Oeno Files

We have been members of the i Prestoni Wine Club at Preston Vineyards for almost seven years. Preston is in the very northern part of the Dry Creek Valley in California's Sonoma County; basically you drive as far north as you can on the west side of Dry Creek, then hang a right and drive another mile through rocky vineyards along the creekbed to get to the winery. Preston makes bread and olive oil in addition to wine, and they are an organic winery on their way to becoming fully biodynamic. They are fun and interesting folks who take wine seriously but don't take themselves seriously. We love their simple, elegant approach to winemaking, and their focus on Rhone and northern Italian varietals.

Tonight we had a 2004 Barbera. Barbera can be intense and dark, but in this case it's a somewhat lighter and smaller wine than the varietal is capable of. But it's a well-balanced wine, with a nice balance of fruit, acid, and ripe tannins. The fruit has a tartness to it, reminiscent of raspberries and currents and a bit of cherry. The acid means that the wine accompanies food well. It has an earthiness from the local terroir that is also quite nice.

The Barbera retails for $26 (although we pay a discounted price as wine club members); I'd give it a B+/88-89 points.

I found the juxtaposition of two recent articles (found via Arts & Letters Daily) on language quite interesting. Wine writer Colin Bower is frustrated with the use of simile and metaphor in wine writing: why can't we describe the experience of tasting a wine in a direct, factual way, without the use of metaphor?

Wine is always described as being like something else. This is appealingly post modern. If a chardonnay tastes a bit like a peach, what then does the peach taste like? A chardonnay? And if so, what does either taste like? If you must describe the Van Loveren 2001 limited edition Merlot as being “chocolately”, does it mean that chocolate tastes like the Van Loveren Merlot? And if we like the Merlot on account if its tasting like chocolate, why don’t we eat chocolate instead of drinking wine?

Consider this dilemma facing the wine writer, and then apply the evolutionary psychology and cognitive science prowess of Steven Pinker to the problem. Pinker has a new book on language called The Stuff of Thought coming out in the fall. One of his topics will be metaphor:

While swearing may garner public attention, perhaps the more surprising aspect of Pinker's work traces the pervasiveness of metaphor in language. Not flowery poetic allusions or rhetorical similes but concrete-to-abstract transitions so common in everyday speech and writing that we often don't even recognize them as metaphorical.

Consider this sentence:

"He attacked my position and I defended it." It uses the metaphor of argument as war. Or how about "this program isn't going anywhere," which uses the metaphor of progress as motion.

Says Pinker: "Look at almost any passage and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.

"Rather than occasionally reaching for a metaphor to communicate, to a very large extent communication is the use of metaphor," he says.

"It could be that 95 per cent of our speech is metaphorical, if you go back far enough in language."

Why? Here, the teacher part of researcher and author Steven Pinker comes to the fore, offering a boring explanation and an interesting explanation, both with an element of truth.

The boring explanation is that using metaphor is a quick-and-dirty way of expressing a new idea without the trouble of coining [notice the metaphor] and propagating a new word.

"But that presupposes that the mind itself works metaphorically, that we see the abstract commonality between argument and war, between progress and motion. And it presupposes that the mind, at some level, must reason very concretely in order that these metaphors be understood and become contagious.

"And that's the more interesting part of the story."

Thus, with respect to wine Bower concludes

I’ve had to give up on so-called facts. They don’t exist. It took wine writers to prove this to me. Nothing is ever knowable for what it is. Admit it, you can no more say what a taste is than you can say what a colour is or what a feeling is.

I think Mr. Bower is a little too postmodern for his own good, and should leaven in some Pinker: it is in the nature of human language to use metaphor as hooks into our shared knowledge when we are describing a personal, potentially unknown experience to someone else. Metaphor provides the flavor and culture referents that we use to communicate our personal wine experiences to each other. Facts don't carry enough information without the metaphor hooks for us to put them in context.

[cross-posted from Knowledge Problem]

Cheap and cheerful from Trader Joe's, went well with chicken, parsnips, and shallots braised in cider (yummy hard cider from Normandy!). Definitely not a complex or nuanced wine, but having the gewurz-y characteristics of apricot, floral notes, and a roundness in the mouth.

We had to drink a very young Petite Sirah tonight because a wine shipment got trapped and frozen in limbo by UPS's aversion to delivering it, despite many prior deliveries, without an "adult's" signature. This is the Preston Vineyards Petite Sirah Dry Creek Valley 2004 (est. $25, ). I was pleasantly suprised by how well balanced it was despite a 10-15 year apogee.

The wine had a deep, deep purple color with a black core that would make any Neon owner teal with envy. Immediately after opening, the nose was dominated by alcohol and tannins, and the tasting was likewise all acid, sugar and tannin. It's a big, young wine.

After about ten minutes of oxidation, the wine has changed a lot. The nose is now dominated by raisin and alcohol with just a hint of the previous tannin. I get a nice acid - sugar - tannin infrastructure overlayed with cherries near the fore and a very interesting combination of mint, menthol and pine saw dust (piney, but with burnt carmel overtones to tame it) near the rear. From the tasting notes, I know that the wine was stored in French oak for up to two years. I don't from where the pine slipped in, but I'm sure that the oak is the provenance of those happy carmel tones. I think that the sugar in the mouth middle still betrays how young the wine is. You can also see granular sugar sediment in the bottom of the glass. I bet this will congeal to a crusty sludge in a decade's time and reward your decision to decant the wine. It's already potent enough to constrict the throat when I try it out at the end of the glass. The sediment is sugar, tannin and something that's sort of napthalene like--interesting but not recommended.

The wine drank well with our dinner although the pairing, an Old World crossroads of ham, cabbage and cheddar-chive mashed potatoes revealed nothing new.

After dinner, the wine had added more delicate floral notes to the nose (gardenias or hibiscus?). I'm not great with floral scents, but we're talking flowers with sweeter perfumes) and a delicate, silica dominant terrior aftertaste. The appearance of that dirt is a testament to the quality of these California winemakers because they're not able to take advantage of a couple of millenia of humans mucking with the soil. The mint and pine flavors are still there. The acid/sugar combo in the fore, mid mouth is still a bit sharp.

We've got a second bottle that I expect big things from in about a decade.

We haven't been drinking much wine lately, so no new tasting notes. But I continue to listen to the Grape Radio podcast. What a font of information! They recently talked about the Hospice du Rhone annual event in California, which I'd like to discuss in more detail.

If you want to listen to a good and informative wine podcast, I recommend Grape Radio.