You two: I am thoroughly enjoying your sparkling reparteé about beverage alcohol and I am absolutely drinking it up. Maybe a regular Wednesday gig?
We’ve been doing a series of zoom wine tasting sessions led by a sommelier. Awkward and very fun.
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Obligatory:
"Of the sparkling wines, the most famous is ‘Perth Pink’. This is a bottle with a message in, and the message is BEWARE!. This is not a wine for drinking – this is a wine for laying down and avoiding.
Another good fighting wine is ‘Melbourne Old-and-Yellow’, which is particularly heavy, and should be used only for hand-to-hand combat.
Quite the reverse is true of ‘Chateau Chunder’, which is an Appalachian controle, specially grown for those keen on regurgitation – a fine wine which really opens up the sluices at both ends.
Real emetic fans will also go for a ‘Hobart Muddy’, and a prize winning ‘Cuiver Reserve Chateau Bottled Nuit San Wogga Wogga’, which has a bouquet like an aborigine’s armpit."
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Or me. But we’re both from beer Franconia, not wine Franconia.
Interesting. With many wineries opting to use stainless steel, it’s clear there are lots of issues with barrels. There might be a fight between producers of pinot noir and scotch over bourbon barrels (if that hasn’t happened already):
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I’m in sales. I certainly make my pay check by grasping and providing this sort of nuanced, context heavy approach, and know a lot of people who do. I’ve also met a lot of producers who wholly engage with the myth making or uncritically accept the received wisdom.
The broader industry’s marketing is certainly fully engaged with these ideas and promotes them heavily.
But I think you let the public off the hook too much. These things wouldn’t have the marketing power they did if the public didn’t view these sorts of traditionalist, European myth making and class concerns as a positive. You can’t sell people a fantasy of white pants wearing, pink bubbly drinking luxury if that sort of wealth isn’t viewed positively. And don’t get the “black people should stop appropriating white European culture by getting involved with wine” responses mentioned in the article without some pretty broadly distributed ideas about what it means to be European.
If those wines were renowned locally among trades people and a rising middle class they probably wouldn’t be status symbols. Instead that renown was in certain very visible, very fashionable European courts and among wealthy classes that would pay a premium.
Take a look at beer where you don’t have the same class connotations. Even for beer renowned enough to be shipped to the same European courts, as with Irish stout and the Russian Imperial Court.
Sure. But it is not the sort of slow, developed from localized custom tradition you referred to.
Many of them were developed by academics, government authorities, and large businesses or industry groups as a deliberate modernization, promoted and sold across national lines. Instituted from without. Which is usually the opposite of what we mean by tradition.
There are supply issues. Not a ton of coopers in the world and appropriate wood is getting hard to come by.
There are traditional shortcomings, product loss through product seeping into and through wood. Lack of control over evaporation and oxidation, and failure rates. Contamination. That sort of thing.
Wine makers use steel for various reasons but a lot of times it’s just that wood flavors and oxidation are not desirable for the style they’re making.
The big nasty on barrels in whiskey is the shortages driven by the whiskey boom. Demand is outstripping supply of barrels and it takes a long time to increase production due to the aging.
Most of your used bourbon barrels go to Scotch and Irish whiskey producers. Where they’re popular cause they’re cheap and constantly in supply thanks to that US rule. But a lot of the supply is already locked in by large conglomerates who just shift them between their own holding or have long term contracts.
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I wasn’t arguing against that point, and certainly see how prejudices make people more susceptible to influence.
I actually wanted to name my first gin “Fallen Empires” in a nod to how this myth making and Euro-centrism doesn’t capture the actual history and context of the products. Gin’s history is basically a master course in militarism, mercenary warfare, class exploitation, the spice trade and technological innovation masquerading as craftsmanship. Unfortunately, only my original copy made it to the bottle. And only on a neck tag.
That’s great. More of this!
Wouldn’t go that far. They sometimes sell Georgian orange wines in Lidl/Aldi! and any specialist wine shop should have them. Not as common as Hungarian and we didn’t study it in school but most people with a bit more than a casual knowledge would know about them and most likely have tasted.
I guess Georgian wines would be more common in non-English speaking parts of Europe. Or at least non-English and selling not only their own… Because continental Europe can be quite insular in its own way.
I would have thought that the more usual critique of appelations would have been that they are too slow, too old, too tied up in tradition and don’t respond properly to developments in winemaking technology (and climate change). I’d agree with that. The world has changed. You don’t get corked wine any more. Nor do you get wine which doesn’t travel, except unusual local wines with no market abroad.
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And it’s marketing is almost wholly based in furiously masturbating to colonialism.
I love gin, but the whole schtick is pretty gross. British Gin brands are often the biggest offenders in colonial themed parties with Black only service staff dressed like lawn jockeys.
It’s gross.
It works better. People are more apt to buy when they feel you’re working with them, and you are more trustworthy if you teach them something and demonstrate you have their best interests in mind. You don’t make the easy sale, but you do better business in the long run.
You’re in Europe!
They mostly don’t make it to the US. Though it’s easier to find after a brief trend for “orange” wine a few years back since Georgia is one of the few places with a history of making it.
I think it’s a weird mix. The traditions they cling to are newer and more industrial than they believe, and things never stopped developing and changing. But the appellation system itself is infinitely tied to whatever they’ve marked as “tradition” and not changing very specific things. Often things that don’t much matter like what your closure is.
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How dare you slander Frankenwein like that! Franconian wines are some of the best white wines out there!
(Thanks to @FGD135 for pointing out this horrible, horrible abuse of Franken!)
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I can’t do wine anymore. It’s a 3 day nausea fest, suspect it might be sulfides.
Luckily I work in beer and mostly drink whiskey.
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This is why I drink beer.
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Ryu you seem to still be able to talk about wine history just fine. Keep it up.
I’m noticing an increasing correlation between feeling poorly and consumption of MSG and alcohol. I’ve tested it, and with either one on its own there’s only the expected effect. Together, urgh.
damnit, I was with you up to the very last couple of words. First Nation people in Australia suffer racism as badly as African Americans in the US, lets all do our part to cut it out.
(yes, I know it was a quote, you could have just stopped after the first three paragraphs and no one would have been the wiser).
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It’s always been celebrated for its excellence.
I’d suggest that a term like “Rioja” and/or “Tempranillo” means (to me) that I am more likely than not to enjoy the liquid therein. “Crianza” means I’m even more likely to enjoy it. (Hadn’t read the article so I don’t know if that’s the terminology he was talking about…) But looking for these is certainly not 100% successful, and I figure these are all more-or-less synonymous with “good, dry reds,” and that I’ve just gotten used to finding them with those names. But I am no connoisseur; I will pair a red with the “wrong” thing (e.g. fish) because 9-out-of-10-times, “white wine” means (to me) “this will remind you of sliced apples and pears that the cat peed on.”
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[quote=“Gyrofrog, post:58, topic:184995”] But I am no connoisseur; I will pair a red with the “wrong” thing (e.g. fish) because 9-out-of-10-times, “white wine” means (to me) “this will remind you of sliced apples and pears that the cat peed on.”
[/quote]
To test this hypothesis we elaborated the following experimental schema: 54 subjects were invited to a series of two experiments in which they had to comparatively describe a real red wine and a real white wine. Some days later the same subjects had to comparatively describe, in their own words, the same white wine and a red-coloured white wine. The neutrality, from an olfactory and gustative point of view, of the colouring was controlled during another test. What the subjects see during the first as in the second experiment is a glass of white wine and a glass of red wine. What in fact is in the glasses during the first experiment a glass of red wine and a glass of white wine whereas during the second there were two glasses of identical white wine, except from the point of view of colour. In question was the perception of the subjects. The results are presented in the following figure.
The real red wine was described from an olfactory and gustative point of view in classical red wine terms. Whereas the white wine was described in usual white wine terms during this first experiment.
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Had read an article years ago about archeologists finding a relatively intact sunken trading vessel that had sealed wine amphora. They decided to have a tasting… this “wine expert” that did the article said that it tasted like horseshit, but good horseshit.
What I wanna know is how he knew the difference, or nay, where he has had his mouth… 
Can’t find that particul;ar article, but I did find this.
But enough shit-talking. Let’s talk manure. That horse-shit scent, politely called “barnyard,” is the product of Brettanomyces, a bacterium present in many wines. Lepeltier, a partner at downtown bistro Racines NY, explained: “It triggers some sexual stuff. And I’m sure about that.” Lepeltier has a degree in philosophy and total certainty in her opinions and taste. Like a musky perfume, barnyard wines appeal to “something very, very primitive in us. So that’s one reason [people like it]. And the second thing is: You can recognize it.”
so perhaps this taster was on to something.
some other unusual notes used to describe (drinkable) wine are “road tar”, “petrol”, and “cat pee.”
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Look, I’m going to sound like a snob here for saying I prefer French, Italian and German wines, but it’s not a question of snobbery, it’s because I live in southern Germany and prefer buying local. If I’m in the USA, I’ll look for wines that taste good with the least amount of transportation involved.
Just buy (relatively) local, people. Everything else is just pretentious one-upmanship.
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