General Wine Thoughts

When I first came to tend bar at a French bistrot some seven years ago I really didn't know too much about wine, other than that it tasted good and that there was alcohol in it, allowing for the famous mildly euphoric and relaxing effect. I don't suppose it took long for a rudimentary understanding of French wines, Bordeaux being blends of Cabernet and Merlot, Red Burgandies being Pinot Noir, the Southern Rhone and Languedoc wines being of Grenache and Syrah along with a few other varietals, and then along with a whole range of minor exceptions, varieties, particular wines unique to certain areas, all alike but different. I'd ask my guys, long experienced drinkers of French wines, what's this Faugeres, or what's a Bandol, or a Madiran, I mean, as far as being able to explain it to people. And typically the cat would reply, 'oh, lovely wine, inky, spice...' and then go about his business.

The more you know about wine, the less it seems. Of course there are a whole range of intimidating titles, sommelier, second level, master of wine, and there are people who without being told can take a sip and tell you the particular wine it is, maybe even the chateau, and probably, the year. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I can roll wine over my tongue and make that slurp sound. I have a nose, though it's not always as clear as I'd like it to be. It is good, I'll tell you, to take your time. You might as well study the appearance of the wine, and then, after swirling the wine in a glass, you must give it a long good nose, which is basically the same as tasting the wine, but with some obvious difference, your tongue being the tactile part of your nose.

Now, humanity has evolved over a very long time from fish-like creatures. We have senses of sight, smell and taste for very good reasons, for having kept us alive and happy for so long. Our brains give us constant feedback, just as our guts do, though with guts usually there is some lag time, some delay, before you realize, hmm, maybe I shouldn't have eaten that. It is all these basic senses that we employ when we bring a glass of wine before us, and eventually with some intention of bringing that wine to match with something that we are going to eat. When you bring food and wine together, magic worlds of cuisine open up.

Noted wine writer Hugh Johnson makes an interesting point. The wine in your glass is water that has fallen from the sky, that has gone down into the earth, and then brought up through roots, then up the stalk of a grape vine and out to sustain the growth of the little budding grape which itself will hang there a whole season until it is perfectly ripe. Think of it! And so it comes to be that there is a mightily important concept that dovetails so neatly with French life. Terroir, the word is. And it refers to the locale where the grapes grow. It means this in the broadest sense. A wine's terroir, 'earth,' literally translated, is sun exposure, the slope, the type of soil, the kind of growing season, the weather, the kind of wine, the drainage of the soil; poetically used, terroir invokes, or evokes, basically all the living DNA that finds itself into all living things native to a region. There is the obvious suggestion that the grape is a very sensitive creature. Almost as if, if a Chinese restaurant delivery gu drove by a field of Pinot Noir often enough, you might get a hint of soy sauce in the air that touches the grape's skin.

Let's have an example of one kind of terroir. Let's take the South of France, maybe, oh, somewhere in the Languedoc. Say, Pic St. Loup, which is an interesting mesa-like mountainous formation that juts up from the hot plains near Montpellier, near Carcassone. Or perhaps a Corbieres, let's say. Down here, in this part of France, not to far away from Spain, we have what is called 'garrigue,' which means, 'dust,' more or less, but refers to all the wild aromatic herbs that grow there, happy in the sun, lavender, thyme, rosemary, sage. Just as we would in Provence, and in the Southern Rhone and in the Luberon. The roots up here on the slope have to reach way down to get their water and nutrients, bound to help produce a wine with minerally character, earthiness. And wine making itself is a natural process, after all. Just pick some ripe grapes, put them into a barrel, give them a crush and a stir, and the local yeast will come and enjoy a feast, in doing so, making wine out of grape juice. And even, in France, the wine maker, who takes the grape and juice and wine all through an aging process, is referred to as a 'vigneron,' a tender of the vines. And it is, indeed, in tending the vines where she or he succeeds. As they say, "God makes the wine. Just don't get in the way." If things are done right, if short-cuts aren't used, if grapes from a large area of varying stages of ripeness were thrown in together, necessitating some added chemical preservatives, if things aren't done stupidly, a wine comes out as it is meant to. A wine has character, just like a person or a dog, really. And this is a very good thing.

Now we come to food matching, or wine pairing, whatever you want to call it, ha ha. A wine that offers that taste and aroma of garrigue will go very well with a dish that has rosemary and thyme in it. It will work well with a dish that has black olive, caper, basil, garlic, the outer periphery of the garrigue neighborhood. The wild boar who has roamed through the scrub brush will eventually taste fine with a glass of such a wine.

I am reminded of the time the chef sat down at the bar to enjoy a plate of veal kidneys. Uhmm, he sort of grunted, when I asked him what sort of wine he might like. I was still learning, so I thought of rudimentary pairing guidelines, like maybe something peppery that generally works with red meat, like a Southern Rhone, or maybe a Bordeaux, for different reasons involving tannins. But the Chef shook his head, to say I should know better and that I had overlooked the basic element tying the dish together, a mustard sauce. And so, I was obliged to say "Duh" to myself, and go for a wine close to Dijon, the home of French mustard, which is a Burgandy, or, if had to, a wine from the Southern part of Burgandy, which is Beaujolais. It wasn't the red meat part, but the mustard, and the mustard itself worked well with the strong irony flavors of kidneys. In fact, the earth of the famous Cotes De Nuit, the Northern part of Burgandy's Cote D'Or, is irony stuff from the center of the Earth, whereas to the South it's ancient seabed limestone. (Now, I suppose a Madiran, which works well with liver, would have worked too, for the same iron red soil reasons, but that we didn't offer by the glass. ) And so Red Burgandy wines have an earthiness to them, even as they are on the lighter end as far as thickness in the mouth.

And that is yet another way how one learns the regional agreement as far as food and wine pairing. The dish of a particular area, a cassoulet, for instance, works perfectly with the wines of the region, as if everyone, God, chefs, tradition, and eaters, were in complete unspoken harmony.

Everything within the grape follows the timeline of maturity. Toward the end of the growing season, as the fruit is now ample and juicy, it is prone to being preyed upon by insect life, who cleverly are set on enjoying their own little share of the energy release of a long-ago Big Bang and the sunlight of a growing season. And so, naturally, the plant produces tannins, bitter darkening chemical compounds that work well to deter invasion and harm. These tannins are thought of, and treated carefully, so that a ripe grape is considered to also have not just ripe fruitiness but ripe tannins, that astringent quality that makes wine enjoyable in the mouth and quite obviously healthy as far as every sense of ours tells us. (Unless we find out the next day that the wine was a 'headache wine.')

And if balance has been achieved in the wonderful ripeness of fruit that has happened at the end of that long growing season, with the right amount of rain, a harvest time not too wet (to make the resultant juice flabby), nor too hot or whatever grapes don't really like, if all that year has gone well, then it stands, and often happens, that a wine has a beautiful balance, that the elements of its fruit, structure, acidity and tannins, mouthfeel and finish are harmonious to each other.