The New York Times book of wine

Talk Dirt to Me

By HAROLD MC GEE AND DANIEL PATTERSON

It’s hard to have a conversation about wine these days without hearing the French word “terroir.” Derived from a Latin root meaning “earth,” terroir describes the relationship between a wine and the specific place that it comes from. For example, many will say the characteristic minerality of wines from Chablis comes from the limestone beds beneath the vineyards (although, when pressed, they generally admit that they’ve never actually tasted limestone). The idea that one can taste the earth in a wine is appealing, a welcome link to nature and place in a delocalized world; it has also become a rallying cry in an increasingly sharp debate over the direction of modern winemaking. The trouble is, it’s not true.

When terroir was first associated with wine, in the 17th-century phrase “goût de terroir” (literally, “taste of the earth”), it was not intended as a compliment. Its meaning began to change in 1831, when Dr. Morelot, a wealthy landowner in Burgundy, observed in his “Statistique de la Vigne Dans le Département de la Côte-d’Or” that all of the wineries in Burgundy made wine essentially the same way, so the reason some tasted better than others must be due to the terroir—specifically, the substrata underneath the topsoil of a vineyard. Wine, he claimed, derived its flavor from the site’s geology: in essence, from rocks.

In recent years, the concept that one can taste rocks and soil in a wine has become popular with wine writers, importers and sommeliers. “Wines express their source with exquisite definition,” asserts Matt Kramer in his book Making Sense of Wine. “They allow us to eavesdrop on the murmurings of the earth.” Of a California vineyard’s highly regarded chardonnays, he writes, there is “a powerful flavor of the soil: the limestone speaks.” The sommelier Paul Grieco, in his wine list at Hearth in New York, writes of rieslings that “the glory of the varietal is in its transparency, its ability to truly reflect the soil in which it is grown.” In his February newsletter, Kermit Lynch, one of the most respected importers of French wine, returns repeatedly to the stony flavors in various white wines from a “terroirist” winemaker in Alsace: “When he speaks of a granitic soil, the wine in your glass tastes of it.”

If you ask a hundred people about the meaning of terroir, they’ll give you a hundred definitions, which can be as literal as tasting limestone or as metaphorical as a feeling. Terroir flavors are generally characterized as earthiness and minerality. On the other hand, wines with flavors of berries or tropical fruits and little or no minerality are therefore assumed not to have as clear a connection to the earth, which means they could have come from anywhere, and are thought to bear the mark of human intervention.

If this seems confusing—especially given that wine is made from fruit—it gets worse when you ask winemakers about how to get the flavors from the rocks into the glass. According to them, a good expression of terroir requires more work in the vineyards, or possibly less; it’s the hotter climate in California that leads to its high-alcohol, fruit-forward, terroir-less style, or possibly not; even the oft-heard contention that a winemaker must “work with what the vines give you” is contradicted by Ales Kristancic of Movia winery, whose family has been making wines from vineyards on the Italy-Slovenia border for hundreds of years. “Plants need to understand what the winemaker wants,” Kristancic says. “Only a winery with great tradition can make great vineyards.”

Since there’s so little consensus among winemakers about how to foster the expression of place—what Matt Kramer calls “somewhereness”—in their wines, what are our wine experts tasting? How can a place or a soil express itself through wine? Does terroir really exist?

Yes, but the effects of a place on a wine are far more complex than simply tasting the earth beneath the vine. Great wines are produced on many different soil types, from limestone to granite to clay, in places where the vines get just enough water and nourishment from the soil to grow without deficiencies and where the climate allows the grapes to ripen slowly but fully. It’s also true that different soils can elicit different flavors from the same grape. Researchers in Spain recently compared wines from the same clone of grenache grafted on the same rootstock, harvested and vinified in exactly the same way, but grown in two vineyards 1,600 feet apart, one with a soil significantly richer in potassium, calcium and nitrogen. The wines from the mineral-rich soil were higher in apparent density, alcohol and ripe-raisiny aromas; wines from the poorer soil were higher in acid, astringency and applelike aromas. The different soils produced different flavors, but they were flavors of fruit and of the yeast fermentation. What about the flavors of soil and granite and limestone that wine experts describe as minerality—a term oddly missing from most formal treatises on wine flavor? Do they really go straight from the earth to the wine to the discerning palate?

No.

Consider the grapevine growing in the earth. It takes in elemental, inert materials from the planet—air and water and minerals—and, using energy captured from sunlight, turns them into a living, growing organism. It doesn’t just accumulate the earth’s materials. It transforms them into the sugars, acids, aromas, tannins, pigments and dozens of other molecules that make grapes and wine delicious.

“Plants don’t really interact with rocks,” explains Mark Matthews, a plant physiologist at the University of California, Davis, who studies vines. “They interact with the soil, which is a mixture of broken-down rock and organic matter. And plant roots are selective. They don’t absorb whatever’s there in the soil and send it to the fruit. If they did, fruits would taste like dirt.” He continues, “Any minerals from the solid rock that vine roots do absorb—sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron, a handful of others—have to be dissolved first in the soil moisture. Most of them are essential nutrients, and they mainly affect how well the plant as a whole grows.”

Most of the earthy and mineral aromas and flavors that we detect in wine actually come from the interaction of the grape and yeast. Yeasts metabolize the grape sugars into alcohol, along the way freeing up and spinning off the dozens of aromatic chemicals that make wine more than just alcoholic grape juice. It’s because of the yeasts that we can catch whiffs of tropical fruits, grilled meats, toasted bread and other things that have never been anywhere near the grapes or the wine. The list of evocative yeast products includes an organic sulfur molecule that can give sauvignon blancs a “flinty” aroma. And there are minor yeasts that create molecules called volatile phenols, whose earthy, smoky flavors have nothing to do with the soil but are suggestive of it, especially in wines from the southern Rhône.

Grape minerals and mineral flavors are also strongly influenced by the grower and winemaker. When a vineyard is planted, the vine type, spacing and orientation are just a few of many important decisions. Growers control the plant growth in myriad ways, such as pruning, canopy management or, most obviously, irrigating and replenishing the soil with manures or chemical fertilizers. The winemaker then makes hundreds of choices that affect wine flavor, beginning with the ripeness at which the grapes are harvested, and can change the mineral content by using metal equipment, concrete fermentation tanks or clarifying agents made from bentonite clay. Jamie Goode, a British plant biologist turned wine writer, describes in his superbly lucid book Wine Science how techniques that minimize the wine’s contact with oxygen can increase the levels of sulfur compounds that may be mistaken for “mineral” character from the soil.

So, if vines absorb only rock that is dissolved in water, if grape and wine minerals are not a reflection of the rocks’ minerals, and if earthy aromas in wine come from microbes and not the earth, do soil minerals have any real role in wine flavor?

Hildegarde Heymann, a sensory scientist at U.C. Davis, is skeptical about the usefulness of the terms “terroir” and “minerality” as they’re used today. But she is intrigued by “minerality.” “People who talk about minerality are describing something they perceive that’s hard to grab on to,” she says. “My guess is that it’s a composite perception, something like ‘creaminess’ in dairy foods. ‘Minerality’ might be a way of describing a combination of complexity, balance and a substantial body. We do know that mineral ions can affect wine flavor by affecting acidity, chemical reaction rates and the volatility of aromas. And we’re just now looking at whether they can affect the body of wine, its ‘mouthfeel.’ They might.”

It’s possible, then, that soil minerals may affect wine flavor indirectly, by reacting with other grape and yeast substances that produce flavor and tactile sensations, or by altering the production of flavor compounds as the grape matures on the vine.

The place where grapes are grown clearly affects the wine that is made from them, but it’s not a straightforward matter of tasting the earth. If the earth “speaks” through wine, it’s only after its murmurings have been translated into a very different language, the chemistry of the living grape and microbe. We don’t taste a place in a wine. We taste a wine from a place—the special qualities that a place enables grapes and yeasts to express, aided and abetted by the grower and winemaker.

In the years following Dr. Morelot’s missive on terroir, the quality of a wine became synonymous with the quality of the vineyard where it originated. This meant the value of that wine was tied to the land instead of to the winemaker, which allowed it to be handed down from generation to generation. The French went on to codify their vineyards into legal appellations, creating gradations within those appellations that demarcated clear levels of quality (grand cru, first growth and so on), the economic effects of which are felt to this day. Given that it was landowners who benefited most, the commonly held idea of terroir—wine as proxy for a piece of dirt—looks a lot like one of the longest-running, most successful marketing campaigns of the modern era.

Today, it’s easy to ascribe all this terroir talk to commerce, to the European reaction to California’s recent rise in viniculture status. It’s been suggested that terroir is just the Old World saying to the New: It’s the land, stupid—we have it and you don’t. But that doesn’t explain why so many Americans have embraced the concept with near-religious zeal. To paraphrase the great French wine historian Roger Dion, why have so many brilliant and passionate wine professionals been so eager to attribute solely to nature what is actually the result of hard work by talented winemakers?

The answer lies in the complex relationship between tradition, culture and taste. Those wine professionals have all spent vast amounts of time and energy learning what traditional European wines taste like, region by region, winery by winery, vineyard by vineyard. The version of terroir that many of them hold is that those wines taste the way they do because of the enduring natural setting, i.e., the rocks and soil. These wines taste the way they do because people have chosen to emphasize flavors that please them.

The pioneering French enologist Émile Peynaud wrote nearly 25 years ago: “I cannot agree with the view that ‘one accepts human intervention (in vinification) as long as it allows the natural characteristics to remain intact,’ since it is precisely human intervention which has created and highlighted these so-called natural characteristics!” Modern European views of terroir recognize that typical local flavors are the creation of generations of growers and winemakers, shaping the vineyard and fine-tuning the fermentation to make what they feel are the best wines possible in their place. Typical flavors are expressions not of nature but of culture.

But culture, unlike nature, isn’t static. It evolves in response to shifting tastes and technological advances. Over the past 30 years, the staid world of European winemaking has been roiled by an influx of American consumers, led by their apostle, the writer Robert Parker. In his reviews, Parker has brushed aside the traditional practice of judging wine according to historical context (that is, how it should taste), focusing instead on what’s in the bottle. His preference for hugely concentrated, fruit-forward wines—the antithesis of distinctive, diverse terroir wines—has dramatically changed the economic landscape of the wine industry. Throughout the world, more and more winemakers are making wine in the style that Parker prefers, even in Europe, where this means abandoning distinctive local styles that had evolved over centuries. “Somewhereness” is being replaced by “anywhereness.”

The simplistic idea of terroir as a direct expression of nature has become a rhetorical weapon in the fight against this trend. Kristancic—who interrupted our interview to raise his fists and shout to the heavens, “They’re ruining wine!”—sees an advancing wave of homogenization that will eventually turn wine into a soulless, deracinated commodity. Like many others, he is afraid of losing what is special about the traditional role of wine in human life, its way of connecting people to the land and to one another. Conjuring granite in Alsatian rieslings and limestone in Chablis puts that connection to the land right in the bottle, ours for the tasting.

If rocks were the key to the flavor of “somewhereness,” then it would be simple to counterfeit terroir with a few mineral saltshakers. But the essence of wine is more elusive than that, and far richer. Scientists and historians continue to illuminate what Peynaud described as the “dual communion” represented by wine: “on the one hand with nature and the soil, through the mystery of plant growth and the miracle of fermentation, and on the other with man, who wanted wine and who was able to make it by means of knowledge, hard work, patience, care and love.” “Somewhereness” is given its meaning by “someoneness”: in our time, by the terroirists who are working hard to discover and capture in a bottle the difference that place can make.

May 2007

A Short Course in Wine Tactics

By FRANK J. PRIAL

It seems that everyone wants to learn something about wine these days. Not necessarily to drink it, but to learn about it. There are wine schools cropping up all around. Adult education centers offer wine courses, restaurants have them too. Even conservative universities, nervous about their dwindling enrollments, are coming up with wine courses. Tasting groups are everywhere and wine books are appearing at a rate of one a month. Some fanatics go all the way and take up enology. Others get jobs in wineries. Some prefer hands-on experience, which they gather in a succession of bars.

Unfortunately, these methods all take time. They won’t save you from a dull evening when you discover you’re having dinner with some alleged wine experts tomorrow night. Most other monomaniacs—the tennis bore, the stock market bore, the hi-fi bore—can be handled. The wine expert is tough. After all, the stuff is inescapable; it’s right there on the table in front of you, ready to be opened, perchance to be decanted, to be swirled, sniffed and sipped until you’re ready to go right through the wall.

Pleading ignorance is not only cowardly, it’s bad tactics. To the committed wine bore, particularly if he is the host, the wine clod is a gift from heaven: a new audience, a possible convert. It’s fire with fire, or nothing.

Here, then, is a short course in wine tactics. If you think it’s going to get you into the Chevaliers du Tastevin, forget it. It won’t even save you from being ripped off in your favorite liquor store. The sole purpose of the following information is to cover your ignorance in polite company.

The expertise offered here consists of a selection of simple words and phrases, all in the mother tongue. This meant eliminating some key terms in the wine experts vocabulary, such as “Mon Dieu,” “yech” and “feh”—but how much better to start off modestly.

The most important of these phrases is this: “It dies on the middle palate.” Yes. Now repeat it six times. What does it mean? What’s the difference what it means? Just say it when the supercilious host asks your opinion. With a bit of practice you can begin building sentences based on this phrase. For example, start with: “Superb, but—” Or you may wish to add, “but it finishes well.”

This is the total wine put-down. Your host will have reverted back to sloe gin fizzes by 10 a.m. the next day. After all, even Philippe de Rothschild can’t argue with your middle palate.

Then there is the word “bramble.” Do you know what a bramble is? It’s a bush, right? Do you know what a bramble tastes like? Of course not: who eats bushes? Nevertheless, that’s what you’re going to say, if the wine is red. “It has a real bramble taste; yes, sir, a real bramble taste.” Don’t worry. It appears on a dozen different California wine labels and it’s a safe bet those guys don’t know what it means, either. For sure, your host doesn’t.

To carry this kind of thing off you must dance and feint; never let ’em lay a glove on you. Don’t start out calling a wine “oaky,” even if you do have a vague idea of what you’re talking about. The wine expert will hit you with “American oak or Yugoslavian oak?” He is piqued by now because the rest of the party has turned to you, impressed by your incomprehensible jargon.

More terminology: “cab,” “zin” and “chard.” These are three embarrassing little abbreviations much favored by California wine cultists. They stand for, of course, cabernet sauvignon, zinfandel and chardonnay, and are employed thus: “We had a tasting of 20 zins and every one of them was really super.” Or: “He’s an O.K. winemaker but there’s too much oak in his cab and not enough in his chard.” Most Californians can’t stand “chard” either, but it does crop up now and then when they talk.

“Chewy” and “fat”: These, you should be aware, are legitimate descriptive adjectives in some wine circles. They can be condoned—maybe—because more often than not they are used to convey some sense of wines that are truly indescribable: overpowering red wines that have too much of everything in them but restraint. The kind of wines one finds described as “big, fat, chewy monsters; can be laid down for decades but are perfectly good for drinking right now.”

Nose. As in: “The nose is very forward.” Bouquet and aroma are two different things where wine is concerned but you need not concern yourself with them. “Nose” is a synonym for smell—and the only acceptable substitute. You can say the wine has a lovely nose or a peculiar nose or even a nonexistent nose. The polite way to say that the wine smells terrible is to remark that it has “an off-nose.”

Body. As in: “This wine has excellent body.” Note: never say “This wine has an excellent body.” That would be gauche. Although someone once got away with—in fact became immortal by—saying of a wine that “it had narrow shoulders but very broad hips.” Body simply refers to the substance of a wine.

Wine also has legs. This is determined by swirling a partly filled glass of red wine and waiting for it to settle. If the glass is clear and clean and the wine any good at all, you should be able to see colorless lines still making their way down the inside of the glass. These are called legs, obviously in keeping with our obsessive desire to equate wine with the human body.

The Germans are a bit more elegant on this one. They call the “legs” kirchenfenster, or church windows, because as the lines come down the sides of the glass they form nearly perfect Gothic arches.

Short. As in: “The wine is pleasant enough but I find it a bit short.” This is actually a useful term. It simply means that the taste of the wine does not linger in your mouth. This phenomenon is also referred to as a short finish. A wine whose taste lingers is said, naturally enough, to have a long finish.

You’re now ready to handle “oak.” As in: “Thank God Mondavi is no longer obsessed with oak.” Oak is the taste imparted to wine by the oak barrels in which it is sometimes stored. Enthusiasts argue over oak the way bears fight over territory, but at the moment oak is mostly out in wine circles. Unless, of course, it’s subtle oak.

Oak, like short finish and long finish, is a tricky term. You’d better have some idea of what you’re talking about when you use it. There is nothing a wine bully likes better than to be able to say to someone who has just pronounced a wine oaky than: “Sorry, but this one was fermented and aged in stainless steel. It’s never seen wood.”

Alcohol. As in: “What’s the alcohol in this stuff?” This is an excellent phrase because it implies that you know what alcohol content means. A table wine that has close to 14 percent alcohol by volume is going to give you a headache if you drink too much and it’s probably too strong to go with your meal. But you don’t have to know this. Merely posing the question will evoke some response from your host. All you need do is nod, knowingly.

pH. As in: “What’s the pH in this stuff?” This term is even better than alcohol because nobody understands it. It has something to do with the intensity of the acid in a wine. Low pH means more intensity, high pH means less. Low would be around 2.85; high would be around 4.

These, then, are just a few of the words and phrases that wine people live by, words and phrases that you can master and use to your benefit without knowing muscatel from Muscadet, or Romanée-Conti from Ripple. It’s wrong, probably, to advocate such brazen chicanery, but it will serve to give you breathing time if you choose to really learn something about wine. Also it will get you off unscathed if you choose never to mention or even think about wine again. And, too, as you begin to hear other people using these terms, you will come to realize how many of them know almost nothing about wine either.

July 1983

Rolling Out Those Chewy Behemoths

By FRANK J. PRIAL

In a series of articles in The New Yorker beginning in the mid-1930s, the writer Frank Sullivan set out to do battle with the inane and the banal in popular writing. He created a cliché expert, Mr. Arbuthnot, and made him the scourge of triteness.

Mr. Arbuthnot turned up intermittently in the magazine into the 1950s, well before wine writers began to impose themselves on the reading public. Because they are everywhere now, it seemed appropriate to resurrect Mr. Arbuthnot and query him about wine and writing.

Q. Mr. Arbuthnot, do you consider yourself a wine expert?

A. No, I am a cliché expert, but I have looked into the literature and have concluded that my expertise is needed even if I can’t distinguish a Bordeaux from a Burgundy.

Q. How so?

A. Let me start with the word “nose.” Poking into current wine literature, I found “brilliant” noses, “subtle” noses, “off” noses and “troubling” noses. Some wines, I learned, are said to have memorable noses while others, it is claimed, have no noses at all.

I quickly determined that a wine’s “nose” is not a gross physical appendage but its bouquet or aroma. Even so, constant repetition has made a cliché of the word, one of the worst sort because constant use has debased it into argot.

Q. Are there other wine words that upset you as strongly?

A. Indeed there are—if you can call them words. I refer to “chard,” “cab” and “zin,” nicknames as it were for important grapes. Are the words “chardonnay,” “cabernet” and “zinfandel” so difficult to pronounce? Did Baron Rothschild ask, “How much cab have you planted?” when he bought Château Lafite? Is the great white wine of Le Montrachet actually derived from something called chard?

Q. You have forgotten zinfandel.

A. No, it warrants special consideration. The zinfandel appears to be a fine, robust grape that lacks some of the charm of cabernet and chardonnay. For this it has suffered a worse fate than either of them. Its often obstreperous fans delight in referring to it as “zinful” and joke about “mortal zin.”

Q. Anything besides wine books you find troubling?

A. The worst offenders are often the winemakers themselves and their spokesmen. They no longer make wine, they “craft” it. “We craft our wines,” they write, or “these wines were crafted,” or, worse still, “hand-crafted.” How else would you “craft” something than with your hands?

From what I gather, winemaking has become a high-tech (another cliché) process and, as the procedure becomes more complex, the language describing it becomes more fanciful.

I found, too, a phrase borrowed from the business world: “roll out.” A new wine is no longer introduced, offered or announced; it is rolled out, like an 18-wheel truck. The phrase has nothing to do with barrels, which of course, can be rolled around in a wine cellar. It refers to new airplanes being rolled out of the hangars where they were built to go on display. Does one “roll out” a delicate wine? I hope not.

Q. What about the wines that aren’t delicate?

A. Some, it would seem, are anything but. They are “behemoths,” “mammoth,” “stupendous, large-scale, full-throttle” and “blockbusters.” They may have “husky mouthfeel” and can display “massive quantities of fruit, glycerin and alcohol.” They can be, as one writer described a California cabernet: “Opulent, as well as tannic, with huge chocolaty, roasted herbs, cassis aromas, magnificent flavor concentration, a big graceful richness on the palate and stunningly focused components that coat the palate with viscous flavors and superlative purity of flavor.” All that and “food-friendly” too?

Q. And what about Champagne?

A. Some writers refer to all sparkling wines rather childishly as “fizzies,” others desperate for another word for Champagne use “bubble” as a noun, as in “a bottle of the bubbly.” But the most overworked Champagne cliché is “vintage.” Once, vintage Champagnes—wines from a single harvest—were rare. Blends from two, three or more years were the norm. Now almost every year is a vintage year, and the term “vintage Champagne” has become mostly a cliché.

Q. Dare I ask for your closing thoughts?

A. My brief exploration into the wine world leads me to believe there are almost as many clichés as there are wines.

There are catch phrases that are also clichés. Like “excellent value for everyday drinking” or “perfect now but will last 10 years or more” or “great wines begin in the vineyard.”

And lest you think hackneyed stuff is all of recent vintage, here, from Alexis Bespaloff’s Fireside Book of Wine, is the legendary André Simon, writing in the 1930s on a 1905 Margaux: “The 1905 was simply delightful; fresh, sweet and charming, a girl of 15, who is already a great artist, coming on tiptoes and curtseying herself out with childish grace and laughing blue eyes.”

Q. Thank you, Mr. Arbuthnot and do come back. With wine clichés, it appears that we’ve only scratched the surface.

January 2006

Guessing Games

By FRANK J. PRIAL

Someone once asked Harry Waugh, the grand old man of the English wine trade, how long it had been since he’d mistaken a Bordeaux wine for a Burgundy. “Not since lunch,” he replied.

No single part of wine lore is more beset by myth and misinformation than the vague area of wine tasting. Fiction is filled with stories about legendary feats of wine detection. At some climactic point, while the rest of the characters hold their breath and the tension is almost painful, the hero, brow furrowed and eyes closed in concentration, swirls his glass a bit and says: “I may be wrong, but I’d say this is a ’64 Bordeaux and, because it’s a bit light, it was probably one of the chateaux that picked during the awful rain that year. Because of the water, there isn’t much body, but the structure is there and the elegance one finds only in Pauillac. I’d say it’s the 1964 Château Pontet-Canet.” And, of course, it is. In the story, anyway.

Bordeaux wine people play these games from time to time, but only among themselves, because they know the reality of wine tasting. One can pull off astonishing feats of detective work one day and not recognize one’s own wine the next.

There are certain things an expert can do. In a now-famous profile of Alexis Lichine, the late Joseph Wechsberg recounted how, on a dare, Mr. Lichine took a glass of wine, tasted it, smelled it, tasted it again and then guessed, correctly, that it was Château Lascombes 1928. Mr. Lichine had an advantage: he once headed a group that owned Lascombes and knew its wines well. But wine guessing is a psychological exercise as much as anything else. Mr. Lichine admitted later that he spent as much time trying to figure out what his host would have been inclined to serve him and what wines he would be unlikely to use. In fact, the process of elimination is probably the most important part of the game.

Not long ago, at a lunch at the “21” Club in New York, the young sommelier, Matthew Siegel, offered us a glass of what he called a mystery wine. We were drinking a 1979 Mercurey, Faively’s Clos des Myglands, at the time. The mystery wine was darker, almost smoky and enormously concentrated. I guessed it to be a Rhône wine, a very fine Rioja, or one of the new California wines made in the Rhône style from Rhône grapes.

I was lucky; it was a 1984 Côte-Rôtie, La Landonne, from Étienne and Marcel Guigal, perhaps the greatest of all CôteRôtie wines, and one I’d never had before. Pressed to expand on my original Rhône guess, I probably would have said Hermitage, although there are distinct differences between the wines of the CôteRôtie and Hermitage. And who knows what made me think of Rioja? Incidentally, there are reasons why very few wine enthusiasts know La Landonne: the vineyards, all of them on terraced, precipitous slopes leading down to the Rhône River, is tiny. The whole CôteRôtie appellation only produces about 20,000 cases, or less than most Bordeaux chateaux—and almost all of it is consumed in luxury restaurants in the Rhône Valley.

But even in that simple little guessing game, elimination was the first step. It wasn’t Bordeaux or Burgundy or Beaujolais or California cabernet or zinfandel. That eliminated a lot of wine, but what about a great shiraz from Australia, such as Grange Hermitage, or a big red from Italy, Barbaresco or Barolo? The Italians are too distinctive and the Grange Hermitage is much smoother and more elegant than that wine.

The California Rhône-style would have been a better second guess than a third; a wine such as Bonny Doon’s Old Telegram, or one of McDowell Valley Vineyards’s Lake County syrahs from very old vines. But that’s where psychology comes in. The California Rhône-style wines are much in the news these days, and are the kind of wines a sommelier may try to spring on his hapless client. Mr. Siegel resisted that ploy.

Well aware of the traps awaiting even the experienced taster, most professionals will beg off these guessing games in the company of amateurs. They know, for example, that it’s relatively easy to fool even a veteran by offering him or her something truly unexpected and out of context. Steven Spurrier’s famous 1976 Paris tasting is a case in point. In that event, a blind tasting, he offered a group of French experts a mix of well-known Bordeaux and—to them—unknown California cabernets. The results—in which an American wine, a Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars 1973 cabernet, placed first ahead of all the Bordeaux bottles—did wonders for California’s reputation but very little for the sensibilities of the French tasters.

In fact, seeing the California wines triumph was less disturbing to them than the idea that they had been led to believe they were tasting only French wines. They were justifiably irritated. As a rule, California wines are drinkable earlier than top Bordeaux. Having assumed all the wines were French and all more or less from the same period, they chose the ones that were easiest to drink.

When the same tasting was repeated 10 years later in New York, one of the now-10-year-old California wines came in first again: the Clos du Val 1972. But, on the second go-around, Mr. Spurrier made up for his earlier mischief by letting everyone know that the same wines were involved. This made the outcome even more of a compliment to the California wines, because tastings, like unfixed horse races, are very unpredictable.

Which means that, like unfixed horse races, they can also be a lot of fun.

May 1989