Chardonnay remains a tale of two worlds.  One way to consider that proposition is by pondering the polarized old and new world style profiles.  But even setting continental divides aside, the two tales of Chardonnay remain conflicted inside the US.  I was reminded of this when the folks at Harvest PR & Marketing got in touch with me during their work on the inaugural release of Domaine Serene 2010 Evenstad Reserve Chardonnay.

We had a discussion based on, among a few other things, these questions:

1. Are you familiar with Domaine Serene?
2. How often do you drink Chardonnay, and for what occasion(s)?
3. What’s your experience with Willamette Valley Chardonnay (and/or Dijon clones), and how do you think it compares to Chardonnays of other regions?
4. How would you describe Chardonnay’s current reputation among your readers and consumers?

I am quite familiar with Domaine Serene’s outstanding Pinot Noir program, don’t drink Chardonnay nearly as much as I used to, and have little experience with the variety in Willamette.  Question #4 was an intriguing one and it gave away the PR and marketing challenge Domaine Serene confronted; what is Chardonnay’s reputation with readers and consumers?  In one Chardonnay tale reported on by the Wine Institute, it is “the most widely planted winegrape (95,271 acres) and ..the most popular wine in the U.S….with sales increases every year….28 percent of California’s table wine volume shipped to the U.S. market in 2010.” Face value, the consumer data is all green lights.

But in a separate Chardonnay tale, the once familiar ABC (anything but Chardonnay) tale, more selective consumers have said “no” to Chardonnay and searched for white wine substitues.  The truth to tale #2 is now better understood as the outcry for fruit-not butter and oak, and wines with balance and acidity to make you salivate and that taste good with food.  While I used to drink a lot more Chardonnay through the mid 90′s, I did get tired picking through a sea of imbalanced, heavily-oaked and caramel renditions in search of the pinpoint balance and fruit focus that makes Chardonnay a world class wine.  Still, so many of the younger wine drinkers (meaning under 40) I know resist Chardonnay, replaced by “hipper” Albarino, Pinot Grigio, Godello, Chenin Blanc, Riesling, Gruner Veltliner, and a longer list of white varieties you can’t easily spell or pronounce.

Somewhat guilty myself, I moved around with my head down these past ten years, lured to the Loire Valley, Burgundy, Galicia, Lombardy,and elsewhere,…getting caught up in discovery and failing to check back in on American winemakers now paying homage to the more traditional Burgundian Chardonnay treatment that at least one significant piece of the market has been screaming for more of.  For sure, the vast US acreage planted to Chardonnay is supported by plenty of bulk gooey, oaky, buttery chardonnay being poured all over town, but not for the people I drink wine with.  I remember opening a delicious bottle of 2005 L’angevin Heintz Vineyard Chardonnay upon arrival at a wine tasting and watching in amazement as many said “no thank you” when they recognized the Chardonnay bottle shape.  That kind of formed bias continues to play out in restaurants and wine shops all around America.  But, is it possible that high end domestic winemaking has been running to catch up to the market and it’s still enough of a secret to keep a piece of the potential Chardonnay market sidelined?

I was curious and sympathetic to the Domaine Serene cause because I knew they were up against it if indeed they were going to rely on their Dijon clones to produce Chardonnays that the upper end of the market will stand up and notice.  In exchange for all my jabbering, Domaine Serene’e Allan Carter sent me a bottle of the 2010 Evenstad Reserve Chardonnay, blended from the Cote Sud (47%), Clos du Soleil (23%), Clos du Lune (16%) and Etoile (14%) to taste after just ten days in the bottle.  He sent it alongside their monumental, silky, gorgeous, herb tinged, fruit forward Evenstad Reserve Pinot Noir made in the great 2008 Oregon vintage, just as a matter of context and to demonstrate the abiding quality of the Chardonnay.

If there are more Wilamette, Oregon, or California Chardonnays produced in this style then I have been missing out on something important.  The 2010 Evenstad Reserve Chardonnay has a very light yellow hue, and at first a restrained lemon peel aromatic is all you get, followed by a feint touch of lees as the wine opens.  The wine goes on to provide a totally clean palate impression, with wet slate and resin aromas.  It offers a delicate impression while expressing pure Chardonnay fruit, with always present acidity that gets the juices flowing, but stops short of being overly edgy.  The wine’s purity, cleanliness,and absence of wood reminds me of austere Chablis.  The wine, in two words, is mind blowing.  All the PR babbling about natural wines, clonal legacies, first to plant, and Burgundian style aside, this Chardonnay demonstrates what it will take to regain the attention of the serious upper end of the informed wine market.  And with the freedom for winemakers to style and blend Chardonnay as they please, the landscape is wide open for a high end Chardonnay revival.

I never would have been able to guess this was a US Chardonnay.  That’s my fault because I have not been keeping pace, going along and ignoring Chardonnay because of the wanderless and uninteresting style the varietal adopted as it was popularized and heavily planted.  Bravo Domaine Serene, you have turned my head and produced a Chardonnay of stunning beauty and grace, just like it’s supposed to be.

Note: The wines reviewed here were provided as complimentary press samples.  Information regarding availability, production, or pricing was not available at the time this was published.  The information will be added as it becomes available.

Alto Adige: Part II – The Wines

While the inspiring Alto Adige alpine basin landscape is undeniably alluring, confronting a flight of mid-term, bottle-aged white wines from the region’s leading cooperatives is utterly compelling. Single varietal bottlings of Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, and Gewurztraminer along with blended versions involving even more varietals were unanimously distinctive and serious wines. Despite the fact these wines are mostly made in cooperatives offering entry level, mid level, and upper level product, all of the wines were authentic ambassadors for their Alto Adige varietal character and none seemed mass produced.  Each bottle offers unique definition of style that was clearly born in the vineyard and respected by winemakers keen on capturing and protecting terroir.  Alto Adige white wines are serious, offer strong value, and many can be included in any list of the finest white wines in all of Italy.

Our flight of wines paraded recognizable regional commonality.  All of these Alto Adige white wines had consistently rich and lush textures that never resulted in overly fat or flabby palate impressions. Significant concentration and velvet mouthfeels reverberated as a common regional characteristic despite the wines coming from scattered Südtirol vineyards to the north and south, and from varying altitudes. Second, these finely textured wines finished crisp and with good acidity, providing structure and balance to the weighty richness.  And finally, the wines offered distinctly different, but authentically unique, interpretations of the same varietals grown elsewhere in Italy (Pinot Grigio from the Veneto and Friuli region) and around Europe (Gewurztraminer from Alsace or the Rhine), often with more restraint, purity of fruit, balance, minerality, and finesse.  All the wines’ current 2009 releases are priced beween $24 and $55, representing outstanding values in today’s market for the finest white wines with aging potential.

Here is a rundown (and shopping list) of the wines we tasted, grouped by star ratings inclusive of prices for current releases:

****1/2

$40 Alois Lageder Chardonnay Löwengang, 2002- Utterly mind blowing and a completely appropriate value substitute for Grand Cru Burgundy in strong vintages. The winery was founded in 1823 and is currently operated by the family’s fifth generation.  While 2002 was a terrible vintage in Italy overall, it was obviously better in Alto Adige, where the mountains are credited with defying the country’s otherwise terrible weather.  The fruit comes from 45-60 year old vines. Stylistically Burgundian, using natural yeast and aged for eleven months on the lees in half new barriques, it maintains great structure, balance, and a pleasantly creamy mouthfeel.  Combines hints of tropical notes, chalk, nuttiness, and acidity all adding up to a fully integrated wine of noble finesse.  You will be challenged to pay $40 or less for a white wine that can replicate top Burgundy wine the way this one does six years following its release.  A major “buy” recommendation.

****

$36 San Michele Appiano Pinot Grigio St. Valentin, 2006- Some butter and oak mixing with bright grapefruit on the nose.  The wine is fermented in new barriques and then sits a half year on the lees in stainless steel.  It shows the regionally familiar super rich and weighty mouthfeel but does not come off fat.  It has pear and apple notes, fresh and not heavy in the mouth, finishing crisply with appropriate acid zing.

$48 Caldaro Sauvignon Castel Giovanelli, 2007-Initially showing bright Sauvignon varietal notes, then touches of earthiness.  Bright berries, peach, and again, a rich and impressive mouthfeel with an elegant and lengthy finish.

$35 Tramin Gerwurztraminer Nussbaumer, 2004-Flowers on the nose pleasingly make way for minerality to shine through and create balance and integration that seems to define this varietal in Alto Adige.  Obvious lychee sweetness, this wine was most impressive for its richness and weight and was easily the fattest wine of the bunch.  Of the two Gewruztraminers, it is probably closer to the style of Gewurztraminer I am more familiar with from places like Alsace and the Rhine.

***1/2

$55 Terlan Nova Domus Terlaner Riserva, 2005- Light yellow in color, a blend of Pinot Blanc, Chardonnay, and Sauvignon Blanc, it is suggested that this wine is best drunk with 2-3 years of bottle age and that it is “better to drink a bottle than a glass”.  It shows stone fruit notes with significant acidity, complexity, and that ever present richness and long finish.   A lovely wine with good finesse and balance.

***

$40 Franz Haas Cuvée Manna, 2004- Here is a blend made from Chardonnay, Riesling,  Sauvignon, and Gewurztraminer. All of the fruit is sourced within a five square mile area in the Southwest of Alto Adige, but altitudes and soils change from 700-2000 feet.  Consistent terroir?  You call it.  Anyway, it is a fun wine to drink with a very deep yellow color, quince, tropical fruit, herbs, and that characteristic rich mouthfeel.  For all that is going in and has gone into the wine, with some varietals fermented in wood, some only in steel before blending and then beginning a resting period on top of their lees, it continues to cling to a restrained and classy style. Fun, but serious in the same sip.

$29 Peter Zemmer Gewurztraminer Reserve, 2006- The reserve notation in Alto Adige refers to the legal requirement preventing release prior to the 2nd January following production.  It is a highly aromatic wine with sweet bursts or nectar, very ripe peach, nuts, flowers, a touch of citrus and one more time, that purity and richness on the palate.

**1/2

$24 Nals Margreid Pinot Grigio Punggl, 2007- This was the first wine we tasted and it made me sit up straight and pay attention.  Entirely unique with chalk, melon rind, and herbs on the nose it was mildly complex and nicely structured in the finish.  The rich luscious mouthfeel was absolutely the single finest and most interesting highlight about this wine, and the finesse, balance, and integration that was more evident in the other wines did not come through in as pronounced fashion.  Still a very good wine and example of Alto Adige style, but just not the best of the bunch.

There is an absence of cute flashiness in these wines that might distract from their pure fruit representation and varietal identity. As such, they exist as tremendous food wines and a really satisfying fine wine indulgence all at once.  Their ability to age was proven in this tasting.  Go and enjoy the discovery of Alto Adige’s serious winemaking culture, and definitely consider paying a visit to this region straddling Italy, Austria, Switzerland, alpine mountains, and Mediterranean influenced valleys.

P.S. If the wines sound interesting but you missed Alto Adige: Part I, then this pictorial overview and regional summary is worth reading. It will cement your intrigue.

My last bottles of 1990, 1991, 1993, and 1997 Stony Hill Chardonnay comprised a short vertical flight preceding two blind flights of 2007 Cabernets that sixteen members of our Boston tasting group recently slurped, swallowed, and spit their way through.  I purchased the wines on release back in the 90′s and one bottle from each vintage survived years of regular cellar raids. Stony Hill’s unique style and winemaking approach seemed a best bet for testing California Chardonnay’s potential for improvement over time.

Robert Dwyer did an admirable job with his comprehensive wrap up of the Stony Hill Chardonnay/2007 Cabernet tasting at his The Wellesley Wine Press blog; one of my favorite, no-nonsense, practical reads in the wine blogosphere.  To be honest, I have been waiting some fifteen years to line these four vintages of hillside Chardonnay up next to each other and to embrace the risky experiment’s results head on. While the California Cab flights from the strong 2007 vintage were thrilling, my anticipation and curiosity was almost completely fueled by the Chardonnays on the evening of the tasting.  So click on the preceding Wellesley Wine Press links and have a peek at the Cabernet tasting summary; it was laced with its own intrigue and surprise.

Stony Hill started making wine in their own unique style and vision, just a few miles north of St. Helena in the western hills of Napa Valley, in the 50′s.  The wine making approach highlights racking off the lees, protection of the fruit’s original acidity, avoidance of malolactic fermentation, and the utilization of neutral oak cooperage to provide some complexity without subjecting the juice to a cloak of dominant oak.  Their goal is to produce Chardonnay with balanced acidity and authentically high toned fruit flavor.  In their youth, the wines defy any preconception of oaky, buttery California Chardonnay and over the twenty years I have been drinking the wines, Stony Hill has never succumbed to market trends or pressures that could have distracted them from this mission .  As a side note, even the label has barely changed over the years and the comforting nostalgic design always make me smile.

How did the wines perform?  Well, just so-so.  Still, the drinking experience was largely educational and mostly enjoyable.  These wines are so expressively fruit driven, focused, and vibrant when they are young that even with this tasting’s validation of their ability to linger on without completely falling apart, they struggled to justify a long term cellaring strategy. Besides the fact I am on the wrong side of 50-years-old, this tasting’s results guide me to lay away new vintages closer to an eight year term.  Here is a run down of the wines’ performances:

1990 Stony Hill Chardonnay ($25 on release)

Amazingly, as the oldest vintage, this wine was thrilling immediately after opening and lingers in my mind as a wildly successful experiment in extended California Chardonnay cellaring. Slight oxidation was evident, but the wine showed off its pear and bright apple aromatics well, representing itself to be surprisingly alive and vibrant with almost bracing acidity. The wine sits in your mouth with enough weight and viscosity to raise eyebrows and nods of approval, and finishes with impressive length. The 1990 proved to be an enigma on the California Chardonnay landscape, and had me patting myself on the back for my patience and commitment to the experiment. Disappointingly, after 15 minutes of oxygen exposure in the glass the wine lost its vibrancy and started to wilt.  But, the first ten minutes were really fun, educational, and rewarding on both hedonistic and intellectual levels.  The moral: age slowly and drink quickly!

1991 Stony Hill Chardonnay ($45 on release)

As opposed to crispy fresh apple flavor in the first wine, the 1991 had distinct baked or mealy apple aromas. It was more flabby than the 1991 in the mouth, was losing its weight and fruit, had a higher degree of oxidation, and many of of the group’s tasters picked up Sherry-like qualities.  It saddened me to drink this wine now remembering its delicious youth, but comforted myself by chalking the whole project up to education.

1993 Stony Hill Chardonnay ($35 on release)

This vintage reignited my interest.  Again, baked apple dominated the nose but it combined with minerals and wet stone aromatics.  While it was struggling to cling onto a tiny bit of lasting structure, there was a lively saline flavor element that spoke to the minerality that also freshens up the nose.  Still not as good as the first ten minute experience with the 1990, the 1993 was most definitely interesting and complex but lacked in structure and lasting fruit.

1997 Stony Hill Chardonnay ($35 on release)

Regrettably, enough folks identified the bottle as corked.  It also had completely lost its fruit and structure.  It seemed closer to what I figured would happen to Chardonnay from California after sitting in a bottle and dark cellar for more than ten years.  Holding this wine was a failed experiment, but I do wish we could have tasted another bottle.

The notes on these old wines should not stop anyone from buying Stony Hill Chardonnay and drinking the wines inside the decade of their release.  They demand attention and are uniquely compelling.  Nor should these notes discourage your own cellar experiments. The learning is tremendously fun and you will taste California wines at a life stage that very few ever get to experience.  That’s special.

Raging self doubt and curiosity fuels an unremitting panoply of cross examinations intended to dig up the root cause of my shifting preference in wine style.  Have I fallen victim to trend and popular fashion?  Is my palate simply evolving?  Or, have I discovered regions and varietals I once dismissed without fair chance? Did I subconsciously succumb to a new breed of wine opinion leaders?  Or, are global wine economics telling my brain to prefer something different than before?  It’s all bothersome.

I have uncorked enough bottles to occupy  an entire landfill brimming with caramel tinged Chardonnay, fruit driven Zinfandel, ripe Syrah, big California Cabernet, and young voluptuous Bordeaux empties. Now, not so much.  My palate’s eye drifts to Loire, Beaujolais, and elsewhere in search of grace and balance, gripping acidity and rocky, stony, mineral driven wines offering restraint, purity of fruit, and low alcohol levels.  It’s no secret that I am not alone, but I hate to think that I have been swept away by popular wine opinion to abandon the style of wine I preferred to cut my teeth on during the last 25 years.

Last year, Ojai Vineyard’s Adam Tolmach repentantly told the LA Times that “The [new] goal is to produce 14%-alcohol wines with nuance…to avoid overripe prune and jam flavors and preserve acidity to allow the more delicate floral and herbal qualities to emerge. I want to take the Eurocentric sense of balance and apply it in California.”  And last week in the New York Times’ Eric Asimov wrote about the old California “Chardonnay Mafia” and offered some insight into the range of styles, from rich to lean, that either existed or emerged over the years.  Asimov struck a chord with me in his reference to a long time favorite California Chardonnay and Pinot producer, Steve Kistler.  Steve has more at stake than I do working his way through a familiar style preference shift; Kistler is reinventing a successful business model to follow his own palate.  Learning about Kistler’s evolving personal preference provided some relief to my trend-adverse palate paranoia:

Kistler is still popular, but its style is evolving, the wines becoming less oaky, less powerful, more graceful and focused. It’s an extremely rare instance of a winery, at the top of the heap, altering a successful formula, and the subject of my column this week.

What does Kistler’s evolution signify? Well, let’s be clear. Kistler is not pandering to a shift in the marketplace or of public tastes. It’s more about following the arc of Steve Kistler’s own taste, and as he told me, he found himself in the last decade preferring wines that were more lively and structured, with finesse, to wines that were powerful above all.

I had another opportunity last week to put my unfaithfully wavering style allegiance to test, organizing and hosting a tasting for a group of twelve tasters with keen palates but less radical style allegiances.  I poured the following wines in a first flight, moving up the scale of alcohol content and down in acidity, in this order and side by side in three glasses:

1. 2008 Domain du Moulin Cour-Cheverny Les Petits Acacias ($16 **1/2)
2. 2008 Clos Roche Blanche Touraine Sauvignon No. 2 ($18  ****)
3. 2005 Paul Hobbs Chardonnay Russian River ($50  ***)

The wines were all fine, good to excellent in their own right. We were comparing the wines primarily for style preference.  They have very little to do with each other, with a whole lot more to separate them.

The Domain du Moulin features the obscure Romorantin grape only grown in this region.  It was a test in acidic tolerance, with crisp lime, wheat, and a raw almond character that was lean and bracing. The aromatics and flavors were a bit flat, you really needed to search. Nevertheless, it is a bit of a fascination to drink wines from Cour-Cheverny just because there really is nothing made like it anywhere else in the world.  I can see it cutting through even the richest white seafood sauce, or maybe served just as a palate stirring aperitif.  It was the least favorite of the group, but not to be dismissed outright.

The Clos Roche Blanche style was favored by more than half of us.  It is a really special wine, and a bargain at the price. Here is a wine that actually combines a saline, tangerine, citrus peel, herb (fresh parsley in particular), mineral profile with a smooth and rich mouthfeel that carries the sharply defined and somewhat edgy flavor components across the palate in a really elegant style. The wine appeals to clean and lean flavor fans, but also has a richness and semi-unctuous mouthfeel that fans of round and richer wines might prefer. It is a special wine, a ridiculous value, and easily my favorite from a stylistic perspective and as an individual wine.  I will keep the cellar stocked.

After these two wines, the Paul Hobbs tasted like a fitting dessert. Granted, it has been laying around the cellar for a few years, always a chancy proposition with domestic Chardonnay.  One person thought it ought to be served with creme brulee. It tasted just that way.  Fat with notes of caramel and hazelnut, the fruit was unfocused and starting to fall away.  There was limited acidity to hold the wine together much longer, and its flabbiness was noticeable.  Yet, the fat style and loud rich candied flavors were recognizeable old friends, something I yearned for no less than 5 years ago.  I marveled, one more time, at my palate’s “about face”.  At that very moment, I recalled recently opening a bottle of another high profile Chardonnay with Eric Broege after tasting through a group of Lopez de Heredia wines, only for him to recork the wine remarking it needed apple pie or some kind of sweet desert to do it any justice.  It was like drinking liquid cotton candy.

Could twenty years of Chardonnay and “big” wine fascination been a palate stage that had me drinking fat, unfocused, super rich wine that were really desserts in disguise?  What I want to believe is that palate preferences mature.  Don’t get me wrong, I still thoroughly enjoy well balanced and structured mouthfuls of bold Cabernets, Rhones, Bordeaux, Zin and the like that tell a story about the land they come from with distinctive character.  But there is no mistaking my craving for pretty wines with restraint and grace that invigorate my palate with salivating acidity. Validated once again in this evening’s little experiment is that I, and actually the majority of the group, prefer the style of wines from Touraine like Clos Roche Blanche because of their grace, minerality, and balance.  The group tasting result added further punch to Steve Kistler’s soothing effect on my self doubting paranoia.  My fellow tasters on this evening applied open minds and untethered palates to give the nod to the wine with the most restrained grace, solid acidity, fresh citrus flavors, and appropriately rich mouthfeel.

The evidence is mounting in favor of my palate’s redemption. Maybe I can stop beating myself up now.  I think I like this kind of wine at this late stage of my life of wine appreciation just because…well just because….I do.

I repeatedly ponder two questions about wine appreciation.  First, I query myself about my evolving preferences, wondering if my shift to more authentic old world wine is palate driven or trend inflicted.  Secondly, I ask myself how so many practical people get so wrapped in wine minutia, devoting large chunks of their waking time studying, tasting, buying, growing, reviewing, debating, rating, blending, importing, selling, discovering, collecting or simply quaffing fine wine to chase a foodstuff of choice.  And just as I ask this very question, here I go again approaching a keyboard contemplating the metamorphic shift of a personally profound wine story into homogenized resonance for easy and wide embrace by willing wine enthusiasts.  This time, I am pushed to this place by the unsurprising coincidence of two separate stories involving social aspiration, Lindemans Bin 65 Chardonnay, and Mateus.

The first story is a short and boring one, and it is mine.  I drank Manischewitz at Passover tables and Mateus during all night Hot Tuna jam sessions in New York’s 14th Street Academy of Music balcony seats before I turned 18.  Not unexpectedly, I disliked wine but appreciated its aura of being a step above beer, two beyond Mad Dog, buzz-worthy, and the undisputed incumbent as most noble beverage.  This was the extent of my personal wine experience through the age of 24: I disliked a beverage I aspired to embrace; alluring and frustrating all at once.

The second story is a more fascinating one, told by Terry Theise in his new book Reading Between the Wines. Coincidentally, and not to draw any comparison between me and this legendary James Beard award winner for excellence importing Champagne, German, and Austrian wines of important and honest origin, Theise also came across Mateus Rosé at a Rod Stewart concert just a couple years earlier than I did and a few blocks east and south of the Academy at the Fillmore East.  Only for Theise, he was sharing the actual bottle Stewart slugged from, passed to him through a few front row hippies before he got his own taste of bad rock star wine.  The wine was distasteful to him, but Theise thought and subsequently wrote:

“Metamessage for me: wine is cool, rock stars drink it.  I want to be a rock star.  This was crucial information.  I had to at least pretend to like wine.”

I remained confused about wine following my Mateus and Manishewitz hazing phases until my first real wino friend, Dr. Peter Adesman, had my wife and I over to dinner in 1986.  He served us a bottle of Lindeman’s Bin 65 Chardonnay, a mass produced but legitimate $7 bottle of  tropical fruit laden Aussie Chardonnay.   I am glad I didn’t know too much about wine that night, because holding $7 Chardonnay while walking through Peter’s 200 case cellar of 1982 Bordeaux, early 80′s Rhones, and California Cabs would have offended me.  But Peter knew exactly what he was doing,providing a novice drinker with highly expressive wine of loud flavor, easy mouth feel, and just enough structure to be unimposing.  The wine turned my head big time, and it marked the beginning of my indefatigable infatuation with wine, needing to understand more about this phenomenon that can coax grapes into masquerading as a viscous melange of melon, papaya, pineapple, and orange with the ability to convert surface scratching conversation into mystical human connection.  The evening also marked the validation of wine’s inference of social and class fitness, as this once rough edged boy from Brooklyn rubbed elbows just fine on this wine infused evening with these smart suburban doctors whose cellars overflowed with correct vintages and makers.

For Theise, it did not take anything resembling 1961 Chateau Latour to turn his life upside down either:

“As I grew older, I (and my girlfriend du jour) would often score a bottle of wine- most of which I hated-for a Saturday night.  The first wine I ever drank and actually wanted to drink again was…(here go my credentials) Blue Nun. It was a novel feeling to enjoy drinking wine.  It was a relief to drink something with low alcohol and fruitiness. …second, I bought a bottle of Riesling for the first time.  This was different! I had never tasted a wine with so much flavor that wasn’t “fruity”.  It tasted like mineral water with wine instead of water.  I needed to know what this odd new thing was….”

These separate stories of budding wine enthusiasm are rooted in honest curiosity stirred by cheap and easy expressive wine.  At one extreme, the experience belongs to me, an avid consumer/hack wine blogger, and at the other end of the spectrum to an extraordinary wine professional that took advantage of living in Germany for his Dad’s job and explored the Saar extensively and naively to eventually help expose the New World to honest wines from the Old World where:

“….wine itself began.  It’s more grounded there.  All things being equal, it is more artisanal, more intimately scaled, humbler, and less likely to be blown about by the ephemeral breezes of fashion.  Its wines are made by vintners who descend from other vintners, often for a dozen or more generations.  They are not parvenus, arrivistes, or refugees from careers in architecture, dermatology, software design, or municipal garbage disposal systems.  They don’t know about the wine lifestyle, and if you tried to tell them, you’d likely draw a blank stare.  You won’t see a huge wite stretch limo pulling out of their courtyards like the one I saw emerging …from Opus One in the Napa Valley.  You will never find Bon Apetit taking pictures in these growers’ kitchens or at garden parties on the grounds.”

Because of the non-discriminatory nature of wine appreciation, where folks from different cultures, knowledge, or background can appreciate the same wine at multiple levels, I often quietly contemplate the mystical qualities of wine.   While its creation and transformation can be chemically or physically explained and manipulated, its real growers rely on terroir and traditional sensibility.   For me, the intersection of earth, sun, nature, and wine maker as Sherpa transcends logic and formula and gets to the heart of the human connection it facilitates.  It explains why some wines create transcedental experience and others do not, or as Theise sees it:

“If you want to experience wine with your whole self-not only  your mind and senses, the wine has to be authentic.  And what confers authenticity is a rootedness in family, soil, and culture as well as the connections among them.  These are aided by intimacy of scale.  And they form the core of a value system by which real wine can be appreciated and understood.

Wine can talk to this thing in us. Some call it soul.  Wine is not apart from this being within us….all it needs is a soul of its own.  It can’t be manufactured; it can’t have been formed by marketers seeking to identify its target audience.  It needs to be connected to families who are connected to their land and to working their land and who are content to let the land speak in its own voice. ….True wine takes its legitimate place as part of your entire, true being.”

So how does one graduate from Mateus and rock concerts to Eastern religious thought and authentic wine? Theise calls it a cultivation of “a particular approach to wine, whereby one prefers the finer over the coarser virtues, the quiet over the noisy.”  I can weigh in that it is a natural journey of personal palate understanding, facilitated by deepening exposure and education.  Wine makes itself available to everyone, which appeals to my innate sensibility and why I protest the trends that launch certain wines and their makers to celebrity status and price points.  It is why I drink very different wines today than I did in my early days of wine enthusiasm.  Theise made it easier for me to understand this as a natural process of palate recognition and maturation, now leaning towards the once undiscovered growers tucked away in their centuries old, Old World vineyards.

It is fun to recall your early and personally important transcendental moments with wine.  Reading Theise’s Reading Between the Wines will uncover or reignite those moments for you and shed some new light on all of it…..for certain.   Most importantly, Theise also gets to the heart of the fanatical pull of wine appreciation, and the legitimacy of the evolution of personal palate, especially where authentic, old world wines are in play.