Meet Mencía - The Dutchess

aka Bierzo on a Saturday Night

Did I order it just because I like pronouncing it?? Bee-air-THO. When I say it the subtext is “Yes, I know of what I speak”. The Bierzo region is a small DO in north-west Spain’s Galicia neighborhood. This medium bodied red is made from the Mencía grape (another fun pronunciation – Men-THEE-ah, gotta love those Castillians!) which lives happily on slate and granite soils not far from the Atlantic coast.

On the palate, it plays out like a less demanding Pinot Noir, not quite the princess. It is similarly elegant with ripe berry fruit and well-balanced acidity and alcohol, although more straight forward and somewhat meatier – it had sort of a Damn Good Jerky undercurrent (like yes, its beef jerky, but it’s the best I’ve ever tasted, no lie!). The first one to cross my palate about six
years back was by José Palacios, a beautiful biodynamic Bierzo named Petalos. It left me feeling like I knew I wanted to experience a Bierzo again before I die. Although Mencía is no princess she has undeniable palate pedigree. She has well etched features, precision posture. Sadly, Bierzo is still scarce in this market. So when I saw it on the wine list at Riposo 46 in Hell’s Kitchen last Saturday Night, I had to jump back and kiss myself.

Pago de Valdetruchas Los Cerezales 2008 Bierzo (wine list price $50/bottle, retails for around $20) was a somewhat simpler version of the one that has haunted my palate dreams over the years. Her corset wasn’t wound as tight, but she was thoroughly satisfying nonetheless. Dora loved it with the Gorgonzola on our cheese plate, while I thought the unabashed saltiness of the Serrano Ham flatbread, which was heaped with generous servings of the ham, rocket lettuce and kalamata olives, made the fruit in the wine come alive and do back spins on my tongue. It was an all around success. My cousin Edrica, a budding wine aficionado in her own right, enjoyed the wine as well.

The great thing is that when you do find it, even the biodynamic Petalos, you will not pay much more than $20.00 a bottle to experience the magic. Wine-Searcher.com came up with lots of hits at around $18.00 for that wine, while it seems the only place to get Los Cerezales is at Wine Library in New Jersey for $19.98. Nonetheless, just for shits and giggles, pop into your local wine retailer and ask them for a good bee-air-THO and enjoy the reaction. With any luck they will indeed have one and be proud to be able to offer it to someone who is obviously in the know. Do let me know how this went!

Meet Cabernet Sauvignon - Team Captain

When I think about Cabernet Sauvignon, I think about the jock. The guy who played three sports and was six feet tall with a great body and a handsome face with chiseled features. He probably rocked the gridiron, as well as either baseball or soccer, and he was on the wrestling team. He was captain of all of them. He is grown up now but he still has that winning smile that captured the attention of almost every girl in school (and some boys).

As a member of those teams, and as a top sales manager in his firm today, he relies heavily upon his teammates for success – Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot are usually his MVPs. But he can definitely hold his own with little or no help. He’s a strong character, but he gets along with everyone – he is well liked. Nonetheless, he doesn’t bend to anyone’s whim. He is who he is no matter what playing field (wine region), or what combination of teammates (blend), or what coaching (winemaking) style. Cabernet is always reliably Cabernet.

When buying Cabernet Sauvignon you can start with these two benchmarks:
Bordeaux from the Left Bank that are blends in which Cabernet is usually the main ingredient and the strongest character
California (particularly Napa Valley) varietally labeled Cabernet

If you are intrigued by wines and foods that have great balance and acidity and are not overtly fruity, Bordeaux is a good way to go. You can find pretty decent Left Bank Bordeaux, particularly Bordeaux Superieur, between US$10-$20 that will suit your taste. If you’re feeling special, look for wines labeled Première Côtes de Bordeaux, Pomerol, Haut-Medoc, Grand Cru and Grand Cru Classé. You will spend more money but in most cases, you do get more for your dollar out of those bottles. They are usually a bit fuller bodied with more layers of interesting flavors.

If you prefer wines and foods that are very flavorful and rich, especially if you are an unabashed lover of meat, then Napa Valley Cabernet should make you happy. You can find good Napa Cab starting around $15. Below that, you may see Cabernet simply labeled as “California” which means the grapes came from various unspecified regions in that great big state. I can’t vouch for these as suitable substitutes. Go for Napa. In general the more expensive the Napa Cab, the bigger a wine it will be on your palate. A couple of C-notes will score you a linebacker!

Nonetheless, there is Cabernet Sauvignon coming out of every corner of this great wine world! And the truth is most of it, even if it is labeled Cabernet Sauvignon, is blended. Cabernet tends to have trouble filling your palate by itself, so he usually teams up with Merlot to fill out the center for you with yummy berry fruit. (in the US a wine can be labeled varietally as long as it contains at least 75% of that grape variety, so Napa Cabernet can contain up to 25% Merlot or other varieties) But he is usually the backbone of a blend, the go-to guy.

Your homework for this week is to try 5 Cabernet Sauvignons. You should have one Napa Cabernet, one Bordeaux from the Left Bank, and three others from totally different places - South Africa, Argentina, New York, Italy, Texas, New Zealand - and tweet your notes to @wineLIFE_ #CabSauvHW. Tell us which one was ur fave (please include the wine’s name, vintage and region), how much u paid for it and its best qualities. You can also post notes on the wineLIFE Facebook wall. We would love to keep up with what you are drinking!!

...And Wine for All

Wine is universal. Vitis Vinifera, the grape species populated by the many beloved varieties that are made into the wines we enjoy everyday, has a very special and unique power. Unlike with other fruit, wine made from these grapes can give a world of different flavors that seem to have nothing to do with grapes at all!

What I mean is that wine made from, say, pineapples will taste just like pineapples, plum wine tastes like plums, but when Chardonnay grapes become wine, the wine can taste like green apples. Young Pinot Noir can taste like a salad of fresh raspberries, red cherries and cranberries. After a little time in an oak barrel, it can smell like baking spices - cinnamon and nutmeg, perhaps tobacco leaf and cedar, and it can have the flavor of hickory smoked bacon. Sauvignon Blanc can smell like freshly cut grass and green bell peppers, taste like citrus fruit like grapefruit and lemon, sometimes even passion fruit. No other fruit can do that!

So when I say wine is universal, I mean that with all those wonderful possibilities, there’s a wine out there for every palate. Seriously. If for example you enjoy eating grapefruits, and you love lemonade then I would think you should start buying and trying Sauvignon Blancs from around the world. If you grew up in South East Asia eating lychees, star fruit, rambutan and food cooked with ginger and lots of spices, get with some Gewürztraminer (say it with me now: ge-VIRTZ-tra-MEE-ner)

This is not the same as pairing wine with food. While that is a fun and interesting exercise, it does not definitively address the issue of personal taste and palate memory. If the flavors in a wine are familiar to you, then you will better be able to relate to that wine, and so it can serve as an easy go-to for you. Like when I first tasted Chardonnay, I just didn’t get it. Growing up in a West Indian household, I did not eat apples really - certainly not green ones. So I downshifted to White Zinfandel (don’t judge me). Bubblegum! Yes, I’ve had that! Then I shifted back up into the real wine world by trying some Riesling - yeah, tropical fruit flavors. Now we’re talking! Suddenly wine wasn’t alien to me anymore. Soon afterward, I took my first wine class - the Wine and Spirit Education Trust Certificate at the Birmingham College of Food in the UK - and the rest is history.

Drink what you like based on what flavors resonate best in your food life. That is my best piece of advice for your wineLIFE!

How We Select Wine

How do we Select Wine for wineLIFE Wine Shop?

The short answer is that we taste. We’ve tasted every single wine in the store at least once. People bring us wine to taste, and we try them, and based on their cost, we decide whether we can a. stand behind it as a wine of quality and value for money and b. fit it into our growing catalog of wines (gratuitous plug).

The long answer is still simple. In our store, we want to offer our customers a well chosen selection of wines. So we started by categorizing everything we tasted - first just into groupings like white, red, rosé, sparkling, then into grape variety categories. And so evolved our Chardonnay (including a lovely, oaky-buttery number from upstate New York and an Unoaked refresher from Australia), Sauvignon Blanc (including an austere white Bordeaux and a fruity Argentine darling), Riesling (including both sweet and dry versions and a great 3L Bag-in-Box), Pinot Noir (including one great Chilean under $15 that actually tastes great) and Malbec (including one with a few years of age on it) sections. Thus we began filling in other areas - Sparkling wines with simple sweeties, crisp Cavas and a Blanc de Blanc Champagne, Cabernet and Bordeaux Red blends.

We also wanted to support local as much as possible, so we made sure to fit in a strong offering of wines from the North Fork of Long Island and the Finger Lakes. Rounded out with some great Italian reds, which will expand into a World Reds section (because honestly, we’re probably not going to have a Sangiovese section in the store), an international selection of rosés, some Pinot Gris and Grigio and some great stickies, we have a store we can be proud of.

Now if we could just wean our customers off that damned Bitch Bubbly...

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 Wine is Awesome Reason #10 - Travel

In the spirit of my Uses for Cheap Wine series that is evolving through this blog, I’ve decided I should start another series, because just as there are indeed many good uses for cheap wine, there are many reasons why wine is awesome.

As President of the NYC Chapter of Women for WineSense, it is a privilege and duty to make my annual pilgrimage west to Napa Valley, land of our founders. Each spring for the last 3 years, I have travelled to California to celebrate and collaborate with many lovely, successful and fabulous members and officers from Women for WineSense chapters nationwide. Two out of those three years were Grand Events, most spectacular occasions, the second of which I dutifully attended and thoroughly enjoyed even though I was 6 months pregnant with my daughter Ché Elizabeth. Last year, during the height of the economic revolution, although we decided not to have a Grand Event, there was still a congregation, a very important annual summit took place as usual. While many important and serious discussions ensued, wine was poured and vineyards were toured.

The truth is you can travel just by trying wines from different parts of the world. While wine’s character is largely determined by the grape varieties it is made of, there is an undeniable sense of place in almost every bottle - not just in the packaging but in the character of the wine itself. For example, you can take a mini tour of the world by trying a selection of Sauvignon Blancs from different places - visit Northern France, the South Island of New Zealand, South Africa and the North Fork of Long Island all in one week on your tour.

Nonetheless, there’s nothing like the being there in person. Voyaging to the places where wine is grown offers such a unique look at a place you often go to for other reasons, as perhaps in Spain, Chile or California or it can take you to places you wouldn’t otherwise go to at all, such as the Upper Loire Valley and the aforementioned North Fork of Long Island (a sleepy farm area that still pales in comparison to the Hamptons in summer appeal, but is now a fantastic destination for wine touring!). Add the experience of drinking the region’s wines and enjoying the foods that they do best - MAGIC!

Wine has given me both many reasons to travel and the opportunity to enhance my travel experiences by adding in winery and vineyard visits and tasting through otherwise unbeaten paths all over the world as well as very close to home. The great thing is that you can always recapture a little of that by enjoying those wines again later, and the pictures tend to be really awesome when you get back home.

Photos from Previous Women for WineSense Grand Events, Enjoy!

Uses for Cheap Wine #3 - Cooking

I must preface this by clarifying that cheap wine doesn’t necessarily mean bad wine, and it is my firm belief that one should never put any wine in their food that they would not drink. To quote the comedian WC Fields “I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food!”

Here are some tips on cooking with wine at a discount:
When you want to create a perfect pairing of wine with a dish that you are cooking that has wine in the recipe, use the same wine you are drinking in the dish. Now, I’m not saying that you should deglaze* your pan with your Kistler Chardonnay! At $100.00+ per bottle, that would make for one expensive pan jus! Instead, get a Chardonnay that is $8-10 a bottle, something that is similarly oaky, but make sure that it is something you would happily drink on a more casual evening.
To make a fabulous herb butter, add white wine to your recipe for herb butter. The wine will provide balancing acidity - use a $6-8 crisp white such as torrontes, or sauvignon blanc.
Use an $8-12 shiraz or cabernet to marinate tougher meats such as beef cheeks, ox tails, veal shanks or brisket. The acid helps to break down the meat and add wonderful flavor. As always, the wine should at least be drinkable.

This should get you off to a good start cooking with wine! Bon appetit!

*Deglaze - after cooking a meat, poultry or fish on a frying pan, add wine to the hot pan. The wine will collect all the pan residue. Reduce this over a low flame, then add cream or butter to make a great sauce!

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

Uses for Cheap Wine #17 - Wine Rack Filler

You LOVE wine! You’re the kind of collector who never has a full rack or wine fridge - you just can’t not drink it! Well, here’s my advice for how to keep your wine indulgence satisfied and still maintain a full rack, because let’s face it, an empty wine rack or wine fridge is NOT acceptable.

On a $500.00 budget:

Take some of your allocations from your favorite California mailing list wineries, perhaps wait until you get your tax refund, and buy:

2 Williams Selyem Pinot Noir @ $54.00 each (or you can split this up into a Pinot Noir and a Zinfandel for more variety, although you would get variety if you got two different Pinot Noirs from WS - the cuvées from different vineyards offer different flavor profiles)

1 Vie Les Amours Syrah @$42.00

1 Anomaly Cabernet Sauvignon $89.00

Treat yourself to a couple of special bottles from the Old World:

1 Chateau Calon Ségur St. Estephe 2005 $90.00

1 Guiseppe Quintarelli Valpolicella $100.00

And then...

you could pick up 4-6 more bottles at your favorite local wine retailer for $45.00 or less TOTAL COST, because the market is abundant with cheap wine, and a lot of it is surprisingly decent!

2 Mia Prosecco, (dry sparkling wine from Italy) $6.99

1 Mil Piedras Malbec, Argentina $8.99

1 OCD Sauvignon Blanc, Marlborough, New Zealand $9.99

1 Amour Vin de Pays de Vaucluse, France $4.99

1 Falkensteiner Rieden Zweigelt (dry red wine from Austria) $8.99 for a 1 liter bottle

Total expenditure to fill your rack: $468.95 + tax. And you didn’t even have to buy Yellow Tail!

The truth is there is a lot of flexibility in what you can fill your rack with. Personally, if I didn’t have a toddler running rampant in my apartment, I would do the above, and put all those fabulous pricey bottles on top, reserving the bottom spaces for a revolving supply of good, cheap vino. And no, I don’t let my higher end stuff sit around too long either, because let’s face it, a special occasion can be the evening I come home to a my warm apartment and I’m feeling extra thankful, and then I’m popping the cork on my $89.00 Anomaly Cab to enjoy with leftover Truffle Risotto with Pork and I’m pouring some into my daughter’s sippy cup and mixing it with a little water.

Also, based on the above, you could actually fill the whole rack for $100.00 or less!

My final piece of advice: Always leave one or two spaces open for those unexpected bottles you get as gifts. Whoever said it’s better to give than to received obviously never got anything, and unlike in France, we are happy to accept a bottle from a friend around here!