You don’t have to be a Rock Star to drink wine like one.  Rock Star Winos beguile fame, demagnetize paparazzi, leave crowd-free wakes, and sign no autographs.  Being a Rock Star Wino with the juice to indulge audiences in sensory, intellectual, and emotional celebration is unassuming and simple.   So, if you read Wine Rock Star- Part 1, my reflex to Dave McIntyre’s routine wino tips, you are now ready and equipped to take your show on the road with Part 2.

Without really knowing if any legitimate Rock Stars drink wine just like this, here are two performance formats that will deliver wine experiences even the most jaded wine enthusiasts would clamor over:

The Three Wine Comparison

Never serve one glass of wine at a time with dinner.  Rather, set out three identical glasses and compare the wines against each other.  Never pick just a white and a red wine.  Instead, pick three whites and three reds. Or, just three reds or whites or rosés.  Most importantly, make sure they are related to each other in some way and serve them side by side.

For example, serve three 2009 Russian River California pinot noirs next to each other with a single course.  Or, serve one 2008 syrah from the Rhone Valley’s Côte Rôtie, another 2008 syrah from California’s Paso Robles appellation, and the last from Australia’s Barossa Valley.  Alternatively, serve 2008, 2007, and 2006 O’Shaughnessy Howell Mountain Cabernet, as an example, side by side.  Or pour 1985, 1995, and 2005 Gruaud Larose from Bordeaux’s St. Julien appelallation.  Or maybe just three different Talley Vineyard 2009 pinot noirs; Rosemary’s, Rincon, and Estate.

Get the picture?  Serve them blind or open to your guests.  Be creative.  Reach out to your local wine monger for help…tell them what you want to do and ask for creative suggestions.  Most importantly, enjoy the comparisons, differences, distinctions, favorites, commonalities, styles, and most of all the simultaneous resonance of appreciation, education, indulgence, and group connection.  This performance qualifies you as a Wine Rock Star.

The Blind Tasting

It’s an advanced move, but intensely rewarding. I organize one each month as a labor of love and for the opportunity to comparatively taste wines I am curious to learn more about. Choose a theme…maybe 2007 Chateauneuf du Pape?  2008 Willamette Valley pinot noir? 2009 chenin blanc from Loire?  2009 white Burgundy vs. California Chardonnay?  Buy a dozen bottles (or 6 of each if you are comparing the same variety from two different regions). Or, buy 10 bottles of the main region and add in two distant relatives to see if they stand out (i.e. one 2009 red Burgundy and one 2009 German spätburgunder added to a flight of 2009 California pinot noir).  Then, remove all the foils and corks and put all of the bottles in paper bags, taped tightly around incognito necks so nobody can cheat.

Invite 12-15 of your closest friends.  Put white table cloths over one or two long tables.  Do this so you are able to see the color of the wines against a white backdrop.  Cut up some baguettes and put plates of bread on the table.  Get some big bowls or pitchers for dump buckets so everyone can pour out wines at the end of flights.  Print out names and prices of the wines so everyone knows what is inside the brown paper bags.  Give each taster a blank piece of paper and number it one to twelve, with twelve individual sections devoted to notes for every wine.

Set up six glasses for every taster.  Pick six random bottles from the group of twelve.  Mark each one by Sharpie with a number from one to six.  Pour wine number one for each taster in the left most glass, number two in the second from the left, and so on.  Once the six wines are poured, begin tasting.  Look at color for all six, then check aroma for all six, then taste all six.  Make some notes, rudimentary or exhaustive, and when everyone has finished tasting….compare your impressions with each other.  You will be amazed how much of a learning experience this is.  And, you just got to taste a half dozen amazing wines with good people.  Rinse and repeat with the second six wines.

Have blind ballots for first and second place, add up the votes, and determine the group’s favorite wine. Such fun.  Twelve great wines, sixteen wonderful people, untold enjoyment, connection, and new knowledge.  Rock Star or not, you have created a new stage for exaggerated wine appreciation for you and your friends.

I just finished reading Dave McIntyre’s recent piece in the Washington Post about ways to enjoy wine more in 2012.  He delivers a handful of useful, but ordinary suggestions for etching a couple more garden variety notches into your wine bedpost. Honestly, I was hoping for more.  Alas, a missed opportunity to share some geeky unknown rituals living at the edge of extreme rock star wine indulgence.

I was in a San Juan, Puerto Rico Salsa club last week and overheard somebody mention how the locals dance like rock stars.  I wished someone from the local Salsa mafia had dragged me onto that floor and showed me the right moves, similar to the way I hoped McIntryre would have slipped me a  rich, more cranked up idea or two for truly drinking wine like a rock star in 2012. While San Juan Salsa rooms are infectious happy places, joining the coordinated dancing masses can be entirely intimidating to uninitiated rookies like me, lacking experience, heels, tight black clothes, and built in Latin beats. But, if I was going to dance Salsa, I would want to experience it like the Puerto Rican rock stars do and not inside some vanilla mainland suburban dance studio.  Likewise, if I was considering trying my hand at serious wine indulgence for the first time, I’d hope to mimic some patterns of the most experienced wine connoisseurs. Here are some sensible and accessible ideas that I would have wanted somebody to share with me when I first yearned to start drinking more like a wine rock star:

Glassware:

my "ready service" glassware

Before thinking about anything else, get the right glassware.  Diving into serious wine appreciation without appropriate glassware is like starting an aquarium hobby with the fish and live coral before you have a tank to put them in.  It’s not dissimilar to hiring a Salsa band without a place for them to perform or for you to dance.  The wrong glassware will inarguably strip a potentially religious wine experience of all its excitement while the right glassware will showcase and enhance the wine’s virtues.  Also, you’ll need a bunch of it.  If you are starting out and motivated to try a few suggestions you will read about in Wine Rock Star-Part 2 next week, you will need at least six identical pieces of fine glassware per person (buy eight to accomodate breakage).

At the top end, if you are inclined to make the splurge, are Zalto wine glasses.  You can buy a set of eight Zalto Bordeaux style glasses at Winemonger for $488.00.  If that’s too rich, you can feel good about the Riedel Crystal Vinum Series Bordeaux glasses at less than half the price of Zalto, or $200 for eight glasses at Brown Derby.  Lastly, a fine budget conscious alternative are the Spiegelau Grande Bordeaux glasses. You can buy a full dozen for $100 at the Wine Enthusiast Catalog for $100.  Of course, there are multiple styles and shapes of all these lines, but if I could only own one shape it would be the Bordeaux glass.

Decanting Vessel:

If you’ve made it through the glassware hurdle and are still on track to some rock star wine fun, you will need something to decant old and young red wine into.  As a rule, old wines need to be taken off their sediment that sits at the bottom of the bottle after you have stood the wine up for a day or so, and young red wines want and can handle more vigorous decanting to make their flavors and aromas more immediately accessible.  There is a great new post by the Brooklynguy on serving old wines that offers lots of useful decanting information from really knowledgeable wine service experts.  I would read through it before attempting to open or decant an older bottle of wine.

I prefer very plain crystal pitchers; the kind you can buy for $10-$15 at your local discount home accessories store. I got hooked on this strategy nurturing my wine enthusiasm for more than a dozen years at 231 Ellsworth, a once fine eating establishment in San Mateo, California that the past owner of Pichon Lalande, Madame Lencquesaing, compared to Paris’ two Michelin star spots after leading a tasting dinner at the restaurant.  They look good on the table, are neither pretentious nor goofy looking, allow you to stick your whole face in the pitcher to get a good whiff, and are sturdy as well as simple to handle.  Here are my own two favorites that I use most often:

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 Time To Drink a Bottle:

For me, it took one dinner and one good bottle of wine to turn my head twenty seven years ago.  Set up a dinner for you and the most special person in your life.  Don’t invite anyone else (more wine for the two of you!).  Prepare a high level meal that involves the food and style that you are most competent and comfortable preparing.  It needs to be special, should include either red meat, lighter meat, or fowl…..but most importantly you need to love the food.  If you can’t cook, call in a personal chef for the evening.  You want the food to rock.

I am not sure that rock stars would exactly pick from these two wines for this special moment, but I would:

1985 Lynch Bages and 1989 Beaucastel

You can look back here and read what I wrote about the Lynch Bages.  It is a wine to revel in.  The 1989 Beaucastel is a perfect example of what a great producer can accomplish in a top regional vintage and how a patient collector can maximize its enjoyment.  Both of these wines are at the apex of their development and are ready to be fully appreciated.  The Beaucastel would be my first choice with its amazing elegance, texture, advanced aromatics, and sweet fruit flavors.  It is a mind blowing wine and could be the most enjoyable modern day Beaucastel I have ever experienced.  The 1985 Lynch Bages is by no means an also ran.  You can find a bottle of the 1989 Beaucastel for approximately $150-$200 here.  It is a steal compared to what you would pay in a restaurant for so many run of the mill wines.  You can click and source the 1985 Lynch Bages here, and it will cost you just about as much as the Beaucastel.

Follow Brooklyguy’s decanting suggestions.  Stick your nose in the pitcher and take a deep breath through your nose with your mouth wide open (open mouth allows for better aroma detection).  Pour two glasses about 1/4 full of wine.  Sit down to your meal, forget about everything else in your life except for your companion, the food, and oh yes…..that amazing wine.  You are now drinking like, and probably better than, a rock star.  Plus, if you are anything like me, this moment of indulgence, discovery, and personal connection just might set you on fire like a Jimi Hendrix guitar.

Come back next week for Wine Rock Star- Part 2 tips.

Two favorite wine writers recently teased at the distinction between sensual wine discovery and accumulated wine knowledge. Their words fanned a flame first kindled by my earliest wine crush back in the mid eighties. Not the press and juice kind of crush. I mean the ten-year-old-kiddie-kind-of-crush; when just the thought of that special “someone” lightens heads, warms chests, shortens breaths, stirs loins, and releases imaginations in delightful ways that never seemed plausible before. This style of sensual and intellectual pleasure requires absolutely no training yet is recognizable by anyone.  So guess what? Connecting with wine at the intensity levels of a 4th grade schoolyard crush requires as little training and knowledge.

Wine Knowledge

How is it that knowledge is not a prerequisite to understanding wine?  Organizing and participating in decades of regular, blind, peer group tastings makes it obvious to me that delicious wine can be picked out of blind lineups by beginner and expert wine tasters alike. Inexperienced palates are perfectly capable of discriminating between wines of the same grape, region, and vintage if they are poured side by side. New wine tasters are at ease identifying favorite and least favorite wines using unformed personal language to describe sensory detection to themselves, but are intimidated to verbalize their descriptions to others with more wine knowledge. Actually, their preferences are as interesting as any other taster’s choice; pure and unaffected by the presumptions of technical wine knowledge. Their interpretations are unadorned with catch phrases and buzzwords used, as required, by tasters with deeper wine education and knowledge.

Wine Expert in a Week? Really?

Committing time and energy to advanced wine education almost always relies on a sequence of loving wine before knowing wine. All the knowledge filling studious winos’ ammunition bunkers only comes after being smitten by a crush on wine.  And, the raw sensory and intellectual stimulus telling someone to prefer one wine over another is not something you learn in continuing wine education programs.

An excerpt from “The Taste of Wine: The Art and Science of Wine Appreciation” by Peynaud and Blouin further illustrates this point:

The transmission of a stimulus to the senses via our nervous system, and the response that our brain relays to our consciousness or motor centers, together create a continuous network of information and interpretation which is the very token of our existence: I sense therefore I am; our consciousness functions precisely because of the host of impressions which surround it.  It is also the means by which we understand our environment.  We live because of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Chauchard reminds us of the Latin adage: “What intelligence we have has its source in our senses”

In one of his recent Forbes.com columns, Jeff Lefevre calls it wisdom and differentiates that from wine knowledge by neatly saying, “…placing wine within a bigger context of the human experience making the enjoyment of wine not something that is reliant upon deep knowledge to appreciate, but rather as a beverage that can complement a life well lived.”  

Wine Crush

In a category of its own, “love” has its certain place alongside the many more structured elements defining a life well lived. Similarly, falling in love with wine is as central and separate a proposition to sensory identification and accumulated knowledge in a well lived life of wine. Addressing a group of wine writers this summer, Eric Asimov asserted “you need to own wine and drink bottles“ with meals to discover your love for wine. Simply tasting and educating yourself about it won’t do it.

The bottle of 1985 Lynches Bages that I first tasted in a blind tasting was a completely different wine experience than drinking the same wine with my wife over a relaxed anniversary dinner at Mirabelle, a once (have not been there since 1990, but it still operates) romantic temple of serious french cuisine in St. James, Long Island. The Lynches Bages was more layered, delicate, nuanced, and complex with excellent food and company.  The experience also cemented my developing fascination for the ways wine feeds human connection.  The links between my love for my dinner partner and crush on the wine naturally weaved themselves into a blanket of sensory delight.

Stephanie Ortigue, assistant professor of psychology and adjunct assistant professor of neurology at Syracuse University, published an important study called “The Neuroimaging of Love,” which touches on the sensory intake that leads to love creation in intellectual areas of the brain and also the heart:

…the complex concept of love is formed by both bottom-up and top-down processes from the brain to the heart and vice versa. For instance, activation in some parts of the brain can generate stimulations to the heart, butterflies in the stomach. Some symptoms we sometimes feel as a manifestation of the heart may sometimes be coming from the brain.

The study establishes that it only takes 1/5th of a second to fall in love when two potential mates establish sensory exchange. Various regions of the brain begin processing past experiences alongside immediate sensory intake to either create butterflies in the stomach or an empty feeling in less than a second. Ortigue asserts her study “…reinforces the fact that love is more than a basic emotion. Love also involves cognition.”

Is this combination of sensory and intellectual processing the same with wine?  If it sounds like it is, then isn’t it entirely possible to fall in love with the right wine and have that crush launch a lifetime of wine pursuit in the very same way two loving mates organize a life of personal commitment to one another?

Beauty and Crush

Commitment is serious business and crushes evaporate as fast as they start.  As we mature in life it’s easier to see that nuance, character, presence, challenge, and intellectual stimulation are as, if not more, important to a lifetime of love than surface level physical beauty.  For this reason, my wine cellar has a certain style of wine that I bought in the 80′s and early 90′s that I won’t buy anymore.  Fifteen years into my life of wine enjoyment I found wines what teased my intellect, challenged my palate, and invigorated my food.  That style combination stole my mind and heart.  And it wasn’t the big, fat, fruit forward, sex bomb style of wine I was previously consumed with.  I guess it’s never too late to grow up.

In a recent open letter of advice to “wine newbies”, the Wine Spectator’s Matt Kramer drew a distinction between wines that can provide “life satisfaction” and those that simply offer “pleasure”.  In it, he leaned on E. E. Cummings who raised the bar by writing, “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question,” suggesting the real trick to discovering a lifetime of wine enjoyment is to find your own “beautiful questions.” Kramer went on to explain that a life of wine satisfaction:

“…depends upon recognizing what you’re really seeking… I was in Napa Valley and was tasting a Cabernet that is, by most estimations, a lovely wine. And it was a lovely wine: dense, fragrant, irresistibly supple and oh-so pleasing. A lot of people like it…Yet I’ve never cared overly for the wine… Here we come to the “beautiful question” part. Whenever you taste a wine that goes beyond the ordinary (dull wines allow only the dullest demands), you’ve got to go beyond the usual techno-talk about tannins or acidity or oakiness. If those are your “more beautiful questions” I promise you that you’ll never really “get into” wine.

So what was my problem with this perfectly fine Napa Cabernet? It had no “edge.” Really good and, especially, great wines, for me anyway, have an “edge.” It’s a certain something that not only fascinates, but challenges. This Napa Cabernet offered no challenge. It only offered—dare I say it?—pleasure.

It’s okay, just like in life, to fall in love with the most beautiful and alluring surface characteristics that produce pleasurable gulps of wine.  It proves we don’t require knowledge for wine to produce its visceral swoons of delight and human connection.  At some point, though, finding lasting beauty requires, as Matt Kramer suggests, asking the “more beautiful questions” that eventually define lifetimes of intellectual and emotional reward through wine.  And from there, the knowledge will easily flow.