupt the experience. After simply mastering "do no harm" with easy-to-remember rules, you are free to explore and enjoy, because the possibilities are truly infinite.
But first, we will put to pasture the standard, inadequate tasting note and its hackneyed attempts to objectively communicate the qualities of a wine. We will build a new, simpler vocabulary that will allow you to explore the great wine regions of the world and the great stylistic differences of different winemakers. You will soon fearlessly navigate to what you truly enjoy, and create a construct to appreciate how your tastes and preferences evolve over time.
Before we get started, I have two disclaimers, one of which relates back to why learning wine is ultimately a worthwhile, almost religious endeavor. First, the many dynamics that create wine make a perfect understanding impossible. Italy alone has over 3,000 native grape varieties. Weather swings from vintage to vintage can make the very same wine outstanding in one year and mediocre in the next. A winemaker might leave a winery, an owner might decide to cut costs, or an importer might decide to stop importing certain wines, all of which means that your opportunity to experience consistency with the wines you love is fleeting. Consistency would make learning wine easier, but clearly, the cards are stacked against us.
Ever watch the movie Somm? It's a documentary about a small group of smart people studying for the hardest wine exam on the planet, the exam that makes you a master sommelier, of which there are just over 200 total in the world. In the movie, after the tasting portion of the exam, the best of the best couldn't agree on what the very first wine was in the blind tasting, with just about everyone citing a different answer: Pinot Grigio, Chenin Blanc, Riesling, Alvariño, and Sauvignon Blanc. Clearly, I'm not knocking these guys; blind-tasting esoteric wines is super-difficult, and they admit as much. However, it should illustrate to you at the outset, that it is quite literally impossible to know it all. Even the most knowledgeable sommeliers can't know everything.
That said, it doesn't mean you need to give up nor should you even be intimidated. You don't have to learn every fact about every wine ever produced; you can learn principles over facts and stylistic commonalities over labels and vintages. You don't have to know the perfect technique for squats or how many grams of sugar are in a beet to know how to live a healthy life. Like I said, learning about wine is like learning a foreign language, and while some people are lucky enough to grow up in bilingual homes (e.g., people who grow up in Napa or in a winemaking family), and some are naturally gifted at processing what they hear (e.g., people with measurably more taste buds on their tongue, "super-tasters," of which my mother is one, I believe), the rest of us will need practice to learn this foreign language.
So don't cower in the face of this impossible complexity; embrace it and enjoy it. #TeachYoMouth the vocabulary. Besides, what is more fun than learning by drinking? I wish my college had offered that class. A bonus to mastering this vocabulary, for all the foodies out there, is the upgrade in your vocabulary for objectively measuring a restaurant or chef's cuisine. Complexity, balance, and texture are not just for wine; they are objective observations of food, too.
My second disclaimer is this: There's one thing, and it's really the only thing, that anyone can tell you when learning to understand and appreciate wine. Wine is highly personal, like any worthwhile experience. You ultimately decide whether you prefer the MOMA or the Met, Paris or London, Captain Kirk or Captain Picard, or Korean BBQ or Texas brisket. Never let anyone rob you of this personal interpretation of an artisanal, historic, decadent experience like wine. If you like Moscato for $6 a bottle, dammit, drink $6 Moscato and tell everyone else they are suckers for overpaying. Go ahead and try to give me crap for enjoying the delicious $3 carnitas tacos from a Napa taco truck, the $3.50 Bahn mi sandwich from the Saigon Sandwich Shop in San Francisco, the $1.35 Skyline cheese coney in Cincinnati, the $2 beignets from Café du Monde in New Orleans, the $2.19 fried chicken breakfast biscuit from Chick-fil-A, or any slice of pizza in New York City. These are my happy places. If Yellow Tail Moscato is your happy place, then show off your kangaroo lower back tattoo proudly.
Finally, and I swear I'm not stalling, there's one word that needs to soak in before we get started. Only one word: taste. Taste often, taste more, and taste with those who know more than you. Just as with Spanish, you'll get better the more you practice. The most fun you can have is putting two different glasses of wine side by side and simply observing the differences, swirling, smelling, and tasting, judging what you personally like better and finding the words to say why. We'll do this a lot in chapter 2 and it's essential to learning wine. Let's begin.
CHAPTER 2ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WINE
'Cause it's just another day in the life of the goddamn boss.
— Rick Ross
While you can't swipe left or "like" any part of this book, it is meant to be interactive. You can't simply read your way to wine knowledge; you have to taste your way there. So I'd ask that you not only read this book, but that you use it as your own personal tasting instructor. You'll need supplies for this safari. Rip out the Shopping List from the back of the book, pick up the suggested groceries and wines, and taste along as you read to truly digest the distinctions that each of the wines will express. My first pun! Drink! New rule: every time you read a pun, you have to take a sip of wine.
Truth be told, this book might make a far better app. But it costs like $100,000 to create a decent iPhone app, so we'll start with a book!
Before we begin tasting, I want to prepare your ears and eyes for some elitist words that might have intimidated you in the past. I'm going to use some of these words throughout the book — words like "structure" and "length." Don't be scared of them; I will teach you their meaning and they will lose their elitist power. Follow me through these pages and you will find more wines that you like and enjoy wine more frequently.
Be a BOSS
Welcome to the acronym that will help you conquer wine: BOSS. Yes, acronyms are lazy. And that's why they're perfect for my fellow Americans! I don't mean that as an insult. We all dedicate our time to things that are important — family, school, work, Candy Crush. We don't all have the luxury of spending 2,000 hours tasting wines to achieve proficiency. That is 100 percent of the reason why Robert Parker's 100-point score system works for wine collectors. And that is the reason we're using an acronym. My promise is to make this simple.
BOSS stands for body, oak, sweet, sour. All wines can be described by these four simple traits. Think of them as four sliding scales, like you might see on a sound system tuner. The adjustment up or down of the treble or bass creates a different experience for your ears. The adjustment of these BOSS traits creates different experiences in your mouth. Dialing up or down the body of a wine (from light-bodied to full-bodied), the oak flavor (from no oak at all to lots of oak), the sweetness (from totally dry to super-sweet), and the sourness (from high-acid or sourness to low-acid or not sour at all) is what creates the differences in wines.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Wine Hack"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Jeffrey Schiller.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: El Corazón del ProblemaChapter 2: All You Need to Know about Wine
Chapter 3: Explaining Some Science behind the Magic
Chapter 4: Finding God: Food and Wine Pairing
Chapter 5: Advanced Concepts
Chapter 6: Story Time
Epilogue: Be a BOSS