DAVE BARRY on WINE

The Tasting:

I have never gotten into wine. I'm a beer man: What I like about beer is you basically just drink it, then you order another one. You don't sniff at it, or hold it up to the light and slosh it around, and above all you don't drone on and on about it, the way people do with wine. Your beer drinker tends to be a straightforward, decent, friendly, down-to-earth person who enjoys talking about the importance of relief pitching, whereas your serious wine fancier tends to be an insufferable snot.

I realize I am generalizing here, but, as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care.

Nevertheless, I decided recently to try to learn more about the wine community. Specifically, I engaged the services of a rental tuxedo and attended the Grand Finale of the First Annual French Wine Sommelier Contest in America, which was held at the famous Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. For the benefit of those of you with plastic slipcovers, I should explain that a "sommelier" is a wine steward, the dignified person who comes up to you at expensive restaurants, hands you the wine list, and says "Excellent choice, sir," when you point to French writing that, translated, says "Sales Tax Included."

Several hundred wine-oriented people were on hand for the sommelier competition. First we mingled and drank champagne, then we sat down to eat dinner and watch the competition. I found it immensely entertaining, especially after the champagne, because for one thing many of the speakers were actual French persons who spoke with comical accents, which I suspect they practiced in their hotel rooms ("Zees epeetomizes zee hrole av zee sommelier sroo-out ees-tory.....," etc) Also we in the audience got to drink just gallons of wine. At least I did. My policy with wine is very similar to my policy with beer, which is just pretty much drink it and look around for more. The people at my table, on the other hand, leaned more toward the slosh- and-sniff approach, where you don't so much drink the wine as you frown and then make a thoughtful remark about it such as you might make about a job applicant ("I find it ambitious, but somewhat strident." Or, "It's lucid, yes, but almost Episcopalian in its predictability." As it happened, I was sitting next to a French person named Mary, and I asked her if people in France carry on this way about wine. "No," she said, "they just drink it. They're more used to it."

There were 12 sommeliers from around the country in the contest; they got there by winning regional competitions, and earlier in the day they had taken a written exam with questions like: "Which of the following appellations belong to the Savoie region! (a) Crepy; (b) Seyssel; (c) Arbois; (d) Etoile; (e) Ripple." (I'm just kidding about the Ripple, of course. The Savoie region would not use Ripple as an insecticide.)

The first event of the evening competition was a blind tasting, where the sommeliers had to identify a mystery wine. We in the audience got to try it, too. It was a wine that I would describe as yellow in color, and everybody at my table agreed it was awful. "Much too woody," said one person. "Heavily oxidized," said another. "Bat urine," I offered. The others felt this was a tad harsh. I was the only one who finished my glass.

Next we got a nonmystery wine, red in color, with a French name, and I thought it was swell, gulped it right down, but one of the wine writers at my table got upset because it was a 1979, and the program said we were supposed to get a 1978. If you can imagine. So we got some 1978, and it was swell, too. "They're both credible," said the wine writer, "but there's a great difference in character." I was the only one who laughed, although I think Mary sort of wanted to. The highlight of the evening was the Harmony of Wine and Food event, where the sommelier contestants were given a menu where the actual nature of the food was disguised via French words ("Crochets sur le Pont en Voiture," etc.), and they had to select a wine for each of the five courses. This is where a sommelier has to be really good, because if he is going to talk an actual paying customer into spending as much money on wine for one meal as it would cost to purchase a half-dozen state legislators for a year, he has to say something more than, "A lotta people like this here chardonnay."

Well, these sommeliers were good. They were into the Harmony of Wine and Food, and they expressed firm views. They would say things like: "I felt the (name of French wine) would have the richness to deal with the foie gras," or "My feeling about Roquefort is that. . . ." I thought it was fabulous entertainment, and at least two people at my table asked how I came to be invited.

Anyway, as the Harmony event dragged on, a major issue developed concerning the salad. The salad was Lamb's-Lettuce with--- you are going to be shocked when I tell you this---Walnut Vinaigrette. A lot of people in the audience felt that this was a major screw-up, or "gaffe," on the part of the contest organizers, because of course vinaigrette is just going to fight any wine you try to marry it with. "I strongly disagree with the salad dressing," is how one wine writer at my table put it, and I could tell she meant it.

So the contestants were all really battling the vinaigrette problem, and you could just feel a current of unrest in the room. Things finally came to a head, or, "tete," when contestant Mark Hightower came right out and said that if the rules hadn't prevented him, he wouldn't have chosen any wine at all with the salad. "Ideally," he said, "I would have liked to have recommended an Evian mineral water." Well, the room just erupted in spontaneous applause, very similar to what you hear at Democratic Party dinners when somebody mentions the Poor.

Anyway, the winning sommelier, who gets a trip to Paris, was Joshua Wesson, who works at a restaurant named Huberts in New York. I knew he'd win, because he began his Harmony of Wine and Food presentation by saying: "Whenever I see oysters on a menu, I am reminded of a quote. Nobody's ever going to try buying a moderately priced wine from a man who is reminded of a quote by oysters.

It turns out however, that Wesson is actually an OK guy who just happens to have a God-given ability to lay it on with a trowel and get along with the French. I talked to him briefly afterwards, and he didn't seem to take himself too seriously at all. I realize many people think I make things up, so let me assure you ahead of time that this is the actual, complete transcript of the interview:

 ME: So. What do you think!

 WESSON: I feel good. My arm felt good, my curve ball was popping. I felt I could help the ball team

 ME: What about the vinaigrette?

 WESSON: It was definitely the turning point. One can look at vinaigrette from many angles. It's definitely like electricity.

I swear that's what he said. And at the time, it made a lot of sense.

The Touring:
MIAMI -- Recently I spent several days touring the California wine country, and I must say that it was a wonderful experience that I will remember until long after I get this mud out of my ears.

I'11 explain the mud in a moment, but first I should explain that the wine country is an area near San Francisco that is abundantly blessed with the crucial natural ingredient that you need to have a successful wine country:  tourists.  There are thousands and thousands of them, forming a dense continuous stream of rental cars creeping up and down the Napa Valley, where you apparently cannot be a legal resident unless you own a winery named after yourself.  Roughly every 45 feet you pass a sign that says something like "The Earl A. Frebblemunster And His Sons Earl Jr. And Bud, But Not Fred, Who Went Into The Insurance Business, Winery."

When you see a winery that you like, you go inside for wine-related activities, which are mainly (1) tasting wine, and (2) trying to adopt thoughtful facial expressions so as to appear as though you have some clue as to what you are tasting.  Some wineries also give guided tours wherein they show you how wine is made.

The process starts with the grapes, which ripen on vines under the watchful eyes of the head wine person (or "poisson de la tete") until exactly the right moment, at which point they form a huge swarm and follow the queen to the new hive location.

No, wait, I'm thinking of bees.  When the grapes are ripe, they're harvested and stomped on barefoot by skilled stompers until they (the grapes) form a pulpy mass (called the "fromage") which is then discarded.  Then the head wine person drives to the supermarket and buys some nice hygienic bunches of unstomped grapes, which are placed in containers with yeast -- a small but sexually active fungus -- and together they form wine.

The wine is then bottled and transported to the Pretentious Phrase Room, where professional wine snots perform the most critical part of the whole operation:  thinking of ways to make fermented grape juice sound more complex than nuclear physics.  For example, at one winery I sampled a Pinot Noir (from the French words pinot, meaning "type of,"  and noir, meaning "wine") and they handed me a sheet of paper giving many  facts about the wine, including something called the "Average Brix at Harvest";  the pH of the grapes;  a detailed discussion of the fermentation (among other things, it was "malolactic") the type of barrels used for aging ("100 percent French tight-grained oak from the Vosges and Allier forests"); the type of filtration (it was "a light egg-white fining");  and of course the actual nature of the wine itself, which is described - and this is only part of the description - as having "classical Burgundian aromas of earth, bark and mushrooms;  dried leaves, cherries;  subtle hints of spice and French oak";   and of course the flavor of "blackberry, allspice, cloves, vanilla with nuances of plums and toast."

Yes!  Nuances of toast!  I bet they exchanged high fives in the Pretentious Phrase Room when they came up with that one!

At another winery, I stood next to some young men -- they couldn't have been older than 22 -- who were tasting wine and making serious facial expressions and asking a winery employee questions such as: "Was ‘93 a good year for the cabernets?" I wanted to shake them and shout, "What's WRONG with you!?  When I was your age, I was drinking Sunshine Premium brand beer (motto: "Made From Ingredients") at $2.39 a CASE!" Needless to say these young men also had cigars.  You have to worry about where this nation is headed.

Anyway, the other major tourist thing to do in wine country is to go to a town called Calistoga and take a mud bath, which is an activity that I believe would be popular only in an area where people have been drinking wine.  My wife and I took one at a combination spa and motel, where we were met by a woman who said, I swear, "Hi, I'm Marcie, and I’ll be your mud attendant."

Marcie led us into a room containing two large tubs filled to the brim with what smelled like cow poop heated to 104 degrees.  We paid good money to be allowed to climb into these things and lie there sweating like professional wrestlers for 15 minutes.  Marcie -- who later admitted that she had done this only once herself -- said it was supposed to get rid of our bodily toxins, but my feeling is that from now on, if I have to choose between toxins and hot cow poop, I'm going with the toxins.

But I have to say that once I got out of the mud, I felt a great deal better than when I was in the mud, and I am confident that one day, if I take enough showers, people will stop edging away from me on the elevator.   So let me just close by saying that, although I have made some fun of the wine-country experience here, I really do feel, in all sincerity, that "Pinot Noir and his Nuances of Toast" would be a good name for a band.