What a welcome!

Whew!

After standing back some, I ventured into a few bulletin board conversations and was immediately reminded why I chose to stand back.

It isn’t that debating issues about wine is no fun—to the contrary, it can be great fun. It’s just that debating via the keyboard and electronic impulses is a weak form of communication at best. It’s so easy to be misunderstood, and after that happens, control of your own words seems to morph into a game of who should own those words, you or those who disagree with you?

There will come a day when I will back away completely—I hope, I hope. But until then, I fear that I will find myself hopelessly drawn into debates about wine production processes and wine criticism, debates that cover much of the same ground and don’t seem to change my or anyone else’s mind.

What is it about wine that makes so many of us so passionate as to hurl at one another whenever a belief or an opinion lands counter to ours?

In my often non-humble opinion, the phenomenon is as complicated as a California fruit bomb with alcohol that rivals jet fuel (now is the time for someone to accuse me of slamming his or her beloved California Cabernet).

On one level, we wine nuts express camaraderie (me, I’m a nut, not a geek). But how easily that friendship can fall apart— if you don’t believe me, just attack the wines of your wine buddy’s favorite producer.

On another level, we wine nuts give lip service to the idea that people have different tastes. But how easily that can devolve into a conversation of hurling epithets as soon as one of us claims to have, well, different taste.

On still another level, we wine nuts agree that we all have opinions. What we don’t seem to agree on is that the opinions of others have any merit. On this subject, I get into trouble regularly, especially when I attack the opinions of wine critics who hold no credentials, have no training, and make rather bizarre claims. I value opinions, but only when they have been formed through knowledge, not just through will and force of personality, or luck at having been given a pulpit.

One of my latest brush-ups had to do with the issue about which I feel strongly: that to be a credible critic, one needs to at least have done a little legwork in the subject, and since wine is a subject with technical, creative, and practical applications, a critic’s duty is to learn what they are.

All too often, I read diatribes from certain critics that display a blatant lack of knowledge alongside a volume of opinions. Not to make a pun, but these wine critics leave me with a bad taste.

Truth be told, and this is where I get into the most trouble with my attitude, I don’t give much credence to the profession of critic. Mainly, a critic tells us what he or she likes or dislikes. Mainly, I don’t really care what someone else likes or dislikes, unless that someone can point me to a reason beyond his or her bias or prejudice. At least then, I can explore and decide whether the critic speaks truth or blather.

I know this is blasphemy in certain quarters of the wine world, but I cannot imagine the value in “calibrating” my palate to someone else’s. My fun with wine includes me doing the exploration, not me finding out what someone else explored and then running down to the nearest wine shop to gobble up the latest achiever.

But then, I never was a follower, so maybe it’s not the critics; maybe it is I who is the problem. Maybe I should just teach people who want to learn what little I know, drink the wines I like, and just shut up.

To do that last one, I believe I might have to throw this computer out the window!

Below is the thread that got me thinking. Notice in the moderator's post just before my final one that I am accused of having "chuztpah," unmitigated gall for living my opinions, and I am also accused of being prejudice and lacking creativity. Within the accusations are these hidden gems: subjectivity equals un-biased; objectivity equals prejudice; and, by extension, faulty logic equals creativity.

Talk about "chutzpah!"

Critic's Ethics

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
July 2008. All rights reserved.

Certifiably government thinking

Recently, a blogger, Lyle Fass, brought my attention to an article by Food and Wine writer, Lettie Teague.

The article Teague wrote was rather confusing, and I don’t fully understand what point she was trying to make, but in one way or another, it concerned the concept of organic winemaking. I was left with the impression that she considers the idea of organic winemaking or so-called “green” winemaking just another marketing scam.

I generally agree that words like “organic, green, biodynamic, etc.” all have the potential for scamming. I’m also sure that marketers use the words if not to scam at least to bamboozle us. To put it bluntly: organic was long ago sullied, and green is beginning to get on my nerves.

How many of you know what exactly is meant by the concept of green winegrowing?

I’d bet that your answer is not the same as mine or as someone close to you. Marketing has already messed that concept up to a fine jumble of confusion—is it “green” to use wooden or cardboard boxes, trucks or trains for transportation, glass or cans for packaging, tractors or donkeys, and how green is it to cut trees down to make barrels or worse, to make wood chips?

Sure, I want the environment to suffer less, but I want that to be a joint effort among industry, government, and us. And to me, a major part of why we pay taxes is for protection against threats to our existence. I can’t think of greater threats than being attacked or fading away because of global meltdown.

I’m convinced that we are threatening our own existence with outmoded Industrial Revolutionary thinking and practices, and that means fossil fuels and petrochemicals.

Along with a better environment, I want both my food and my wine to have as little exposure to petrochemicals as is humanly possible. But I know that there is no easy fix—our culture is heavily invested in the chemistry of petroleum. No company illustrated that fact better than Dupont with its decades-old commercial message, “Better living through chemistry.”

The other day, while digging into my latest issue of Wines and Vines Magazine, I was slapped awake by my own incredulity. The article was about federal and local government requirements for certification for so-called organic grape growing.

The way things work, individuals who use petrochemical sprays on their vines must take classes and be certified, mainly because everyone recognizes the danger in using the chemicals. But nothing on a wine label is required to indicate whether or not there are potential dangers to the consumer.

Yet, when a wine is produced from grapes that were not grown in the “better living through chemistry" mold, giving us grapes that are pesticide and fungicide free, the wine producer must be certified by the authorities before the company is allowed to tell the consumer about its organic practices.

In other words, we aren’t warned when there might be danger in our wines, but we are warned when there probably isn’t any danger.

How about the following addition to the GOVERNMENT WARNING label:

The grapes for this wine were produced without petrochemicals, but don’t worry, these guys applied for and got certified for the privilege of doing things the natural way.

Rest assured that we’ll charge them a fee each time they do it right.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
July 2008. All rights reserved.

Biased notions

Something can be said for the fun of that parlor game when you single out the wine know-it-all and get that person to taste a wine—blind—to try to guess what it is.

It’s fun to serve a wine that is close to a certain other wine that you know this person will have tasted before and so is likely to be fooled this time around.

It’s even more fun when you throw in a $5 cheapie and this knowledgeable fool proclaims it Pavie or Cheval Blanc or something else of high esteem.

The above may be fun, but it has nothing to do with blind tasting wine, and I was particularly amused (and somewhat surprised) to discover that there are people out there who consume a lot of wine and spend a lot of money every year on it, but they don’t know the value of a truly blind evaluation and comparison.

Recently, I got into a discussion about the attributes of Finger Lakes Riesling. It was the same old discussion of how Finger Lakes Rieslings don’t hold up against German or Alsatian counterparts, a belief that I am convinced is of questionable merit.

The reason I think that consumers who make the claim that Finger Lakes Rieslings, though good, are not world class, is because I have numerous times sat in on blind evaluation comparisons. Finger Lakes Rieslings easily held their own.

The kind of evaluation I’m talking about is when the tasters know only that the wines are Riesling and that each flight of wines is within a certain stylistic parameter and vintage. We know nothing about their location, winemaker, producer, and price. That’s a blind tasting.

A double blind evaluation means that the taster knows nothing about the wines, not even the grape variety. That method is best used for training purposes, to hone one’s sensory abilities.

The task in a blind tasting is to evaluate each wine on its merits, to see if it lives up to varietal character and to stylistic parameters.

A blind tasting is not when a bunch of geeks bring bottles of their favorite wines and then someone puts them into a brown bag and the tasters don’t know which wine is in which bag. Just knowing that your wine is in the bunch will either expose or shatter your bias. It’s human nature to look in every glass of wine served for the one you brought. It will confuse the hell out of you. You may find it, or you may think you ha found it. (Not to mention that bottle shapes can give a lot of information.)

A blind tasting is not when the people selecting the order, opening, and pouring the wine also serve it to the tasters. To remove all bias, even the servers shouldn’t know what they are pouring. That way, they can’t give something away with unconscious body language.

In a well run blind tasting, the wines are poured in a back room or kitchen. The glasses are numbered to correspond with numbers that have been assigned to the tasting sheets. The pourers give the glasses to the servers and they take them to the tasting panels to serve.

Tasters are free to taste in whatever order they want, but they must be sure to correspond the correct glass numbers with the tasting sheet numbers.

The evaluation can be done with scores, verbals, or both. But everyone should conform to a pre-established set of scoring rules.

I and two other fellows proposed to the unbelieving that if they claim that Finger Lakes Rieslings do not belong in world class status with their beloved European products, then they should be willing to compare the wines in a completely blind tasting setting.

One geek said I was a chicken, apparently meaning that I was using the blind tasting as a way to back out of proving my point, which is that Finger Lakes Rieslings are likely to surprise those geeks.

His childish chiding, however, illuminates to me that he hasn’t a clue what the purpose of a blind evaluation is. More important, he seems to think that he has super-human talent, that he can remove all bias by simply willing himself to do so. I’m worldly enough to smell the bullshit in that concept.

I’ve seen too many so-called unbiased wine tastings in my day. The main purpose is to prove an already expressed opinion and to have fun while doing it. That’s a parlor game.

The truly blind tasting method is closer to science, and we all know that science is supposed to search for answers—not validate preconceived notions. Well, maybe all but the biased wine geeks know that.

I'm unsure if the blind evaluation will take place, but I know that I am willing to take the risk. I believe that tasters would find many Finger Lakes Rieslings to be world class wines, especially since they won't know that they are tasting Finger Lakes Rieslings.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
July 2008. All rights reserved.

Long in the tooth

Being born with a small physical frame has its advantages and its disadvantages.

As a youth, the advantages of my small frame produced a decent track runner and base stealer, not to mention an ability to squirm through small spaces like side windows to perpetrate my share of adolescent indiscretions.

Some of the disadvantages of my small skeletal frame include a put down at a party for being too short for a great looking Air Force nurse, a small bladder that has caused me to rack up many miles over my life on my small feet as I made my way—frequently—to restrooms across the world, and a mouth of gums that are too small to house all my teeth, making flossing a challenge as the string continually gets caught and snaps between the tight spacing.

Speaking of gums, the phrase “long in the tooth” refers to a particular condition of aging, when gums begin to recede. In some cases, the recession can expose nerves located where the teeth’s roots begin under the gums. A person long in the tooth, as I am, sometimes knows exactly why wine is considered an acidic medium.

Last weekend I was a judge at the New York State Fair Wine Competition. The State Fair competition draws more Finger Lakes wineries than wineries from the other New York appellations. The common thread among Finger Lakes wine is acidity. A guy who is long in the tooth has to be careful.

The judging was broken into panels of four judges each. After each wine flight, each panel of judges compared scores then decided whether or not to award medals by forming a consensus.

Only a few times did the judges on my panel have to discuss to make a case to gain consensus. The majority of times we had to do nothing more than to compile our aggregate and form an average to arrive at a consensus that fit the wine.

In a field of more than 100 wines that day, our panel awarded only one Gold Medal, a few Silvers, mostly Bronzes, and a number of no medals at all.

With so few outstanding wines having reached our panel, I began to wonder whether or not wineries have the ability to determine the quality of the wines they submit for evaluation. Or maybe they have little regard for the abilities of the evaluators. Or maybe, since winning medals is one way to promote and sell wine, they just send in their wines and hope for the best.

This is volunteer work. Judges are paid only for expenses incurred, like travel to the site and overnight hotel and dinner. It would be nice to know that wineries try to send us their best. In my case, I don’t even mind suffering a little pain afterwards for the good of great wine, and by the end of this all-day judging I was rewarded with short bursts of pain every time I drank or ate something cold, hot, sweet, or salty. The acid worked on my gums.

Yet, considering the results of the judging, I have to wonder whether I should try to suffer a little less in my waning years. Maybe I need to lobby the organizers of the wine competition so that I wind up on the panel with the most Gold Medal entries instead of the least!

I probably should retire from wine judging, but I won’t.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
June 2008. All rights reserved.

I'm baacck!

In early spring, I read somewhere that this summer was scheduled to be hot and dry in the Finger Lakes, thanks to El Nina. Well, it ain’t summer yet, and it surely is hot and dry.

My land is cracked the way it usually gets in late August. Right now, I have eggplant, okra, and Israeli melon plants far ahead of their usual slow start in this region. For the first time since I can remember, in June I have bell peppers and tomatoes already fully flowered and maturing!

All this is to say that if it keeps up, this could be a truly anomalous vintage year in the Finger Lakes, and that isn’t necessarily a good thing. We like our crisp, acidic wines here—we don’t want no stinkin’ California style vintage…

Speaking of the Finger Lakes, two weeks ago I hosted two separate groups of six people here at Keuka Lake. The first group comprised old friends who have been here before but never for an extended stay and never for the red carpet treatment that my wife and I gave them. It was a glorious Memorial Four-Day weekend, topped off by a fabulous dinner at the Pleasant Valley Inn, outside of Hammondsport.

I’ve known the owner of the Inn since he took it over in 1991. He knew it would impress my friends, so he brought out an old wine list from 1993 on which he had listed my Gewurztraminer, which he loved and used to sell at the restaurant when my winery was in business.

Looking at restaurant wine prices of 17 years ago surely induced nostalgia!

Tom, that’s the owner’s name, never charges exorbitant prices for the wines he serves. He told me a long time ago that his aim is to offer great food with decent wines at prices that bring people back, not push them away.

My old friends are not wine geeks. They simply enjoy wine with food. When we dine out together, they usually allow me the privilege of selecting the wine, and they rarely, if ever, complain either about my choices or about the prices. This held true at the Pleasant Valley Inn.

On the heels of the first group to visit, the second group comprised new friends, all of whom are more wine centric than my old friends, one of whom seems to go over the edge every so often with geekism.

My friend claims he does not care for wine geeks with inflated egos. He knows they are concerned more with themselves than with the wine. I generally agree. But wine geeks do other things that drive me crazy, and my friend did it at the Pleasant Valley Inn.

First, he mentioned that he would like to bring wine to the restaurant. I did not like the idea. Reasoning that the only wines my friend had with him were the local Finger Lakes wines that he picked up at some of the wineries, I told him the restaurant would have Finger Lakes wines, too. Fine. He brought no wines with him.

At the restaurant, however, my friend grew interested in a 1982 Lynch Bages on the list that he said was reasonably priced (I did not look at the price. I felt if he was buying the wine, I should be gracious and not try to determine what he is paying for it.)

My friend wanted to be sure that the wine had been stored properly so he asked the waiter to find out the temperature of wine storage at the restaurant. This is where I became nervous.

I reasoned that I know Tom, and if he were to sell a wine that the customer thought was spoiled he would easily take it back. I figured if the price was good, it was worth the risk. Quite frankly, I was trying to head off my embarrassment in front of both Tom and my visitors, because either way, this was a no-win situation for me.

My friend was not having any of my ideas and so I went to Tom and asked him myself about the temperature of his wine storage.

Tom told me that he keeps wine in his cellar over winter (about 58 degrees F) and when he opens the restaurant between May and November, he brings the wine upstairs and stores it in a room with cement floors and no windows that remains between 65 and 68 degrees F. Then Tom said, “Tell your friend not to buy the wine. I don’t need the aggravation of having to stand their discussing the intricate details of a few temperature degree shift.”

It was obvious that Tom was annoyed and that embarrassed me.

After having worked in the wine distribution trade, and after having sold wine to restaurants, I don’t often trust restaurants about wine storage either. But I handle the matter in a different way. I simply don’t order certain wines in restaurants—I opt for the ready to drink crowd.

If I find myself in serious doubt about a restaurant, even with the ready to drink crowd of wines, I simply eat elsewhere. I certainly don’t care to grill the restaurant owner about his wine storage practices while my dining partners look on.

To me, there’s a distinction between dining out with friends and evaluating wine with geeks. If pressed, I’d always prefer the former to the latter, and that guides my attitude at a restaurant.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia, June 2008

All rights reserved.

Okay, okay, I'm awake!

Well, now I am awakened. My last entry received more responses than all my earlier blog entries-some responses online, and some via email.

Generally, I have been supported, yet mildly taken to task for being cynical and giving up. An email I received this morning from another Finger Lakes-based writer made a good point about my cynicism, not to mention the relative difficulty in posting a comment on the Worpress version of Vinofictions, as opposed to the ease of doing so on Blogspot.

Unfortunately, the Wordpress version is more prone to spammers, and I am a simple writer. I don’t want to spend my time fending off spammers and various forms of sludge. Hell, I don’t even want to take the time to look into the stats to find out how many and who is reading this blog. I just want to write. So, I take the easy route. Maybe I should shut down the Wordpress version—maybe I will.

I’ve decided not to quit, but I will have to scale back my entries for the summer. My wife and I are erecting a greenhouse plus, we have various guests coming from the world over throughout the season.

For now, let me say a few words about why I made the previous entry. Primarily, it was because of the wine forum Websites. I read them in the hope of gaining information and to keep up with events, but I generally am sick of most of them. Not only are the conversations circuitous and repetitive, they are often abrasive and obsessive. But what truly gets to me about them is that the majority of their habituates seem comfortable with their myths—impervious to greeting a fact and shaking its hand.

My other problem: too many people don’t seem willing to take their own initiative, to go out and explore wine for themselves. They need one or two critical palates to guide them. Being a general “do it my way” kind of guy, I admit to finding the lemming trait offensive. But I do understand the argument that there is so much wine out there it is impossible for any one person to find them all.

I understand that argument, but I don’t buy it. In the immortal words of Dick Cheney: so what?

Once you realize that there isn’t enough time in your life to drink them all, it doesn’t mean you need to let someone else direct you to the wines, and it certainly does nothing to change your tastes, provided you are willing to trust your own taste and not the taste of the self-anointed.

Then there’s the argument that “I have only so much money, I don’t want to waste it on buying wines I may not like.”

First, a review and a high rating maybe helps, but it's no guarantee. I've never thought that I need anyone else's palate to guide mine, and I don't believe anyone else does. Anyway, consuming wine is a matter of personal taste.

Second, so much that we spend our money on comes with risk. As an example, take the Maytag dishwasher that I am throwing out the window this week.

Remember those TV commercials with Jesse White playing a Maytag repairman who sits alone most of his life because the units don’t need much service?

I stupidly bought into the Maytag reputation (not realizing that the company was sold to Whirlpool). I might as well have taken the $500 I spent on that dishwasher and lit it in the fireplace—that way I would have gotten something for my money. In other words, I took the easy path, didn’t do my own homework, bought from reputation and suggestions. What I got didn’t work (in less than four years, I had to replace the control panel three times!).

Buying anything comes with risk. High ratings and high praise do not negate that risk. In fact, if you look at it another way, they probably increase the risk by creating complacency, a sense of false security.

Sure, we’ll never get to taste every wine in the world, but we can have fun finding them on our own and trying as many as we can. In fact, sticking to one style or one place creates a stagnant taste preference. What fun is that?

I believe that with all the wines available to us, obsessing over the possibility of missing one of them means needing help, but not in wine buying…

Thanks to all who slapped me a little. You made me realize that there is an audience for my ramblings, and even if it is a small audience, it’s a fine one.

PS: To Tom Wark I have a suggestion (and to anyone else interested). Maynard Amerine once wrote a beautiful essay concerning wine quality: how to evaluate it and why it can and should be done. Try to get your hands on a copy of it. Look up Wayward Tendrils, a California organization of wine book collectors. Someone there might be able to help you find the essay, which Tendrils covers in its latest quarterly.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
May 2008. All rights reserved.

The SwanSong

So, I’m sitting in my chair facing my keyboard and looking at a blank screen—that’s today’s version of a writer facing a blank page.

In this case, the blank screen is because I am no longer sure what to say about wine online.

A number of adjectives describe what the online discourse about wine sometimes does to me. This week, I stumbled upon one too many adjectives, along with one too many jerks.

It saddens me that so many times those who voice their self-righteous proclamations seem to know just enough about wine and winemaking to be dangerous and not enough about humility and the general way that people need to act toward one another in order to peacefully share this planet.

In other words, a hell of a lot of wine geeks should never have been let out of high school!

How did it come to pass that people use the gift so pleasant as wine to bring attention to their status, to their self worth, and to their self-appointment as arbiters of taste? They subvert the goodness of wine. They claim they speak and consume wine out of passion. What comes through to me is obsession. Passion is an emotion of the heart—obsession is an emotional illness.

In any case, wine geeks never were my intended audience for Vinofictions. They are not my whole problem.

I aimed for the general wine consumer. My aim was to use Vinofictions to educate to the extent of my knowledge, which in wine amounts to about 26 years of study and experience in the business, from grape growing to winemaking to wine selling and wine writing, alongside decades of wine consumption that reaches back to age seven.

I am fully aware that, while I may have learned things through study, I don’t know it all, and so I also hoped that through dialog on Vinofictions I could continue to learn from others while they learned from me. But Vinofictions hasn’t really captured much attention and has generated even less dialog.

Wine writers with more than just opinions can help others come to their own decisions by giving them an understanding of the facts. But that doesn’t appear to be what gets the attention. What seems to get attention are wine writers who issue proclamations and position subjectivity as if it were information. I don’t do that kind of thing well because I do not believe in it.

I am suspending Vinofictions for the 2008 summer while I consider if I have anything left to say and also to find out if what I have to say has much of an audience. Right now, I’m of the opinion that the audience isn’t nearly as large as the time and effort warrants.

The blog will remain online so that the archives will be available to sift through and read.

A few of you have been kind enough to take part in this blog and to throw me encouraging words. I thank you. I wish there were more of you.

And to prove to you that I am not a saint, and that I, too, have something to sell: my third book is scheduled for an autumn release. Hope you all read it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
May 2008. All rights reserved.