Eight Ways to Find Good Wines
Marshall Sontag and I have been working hard doing research for a new online business we plan to start in the wine industry. One of the books I’ve been reading in this vein is Lewis Perdue’s excellent The Wrath of Grapes.
Perdue devotes a full chapter to the incontrovertible health benefits of moderate wine consumption, and the wine industry’s perpetual incompetence at capitalizing on those health benefits.
I’ll have more soon about our wine industry projects. In the meantime, I couldn’t pass this up....
Writing for the Napa Valley Register, Dan Berger has an excellent column with suggestions for how to find good wines.
From the article:
Be aware that the following suggestions are based on your having access to a knowledgeable wine merchant, not the 17-year-old stock clerk at the supermarket. That being said, here are a few things you can do to find wines that will be pleasing and not all that pricey:
1. Stage your own blind tasting. Buy two similarly priced wines of the same category (two Merlots, for example), and place them both in bags. Pour the wines without knowing which is which. Try the wines first without food and then with a meal. The wine you consume more of is the better one — to your palate.
2. Ask a wine merchant to suggest two different wines of the same type (for example, a California Sauvignon Blanc and one from New Zealand) and in a similar price range. Try the wines side by side to see how similar and different they are.
3. Ask a good wine merchant for the two best $10 wines in the shop, one white and one red, irrespective of type or country. See if you think they are worth the money.
4. Take the advice of the wine columnist who suggests a $12 bottle of something he or she thinks is sensational. But ask the merchant for something like it and not priced radically different. And try them side-by-side.
5. Ask a merchant for an interesting, “offbeat” wine, one most people would not discover on their own. (It could be something like gruner veltliner from Austria, a garnacha from Spain, or a chenin blanc from South Africa.)
6. Try a German riesling designated as Kabinett. You may be surprised at the fruit, the freshness and the vibrant acidity to balance the sweetness. Try it with highly seasoned foods — like Thai.
7. Buy a bottle of a dry oloroso sherry from Spain, and try it with creamed soup.
8. If a wine you’ve bought doesn’t impress you on first taste, decant it into a pitcher or decanter and see if a half-hour or an hour improves it. You may be surprised.
Marsh and I will be launching a wine blog soon, where we’ll be posting lots of tidbits like this.
Stay tuned for more.
