Bringing Wine

So you've been invited over for dinner and you're not sure what wine to bring?  I got you!  There are several ways you can arrive at a decision of what to buy, and its a good idea to have a sense for what you want BEFORE heading down to the wine shop (in this case, wineLIFE, I'm sure) to make your purchase.  Just follow this easy wine buying strategy, and you'll be in and out of the store in no time with the perfect bottle for the event!

When thinking about what wine to buy, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Who will I be drinking this bottle of wine with?
If you're visiting good friends, and you're not particularly worried about what they will think when you pull the bottle out of the bag, then skip to question 3.
If this is your first time to someone's home and don't know what's for dinner, go red. Think Cabernet Sauvignon or Syrah - these wines have wide appeal. 
If you want to impress - meeting the parents, going to the boss's holiday dinner, wowing a client - go with a wine that has a good reputation, whether red or white, still or sparkling.

2. What food will I be drinking this bottle of wine with? 
If you know what's for dinner, go with rules of thumb that work - whites and lighter reds for fish, pork and poultry, richer reds and bold whites for red meat and game.  If you know me, you’ll know that I abhor wine rules, but in cases when you’re not sure what’s being served, it helps to narrow down the choices.
3. How much should I spend?
In most cases, $15.00 can get you a great bottle of wine. 
If you are eager to impress, be prepared to spend at least $20.00
If you know what is being served, go with the tone of the menu. If your host is just having hors d'oeuvres or making guacamole, a bottle around the $10 mark should be fine, but if he's going to town with confit duck and wild mushroom risotto, your bottle should live up to his efforts. 

4. Should I gift wrap it?
Yes you should! Presentation makes all the difference - a fun wine bag or just wrapping the bottle in nice tissue paper shows you really appreciate being invited over and the wine purchase wasn't strictly obligatory. 

A Few More Tips...

Be open to the possibility that your host may have the wine for dinner taken care of and that they may put your bottle on the rack to enjoy another time - that's a great way to offer a wine gift!  

The wine, your experience buying the wine, even the bag you brought it in can all be great fodder for conversation. Consider this when making your buying decisions. 

Sparkling wine is always fun and is not necessarily just for celebrations - they go great with foods that call for crisp whites. Champagne is usually $30.00 or more per bottle. If you don't want to spend that much, Cava and Prosecco are other popular alternatives that cost a lot less. 

Happy shopping!

Why Champagne?

Not that anyone has ever actually asked me this question, but I thought perhaps it is something we could delve into, what with my upcoming True Champagne tasting at wineLIFE. (hope you are registered already!)

Just to clarify, at the risk of sounding cliché, all champagne is sparkling wine but not all sparkling wine is champagne. Champagne is a place, a region defined by three towns that form sort of an acute triangular slice a mere 100k east of Paris. The towns, cathedral-and-cobblestone-clad Reims, the even smaller Epernay, and the southern satelite of Aÿ create a triad that contains some of the most valuable Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vineyards in the world. The other triumvirate of Champagne is the trio of featured grapes - the two aforementioned, joined by a much more obscure Pinot Meunier in a blended bubbly that varies in style from house to house depending on its recipe.

Here in Champagne exists the greatest anomaly of the wine world: vintage wines are the exception, not the rule. Not only are the wines a blend of grapes, the traditional practice in champagne is to reserve wine in stainless steel tanks every vintage, usually over about 5 years, so as to blend across vintages to achieve the house style. Most champagne sold in the US is non-vintage brut, at around $30.00-$40.00 a bottle - Veuve Cliquot Yellow Label, Taittinger, Laurent Perrier and Pol Roger are some more recognizable ones.

Vintage champagne is only made when the conditions are perfect - not a common occurance in this cool, northerly region. They are given the lofty title Tête de Cuvée, the top pop (tête = head) and fabulous names like Veuve Cliquot’s La Grande Dame, Moët’s Dom Perignon, Laurent Perrier Le Grand Siecle (literally “the great century”) and Louis Roederer’s now highly unpopular but still astronomically priced Crystal. Their price tags and packaging always match their status - a Tête de Cuvée starts at around $100.00 and soars upwards of $250.00 from there.

Champagne comes in a small but intriguing variety of styles that you could have fun exploring. If you like pink, try some brut rosés, the best of which is made by Billecart Salmon and is quite tough to come by! The anomalies continue - champagne is the only rosé that is actually made by blending red and white wines, not by the saignée method (literally bleeding, referring to the steeping of the skins of red grapes in the vat with the juice so they will impart color), and here again, the non-vintage version is less expensive than the vintage version. You can also try creamy Blancs de Blanc (translates literally as white of white) champagnes that are 100% Chardonnay or Blancs de Noir, romantically fragrant wines that are made of 100% Pinot Noir, but are indeed, as their name suggests, white bubblies.

You’ll also notice that sometimes I spell champagne with a lower case c and sometimes with a capital C. Capital C refers to the region, lower case c refers to the wine. But I still haven’t really answered the question have I? Why champagne? Because while there are many great substitutes that are much less costly - I’m a huge fan of Prosecco, I don’t balk at Cava, and I enjoy tasting sparkling wines from a around the world that are made in the traditional method - champagne is the originator of the style - sparkling wine was invented here! As an American wine drinker, who’s market is bursting with cases and cases of fabulous high end champagne (in contrast to England, where cheap champagne lines the shelves of supermarkets nationwide) I can’t help but quote Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell: Aint nothin’ like the real thing, baby, aint nothin’ like the REAL THING!

Stay tuned for Why Champagne? Part Deux - Growers

Consultants - Who needs 'em?

Once upon a time I asked myself this very question. I couldn’t understand paying someone for some abstract service of “consulting”, like giving advice. I get free advice all day, every day, even if I don’t want it! To be honest, I’ve long avoided using certain words to describe myself, consultant being one of them. The other was expert. I’ve gotten over that one.

Truth be told, if a person has a high level of knowledge and experience in a field, they should not shy away from referring to themselves as an expert. You worked hard, you devoted yourself, and now, you have a breadth and depth of knowledge in your discipline that surpasses most and rivals the top people in your field. You are an expert. That being said, it doesn’t mean that you know everything, that your opinion should be taken as the final word on a subject. Rather, you are a good source for an educated opinion or guess when a question is asked, you are a good person to learn from about that topic. So yes, I am a wine expert.

And now, I am a wine consultant. Same concept as being an expert, except now you get paid to share your opinions, advice, guidance. So who needs a wine consultant? Well, the truth is many of the things I can do for you, you can do for yourself. For example, I have a client who wants a complete overhaul of his wine list at his restaurant. Could he select and purchase wine, write it up on a piece of paper and hand it to a customer to peruse without my help. Absolutely! Now here are the questions to be asked:

What wines are you buying for the new list? Why these wines? What does your product mix look like as compared to that of your closest competitors and the market at large?

What kind of pricing strategy are you implementing? Are you making the most money you can on your list?

Is your staff equipped to sell the wines (after all, a wine list is a sales tool, you still need the human element)? Do they know what to say and how to say it, how to serve it? Can they explain the offering to your guests?

How is your wine stored and where? How much storage space is available? How will that affect your purchasing strategy?

I could go on. The point is you as a restauranteur could

A: Spend a few years taking wine courses to bring your knowledge base up so that you can create, implement and administer a wine program well.

B: Make all the determinations of storage, purchasing, market positioning etc. on your own.

C: Conduct ongoing wine training for your staff or hire more wine savvy servers and bartenders (who then expect more financially)

D: Hire a full time sommelier and pay payroll taxes and worker’s comp insurance for them.

E: All of the above.

Consultants - who needs ‘em? People who want to do something positive for themselves, their asset portfolio, their business and their lives, but don’t have the expertise or time to do what they would like to get done. As Robert Kiyosaki says in his iconic book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, the rich are wise enough to hire and pay people who are smarter than them to get things done for them. Wine Consultants, unite! We are important and needed, so let’s get crackin’!

Back to wineSchool

Last Saturday at wineLIFE, we started our mailing list. We asked for people’s names, email addresses, and we asked them to write in what their favorite wine was. Some were very vague (red), while others were very specific (merlot, montepulciano), but the overall common thread of the day was made up of many requests for wine classes.

The Back to Wine School window looks really good - complete with marble notebooks, big number 2 pencils, wine text books and a real school desk (please, don’t ask me where we got it from!). Now, it seems, the theme will continue inside as I think hard about what classes to offer and how.

My first thoughts were to offer a set of themed series - five classes covering five of the major grape varieties, a series on different wine countries or regions, perhaps a three part look at red, white and sparkling wines. One thing was clear in my mind: I’m not sure a “wine 101” is the way to go. Of course, final decisions will be steered by the results of a poll I will conduct among the people who would be my students. But based on what I’ve seen so far, no one really needs to be treated like they have to go to a vinous version of Pre K. Wine savvy comes in all forms from those who know think they “don’t know anything about wine” but know enough to know they love Pinot Grigio/Chardonnay/Merlot, to those who love Italian wines, like Burgundy. All of this would strike the average wine connoisseur as very elementary, but to me, it means that consumers have a sense for what is out there, and know what they have enjoyed in the past and/or present, so it is time to take them to the next level so they can feel more confident navigating the world of wine.

Email me, please, with your thoughts on what wineLIFE wineSchool should cover. It will help me form a curriculum that is both valuable and enjoyable to all my future students!