California confusion

Lots happening this week in the world of wine. Like a houseguest!

James Isbell came to town and with him he brought tales from Google, lots of good vibes and a beautiful bottle of Cabernet:

This Cab was ripe and burst-y like Ellen Burstyn with plenty of classic Cabernet blackberry and black cherry flavors, plus pepper and leather. Its earthiness, which as you know I've been on a quest for, reminded me of a slightly disappointing wine I'd brought to a Golden Globes party the Sunday prior:

Black Mountain Pinot Noir was plenty tasty. It just wasn't what I was looking for in a Pinot Noir. Pinots are supposed to be light bodied with notes of red cherry and red meat and cola and earth. But this guy rocked raspberry and vanilla above all else. Wtf? Then I remembered another California Pinot Noir I tasted and realized I was starting to see a pattern (this is a real link. I get that I burned you with that Google one but this one is real). These were great wines, but not in the ways I was looking for in a Pinot Noir.

Another accidental gif! How am I doing this?! I think taking many pictures of the same person in the same place in a row? I'm literally magic. Also check out Kate's Olivia Pope wine glasses! I am told by people who watch television program "Scandal" that this is impressive! This is a long caption!

Ok, back to business. I didn't even realize I was buying the same brand when I picked up this Zinfandel:

I simply took Paul's suggestion that he often finds earth (and spice and smoke, his favorite aromatics in a wine) in California Zins. And now I see it. Now I see why Zinfandel is California's grape. And just like I can eat pizza here and tacos in New York but they aren't gonna be as good, I get why a great five dollar wine can only be found in the local wheelhouse.

Because this wine doesn't just suit my savory-minded style. No, this guy is layered as hell, combining Old World and New World aromatics for a full, fruity, leathery, peppery wine. Raspberry, blackberry, green and black pepper, leather, tobacco on the nose. A rich jamminess, a little caramel and smoke on the palate but not too sweet. Our other roommate David made a heavenly tomato jam this weekend and it reminds me of that, with its balance of sweetness, acid and layers on layers of spice. All this Old World prestige and New World bounty for I think it was 5 or 6 bucks? It's safe to say Black Mountain 2012 Zinfandel is one I'll be buying again.

Adventures in wine tasting and how it turns out I'm totally predictable

As I mentioned last week, I signed up for this HuffPo-certified wine club. The first thing they do in this club is send you mini bottles of wine. You taste those, and your reactions to them creates a taste profile that helps Lot18 send you wines you'll like. This weekend I got my tasting kit and learned a very important lesson:

Wine tasting is exactly like dating.

As a 27-and-a-half-year-old woman of the modern era with breasts and minimal shyness, I've had the opportunity to date a lot. I'm not one of these people who likes going on dates. I admire those people. I really do. I wish I could be like them. But for me, dates are all about anxiety. Will he like me? Will I like him? Will he like me but I don't like him and then I'll blow him off totally gracelessly and rack up even more bad romantic karma? Will I be honest, like everyone tells you to be, only to be known as a bitch forevermore (the guaranteed consequence of honesty, by the way. I've determined there are only two ways to tell someone you're not interested that will spare their feelings and yours: say you've decided to be exclusive with someone else, or just ignore them entirely and let them assume you died. Lying and disappearing may seem immature, because they are, but they're also the easiest and kindest way to go about things. No one wants to hear the truth. Anyone who says they do is lying. People want to hear they're great and that is all).

What got me thinking about all this, besides the fact that I'm a human being, was my tasting kit. Lot18 gives you six wines, two whites and four reds, along with basic tasting instructions (that are woefully incomplete), and a piece of paper to put your glasses on which makes it seem like they had some extra glossy card stock lying around because why. I was so excited to get deep into my nuanced reactions to each wine so as to create a specific profile for my taste buds and then receive wine each month catered to my very whims.

So you can imagine my disappointment when the only questions about the two white wines were: which did you like better? How much more, a lot or a little? And that was it. How are you supposed to tell anything about my tastes just from that??

Another disappointment was the wines themselves: Ten Sisters 2011 Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand and Finial 2011 Chardonnay from Sonoma. I get what they did here: gave me the two main families of white wine, buttery and tart. And while each wine did a fine job representing its typicity (meaning what wines of that grape and region tend to taste like), neither was particularly exciting. The Sauvignon Blanc had a mineral quality and tartness, but without the burst of grapefruit and green apple I expect, especially from Marlborough. The Chardonnay was pure buttered popcorn and baked red apple, which might be nice for a Chardonnay but just isn't for me. I didn't really like either wine, but didn't want to get sent a bunch of Chardonnay, so I said I liked the Sauvignon Blanc much better. Sort of like when a friend sets you up with an actress and a doctor, and you don't like either, but since everyone in LA loves to hate on actresses, you say prefer the doctor for future reference. But you sleep with the actress because, I mean, of course. Like I wasn't going to not drink the Chardonnay. There was perfectly good alcohol in there. End of the whites.

I moved on to the reds expecting more bland typicity and unrevealing questions. Voila 2009 Pinot Noir from California was next, and it had the basic earth and fruit balance of a California Pinot, some berries, fruitier than its European counterparts but still a bit savory. It was fine. And just as I started to worry that maybe it was me, maybe I was too picky, maybe I'd never find a wine I could truly love because I didn't love myself, I took a whiff of the Nebbiolo. And, as it turns out...

Everyone has a type.

Ordine di San Giuseppe 2011 Nebbiolo d'Alba is a star. Licorice and dirt and blackberry and leather and pepper and WOW. And I hadn't even tasted it. On the palate this wine was super tannic but still velvety and weird and wonderful. Now, here's the thing. I've tasted Nebbiolo maybe twice in my life. So even if this is typical, it's new to me. Here's the other thing: I don't care. This is exactly the kind of wine I like. Which made me realize that this, too, could be a basic, typical wine. But when you find your type, to you, it's new and electrifying, even if it's just like all the other wines you've tried or people you've dated because there's a reason you keep going back. It's chemical.

I go back and forth with online dating. I was off for about four months but I recently reactivated my profile. When you do this, all your old messages pop back up. Some of the users have since left the site, but if they're still on it, but some are still around, looking for love. I logged in and found most of the messages were from users who were no longer active. But there was one chain with a guy I'd been messaging back and forth with quite a bit, who I seem to have been pretty into. Too bad I left the site. It seems like we could have dated. But I'm not too worried about what might have been, because, you see, we did.

About a month after I left the world of internet love, I met this guy in real life. We dated for six weeks or so, and then just stopped calling each other. While we were perfect on paper, I think we both realized the spark wasn't there. That's how I felt, anyway. I have no idea why he just disappeared, the bastard. And I know he didn't just die because I ran into him since then. He was on a date. She looked a lot like me.

In our messages, this guy talks about his new favorite place in LA. We went there on our second date. We discuss our favorite books. We did it again in real life. I had no clue when we met or throughout the relationship that we'd had this correspondence. If he did, he didn't let on. Remember, my profile disappeared when I deactivated my account, so he wouldn't have had the pictures for reference anymore. But this wasn't fate. This was too banal for fate. This was just the inevitability of two people who were each others' types. When you find someone or something whose qualities you're predetermined to like, you're gonna like them, no matter how typical.

There were a couple other wines, Letterpress Red Blend (I think, this wine needs a far less confusing label) and Fortuna 2010 Cabernet Sauvignon from Paso Robles. They were solid but nothing compared to the novel Nebbiolo. More typicity at work. I answered the shockingly few questions dutifully and received my profile.

The whites profile was dumb. I mean, I compared two wines I didn't like without ever being allowed to point out that I liked neither. So I clicked to the reds, and was embarrassed to find...

They nailed it.

I mean they just got me. I'm just as typical and predictable as these wines! In only a few questions, I managed to be pegged for my exact tastes. I love Tempranillos. Earthy wines are my fav. I was just as fated to love the wine that was perfect on paper for me as I was inevitably going to date that guy.

I ended up canceling my membership when I saw the wines they planned to send me. Until they expand their inventory, it seems they'll be sending more of a sampler than wines tailored to the members' tastes as promised. I know what I like. But I also know that the most important thing is to be surprised. That element was lacking in my autumn courtship and exploded from my glass of Nebbiolo. Surprise doesn't mean dating or drinking against type. It just means that even if something is perfect on paper, it needs an x factor to put it over the edge. The scent of licorice. The subtle kiss of leather. Or really good sex.

Surprise! When wines are dubious tricksters and SKIN

It's 9 o'clock on a Tuesday night

The regular crowd shuffles in

There's an old man sitting next to me

Just kidding, I am by myself

Billy Joel just gets it, you know? And I think he really crushed it feelings-wise when he wrote:

I don't want clever conversation 

I never want to work that hard 

I just want someone that I can talk to 

I want you just the way you are. 

Because cleverness is exhausting, hard work is straight up terrible and acceptance of the person you are boning is a classy move. Also, so you don't have to even put in the hard work that is typing it into your search box, here you go. You're super welcome.

Let me set the scene for you dreamy readers out there. It's Tuesday evening. I've made it through such trials and tribulations as another health insurance application and a misunderstanding vis-a-vis the time of my Groupon manicure which led to no Groupon manicure. The vibe in my apartment is very Karen Sharp. And the wine I'm sipping started out a little closed off, green bell pepper, spice, underbrush and resin, then opened up into smoke, mesquite and blackberry. Oh my goodness, who is grilling blackberries up here? Oh wait, NO ONE! Bam. Luscious and jammy on the palate, black-red and nearly opaque, and at 14.8% ABV, this 2011 Bear & Crown drinks like a Bordeaux blend. So what is it? Merlot? Cabernet? Syrah? All of the above? Nope. Check it out:

I know, right? As my dad texted me during the Oscars, "WTF is Seth McFarland?" That may not be applicable here but I really wanted to share that text with the earth. This, a Pinot Noir? Aren't those supposed to be translucent and subtle and smell like raw meat and raspberries? This meat smells cooked over fire! Raspberries are similar to blackberries so ok fine! But this does not look like a Pinot Noir:

Yes, I did my nails myself because the lady dicked me over. By the way, this is how you should check a wine's appearance: white background, tilting the glass (which shouldn't be more than a third full anyway so you can swirl and sniff), in the presence of Trader Joe's olive oil cooking spray. That way you can get a sense of the hue, the opacity, and even the age. This wine's color goes all the way to the edge and has a very slight purple-blue tinge. It's pretty young. The purple-blue would be more pronounced if it was super youthful, but this is pretty ok. That doesn't mean it's young in years (although it is, it's a 2011). That means it's young for this particular wine. This could be a 2008 or a 1989 and if it looked like this we'd call it young. Reds get lighter and more rust-colored with age (though Pinot Noirs are almost always light even when young. Not this time!), so regardless of the year, some thin, rusty-ass wine is old. White wines get darker with age, toward amber colored, and have a green tinge when they're particularly youthful. And just in case this wasn't confusing enough, some wines are meant to age, some aren't. Most wines should be drunk 3-5 years within the vintage date.

Ok, so let's think about how this happened. How did this thin-skinned grape that usually results in light, low-tannin, delicately flavored wines end up this big, bad, bold motherfucker? Well, I don't know, write this Robin Langton character the label says made it a letter and find out. But when you do, run this guess by her...

Skin contact. This is my theory. These grapes sat in contact with the skin for a long, long time. Here's why I think this: the juice of red grapes is clear. The color comes from contact with the skins. The skins of white grapes are removed early in the process, but red grapes ferment with theirs and sometimes get extended maceration or other processes to really get every last tannin and aromatic out of the skins. I think that's what happened here: bonus skin time. That got all these rich aromatics out of the skin and gave it a hue whose corresponding lipstick is more goth than femme fatal. Rose wines have some contact with their skins (and depending on what that skin is, will have color ranging from ballet slipper pink to magenta. And magenta isn't necessarily sweet, it just comes from thick-skinned grapes like Syrah). White wines have little or no contact with the skins. 

Here's a metaphor I just invented, debated not using, then took a few more gulps of wine and decided was genius. In this metaphor, the skins are skins. Like when you first meet someone, you're all, I do not know if I want you in contact with me, what if you have a rash or what if you hurt me like the others or what if you are made of glass and the temperature and smoothness of your body is a shock? You have little or no skin-to-skin contact with the other person. 

Ok, so that's white wine. 

Rose is the honeymoon stage, when you're blushing and happy and delighting in your sex injuries because you've had lots of skin contact but only for a short period of time. The chemistry is electric and you're still pretending to like farmers markets and thinking this person is perfect when their skin disappears (hopefully with the rest of them, or not hopefully, depending how rude the disappearance was) and you just stop everything and go into a metaphorical bottle which is the walls you put up that you don't know if you can ever smash down. 

Red wine is when you've been with someone for a long time and everything is darkness and drinking and 14.8% alcohol doesn't seem like nearly enough and also the bottle is the walls. This part may need some work.

The point is, labels aren't everything. Grape variety isn't even everything, which I find startling and uncomfortable and a little bit freeing, like the time I found out Josh Brolin and Diane Lane were married by finding out they were getting a divorce, or the other time I almost typed Russell Crowe instead of Josh Brolin. The wine in the glass is everything. The wine in the glass is worth two wines in the bush because what if you forget which bush you hid the wines in? I just wish Josh and Diane realized this before it was too late.

So try wines, form your own opinions, and never close yourself off to a particular grape variety altogether. You may have just hated the winemaking techniques used, or the person you were drinking it with, or eaten it with the wrong food, or not been mature enough to appreciate it, or have drunk it out of a chalice that was full of ebola like ten minutes before you poured. All of these things could have happened.

Even with Chardonnay.

I'll snuggle you juuust the waaay you aaaaaaare