The Face of Sanity

Who's that guy? Harold McGee, a personal hero of mine, and the author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. His approach to cooking, with it's rigorous scientific method and open approach makes for a fascinating read, and when I got it more than a decade ago it changed the way I thought about cooking completely--and this after spending five years as a professional cook in a French brigade kitchen.

Harold had an interesting article in the NY Times last month, To Enhance Flavor, Just Add Water. In a nutshell, he talks about water as a flavour enhancer, particularly in wine. This is pretty counter-intuitive, but he raises an important point: 

Aroma molecules are also more chemically similar to alcohol molecules than they are to water, so they tend to cling to alcohol, and are quicker to evaporate out of a drink when there’s less alcohol to cling to.

One of my friends commented the other day about my Winemaker Magazine blog. He told me that for a blogger, I sure didn’t blog very much. I have plenty of excuses: busy times, other deadlines, multiple blogs to keep up and sites that I admin and moderate on, but at the end of the day there’s really only one person to blame.

Wes Hagen.

Love the man. Have you met him? He’s a peach, honestly, really respect his winemaking skills and he’s even got a cute little doggie, but dang, he had the Winemaker magazine software so constipated that I was gritting my teeth every time I posted here. It’s a long story, but through the magic of computers, Wes somehow arranged it that every time I tried to use the blogging software I have to download the entire Clos Pepe server of his hotlinked pictures—and there are thousands of them! It’s enough to make me hide my head under the covers and drink right from the bottle of (Clos Pepe) Pinot Noir some days. Seriously, you can’t tell reading this but a previous attempt to post this blog crashed my laptop so bad that I couldn’t do anything except yank the battery out of it to shut it off. Sigh.

I got an interesting question from a winemaker in California the other day. He wanted to know why the published Brix levels of a kit we sold were low, relative to commercial harvest sugar levels. It's a good question because it's got a two-part answer. 

A quick update on my Jumbleberry Freezer Surprise. I checked it for clearing the next morning, and what did my eyes behold? 

Wherein your author answers the question, 'Whatever happened to that fruit wine?'

When I last left off blogging about my Jumbleberry Freezer Surprise wine (a quick re-cap: a failed freezer door seal defrosted many pounds of fruit and left me with no choice but to engage my winemaking prowess to salvage said fruits)I had just done the first racking from the primary fermenter, away from the fruit solids and into carboys. That was some time ago . . . July of 2009 as I recall . . . ah well, Emerson said punctuality was the hobgoblin of those one  a schedule and all that. 

Nice manicure

Latin for, 'Die, bottom-dwelling fish!'

Dear Wine Kit Guy,

Which wine should I serve with my holiday dinner? My family does the full-pull with turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, yams, Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, the whole shebang, and I need a wine to go with all of it! Help me Obi-Wan Kit-nobi, you're my only hope!

THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY FOR HIS STORY

(With further apologies to the rotating ghost of John Bunyan)

When at the first I took my glass in hand
Thus for to drink, I did not understand
That I at all should take a little drink
At such a point I stood on the brink
To take another; which, when almost done,
Before I was aware, the bottle was gone.

I am living proof that wine lovers are made, not born. If I can find a space in my life to learn about and enjoy wine, literally anybody can.

You see I didn’t grow up drinking wine. Indeed, the only wine available in our family was a screw-topped, vaguely soda-poppish beverage (‘Lonesome Charlie’ for those with long memories) heavy on the sugar and bubbles, but light on actual wine content. If this was wine, include me out, I thought.

Another influence was my family’s ethnic and religious background: I come from a long line of Russian-Germans, observant of the Mennonite faith. While long on community, family and church, they disapproved of beverage alcohol on general principles. It was felt that alcohol was not drunk to appreciate the subtlety of its flavours and aromas: it was drunk stealthily, behind the barn, for the purposes of sneaking into the pool hall to lose the grocery money among loose women. While we were less observant than some (well, okay, most), these attitudes still coloured how I felt about drinking as a lad. I wanted to be like my old man, I thought, and drink beer from cans and Rye whisky mixed with cola.

Now that the fall winegrape season is upon us, it’s time to discuss the Fall programs that wine kit companies launch every year. All of the major manufacturers have some sort of specialty kit they offer once per year: Project Cellar, Restricted Quantity, Limited Edition, etc.
 
The gist of these programs is an offering of a wine outside of the regular line-up of products the company offers. Sometimes it’s a rare grape, sometimes it’s from a growing region that has limited exposure to the consumer winemaking market, and sometimes it’s just a case of us getting our hands on awesomely cool grapes.
 
The program, as it usually goes, has the company sourcing a limited supply of these desirable grapes, once per year. They trial, test and work with them, and if they produce the kind of top-notch product necessary to the program, they’re in. The kits are often pre-sold, with a waiting list—demand always exceeds supply—and the announcements are closely guarded and the varieties kept secret until go-time. The kits are released post-harvest, often in the beginning of the new year, and usually at the rate of one or two per month until springtime.
 
It’s an offshoot of the harvest season and has some interesting interlocking benefits. It’s a way for winemakers using kits to participate in a calendar-mediated harvest (often because of blending kit vintages can be a bit blurry or overlapped) and to source grapes from potentially unusual viticultural areas—Alsace, Canada, Tasmania, etc. Try that as a grape winemaker living in North America!
 
Also, wacky grapes get in on the program. Things like Symphony, Tannat, Grillo and other bizarre and unheard-of grapes get their trial in these limited programs. Sometimes they graduate into the regular line-up, and sometimes consumer acceptance is low and they sink into history. But there’s always at least one offering that’s unusual and worth taking a risk on.
 
Manufacturers, of course, get to sell kits and consumers get to try something keen and exciting. But more than that, there’s a quality issue that has to do with efficiency: because the kits are all produced just once per year, and they’re not inventoried (we make ‘em, we ship ‘em. After all, they’re all spoken for before their release) there is a significant cost-savings to the manufacturer. Not only do they not have to inventory kits in their portfolio for an entire year, they don’t have to inventory the raw material at all, as it comes in and goes into kits with practically no turnaround time. This allows the company to build in extremely high quality, often equal to their hyper-premium kits, at only a bit more than their regular premium products. Win-win! (or is that wine-wine?)
 
So that’s the deal in a nutshell, but there’s a few catches that you need to be aware of: first, most of these kits are higher in dissolved solids, flavour and aroma compounds, minerality and tannins than regular wine kits. This means most of them are simply not ready to drink in six months—or even a year. Some of the lighter styles and off-dry wines can be drank early on, with much enjoyment, but even these will evolve significantly over time, with even the softest and most delicate Riesling taking on complexity and minerality and structure at one, two, three and even more years in the bottle. If your intent was to make these instead of your regular, a-batch-every-three-months table wine, you’re going to be underserved by your choice.
 
Clever fellows that wine kit marketers are, they really want you to make these kits in addition to your regular wine cellar choices. While that’s a direct benefit to the companies (and thank-you very much for your business) it’s also a sneaky educational tool. A lot of folks who make wine kits have a habit of living hand-to-mouth (or is that mouth-to-bottle) with their wine production, and are chronically short of well-aged wine.
 
Lest you think this a rebuke, I’ll admit it: I have a lot of trouble hanging on to well-aged wine, particularly whites, which I seem to drink with more rapidity than someone who is an avowed ‘red’ man should. But I always hang on to my Limited Edition wines for a year before I start dipping into the whites, two or three before the reds.
 
Back when I used to enter the Winemaker Magazine wine competition (something I highly recommend doing, by the way) people wondered aloud what eeevil secret tricks I was using to get so many medals. Was I shotgunning (entering hundreds of wines to get dozens of medals)? Nope, I generally had a very high medal rate—sometimes 9 out of ten of my wines scored in the medals.
 
Was I using my incredibly proficient skills as a professional winemaker to massage the kits in unusual ways? Hah! I’m a proficient amateur winemaker, but not a truly great one: I’ve never had enough time to dedicate to it, so I leave it to the ground-in geeks like my esteemed colleagues Wes Hagen and Dan Pambianchi to be master oenologists.
 
Was I adding some secret wine kit company ingredient to the kits to make them more delicious than technically possible? Aha, the answer to this one is both yes, and no. I was using an ingredient that improved my wines far beyond the scope of similar ones entered into competitions, but it was no secret, and it’s available to everyone. It’s time.
 
I generally entered some young wines, in order to check how they evolved. Entering the same wine sequentially, year after year told me a lot about the flavour and aroma development possible with my kits. But for the most part I was entering wines three to four years old, and some as old as ten years. And it made all the difference in the world. Of course, I don’t enter the competitions any longer, due to the fact that I work for both a sponsor of the contest (Winexpert) and the people who put it on (Winemaker Magazine). But my wines still do rather well in International Competition, with my 90% hit rate intact so far. 
 
Top quality at a value price, interesting growing areas, unusual varietals and the opportunity to age wines beyond your normal patterns—whoa, I’m starting to sound like a marketing type. Let’s just say that I’m making a big old pile of them for myself, just like I do every year, and I’ll be enjoying the fruits of my labours in years to come. It’s one way I can force myself to age my wine properly!