One byproduct of having a wine column is that my colleagues hand me the wine list whenever we end up at a restaurant (although they know not to take my advice personally or professionally in any other context). A lot of people are spooked off wine by the fear that it takes a hyper-sensitive sense of taste and smell to appreciate the qualities of a fine bottle. I’m pretty sure this is not the case. Dogs have 25 times the olfactory receptors that humans do, and yet they’re no help when it comes to choosing a wine.
As far as I am concerned, the doorway to wine appreciation is not a superhuman palate or a nose that has been trained since birth to sniff the difference between a Chateau Lafitte and a Chateau Latour. All it takes is curiosity and a love of experimentation. And why not, when the research is so much fun? What is that bottle going to taste like? Have I tried that grape before? If I enjoyed this winery’s Cabernet Sauvignon, will I also enjoy their Merlot? Sometimes the best wine on the list is one that you have never heard of.
I’m trying my own kind of experiment this week. I am setting out to get to the bottom of what they mean by “a good year ”. I’ll do this by building a vertical of some French reds from Bordeaux. A vertical is simply a sampling of the same wine from the same winery in different years (also known as vintages). Like any proper experiment, it has its controls and variables. Since I’m controlling for the grape variety, the region and the winery, the variable in a vertical is the year. This will paint me a nice picture of what impact the different weather conditions for each year can actually have on a wine: the heat of the sun, the level of rain, the time of the harvest. Weather is one of the beautiful and ephemeral ingredients in wine, and this experiment will capture its elusive taste inside my glass.
In my next post, I want to share with you the wine I’ve selected for the vertical – three vintages from an unknown and undervalued gem called Chateau Puygeraud. This is not a wine to miss.
Matthew Sullivan is a lawyer with the Department of Justice in Toronto. He writes a weekly blog entry here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca.