The best wine in the world...

Is friendship. Duh. But the second best wine in the world is R. Lopez de Heredia "Vina Gravonia" Bianco Rioja 2004 and on Sunday, I had both.

My beautiful bestie. Not the girl in the background. That's my Ultimate Nemesis.

Pictured is Ms. Julia Cox, Friend Supreme as well the writer of this smart people equivalent to fan fiction. In this photo, she's not actually drinking the second best wine in the world, because when we were served the second best wine in the world, we were a little too busy exclaiming over it to bother with a picture.

If you've yet to attend a tasting at Silverlake Wine, remedy that immediately. Not only do they use my preferred spelling of "Silverlake" (the incorrect, one word spelling), it is simply the best wine tasting experience you can have. Somehow the folks there find the exact sweet spot between knowledgable and laid back, meaning anyone, from the most distinguished oenophile to the most dedicated beer drinker can have a hell of a time. For 12 bucks on Monday and Thursday evenings, you can have a delicious flight of generous pours. Mondays feature a spread of complimentary cheeses, Thursday's, bread and the finest butter I have ever known, and both nights you're welcome to bring food in. Killer food trucks linger outside, and one time my dear friend Aubrey brought in a pizza and that was ENCOURAGED.

But Sundays. Oh, man, Sundays at Silverlake Wine. I had no idea. I had some idea. I am on their mailing list. Sunday tastings are more formal (relatively speaking). They require a reservation. There are little speeches before each wine. They have start time of 3pm, which says, "this is serious wine tasting, not after work drinks." Sunday tastings are 20 dollars, feature five wines and come with an impossibly delicious spread of food. I finally went this past Sunday and, 3 hours later, dawdled home in the best mood ever and bought a ticket to The Lego Movie and went by myself and it was dope, obviously.

Just the atmosphere and company alone would have been enough. But, as I said, there was also this wine. This wine:

This wine.

I don't believe in love at first sight. Probably because people are constantly claiming to be in it with me like 24/7/365 plus more, like many times per day. But this was love at first sniff and I know it with all my heart.

This is the strangest wine I've ever tasted. The name of the grape escapes me, but it's definitely not one I've tried. It's an aged white, which is rare. Ten years old for a white is generally seen as too much. But whatever they're doing at this winery, they're killing it. Cool thing is, they don't exactly know. Most places that age in oak barrels use small, new ones so a wine will get lots of oak flavors (for whites this generally means the buttery, biscuit-y aromatics associated with California Chardonnay). These guys use old, big barrels, which means less direct contact with oak and less oak flavor. What's more, they don't wash them. Most places wash after every season. Nope. Here they love their wine so much they're afraid of changing anything, so they keep it as is, grime and all.

And it's easy to imagine a magic bacteria is the key to the success here. The first sniff was packed full of earthy, salty, rich aromatics. Brie cheese. Mushrooms. Julia said mushrooms on toast, and that's dead on because of the butter and near salinity in there as well. But there's also honeysuckle. Dried apricot. This wine is bone dry on the palate, not sweet at all, but there are layers we'd normally associate with a dessert wine--honey, dried fruits. It's old, but has the minerality and refreshing zing of a young Sauvignon Blanc. Lemon curd. Rosemary! Name an unexpected aromatic and it was probably in there. And it kept changing. They had decanted the wine for an hour (another rarity with whites). When I got a second pour after the tasting (4 dollars extra. FOUR DOLLARS FOR A GLASS OF THIS HEAVEN), it was a whole new bouquet.

We tried the wine with the delectable fish stew from Heirloom LA, but found it went better without food. There's so much happening here, you just want to take tiny sips and big whiffs forever and keep searching. If I had to pair this wine with something, I'd pair it with a little bit of pot. The things you would find!

I bought two bottles, and I plan to serve them with a nice little cheese plate and stellar conversation. If you happen to be in the neighborhood with 29.50 to spare, I highly recommend you do the same. I also cannot recommend friendship enough. Just, so good.

Oh I fancy huh

It may shock some of you to learn that these posts aren't all that official. Like the Schouten Feelings Standard has yet to be adopted by sommeliers worldwide. Lame. For fun, I thought I'd share a proper tasting note I did last spring for my wine class. It also allows me to brag about the one time I drank a wine that cost more than $20 (thanks, Dad). True tasters will evaluate wines the same way every time, taking down each detail from price to palate. This allows them to compare wines efficiently, even if they haven't tasted a particular wine in a while.

Below my tasting note (after the terribly framed photo. Thanks, self) is an explanation of how to draw each of these official, non-feelings-based conclusions. Even if you don't plan to ever make a proper tasting note, these tips will help you evaluate wine wherever you are and whatever your price point. Because engaging our senses is fun! Speaking of fun, quick puzzle update, I am TEARING THROUGH this thing even without a box top so I don't know what it looks like. It's a great puzzle full of twists and turns and things are going really well between us.

Francis Ford Coppola Director's Cut 2011 Merlot
Sonoma County, CA
$20.99, 13.5% ABV

Appearance: A normal red wine in the glass. Only the tiniest bit transparent, mostly opaque. Ruby red with a little purpley-blue.

Nose: Earth aromas of forest floor and oak alongside black cherry, blackberry and smoke. A little caramel, coconut and cedar as well.

Palate: Dry wine with sweetness at the tip of the tongue. Fruit-forward with a little raspberry in addition to the black cherry and blackberry. Lots of earth and smoke here as well. Finish is medium to long, especially since the caramel and coconut really hang on the alcohol. Both acidity and tannins and low to medium, and the quality of the tannins are smooth and round.

Conclusion: I'd call this wine layered but not complex. It is straightforward in its many aromatics, which hit fruit and earth and winemaking right on the head. To enhance the smoke, pair with grilled meats in a lighter marinade or chipotle-spiced tacos.

Tasting note breakdown

Heading: Here you will provide all practical information about the wine. If wine tasting is like dating (which I have already told you it is), this is where you get the basic details: height, job, dopeness of hairstyle.

Appearance: Unlike in dating, here the appearance is the least important factor in determining anything about anything. A few clues, however, can give us potential insight into a wine's age, style and grape varietal, but all must be confirmed by other factors. A quick swirl can help you determine the body of the wine. Unless a wine is high in sugar and alcohol, like port, which will move more slowly, it should be in the normal range.

When I say age, I mean age for that wine. A Cabernet may be too young to drink even after a few years, while a Sauvignon Blanc should be consumed quickly and will start to look old perhaps after only 18 months. Red wines get lighter with age while white wines get darker. A young red wine will have a purpley-blue tone that reaches all the way to the edge of the liquid when the glass is tipped slightly, while over time the color will move toward a translucent rust-brown color. White wines will be clear and bright in youth, then they'll brown over time. But a good Pinot Noir is often transparent, and a beautiful Amarone will be brown-ish in color even when young. And you may prefer an older wine. I sometimes do. Young wines will yield more fruit-forward flavors. Older wines develop what is known as a "bottle bouquet" and have weirder, more complex, tertiary flavors in play.

This is also the time to notice sediment or petillance. Sediment is extremely rare and usually a good thing. Most wine now is fined and filtered, expect for old or fancy or super organic wines. So before you send a sediment-y wine back, consider how expensive it is. Seriously. The more expensive, the more likely that sediment is supposed to be there. What you believe is sediment may also be tartrates, a natural byproduct of tartaric acid, which is the acid from grapes. Not an issue. Petillance is common in delicate whites. If you see it in a red that's not supposed to sparkle, it could be a sign of bad things. Ask your server for their opinion.

Nose: Contrary to popular belief, you should not immediately swirl your wine. You'll actually pick up a different set of aromatics when a wine is still and right after it's been swirled. So give it a good sniff and make some notes before swirling. Then spin and get your nose up in there again. Cool, right? The incomparable Shelby Ledgerwood gave us a neat tip for helping to determine what we're smelling: start broad then narrow it down. So start with citrus, then consider what kind and even what form. Fresh grapefruit. Lemon curd. Dried orange peel. Start with earth, then narrow that down: dirt, leather, tobacco, horse. I don't always get all the way there (see: "earth" in every post I've ever written), but it makes trying less intimidating.

Palate: The same as nose, plus more! You may get slightly different aromatics on the palate (known as "in-mouth aromatics"). To help with that, hold the wine in your mouth and suck a little air in through your teeth. You'll get a little slurping noise. The air coming in helps you activate your nose, which is where tasting really happens. Our mouths only taste sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami. Everything else is scent. Here you'll evaluate those taste elements (dry wine or sweet, how dry and how sweet?). Salty wines don't really exist, but some super fresh whites will be so dry they'll seem salty, as you'll salivate a lot after drinking them. Bitterness comes from tannin. The tannin level will inform your serving and pairing suggestions (which will come in the conclusion). Fats cut tannins, and bitter foods like greens boost the bitterness. Most wines do NOT need to be decanted or oxygenated or let to breathe. Only super tannic wines require this, so don't pour out your reds automatically. Taste first, pour second. The acidity and finish are also evaluated here. I'm terrible at evaluating acidity. I think it's like determined by the sides of your tongue? And how dry your mouth is after? Sorry, bros. The finish is how long the flavors persist on the palate. 2-4 seconds is short, 5-8 is medium, 9+ is long. A classic "one Mississippi, two Mississippi..." in your head will do.

Conclusion: Here is where you evaluate anything you want about the wine. The value for it's price, what to serve with it, when to drink it, how it compares to other wines of its varietal and/or region. It seems like a good spot for some feelings, but a true taster will be using an objective system. It's not about if you like it, it's about the structure, nose, and quality of the wine. I tend to do a little of each. I try to evaluate first objectively, then in terms of how much I like it. This allows me to determine the kinds of wines I like to drink. So at this point, even without my recent discovery that I'm embarrassingly predictable, I know I enjoy a murky, dirty, Old World-style wine. Give proper tasting a try. At the very least, you'll have taken a moment out of your drinking to engage the senses. If that's not the best form of meditation, I don't know what is.

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.

My friends are doing some pretty exciting things

You know, friendships can be tricky. You have to pick super awesome people, then be loyal and kind to them. Oh, wait, so no, they're not that hard at all.

My friends are doing great things constantly, but I thought I'd take a moment to point out three in particular who did things that fit in ever so nicely with the themes of this blog: wine, food and comedy.

On the food front, my friend Gianna has been delivering solid recipes and adorable insights on her quest for Italian citizenship over at A Pinch of Direction for a while now. In addition to some of the tastiest recipes I've ever been blessed to try (the passionfruit jam will change your life), Gianna's candid admission of mistakes and tips for correcting them in advance are something I'd like to see in every cookbook. She changes recipes to suit her mood or diet and encourages you to do the same, all of it with heart and humor. It makes cooking fun and improvisational and collaborative instead of intimidating. Definitely check her out and get cooking.

Comedy-wise, I am beyond excited about my friend Kate's super new and already super successful new project, Ladies Against Humanity. Created in the most organic, why-not fashion when she heard Cards Against Humanity had no female writers, Kate expected it to be a silly little website to show a few coworkers. It took her about 20 minutes to make it. When I retweeted her a mere 2 hours after she created it, I didn't realize I was actually jumping on a bandwagon, as the site is already a runaway success. And of course it is, just look at it, it's hilarious. You can follow and tweet suggestions for additional cards here. Guys, this is the person with whom I will be watching The Millionaire Matchmaker tonight. I feel like I won the friendship lottery.

Oh, and isn't this blog supposed to be about wine? Totally killing at being a social human being and aspiring oenophile is my friend Liz, who has started The West Hollywood Wine society. Liz is a great hostess. I've witnessed and been guilty of spills, glass breaks, and all sorts of mischief, and she always takes it in stride. But this might be her most genius gathering yet. At the bi-weekly meetings, she has everyone bring a bottle based on a theme and say something about it, plus has two people "volunteer as tribute" (her adorable way of having a couple guests bring snacks). Liz kept the ball rolling on discussion and even let me lead douchey, official-ish tastings. The pours got bigger as the hours got smaller, and suffice it to say I had way more fun on a Wednesday night than anyone should be allowed. Kudos, Miss Elizabeth! Thank you for letting me bring my tasting glasses and act very pretentious, and for the moment you hushed the room and encouraged me to recite a poem. Your friendship choice here may have been questionable, but I am grateful you made it. And if anyone is interested in my selection for last night's theme, "Your Go-to Wine," it was this guy.

some of last night's crew

That's not rose.

GUYS I ACCIDENTALLY TOOK A GIF ON MY PHONE AND HAVE NO IDEA HOW I DID IT BUT WANT TO DO IT AGAIN FOREVER HOW????

lovely liz

I just did this...

Won't you join me and we can do our tasting kitz together?

The thing I wish I'd done, though, is actually work up the nerve to dye my hair this wine-inspired color, as it appeared when I was beneath a red spotlight. Thoughts?