Here in the FKC Wine Corner we’re frequently asked for recommendations and we do our best to respond to them individually and thoughtfully. Often, your queries are routine; sometimes not so much. It’s one thing to suggest a red wine around $20 to serve with your roast chicken at home, quite another to propose something to bring to a dinner party where the menu is exotic and the guest list replete with wine enthusiasts of the know-it-all-seen it-all variety.
In both these cases — and pretty much every case in-between — the problem we’re trying to solve with you is an immediate, tactical one. It’s much less often that we get to mull over issues that might be better termed strategic: the bigger picture that helps keep the little picture in focus.
So here we are, in our cheeky TWWC way, about to offer some unsolicited, but we think signally useful recommendations of this higher order. After which, we pledge to go right back to those roast chicken questions, which, we hear, are already piling up.
May we recommend you shed your fixation on varietals? The time is long gone (if such a time there ever was) when the question “what kind of wine is this?” could be adequately addressed by naming the grape varieties in play. Yes, varietal identity is a factor, and obscure, under-appreciated varietals offer an especially rewarding field of exploration. But where the wine in question was made, by whom and in what style will almost always have more bearing on what makes the wine in your glass distinctive than any varietal component.
May we recommend you value values over flavors? Values have to do with the structural aspects of wine such as body, texture, acidity and alcohol and how these elements combine and interact to produce an overall effect we like to call temperament. It’s fun to note the familiar flavors we detect in wine, but these are the least significant things to give your attention to, because they offer little insight into the more important matters of fundamental character and quality.
May we recommend you walk a mile in your wine’s moccasins? Every honest wine, at whatever price, has a life to lead that can’t be experienced or appreciated without being given time to thoroughly unspool. Sometimes we just want to upend our glass and drain the bottle — and we have no objection to that. But you should know that the wine you find unremarkable tonight may bud and burst into bloom open a day or two or three. Ugly duckling, we’re looking at you.
May we recommend you read a wine book? In your correspondent’s humble but perhaps not entirely dismissible opinion, the single best introduction to wine in English remains importer Kermit Lynch’s 1988 Adventures on the Wine Route. This almost magically transformative little memoir is both delightfully entertaining and subversively pedagogical. Absorbing it provides a kind of immunization against the pretense and nonsense that continues to bedevil our wine world. Kermit, we’re all in your debt.
Now, about those roast chickens . . .