Miscellaneous Winetasting Notes: Unusual White Varietals @ The Corner Club

(...in my own innovative "I don't know winetasting words" vocabulary...)

Deakin Estate Moscato, Australia, 2007: like drinking granny-smith apple flavoured soda (possibly due to 5% alcohol content).

Old Broke Block Semillon, Australia, 2004: upon first swallow, produces a warm, goose-pimply feeling in the body.  ever so slightly burnt, if you stick your nose deep into the glass; reminiscent of dry grass hills, ranches in a hot climate.

Alamos Torrontes, Argentina, 2007: my favorite of the night.  offers about 1,000 flavours in each sip, ending with a warm, satisfied feeling.  feels like a burst of fruits, flowers, and bitter tastes in the mouth.

Piropo, Pinot Blanc, Argentina, 2007: very bitter taste, not especially smellable.

Bisceglia Falanghina Beneventano, Terre di Vulcano, Italy, 2007: very drinkable and pleasant, not too sweet, mild aftertaste.  better balanced than the next Italian (below).

Thesaurum Zibibo, Sicily, 2007: cheese and fruit smell, with a wisp of designer perfume just before the first sip.  rich, flowery taste, which is gorgeous but would be overpowering and ultimately tiring in any quantity--a show off wine, perhaps.

Vivanco Viura/Malvasia, Spain 2006/7: faintest whiff of smoke, followed by a slight sparkle at first taste.  extremely drinkable white rioja.

Oviacion Rueda Superior Verdejo, Spain, 2007: very strange taste!  overpowering chocolate smell, mixed with smoke, the result being an extremely chocolaty-and-woody flavour.  literally uncomfortable at first taste, but a pleasant aftertaste that coats the mouth in an almost meaty way.

Corbieres Blanc Vielles Vignes, France, 2006: delicious wood-fire smoke smell.  produces a slightly sharp feeling on the tongue, but has a sweetish, thickish taste.  very pleasant at first, but has a hollow aftertaste, as if it can't live up to itself.  an emptiness about it.

Chateau Berranger, Picpoul de Pinet, Languedoc, France, 2006: extremely drinkable; something the tiniest bit bitter at the end of a sip.  notable especially for its name, "picpoul," which the frenchman at our table translates literally as, "poke the chicken."

Taste of the Place

At a wine tasting last night (held upstairs at the Corner Club, formerly QI) I discovered that, in fact, I have a curious way of tasting wine indeed, as it actually very often doesn’t involve taste at all, in its conventional sense. Instead, I have a tendency to experience the wine. As a pathetically undereducated and only very informal fan of wine, I certainly enjoy identifying the curious tastes in a glass (a cursory glance through the notes I made last night reveal that I found one to be faintly meaty, another nutty, another simply “sharp”) but what I notice more fiercely is what the drink actually feels like (how it rolls over my tongue, the way it leaves the roof of my mouth), and in fact most of the notes I did make have more to do with tactile impressions than flavors.

I found myself turning to the boy (beside me in a suit, looking almost unfairly dapper), who is of course infinitely more knowledgeable than myself in matters of both viticulture and culinary adventures (I had to ask him what was on my plate at dinner later), and telling him all about what my mouth was experiencing. Trust a girl to always want to talk about her feelings, even when it’s taste on the table, right?

Finally I said: “Actually, most of the time I’m so distracted by what I feel that I don’t even notice most of the flavors,” to which he very kindly replied (I’m including this only because it may add a tiny bit to my credibility here): “That may be, but you do notice flavors I would never be able to point out, and after I’ve seen you write them down that I find myself agreeing completely.”

Sweet indeed; and to be fair to myself, I’m unlikely to enjoy a wine whose flavors I inherently object to. But the discussion came to its zenith after the Syrah was poured; I took a sip, wrinkled my nose and twisted my lips as if I’d just tasted something foul, and was in the process of noting on my paper that I most definitely did not like this one when I discovered that the taste in my mouth was suddenly quite pleasing, and the actual feeling even more so: a kind of warmth spreading through my belly, settling on my tongue and in my head. The aftertaste was soft and buttery and I felt like I might be glowing. I immediately went back for a second (and rather large) sip; and was again confronted with revulsion. “Ugh,” I said out loud, and then felt all warm and fuzzy again, and smacked my lips happily against the creamy taste.

“This one’s like a fickle lover,” I said at first.
The pinstripe suit beside me lowered his glass in surprise. “I’m sorry?” he said.
“Well, that's not the best description. But my first reaction was that I absolutely hated it. And about two seconds later I loved it. It’s got such a nice feeling—all sort of—warm and glowy—and—" I paused, wondering if what I was about to say was even allowed to be uttered out loud, or if someone would come escort me away from the very civilized table for being too crude—“it’s sort of like the feeling of being on the cusp of an orgasm? Only obviously not so intense.”

To the silence beside me I begged, “do you know what I mean?” and got at last a, “yes, I do, actually," and a thoughtful sipping.

“But it’s amazing how extreme the two reactions are," I went on, "and how quickly I switch from the first to the second. It’s almost like…umm...ok, these are probably not official wine-tasting terms, but it’s like someone who you think is a real bastard at first, only he turns out to be absolutely sweet in the end.”
He actually agreed (was it all the sipping?) and then “surely,” he said, “surely we know someone like that?”

(Which is how the Syrah, which they sell, rather wonderfully, by the glass at The Corner Club/QI, came to be called, between the two of us, after a friend of ours.)

Then Mike, the man who had brought all the wine, started speaking about terroir, which he translated roughly as “taste of the place”—an elusive term used, I gathered, to describe the way the components of place (soil, sun, wind, rock: whatever it is that makes one grapegrowing site utterly unlike another) are imparted into the taste of the resulting wine. Apparently new world wines (Australia, Chile, California, for example) have a tendency to lack true terroir, where it is far more apparent in old world wines.

My understanding of the term may be rudimentary at best, but it is interesting to think that there is a word for being able to taste the origins of a wine. Then I started wondering if perhaps the new world wines lack this because the new world itself (being new only in a euro-centric cultural sense, of course) lacks the same sense of roots and identity as the old?

I can say this because I am myself a product of the new world (in other words: I may still offend but you cannot call me crass or unfeeling; I have greatest respect for my roots and my homeland) and the one commonality of my new world, at least, is a sense of confused heritage. I’ve lived somewhere that was settled by the Chumash, taken over by the Spanish and owned by Mexico before it was appropriated again by a young country whose ideological values tended to align more with Western Europe than anywhere else; somewhere that has subsequently been settled by scores of people from all over the planet. You see an old building and it is maybe a hundred years old; what is that compared to the ruins of Stonehenge, the medieval cathedrals of Western Europe, the villages that have existed since written records began? The place itself is old (the soil, the bedrock, the mountains and oceans) but the people who were there first are there no longer, not in any great number—replaced by inhabitants whose roots stretch all the way around the globe, invisible golden strings that run lines back and forth, up and down the earth.

In such places, grapegrowing is a new endeavor (I remember the fields of the Santa Ynez Valley before they were turned into a thousand vineyards, and I am young indeed). No wonder then that you can’t taste the place as well; for the place is still developing itself. Earlier we had sat upstairs with a local restaurant owner talking about California cuisine, which is so wonderfully a product of cultural hybridity, of combination and amalgamation: where else do you get a food culture where fresh is paramount (and, thanks to climate, eminently possible) but where dishes themselves are things which have been influenced by Mexico and South America, the Far East, Europe, and classic American ideals of cuisine? If terroir is about tasting the environment in which a given varietal has been grown, then it would be impossible to taste in new world wines, wouldn't it, where the environment is as mutable as the sky?

for posterity's sake, I should really add that none of the photographs in this post were taken at the event described.

If You Give Me a Blanket, I Will Sleep Here All Night (Thoughts of Houses)

Since I’ve been in California (the first time I’ve been back since March of this year, when I spent a few early-spring days soaking up as much thin warmth as I could before returning to Boston) I’ve adopted a new ritual, one which I seem to have absolutely no control over. It is almost as if some sort of timepiece has crawled its way into my consciousness, embedded in thoughts and dreams—for the instant the digital clock on the oven hits 9 PM, my body drapes itself wearily upon the couch, my eyes hover half-open for a moment before shutting fast, and my breath becomes sleepy.

Last night I caught the household milling around me, wisps of conversation floating into half-attentive ears: “she’s asleep,” “what are we going to do about her?” “do you think she wants a blanket?” No, I thought, I do not want a blanket. If you give me a blanket, I will sleep here all night, and wake up with the buttons of my jeans pressed into my skin and my arm numb from all my weight crushing against it. I think what came out of my mouth, however, and in the form of a feeble mumble, was, “mmmm num num.”

In the morning, we awake drenched in hot sunlight. The two comforters my mother has kindly placed on the guest bed seem excessive and I throw them off dramatically, leaving my skin to soak up bright yellow lines of sunshine. It is rarely any later than 8:30, and we find we cannot find sleep again, so we get up. We have breakfast. We marvel at the morning.

It’s something to do with the light, of course. But also to do with the stillness outside. When nature itself seems to be sleeping, curled in on itself, the hills lying flat, black silhouettes on a navy sky, no artificial light but a small stream from the house spilling onto the silver line of driveway, it takes all my will to convince my body that it, despite all of the world’s cues, should stay bright and awake.

Part of me feels this is the right way to be: attuned to the rhythms of something greater than oneself; lying and rising to moonlight and sunlight. Another part of me craves the proximity of a city. I think of Oxford, where I’ll soon be, and how refreshing it is to be within walking distance of one’s friends, to have the glow of streetlights to guide you home late at night. I find I cannot reconcile these duel desires except to console myself that each belongs to me, in some way (or I belong to each, perhaps more accurately); that each draws me and repels me with equal force, and that no-one except myself would ever demand that I make a permanent choice about lifestyle when I am still so young. And so I free myself.

This afternoon, inspired by bright skies and dramatic clouds, we drove down Santa Rosa road for tea with the Cadwells. Their house from the outside blends into the countryside: a simple, one-story cottage, with a tiled roof and vines climbing up its sides. Inside it looks like something concocted in a Bohemian reverie: dark wood with cracks and character, bright teal walls in the kitchen, peach colored ones in the office, and yellow ones in the lounge, tablecloths with flowers and patterns that only someone high could come up with, but anyone can appreciate. There are papers strewn about and wildly imaginative artwork displayed above a creaky piano that has been out of tune since I first met the Cadwells, about twelve years ago. We sat at the dining table and drank tea from delicate cups with saucers and ate lots of things with sugar (mini macaroons, honey-filled biscuits, English Christmas pudding that Xander carried all the way from Britain), alongside English Stilton cheese with persimmons and walnuts.

Meanwhile, Clara’s baby, nine months old and dressed in a striped jumpsuit, crawled his way around the table and bounced happily from open arms to open arms, deigning to crack a smile only on rare occasions but mostly looking slightly disgusted with the gluttony of the adults. Once he tried to feed Olive a slice of persimmon; she took it willingly in her teeth before he suddenly yanked it back, as if he had decided at the last moment that in fact she would not do, this silly aunt of his: not worthy of persimmon slices, not worthy of his efforts. Olive, collapsed in giggles, ruffled his hair and he snuggled deeper into her lap. Outside, the light was trying to turn to dusk but only half its heart was in it: the brightness lingered, settling over the horizon, shooting down over the fields below.

We decided to make an attempt at wine-tasting further down the road. We arrived just as they were closing up the tasting room at Sanford, but very kindly, we were served anyway, and I learned to properly swish the wine round my glass (something I’d only partially mastered before), and that, according to Xander, you get the strongest taste by making silly sucking noises through your teeth (the air does something to the wine, allegedly). We watched the sun simper down towards the horizon, hesitating, shooting glorious rays our way, coyly hiding behind bare tree branches, teasing, taunting, until a fuzzy grey darkness finally covered us.
On the way back we looked at real estate ads in local papers: this one’s just $24 million, and look! A bargain at $15 million.

Earlier I had been caught up in thoughts of how I wanted a house like the Cadwells’—shabby but warm, with the smell of a wood fire in winter and the french windows opened wide in summer. Now all I thought was: how do people in the modern world afford to make a home of their own? Whilst I ponder that, I shall work out how to cover my $100+ electricity bill—the product of the first month of a Boston winter, and quite a change from my September bill, which was only $12 (I am reminded yet again to be thankful that I no longer live there). The bar graph on the bill looks like an error, but it isn’t—it’s just a map of the jump between seasons.

Now we are home, and it is 7:30, and one suspects that as the clock strikes 9 I will again become hopelessly sleepy.

Satellites & Surface Area

Between the two of us, we don’t have enough money for the bus. I find it funny that this could be: two people, smart, funny, good looking young people, each with a university degree (well, almost), neither of whom can manage to cough up one-pound-thirty. The relative poverty of youth, I think, for the millionth time this week. We are living partly on the high of our own happiness, partly on the kindnesses of those older than ourselves, and partly on the empathy of our friends, who suffer similarly at other times. They will always find a way to buy us a drink; and we, when we can, will always find a way to reciprocate. Of course, we are all also doing this partly on sheer luck.

A thrown-together dinner party: it was meant to be risotto, but we had so many potatoes that at the last minute, we figured it would be better to make gnocchi from scratch. We buy half a shoulder of lamb from the butcher, and some quail’s eggs on sale, and are delighted when our entire bag of vegetables costs under five pounds!

The guest list fluctuates—it is only finally settled an hour and a half before we are due to start cooking, and even then it is only because we wrangle a deal with A, who says he will only come to dinner if we have a drink with him first (a stressful day at work, he says). So we carry our groceries to the pub, and A buys us cider, first one pint, then another, but because I drink slower than the boys X worries he should head home and start cooking. He takes the food and goes off to catch a bus while A and I discuss the woes of writing our respective dissertations. And we are growing progressively more and more animated, exchanging ideas like tennis players volleying, and I have scarcely sipped my drink, when X comes toddling back. His tail is between his legs and his cheeks rosy from cold.
“No money for the bus," he remembers.

A hands him a few pounds for another pint: a wordless exchange. Are we drinking to forget? I forget to worry about this. X comes back outside with a cider and a folding map of Oxford pubs.
“Did you know,” he says, “that this style of folding was derived from origami? Now it’s how they fold satellites.”
He takes the two corners and pulls; the map unfolds, and the table is covered by a paper representation of a dozen wizened old drinking establishments. I point at the ones I’ve been to while X says,
“It’s about surface area. And it’s also far simpler for a robot to simply pull two corners, than to futz with folds.”
“All except three,” I say. “I’ve been to all the places here except three!”
X squeezes the accordion-like map shut again; then pulls, and unravels it again.
“How do they get satellites to twist and fold like that?” A wants to know.
“They’ve just got the right materials,” X says. Flexible, foldable, satellite materials.

We are now running very late. We send A to get wine and throw the lamb in the oven, and dance round the yellow-walled kitchen washing dishes and cracking quail’s eggs and dropping vegetable stalks on the floor and sniping at each other until I spill egg all over myself and run upstairs in a huff, and X follows me and folds me in his arms and whispers “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you,” but it is not till twenty minutes and seven outfits later that I am able to come back downstairs and feel at all composed.

We drink the fancy bottle of wine at dinner. For as long as I have known X, it has been there, on the counter, a yellowed French label.
“I’m saving it for a special occasion,” he always told me. “It’s really nice stuff.”
But tonight he leans over to me and says,
“I don’t know why I made it out to be as big as I did. It’s not that nice. It’s not so special. I was thinking, on the way over here, that we should drink it.”
I protest. I do not know what significance—if any—it may hold, but I feel this is a rash decision.

I protest, and he protests to my protests, until we’re tongue-tied and twisted. “Honestly,” he insists. We’ve moved through seven bottles already, so we throw caution to the wind, and open the fancy wine, the wine for a special occasion. I think: well, it is a special occasion, isn’t it? Of sorts?

In the morning every space in the kitchen is covered with the detritus of a lovely meal. There was scarcely room for six of us at the table; I find myself thinking, “we need more surface area”. I picture our lives being unfolded by robots, grasping at the corners, pulling gently, and what they would see this morning, I suppose, would be colored by nice wine and quail’s eggs, and a whole lot of a happiness that has nothing whatsoever to do with money in a bank.