Red Wine with Fish

The forthcoming Memorial Day festivities have made me a bit retrospective. It has been slightly over a year since I began my adventure in the wine business. It seems like a good time to think about my expectations when I started and what I have learned since then.

I won’t say that much has shocked me about the way the wine business functions, but I have certainly had eye-opening experiences.

For example, most people don’t know the degree to which many wines (whether the winemaker admits it or not) are “engineered”. I have written about this before. Making wine is still very much an agricultural process, but whether they admit it or not, most wine makers will go to great lengths to make sure the wine is drinkable, regardless of what nature has provided in the vineyard. Upon learning about acidification, chapatalization and copper-sulfate fining, many people become extremely disenchanted. But to me, this is one of the things that make wine fascinating: it is not easy to make wine that allows the vineyard to speak for itself and is consistently pleasant to drink. Sometimes nature just doesn’t cooperate.

I have also become much more critical than I was when I started drinking Oregon wine. A few years ago, I liked all but the most boring or flawed wines from Oregon. I just hadn’t had anything like Willamette Valley Pinot before. While I still love this wine, I am much harder to impress, having seen much of what this region has to offer. These days, most of my wow moments are coming from European wines and older vintages of our Pinot Noir.

Speaking of which, I have learned not to discount Willamette Valley wines’ aging potential. If you are tempted to drink that ‘04 Argyle Spirithouse Pinot Noir, ‘03 Scott Paul Audrey Pinot Noir or even that ‘04 Domaine Drouhin Arthur Chardonnay now, make sure you have a few put away, because some neat stuff starts to happen after about 5 years in the bottle.

I have considerably more to say about this industry than time permits this evening, so look for this post to be continued, perhaps not until after the Memorial Day Madnes is over and done.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Call of the Wine, Wine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.