Dan's wine guide
added by dan 12-04-2002
Okay, right from the start, I'll admit I didn't write this - it's a collection of notes from other greats...
PS. If you're into wine, check out my wine notes.
Which glass?
You'd never catch a wine buff drinking out of coloured glass, even a glass with a coloured stem. A good wine glass is made of plain, clear, uncut glass, and has a tulip-shaped bowl. And somehow, wine always tastes finer out of thinner glass. You also need a glass of reasonable size, to allow room above the wine for the aromas to gather. And space, if you're a real wine buff, to give the wine a good, aroma-releasing swirl without spattering yourself and your neighbours with fly-away drops.
If you're a real perfectionist, you can even buy glasses designed to make different styles of wine taste their best - a Chardonnay glass, a Bordeaux glass, a Shiraz glass. It's hard to believe until you've actually tried the experiment, that the taste of the same wine will alter depending on which shape of glass from which you taste. Of course, you don't need a vast armoury of different glasses. It's good to have a set of tall, narrow-topped tulip-shaped glasses for Champagne and sparkling wines. Bubbles escape less quickly from the narrow surface.
Otherwise, one set of largish, tulip-shaped, fairly thin-walled glasses will do justice to most wines - something at least the size of the traditional 'red wine glass'.
A big glass doesn't mean you have to drink more wine. Whatever the glass, it should be filled to no more than two-thirds capacity. Really large glasses need no more than a normal wineglass measure in the bottom. The 'large glass, two-thirds full' rule goes for sherry and port, too, though you might use a slightly smaller glass than for other wines.
Personally we rarely change glasses between wines - anything to avoid washing up! If the previous wine is likely to taint the next wine's flavour or colour, we'd pour a little of the second wine, give it a swill around the glass, drink it, and then pour a proper serving. You might want to change glasses for a very formal meal, or when changing from a very dark red wine to a white.
Glasses that smell of washing-up, old dish-cloths or cupboard can spoil a wine. Always rinse glasses in clean, soap-free water after washing, and dry with a fresh, clean towel. Don't lace the inside of your glass cupboard with polish or other cleaning products. And glasses stored upright generally seem to smell better.
Temperature
Throw away the wine thermometer - you don't have to go so far as to take a wine's temperature. But you can reduce your drinking pleasure by serving a wine too warm or too cold.
All whites and rosés taste better chilled. They taste brighter and fresher. Fuller, more alcoholic whites taste more flavourful a little warmer than fridge temperature: expensive Chardonnays, good white Burgundies, big Australian Semillons, for example, might benefit from coming out of the fridge ten minutes or so before you want to drink them. But they'll soon warm up in the glass if you serve them straight from the fridge.
Lighter, inexpensive, low-tannin reds can benefit from cooling, too, especially in the summer, and/or at a party or picnic. You might try chilling Beaujolais or Beaujolais-Villages, lighter red Loire wines, northern Italian reds including Bardolino and simple, inexpensive Valpolicella. This doesn't work with tougher, firmer, more tannic reds.
Remember how the tannin in tea tastes tougher when cold? It's the same with wine tannin.
'Room temperature' was always the rule for these bigger, firmer reds. That was in the days before central heating. The room temperature of the average house in winter is probably on the warm side for wines. Ideally, serve red wines cool rather than warm. But don't worry too much - your room temperature will probably do, and if a red is too cool, you can always warm it up by cupping your hands around the glass once the wine has been poured.
What do you do in an emergency? For instant chilling it's worth investing in a Rapidice chiller-sleeve These bottle-hugging sleeves are filled with freezer-fluid, and, kept in the freezer till required, they'll chill a bottle within ten minutes. Next best is an ice bucket or vase, filled with lots of ice and water (icy water works better than ice alone). A short spell in the freezer is also effective. But don't forget the bottle - separating the shattered glass from the frozen peas is a hazardous business.
Wine after wine
Note from Dan: I disagree with this bit to some extent. In general, you should drink from white to red, from light tannin to heavy tannin, from cold to warm...
Don't worry about the order in which to serve different types of wine -just suit each dish individually. There's nothing to stop you serving a red with the starter and a white with the main course if that's what goes best with the food. But a word about puddings and desserts. Sweet foods make red wines taste tough and fruitless; they make dry white wines taste dull and fruitless. Try it and see.
Why not serve a sweet wine with the pudding or dessert? If you have a cheese course as well, consider following the French example of cheese-before-pudding, so that the red wine can follow through from the main course. Or do it the English way, pudding-before-cheese, but choose cheeses from the food with wine section that go with sweet wines or port.
When to open
According to old wine lore, you should open red wines an hour or so before drinking them. Personally, we always open our red wines moments before drinking - whether the wine is cheap or expensive, young or mature. The open-early theory is that any 'bottle stink' will escape, while the air will get to the wine and start to soften if. Scientists have shown that that tiny disc of wine-surface in the bottle-neck is too small for the air-contact tomake any difference.
Opening early might be an advantage in two cases. 'Bottle stink' is the first. This is cover-all term for a number of smells caused by sulphide compounds that sometimes accidentally develop during winemaking. You may detect 'hot water bottles' or, at worst, 'rotten eggs'. Again, that tiny disc of wine in the bottle-top will probably be too small to allow much of this to escape. Sloshing the wine roughly into a jug will be more effective. If the smell is still there, slosh the wine back and forth between two jugs until it disappears.
Young tough reds might also be softened a little by the same treatment - early opening and sloshing into a jug.
I advise against early opening for fine, elderly, mature reds - and especially against early decanting. Mature wines can fade quickly after opening. They can be so fragile that that tiny bit of air exposure in the neck does have an effect. It can tip them over into senility. Really old wines can fade and die in a matter of minutes after the air-exposure of decanting. If you do it too early, you may lose much of the subtlety and pleasure the bottle had to offer. If you are serving old vintages, open them between courses, just before serving.
Decanting
You don't need to decant most wines. The main reason for decanting is to remove any sediment in the bottle. If poured with the wine, it might make it cloudy, and the last glassful might be crunchy! But nowadays, fewer wines throw a sedi-ment. Many modern wines are treated by various means, including chilling and filtration, to ensure that sediment won't form. And anyway, the formation of sediment takes time, often years. Modern wines tend to be made to drink young and fruity. And you can drink them right down to the last dregs, poured directly from their bottle.
There are exceptions - usually expensive, elderly ones! Vintage port, mature fine Bordeaux or Rhône wines, mature Barolo, mature Cabernet Sauvignons or other big, expensive red wines, all these are likely to have a perfectly natural gritty or sludgy deposit in the bottom or on the side of the bottle. It's a mixture mainly of natural salts, tannins, and colouring matter. Even in a younger, expensive red wine, a solid deposit is a good sign (rather than a reason to return the bottle!).
It means the wine has been treated less by the winemaker, so as to retain more of its flavours. It is only these exceptional bottles that you need to decant - pouring the wine gently off its dregs into another container - to ensure that every glass you pour will be clear. The new container need not be a priceless antique decanter - a clean, odour-free, detergent-free jug will do fine. If your bottle has been stored on its side, it's worth standing it up for a day or two to allow the gunk to settle at the bottom of the bottle. The aim is to get as much clear wine as possible off the sediment, in one continuous, gentle tip of the bottle.
In order to see the sediment, you'll need a light source underneath the bottle. It's fun and romantic with the traditional candle, but a torch will do the job. If your hand has been steady, you should end up with no more than half a glass of dregs. Don't throw them away - add them to a meat sauce or gravy to enrich the flavour. Mature, elderly wines often fade quickly after decanting. Old vintages are best decanted between courses, and poured straightaway.
Tasting wine
The clue to tasting wine is to think as you drink. Do you often just let it slide down without a moment's thought? Most people do. Katherine and I suffer from being at the other extreme. We spend so much of our time thinking about the flavour of what we put inside our mouths that we do it automatically, even if it's only a glass of water or a cup of tea. You look a bit of a prat solemnly taking a mouthful of water and swooshing it round your mouth. We know. We've been there. Anyway, back to the wine-tasting Why bother? Well, you get more pleasure out of tasting wine if you think about it.
You sometimes see people holding up a glass of wine to the light, and examining it closely. You look at wine to see the colour.
Ah, isn't that pretty! No, seriously, to work out if you reckon the wine is in the condition it should be. Young white wine should be light, hardly coloured at all, unless it has spent time in oak barrels, when it might be beginning to get a golden tint. If a white is young, and looks the colour of old gold, it's probably in bad shape. Likewise, if a red is young, it should have a pinkish, even purplish tinge to it. If it is beginning to show a change towards yellow or brown, take it or send it back (make sure you do this against a white, not a yellow, light!).
Then, the sniff. Why? This is your early warning system. There exist, we're afraid to say, wines that are so horrible that you would not want to put them inside your body. To avoid this kind of unpleasantness, grasp your glass firmly by the stem and swirl the wine round in it. But before you do, HANG ON! We didn't tell you the glass should on no account be more than one-third full. Particularly if it's red wine and you're wearing light-coloured clothes. Phew! Why are you swirling it? To help the molecules of the aromatic compounds break free from the wine and rise to greet your waiting nostrils, because the nose is where most of the work of tasting, as well as smelling, is done. Even though you think your tongue perceives all the flavours when you have the wine in your mouth, it's actually the nose, or, rather, the retro-nasal receptors.
The tongue is much less sophisticated than the nose. It can only do four things, or possibly five. Sweetness, saltiness, sharpness and bitterness. And the fifth one is called umami, discovered by the Japanese a few years ago. Savouriness, as in Marmite, or dried mushrooms, or cheese, or all sorts of things. Everything else happens up in the retro-nasal cavity. That's why it's difficult to tell the difference between orange juice and pineapple juice when you've got a cold. Your tongue can still sense the sweetness and the sharpness of the juices, but your nose is too bunged up to sort out the rest. If you don't believe us, try it. Put a large clothes peg over your nose and try. Should give the family a laugh, if nothing else.
At last, it's time to put the wine in your mouth. No! Don't swallow it! You're supposed to be thinking about it! Now comes a difficult bit. Holding the wine in your mouth, draw air through it. Why are we making this noise like a vacuum cleaner with an upset stomach? To help those old retro-nasal receptors. Drawing air through the wine helps to volatilise some of the aromatic compounds, and send then whizzing up into the retro-nasal cavity. Keep going - don't swallow it yet. Think about the flavours.
What are you looking for? Well, it depends on the wine, but there should be some fruitiness in most wines.
What kind of fruit? Is it citrus (lemon, grapefruit, orange etc), or red fruits (raspberry, strawberry, redcurrant, etc) or black fruits (blackcurrant, blackberry, damson etc)?
If it's white wine, you ought to think about the level of acidity, the sweetness, or whether it has been fermented or aged in oak barrels. That would give it a creamy richness, and toasty, vanilla flavours. Has it been through malolactic fermen-tation (see Jargon Buster)? This would give butterscotchy, buttery flavours.
Red wines have fruit, they sometimes have oak, but the big difference is tannin (see Jargon Buster). This is that mouth-shrinking feeling. You also get it in stewed tea. If this is in balance with the rest of the wine, it can as a pleasant firmness, as well as helping a red wine age gracefully. But there has to be enough fruit to balance the tannic structure. If not, the wine may still be tough as old boots when the fruit's worn out.
Balance is the most important factor. And, in an expensive wine, there should be lots of different flavours to find and appreciate. That's 'complexity'. And 'length' is the time you can still taste it after you've spat it out. Or swallowed it.
