Oeno Files

While the KP Spouse and I were enjoying the German Riesling we had with our roast pork and sauerkraut on New Year's, we were lamenting the lack of tasing notes that we take when we drink wine; in short, we have only a sketchy history of the many interesting wines we've tasted over the years. So we have been thinking about capturing our tasting notes in some way, and naturally we thought of doing so via a blog.

Then we got to thinking about this whole "aggregation of knowledge" thing, and we realized that if we could capture the tasting notes of our friends who like wine, we'd have quite a useful repository of knowledge, for ourselves and for others.

Thus Oeno Files. We have asked a few of our friends and family to join us in using this site as a repository of useful knowledge about our wine experiences.

A few things: we will organize our notes by varietal and by region; the regions are pretty general, and we will use the tags feature to include more specific detail (e.g., St. Joseph in a tag, Rhone as the category, although the region could also be a tag, because that enables Technorati and other engines to search on the region tags too).

We haven't picked a sole metric for evaluation. I am partial to taking the Wine Spectator or Wine Advocate number ratings and dividing that number by the price (i.e., quality per dollar). In fact, that's what Neil Monnens and the good folks at QPR Wines do in their publication. But if we are coming up with our own evaluations, I'm not sure that we all want to use a number rating. So another option is letter grading. I'll probably use both in my first few posts, and we can see how that evolves over time as we all use it.

OK, let's drink!

To claim ownership of Oeno Files:

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We've not been drinking wine since Sunday, when the KP Spouse came down with a stomach bug. It only lasted about 24 hours, but it's meant simple meals (even cheese pizza!) and no alcohol.

Hopefully we'll be back in the swing of things soon. In the meantime, what have the rest of you been drinking?

Check out this Wine Enthusiast interview with Kermit Lynch, one of my wine heroes. Don't over-intellectualize the wine, is the punch line. Love him, love him.

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]

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.

Once in a while we pick up a few bottles of cheap red and white wine just so we are not tempted to open something way too good for what we're eating. Often it turns out fine, but on occasion not so much. While my wife informally practices a "don't cook with any wine you wouldn't drink" rule, usually the failed experiments become cooking wine.

Enter the Little Penguin. You may have seen this brand in your grocery store, looking "cheap and cheerful." Don't be fooled. We opened a bottle of Little Penguin red, poured two glasses and took about one sip each. We couldn't do more.

In fact, though the Little Penguin sat on the counter near the stove for a couple of weeks, we couldn't quite get passed the memory and actually pour that wine into something we were going to eat. Eventually it went the way of all penguins, back to the sea. (Well, technically, to the waste water treatment plant, but eventually eventually I'm sure it made it all the way downstream.)

Maybe we should have been a little more forgiving, because cooking is a great leveller of wines. At least according to an entertaining story in the New York Times by Julia Moskin: It boils down to this: cheap wine works fine.

Well, cheap wine works fine with some limits according to Moskin, so read the story and see how low you can go.

In Friday's Wall Street Journal, wine writers Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher wrote about ordering wine in restaurants that you can't buy in a shop (subscription required). In particular, they highlighted one of our favorite wines, Navarro Gewurztraminer:

Consider Navarro Vineyards Gewürztraminer. We love the spicy, unique taste of Gewürz, and Navarro routinely makes one of America's best. We celebrated our daughter Media's 18th birthday at New York's Le Cirque restaurant last month. The wine list was huge and filled with some reasonably priced wines and a lot of famous wines that cost thousands of dollars. Amid all of these, Dottie spied Navarro's 2004 Gewürz for $55, the best buy on the list. We ordered it to go with the seafood-heavy tasting menu Media selected, and it was excellent -- dry, spicy and filled with personality. We felt so lucky to have it because we knew that we'd rarely see it in a store.

Deborah Cahn, who owns Navarro with her husband, Ted Bennett, says the winery makes about 1,900 cases of the Gewürz. Most is sold directly from the winery to consumers, and about 500 cases go to restaurants. The winery doesn't sell to retailers (except a tiny amount to a few old friends). Why? "I think all of our wines show better with food. They are meant to have with a meal. So for us, selling to restaurants that we like to eat in is almost a form of advertising, because it introduces the wine to people who otherwise wouldn't have a chance to come to the Anderson Valley to try our wines." By the way, the Gewürz sells for $18 at the winery, which means the markup at Le Cirque was about three times retail. But we're not complaining. It's sure cheaper than a plane ticket to California.

We've been keeping notes on our tastings, but haven't had the time to enter them here; we're about a dozen bottles behind!

Here's a combination that will put the kibosh on the wine blogging: write a book, edit a book, take on two new jobs, and tear the back off of your house!

We've been drinking wine, but lots of unremarkable cheap-and-cheerful reliable bottles that we don't need to memorialize here. Plus the kitchen in our rental apartment doesn't inspire a lot of cooking, so we don't have that impetus.

We have been toying with some Priorats, but we don't really have a handle on them yet. They're funky, which is surprising, since they're 100% granache, so it's not blending ... anyway, more on that later.

Happily, we are getting a case of Navarro Vineyards wine for Christmas from my wonderful sister-in-law and brother-in-law, and our quarterly wine club shipments from Preston Vineyards continue. So we'll have things to write about.

And we move back in late February, so there will be lots of cooking and wine drinking in the new kitchen!