Frequently asked questions, frequently given answers...
October 21, 2005
Q: What's a good wine?
A: A good wine is one you write down on your "List of Favorite Wines" that you carry around with you in your wallet or purse at all times. When you catch yourself saying, "I gotta remember this wine!" and then writing it on your list, that's a good wine.
Q: What makes red wine red?
A: The short answer is red grapes, but that's not completely true. Red grapes make pink wine, and if you press them very gently, white wine too. When the wine maker adds the red skins back into the juice and ferments it all together, then you get red wine. White wine is almost never fermented in contact with its skins.
Q: What's with the price of wine? Is a $20 wine really twice as good as a $10 wine?
A: The price range of wines is as broad as the ocean and at least as mysterious. If you drew a line through the world of wine at $20, it cuts through the middle of California chardonnay, the bottom of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, the top of Argentina malbec, and the sub-basement of red Bordeaux. That's why a $10 malbec can knock your socks off while a $20 Bordeaux might leave you wondering what's all the fuss. The key is to try to buy at the top of any affordable food chain. There are some optional but objective things vineyards do that cost them time and money, like barrel aging, bottle aging, limiting vineyard yield from eight tons an acre to two tons, and others. These steps have to be paid for, and since they also make better wine (why else do them?), the plan is to charge a little more money, but that's really the smallest part of the market equation.
Q: Some wine gives me a headache. Why is that, and is there anything I can do?
A: Research indicates that it is the people you are drinking wine with that give you the headache, not the wine. Try the same wine with different people, and see if you don't at least get a different kind of headache.
Ask Me No Questions
2000 Fat Bastard Grand Reserve (about $20, available nationally, imported by Click Wine Group, 800-859-0689)From the front label, you'd never guess this wine was anything but a modern, thoroughly new world wine, from California, or given the irreverence of the name and the audacity of fashioning a grand reserve of it, Australia perhaps. The hippo glancing coyly over its shoulder makes you think of Africa and then naturally South Africa, but no -- all these guesses would be wrong.
Flip the bottle over, and about 75 words into the back label, there's a fleeting mention of "wild herbs and Mediterranean bushes," then some casually dropped place names: Languedoc, Carcassone, Narbonne, Olonzac, Minervois. Finally, just above the pointless government warning -- which always occupies the most undesirable parcel of real estate on the label -- in the teeny-tiniest typeface ever, the word France appears. Without my reading glasses or that little magnifying glass I would be embarrassed for anyone to know I sometimes use, I would never have known.
World War Two stories about disguising French Resistance fighters and smuggling them in and out of the country abound, and it looks like they've still got a knack for this kind of thing. If you bought this Fat Bastard (I have to admit, I love saying that, especially in front of a stiff wine crowd) under the impression it was an Aussie shiraz, the drinking of it would in no way clear up the misapprehension. It is ripe and round, full of dense black fruit flavors, with lots of soft easy-to-take tannins.
Fat Bastard Grand Reserve was aged in French oak for two years: a third in brand-new barrels, a third in year-old barrels, and the rest in two-year-old barrels. The resulting blend is delightful and smooth, rich in cinnamon spice and a little brown molasses. I'd drink it with a rosemary lamb stew over garlic polenta.
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