Not Ready for Prime Time – Yet

This is my long-promised post on 2006 Barolo, and here is the gist of it: If you want to enjoy this potentially great vintage, plan to live a long, long time. Right now it’s almost as mean as the proverbial junkyard dog, but behind its off-putting tannins and deeply veiled fruit, it has the stuff to become one of the great vintages. It reminds me of some of the legendarily tough wines of the past – 1961 Bordeaux, 1978 Barolo – a few of which are only reaching their peak now.

Foreground, Cogno Barolo vineyards; background, classic Barolo skyline

You can see why I was in no great hurry to post this news: This wine is going to be around for a long time. In addition to its being structured for very long life, it is also competing for shelf space with a lot of attractive predecessors: 2001 and 2004 are top-flight vintages, both of which are still on store shelves, as is the lesser but still pleasing 2005. And coming down the pike is 2007, which early on is giving every sign of resembling 2005: friendly, easy drinking, and easily good for ten years or so.

With all that competition, I doubt 2006 Barolo is going to be walking off the shelves. But if you love good, old-fashioned Barolo – deep Nebbiolo fruit and character wrapped in the kind of tough (not green, just tough) tannins that may take five or more years to become drinkable, but then get better and better for maybe more than a single human life span – if that’s your pleasure, this is your vintage. Buy some, and bury it as deep in your cellar as you can. Try to forget about it for a decade, then look in and see how the kids are doing: you’ll probably get some lovely surprises.

Tasting the 2006 vintage at Nebbiolo Prima was brutal work, one of the toughest tastings I’ve ever experienced, in both its physical and intellectual demands. One young Barolo like that is hard enough – but one after another of them for several hours leaves the mouth coated with tannin and makes it almost impossible to taste fruit even when it’s showing well. This absolutely necessitated tasting the wines again in different circumstances – with some food, or in a vertical, or as part of an individual producer’s whole line of wines – anything that would give some relief from those punishing tannins and allow me to come to grips with other aspects of the wine.

In those other circumstances, I was invariably very impressed with what 2006 Barolo has to offer. And for that reason, by the way, I apologize to those producers whose wines I didn’t get to retaste and whom I have almost certainly underestimated because of it. With the limited time I had in Alba, I couldn’t manage to taste everything again, outside the formal procedure. I will do my best over what remains of my lifetime to correct those omissions.

I did at least get to visit three excellent producers – Elvio Cogno, Giacomo Fenocchio, and Massolino – and they didn’t disappoint. Far from it, in fact: They made me realize just how good a vintage 2006 could be.

 Cogno: a family firm, working 11 hectares in the commune of Novello. The winery sits atop Bricco Ravera, an esteemed cru of Barolo. All wines are lightly contemporized traditional styles – i.e., most see a small amount of new oak, which does nothing to interfere with the classic fruit flavors. Top wines are the Barolos: Vigna Elena, vinified entirely from the rosé clone of Nebbiolo; Ravera, from lampia and michet clones; Bricco Pernice, entirely from lampia clones; Cascina Nuova, from their youngest vines, and designed to be easier and earlier drinking than its more austere elder siblings.

Valter Fissore, winemaker at Cogno

Cogno also produces top-flight Barbera and Dolcetto d’Alba, plus a distinguished Langhe Rosso called Montegrilli, blended half and half of Nebbiolo and Barbera. And if your palate should need freshening, Cogno also has been working to revive a very localized white grape called Nascetta (probably descended from Vermentino) with which they make an intriguing white wine they call Anas-Cetta.

Giacomo Fenocchio:  A very traditional producer. The family works about 12 hectares in several communes; the winery and home vineyards lie in Monforte d’Alba, one of the most esteemed communes of the Barolo zone. The wines all show great continuity of style and structure and fruit presence – elegant and forceful without being overpowering or in-your-face. No new oak anywhere, just great Nebbiolo fruit and Barolo terroir. Top wines include Barolo Bussia, Barolo Villero, Barolo Cannubi – this is a roll call of great crus – and a monumental Riserva. Also very fine Dolcetto and Barbera d’Alba and an excellent Langhe Nebbiolo.

Claudio Fenocchio, winemaker at Giacomo Fenocchio

Massolino: Once more, a family-owned estate and largely traditionally made wines. Headquartered in Serralunga d’Alba, Massolino has long been identified with Vigna Rionda, one of the zone’s and the family’s prized crus. They also vinify two other excellent crus, Margheria, like Rionda very traditionally made, and Parafada, which until recently had been aged in new barriques, but from which it has been steadily weaned over the last few vintages. All three are superb, long-lasting wines.

Franco Massolino, winemaker at Massolino

As a traditional house, Massolino also makes a “basic” Barolo, blended from Nebbiolo of all its vineyards. And as a market experiment, Massolino has just released Dieci Anni, a ten-year-old Vigna Rionda, which is unquestionably the best wine I’ve yet tasted of the 2000 vintage.

Beauty and the Beast: Barbaresco 2007 and Barolo 2006

Add two more – 2006 and 2007 – to the already improbably long list of better-than-average-to-great Barolo and Barbaresco vintages that has been accumulating since 1988. These two – the most recently released of the two appellations – are a little different, however, both from each other and from what has preceded them over the past 22 years. Side by side, they look like Jekyll and Hyde: Barbaresco 2007 seems gentle, friendly, good company, while Barolo 2006 is rough and tough and, at this moment at least, decidedly unfriendly. Together, both resemble pre-1988 vintages more than any more recent ones, the ’06 closed and ungiving as superior Barolo vintages used always to be in their youth, the ’07 softer and more welcoming, as good lighter vintages used to be, especially in Barbaresco.

No one ever said Nebbiolo was an easy grape variety to grow or to know. In the past, it was more often heartbreaking than heartwarming, and outside of a few very restricted areas of Piedmont, it still is – a highly localized glory that it shares with Pinot noir, to which it is often compared. And while we appear now to be in a sort of Golden Age of Barolo and Barbaresco, Nebbiolo still occasionally reminds us all – producers and consumers alike – that it is no pushover.

Some of the tasting samples at Nebbiolo Prima

Any wine journalist who might have forgotten that fact was forcibly reminded of it every morning at this year’s Nebbiolo Prima (formerly the Alba Wine Event). Every morning the participating 50-odd international journalists confronted approximately 85 newly released 2007 Barbarescos and 2006 Barolos (plus some few Barbaresco Riserva 2005 and Barolo Riserva 2004).

By noon every day, almost all of us had black teeth and tongues, and cheeks that felt as thoroughly tanned as our best shoes. Make no mistake: this annual Alba marathon is penitential tasting – but it is worth it, for what you learn about the vintages and the way the producers have handled them. Nothing gives you a better sense of a whole vintage across an entire important zone than does this annual endurance contest.

A selection of the Barbarescos at the tasting

As a sort of gentle start, we always taste first the Barbarescos, which get a year less aging before release than do the Barolos. (This also gives us a sneak peak at next year’s Barolo prospects, since there isn’t that much difference between the two zones.) This year, most of the ’07 Barbarescos showed very well indeed. Some examples from Neive were overoaked, but even there I could still taste the vintage’s cheerful, enjoyable fruit. All these Barbarescos displayed lovely balance. Overall, 2007 in Barbaresco has medium body, delightful fresh fruit of an authentic Nebbiolo character, and a nice touch of elegance. These aren’t wines for long cellaring; they are already approachable, and they should be thoroughly enjoyable drinking for the next seven to ten years – which isn’t bad at all.

Here are some of the wines that for me stood out from the (very pleasant) crowd:

• Cascina delle Rose Rio Sordo and Tre Stelle
• Castello di Neive, the basic Barbaresco and the Santo Stefano
• Marchesi di Gresy Martinenga
• Moccagatta Bric Balin
• Poderi Colla Roncaglie
• Produttori del Barbaresco, the basic Barbaresco
• Albino Rocca, the basic Barbaresco and Vigneto Brich Ronchi
• Bruno Rocca Rabaja

Most of these names will probably be familiar: they are among the perennial top performers in Barbaresco, turning in excellent wines vintage after vintage. New to me was Cascina delle Rose, which I wish I had known about years ago. I managed to visit the property, a little gem – just about three hectares – in the sweet spot of Rio Sordo. Its nearest neighbors are Gaja on one side and di Gresy on the other, which speaks volumes about its terroir.

The proprietors of Cascina delle Rose, Giovanna Rizzolio and Italo Sobrino, at the cut-out in their cellar that shows the dramatic striations of their terroir

The owners are charming people and very traditional winemakers: no fancy tricks, just straightforward Piemontese craftsmanship. They produce lovely Dolcetto and Barbera d’Alba, as well as their classic Barbarescos, and they also have accommodations for travelers and vacationers (www.cascinadellerose.it).

Still to come – but this will have to be another post: this one’s long enough already – are the 2006 Barolos, which are a whole nother story.

Putting La Morra on the Map and Other Nebbiolo News

Three short items today: a new vineyard map; a précis of Nebbiolo Prima, formerly the Alba Wine Event; and a buying opportunity for top-flight Barbaresco.

I spent an intense week in Piedmont last month tasting wines and visiting producers – I’ll report briefly on that here, in detail in future posts. I want to start with what is definitely good news: the map of the commune of La Morra that Alessandro Masnaghetti has just issued.

Alessandro Masnaghetti

As I explained in an earlier post, Alessandro Masnaghetti is a highly respected Italian wine journalist, the publisher, editor, writer, mapmaker – pretty much the whole writing and production staff – for Enogea, a bimonthly Italian-language journal devoted to the wines and terroir of Italy’s great red wine areas – most notably, Piedmont and Tuscany. He has been producing a series of vineyard maps, in Italian and in English, of individual communes in those zones. These maps are more accurate, more detailed, and provide more information about sites, expositions, and ownership, than any vineyard maps I have seen for any other wine region. So complete are they that you can even use them to locate the newly created subzones of Barolo and Barbaresco.

This newest map, of La Morra commune and nearby Roddi and Cherasco, is fully up to the standards set by its predecessors. It completes Masnaghetti’s survey of the vineyards of Barolo. So he has now issued complete maps of both major Nebbiolo denominations, Barolo and Barbaresco, containing as much vineyard and producer information as any wine maven could desire. The maps can be obtained by contacting, in Italy, almasnag@tin.it or, in the US, www.rarewineco.com.

Map detail: the village of La Morra and some nearby vineyards and wineries

Nebbiolo Prima: the Short Version

Now for the less good news. What used to be the Alba Wine Event (I always liked the acronym) is now Nebbiolo Prima, with new (and definitely not yet up to speed) PR crew replacing the very competent Wellcom staff who previously ran it. So there were glitches, not least important of which were the temperature of the wine storage (tasting samples were too warm) and tasting room (chronic trouble with the air conditioning) – both of which make serious problems when you’re tasting 85 newly bottled Nebbiolo wines every morning.

Here is the summary of the event. The 2007 Barbarescos are charming – very accessible, with lovely fruit, good acid, decent structure. They may not be the longest-lasting wines ever to come out of the zone, but they will be enjoyable drinking over the next ten years.

Charm, on the other hand, is not a word to use in connection with 2006 Barolo. These are tough, enormously structured wines, complex and deep, but leatherbound right now and maybe for the next five years. If you miss old-fashioned Barolo as I do – wines that took years to come round and then got better and better for decades – 2006 is your vintage.

Buyer, Be Aware

Here’s an important piece of news that should affect your wine budget: Produttori di Barbaresco, the superb cooperative that every year offers some of the best wines and finest bargains in Barbaresco, has decided not to bottle separately any of its cru wines in the 2006 vintage. All have been vinified separately but will be blended back into the “basic” Barbaresco.

The reasons for this are, apparently, first, that there is too much wine already in the pipeline, and, second, that in 2006 the cru wines reflect the vintage – as in Barolo, it is that kind of dominating vintage – much more than they do their individual terroirs. Whatever the reasons, this makes a fantastic buying opportunity for Nebbiolo fans: a first-rate vintage from a first-rate producer at bargain-basement prices. I have already seen Produttori 2006 Barbaresco here in New York for as little as $30 a bottle. That’s a whole case of a fine, long-lived Barbaresco for the price of a single bottle of Gaja. Need I say more?

Out of the Cellar . . .

In the 50 or so years that I’ve been drinking and paying attention to wine, the culture of wine has fundamentally changed. In those thrilling days of yesteryear, as the Lone Ranger radio program used to intone, wine was primarily French, and, except for Beaujolais, most wines were thought to be the better if they were aged for a decade or so. A well-stocked cellar was the ideal most wine neophytes aspired to, and the superiority of old Bordeaux and Burgundy to any young wine from anywhere was an unquestioned and unquestionable truth. 

EVERYONE'S DREAM WINE CELLAR? (Photo by Petr Novak, Wikipedia)

Now, young wine rules. Fruit is king. Big, fresh, forward fruit flavors – berries and plums if red, pears and apples and tropical fruits if white – guarantee a wine big scores, big sales, and maybe a cult following. Serious producers lament that their wines are being drunk far too young, but every year more of them restyle their wines to push that fruit up front. Terroir gets lip service, but fruit balances the books.

At the same time, cellaring wine has transmogrified from a connoisseur’s hobby to a hard-nosed investor’s practice. Wine – at least, the top-growth Bordeaux, some grands crus Burgundies, and a handful of Italian and Californian stars – has become a commodity, bought and sold and re-sold for profit. We used to make jokes about the Japanese, who ceremonially gifted and re-gifted each other with never-to-be-drunk bottles of Margaux and Lafite. Now we nod sagely at the latest auction prices for never-to-be-drunk cases of Margaux and Lafite. I know which of the two situations I find more pointless, but I suspect not many people would agree with me.

In the old days, cellaring wine was relatively simple, even if the rules were iron-clad. A good wine cellar had to be dark, because light could cause chemical changes in wines. It had to be still and vibration-free, because even small amounts of motion or shaking could speed up the wine’s process of maturation, stir up its sediments, agitate it, and cause who knows what undesirable chemical changes. It had to be a constant 55 degrees (or 50 degrees, or 45: experts disagreed), because heat is the great enemy of wine, causing it to age much too fast and unpredictably, and also contributing to undesirable chemical changes (do you sense a theme here?). It had to have a constant 35 percent humidity, to prevent corks from drying out, which would destroy the wine by leakage, oxidation, and – you guessed it – undesirable chemical changes. In short, any change in the wine not brought about by slow, controlled aging was probably undesirable.

Now that wines have become an investment, the folks who play that sort of game follow the rules even more rigidly, and they make sure that all those conditions are certified as surely as the wine’s provenance, lest they miss a penny of profit on the transaction. That usually means third-party storage under secure, temperature-and-humidity-controlled conditions – an expensive proposition that adds a great deal to the now-stratospheric purchase price of the great growths and their kin. From my point of view, it’s a chump’s game. I couldn’t enjoy drinking a wine so expensive it made my hand shake and my mouth go dry – and if I can’t enjoy drinking a wine, what’s the point? Maybe it’s just envy of things I can’t afford, but I can’t get past this simple mantra: Wine is meant for drinking.

That indeed was the whole point of cellaring wine in the first place. Most of our beliefs about cellaring wine have their roots in the conditions prevailing in Europe in the 1700s and 1800s, which is when the modern version of serious wine collecting began. (The classical version of wine collecting, under the Roman republic and empire, involved entirely different conditions – clay amphorae sealed with resin for storage of the prized wines of Campania. Bordeaux and Burgundy were still wildernesses.)

The purpose of cellaring wines was exclusively to mature them for drinking, and as connoisseurs – primarily Englishmen – gathered their prized wines, they did their best to keep them under conditions similar to those of their making. Thus, cellars for dark and cool and humidity, etc. – the whole by-now-traditional package of requirements. Think 18th-century European farm and manor houses: earth cellars, no central heating, no AC, no humidifiers, and lots of servants – a very different world from ours.

One thing has remained the same: The underlying reason to cellar wines is that you love the taste of mature wine. So if all you’re after in wine is fruit, or if those primary fruity flavors that almost all young wines display are what you most enjoy in wine, then forget about cellaring altogether. You don’t need it. It will add nothing to a wine that you won’t get within a few months of its release. In fact, cellaring may well subtract from that element of your enjoyment.

If, on the other hand, you’ve been bitten by the mature wine bug, you’re cursed and blessed – cursed with the endless pursuit of age-worthy wines, and blessed with the incomparable pleasure they will give. I was lucky enough to be able to drink some properly aged wines early in my bibulous career. Those were for me profound experiences, which left me with a life-long love of mature wines.

One long-ago Thanksgiving, for instance, my good friend Al Cirillo poured for Diane and me a 1928 Barolo – some 40 or 45 years old when we drank it. We have no idea who its producer was: Its label was so faded and tattered that only the name Barolo and the vintage were legible. Al had picked it up in a shop that had acquired it in a miscellaneous cellar collection. A good three inches of sediment lay at the bottom of the bottle. When poured, the wine was very pale garnet with that ubiquitous Nebbiolo orange edge. And what an aroma! What a huge mouthful of dark, leather and pepper, dried-berry and plum flavors. The youngish (10-year-old) Clos de Vougeot that we had drunk just before the Barolo faded into insignificance in the face of the Barolo’s profundity. We’ve never forgotten it: it has been for years a palatal reference point for us.

The modern cellar at Pontet Canet

Similarly, many years ago, when I was first beginning serious wine journalism, I and several other scribblers visited Chateau Pontet Canet, a long-neglected Fifth Growth Pauillac, acquired just a few years before by Guy Tesseron, who was then beginning the process of renovation that has brought Pontet Canet and its sister estate, the St. Estephe Lafon Rochet, to their present heights of prestige.

We dined in the cellar, I recall, a cool spot in a very hot Bordeaux summer, and after several vintages of Pontet we were served the pièce de résistance, a 1945 Lafon. The Fourth Growth Lafon in those days didn’t rank very high on anyone’s list of great Bordeaux chateaux. It too had not been well maintained (there wasn’t a whole lot of money to be made in wine back then, and consequently not a whole lot to be invested in it). But, however humble, this was a wine that had reposed in its birth cellar for some 30 years, and until served to us probably hadn’t been moved since it was first laid down. Once decanted and poured, it was a revelation: as wonderful, as elegant, as balanced, supple, and complex, as any of the First and Second Growths I had tasted. That, I thought at the time and still believe, is what proper aging can do, and that is exactly why you bother to cellar wine.

For many of us, however, “cellaring” can only be a metaphor. Next post (to paraphrase Freud): What do wines really want?

Map Reading

I am not really a map person. I’m not really even a directions person, truth to tell. I seem to suffer from a form of right/left, east/west dyslexia. Even after decades of life in New York, I still get disoriented coming up to street level from my neighborhood subway. Given all that, you can understand that I usually don’t get very excited about maps, and that the idea of a “good map” is sort of a foreign language to me. So when I tell you that an Italian wine journalist named Alessandro Masnaghetti is publishing some truly great maps of the major Italian wine zones, you can believe that they are really exceptional.

Here is a detail, about half actual size, from his map of the Monforte d’Alba commune of Barolo.

I’ll return to this image to explain just what makes Masnaghetti’s maps so superior in a little bit. Right now, I want to frame the picture for you. Alessandro Masnaghetti is a highly respected Italian wine journalist, the publisher, editor, writer, mapmaker – pretty much the whole writing and production staff in effect – for Enogea, a bimonthly Italian-language journal concerned almost to the point of obsession with the wines and terroir of Italy’s great red wine areas – most notably, Piedmont and Tuscany.

He has been producing a series of vineyard maps, in Italian and in English, of individual communes in those zones. These maps are more accurate, more detailed, and provide more information about sites, expositions, and ownership than any vineyard maps I have seen for any other wine region anywhere. So complete are they that you can even use them to locate the newly created (the names will start appearing on labels in 2010) subzones of Barolo (177 – that’s right, 177 – named subzones approved) and Barbaresco (66 names approved).

Back to the map detail. What you’re looking at here is the northwestern corner of the commune of Monforte d’Alba, a township that is one of the most prized sources of Nebbiolo for Barolo. In particular, you’re looking at Bussia – Bussia Soprana to the left, Bussia Sottana to the right (with Munie shown in pale blue just below it). Bussia is one of the great crus of Barolo, a name that appears proudly on the labels of some of the zone’s most prestigious makers.

What the color-coded map shows are the major subdivisions within that – for example, Colonello, Cicala, Romirasco – as well the sites of wineries in the zone – #5 is Francesco Clerico, #6 is Bussia Soprana, #4 there in the center is Giacomo Fenocchio. So what Masnaghetti has created is a cru map of Monforte d’Alba, showing the locations of all the key vineyard sites within the township.

That by itself would be valuable, but the back of the map provides yet more, and even more crucial, information. Here, slightly enlarged, is Masnaghetti’s breakdown of the ownership of Bussia Soprana:

In addition to identifying who owns what and where, there are arrows indicating the direction of the slope and therefore exposure. The prose accompanying each such vineyard map – and there is one for each cru of the commune – gives data about elevation, soil quality, wine characteristics, and varieties cultivated, if any beyond Nebbiolo. From my own experience, I can tell you that this kind of information is not casually come by. Each one of Masnaghetti’s maps represents a massive effort, and for the real Barolo nut – of which, for better or for worse, I am one – all this data is candy for the baby. Besides all that, the maps are handsome: I’ve rarely enjoyed just looking at a map before, but these give me real satisfaction, both visually and intellectually. I think they are an amazing accomplishment.

Thus far, Masnaghetti has produced vineyard maps for the townships of Barolo, Castiglione, Monforte, and Serralunga in the Barolo zone; for Barbaresco, Neive, and Treiso, the entirety of the Barbaresco zone; Giaole, Panzano, and Radda in Chianti Classico; Bolgheri and Bolgheri Sassicaia elsewhere in Tuscany; and Mazzon in the Alto Adige. Non-subscribers to Enogea can obtain the maps by contacting, in Italy, almasnag@tin.it or, in the US, www.rarewineco.com.

Hello, World!

Why should you read this blog?  More to the point, why should I write it?  From what I’ve seen of the blogosphere, more people should ask those questions and demand hard answers of themselves and others – which is one of the negative reasons I’m writing this blog.  This will not be another collection of what-I-drank-last-night snippets, nor will it tell you the best wine to seduce/dump/make up with your current flame.

My positive reason is that this blog will be the wine column I’ve always wanted, a place where I can talk about the wines and winemakers who really interest me, as opposed to the wines and winemakers that an editor thinks will sell more copies of the magazine or appeal to the already established preferences of its readers. 

I’ve loved wine and been writing about it for decades now, and I’ve spent my adult life – the part that paid the bills, which wine writing rarely does — in education.   I think the two primary purposes of any kind of writing are to entertain and to instruct (old-fashioned idea, isn’t it?) – and that means, in wine terms, letting your readers know about wines and regions and producers they may never have heard of as well as giving them more information about the ones they already like. 

For real wine people, the recondite and the familiar are equal fun, so I plan to include columns on wines that are probably going to be ho-hum for connoisseurs, but may well be news for wine beginners.  And I will certainly do some columns that will intrigue the deep-dyed winos but bore the pants off beginners.  That’s life, and wine is nothing if not the stuff of life.

Some readers of this post may already know some of my wine writings; most, I suspect, will not, so a little up-front true confession is in order.  I’m a geezer: I learned wine, from a starting point of total ignorance, back in the days before it was a common drink, back when wine was largely French, back when you just couldn’t find any wine outside of major metropolitan areas, back when it was thought a little odd, a bit of an affectation, to drink wine.  So I’ve lived through and learned from the major shift in American attitudes toward wine and, even more important, I’ve witnessed the most fundamental changes in winemaking since some smart Greek discovered you get better grapes if you make the vine grow up a post, about 3000 years ago.

I’ve been lucky enough to taste a lot of wines (many I couldn’t, and still can’t, afford to buy — alas).  And I continue tasting a lot: every year brings a new vintage all around the world, and that means a lot of wine to learn anew every year.  It helps to have a long perspective for that, so that each new wine isn’t a total novelty.  In recent years, I’ve been a member of tasting panels for important wine publications.  I’m usually the oldest person present, by several centuries, and most of my fellow tasters work as sommelier(e)s and wine managers for often-quite-prestigious restaurants.  They are usually in their thirties, with a few in their twenties and fewer in their forties.  The experience has made me very wary about ordering wine in restaurants, and in fact ranks among the things that moved me to start this blog.

Here’s an example, from a few years back.  The group was blind-tasting Barolo, and the wine we were just presented with was a lovely pale strawberry color, with a light, fruity, almost-strawberry aroma.  In the mouth, it lived up to the expectations that sight and smell created: light-bodied, fresh, mildly berry-ish – quite delightful and refreshing.  A wonderful wine, if it had been a Grignolino or Freisa or even a Beaujolais – but it was supposed to be Barolo, which is a whole different animal.  To my surprise, the young sommelier(e)s loved it, extravagantly, and talked about nothing but its fruit.  When I pointed out that it failed to live up to the basic standards of its breed – that it was, in effect, a Pekinese passing itself off as a Great Dane – they looked at me with incomprehension, as if I was speaking a foreign language.  So, I said to myself, maybe I shouldn’t order Barolo in a restaurant.

Much more recently, I had a parallel experience.  This time the wine in question turned out to be (we found out afterwards) a very expensive, single-vineyard bottling from a very prestigious producer.  But in the blind tasting, what came through wasn’t the grape variety or the vineyard, but the hand of the winemaker: this was a wine that had been given the full, high-tech cellar treatment, and as a consequence tasted neither of fruit nor soil but of toasted oak and oak sweetness.  It was very sleek, very modern, very international-consumer-friendly, but, given the producer’s willingness to pay for all that expensive oak and cellar equipment, it could have been made anywhere, from any grapes – in effect, top-dollar Coca Cola, and not a wine I would spend a dime on. 

Again, the young sommelier(e)s loved it and praised what they called fruit sweetness that was in fact oak sweetness  This time, when I spoke of the standards of the breed, they looked embarrassed and didn’t meet my eyes, as if I had just wet myself in public.  Afterwards, when they found out the suggested retail price of the wine (over $200), some insisted even more emphatically that it had to be a good wine.  This time I said to myself, maybe I shouldn’t drink wine in restaurants at all.  

In wine, the axiom should probably be, don’t trust anyone under sixty.