The best wine I ever tasted

Nearly every single time I tell anyone that I work in wine they in veritably ask "what's a good wine?"  Which to me is like asking "what's a good song?"  There is no perfect answer because it just depends on so many variables.  Time, place, what's for dinner and the like.

I've also been asked "what is the best wine you ever had?"  This one is harder for different reasons.  For starters, what does "best" really mean?

It certainly wasn't the caterer supplied mags of Chilean plonk we served at our wedding, or the perfectly acceptable cava we toasted with that was rendered almost undrinkable by serving it in early 1960's vintage Italian silver coupes.   The toast looked great for the photos, but the wine tasted of metal and acid.  Though my wife's grandmother really liked it and got fairly well lit on the stuff.

Then I think of memorable opportunities to taste rare bottles.  That 1969 Terlaner Classico, a Pinot blanc, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc blend that when I tasted it at the ripe age of 30 was still alive and vibrant, and is the only wine from my birth year I've ever had.  The 1937 Kopke Colheita that was shared by a restaurant buyer with every sales rep who came in that fine Thursday afternoon.  The 1976 Clos des Mouches that had sadly lost all its fruit to time or poor storage, yet we drank every drop that tasted like walking through a forest on a rainy afternoon.  The 1995 Gundlach Bundschu Vintage Reserve Cabernet that I drank entirely by myself one night while my wife was gone on a trip and which I liked so much I sent a long complimentary email to Jeff Bundschu to say how good it was.

But then what about wines of great pedigree?  The few vintages of a couple of the first growth Bordeaux that I had been lucky to taste.  The Chateau de Sales, a Pomerol wine from a small vineyard that is right across the street from Chateau Petrus.  The 100-point Chateau Rieussec Sauternes or the 100-year-old Pedro Ximenez Sherry.  The champagne we drank on New Year's Eve 1999 or that bottle of 1996 Bruno Rocca Rabajá Barbaresco that is hiding in my basement, though I tasted it with Bruno in his cellar.  Or any of the super Tuscan wines that were open at the party to celebrate the 10th year of Poggio al Tesoro.

For so long I tell people that one of the things that keeps you in the wine business for so many years, in addition to the people and the places and food, is that you get to taste and try so many things.  It's not a stretch to say that I've tasted tens of thousands of wines.  So, what was the "best"?

The more I think about it the more I realize there is not an answer, any more that you can say there is a "best" song.  You'll always get a disagreement.  ("Free bird is the best song ever, man!"  "Overplayed junk!")

Here's my top three.  I eliminated the white from Cinque Terre, though it was a beautiful evening overlooking the Ligurian Sea with my wife, on a rocky terrace eating the fresh fish from the waters below.  The thing is, the wines of Cinque Terre aren't really that interesting no matter how much you remember they are, or think they were.  It was really all about the place.

Number three was a bottle of the Rosso from Pietratorcia on the Island of Ischia, off the coast of Napoli.  I couldn't tell you what is was made of, and I'm not going to bother to look it up. And I don't remember the vintage.  I remember sitting on a patio that was made from the volcanic "Tufo" stones, eating bruschetta made with the most insanely ripe and delicious tomatoes in the history of the earth, with unbelievably fresh mozzarella di buffalo.  I remember the wine tasted like the island felt.  I remember I actually asked the owner of the winery how long his family had lived on Ischia and he looked at me like I was insane.  They had "always" been there.  What an American question.  It was the first time that the idea of wine reflecting the place finally made sense to me.  Wine is how you capture somewhere and transport it to another place.

Number two was the copious glasses of Manzanilla from Antonio Barbadillo that we drank in a seaside cantina.  We ate mounds of enormous shrimp and a monkfish dish with saffron that was ethereal.  The wine, the place, the food all came together as one. You could almost taste the sea in the wine, like standing on a windy beach on a sunny day.  It was the end of trip through Portugal and Spain, and was the beginning of my love of both countries' wine, food and people.

Before my wife and I started a family, she asked that we do a trip to Italy since she wouldn't be traveling much in the likely future.  I had just been on a trip that included the Ischia stop, and sadly she has not been back since we did go.  We took three weeks and saw Verona, Venice, Sienna, Florence, the aforementioned Cinque Terre, then off to Nice, St. Remy-de-Provence, trips to Avignon and Aix, before ending in Paris during the unbelievable heat wave of 2001.  We ate a lot of great food, and drank a lot of nice wines.  We visited a couple of wineries, had dinner in Montalcino, and ate way too much cheese.  We took turns writing in a journal at the end of each day, to keep track of what we did and saw.  To remind ourselves of what we liked (lemon Gelato!) and didn't (our hotel in Venice).  I guess it was a blog but those were still new.  Fun fact, in 1999 there were 23 blogs.  In 2006 there were 50 million.

So naturally you'd think my all-time wine would be an Amarone, Brunello, Super Tuscan, or even a Chateauneuf from that trip.  But the wine that pops into my mind every time I'm asked was not any of those.  We had finished up a tasting of wines at San Felice, as we were staying in their guest house in the Poggio Rosso vineyard.  We asked the young woman who showed us around where we should go for dinner.  She said we should go into the nearby village and get some groceries and make a simple pasta in the kitchen of our villa.  Then she gave us the opened bottles that we had just tasted to carry back down the long dirt drive to the house.  I made some simple pasta with fresh veg and some pecorino, and added in a splash of their Chianti Classico Riserva.  Cooking with nice wine has its advantages.

The wine that I consider the best was the simple Tuscan Chardonnay that we drank out on the patio as the sun was setting over the hills of Tuscany.  I don't remember the vintage and I don't even really remember if it had oak or not.  I remember sharing that bottle with my wife and that warm May evening, the cicadas were so loud it was almost deafening, the air was thick with the smells of the vineyards and the warm red soils.  The wine was cold, and perfect for a perfect moment.  And it was all ours.  Just like the song we danced to for our first dance at our wedding.

(“Somebody” by Depeche Mode, if you must know.)

Bordeaux made me like espresso

Somehow, I made it through college without ever drinking coffee.  I do remember actually dissolving a "no-doze" in a can of "jolt" one night while writing a paper at the very last minute.  It did three things.  It killed all the fizz; made it taste minty and altogether gross, and made me shaky and ill for more than just the next day.  The thin watery coffee that was cheap and widely available for underfunded university students held the same allure as the bitter and watery beer that was all that could be afforded.  A choice of last resort and desperation.  Somehow, I avoided the black water, yet drank more than my share of the cheap beer.My parents drank coffee after dinner, which seemed counter intuitive to me.  I couldn't imagine getting some caffeine in me right before I was supposed to go to bed.  But that was when I would routinely stay up all night anyways without any help needed.  But in all the times I'd had a lunch or dinner and coffee was offered, I always passed.Until I went to Bordeaux.  Or more specifically to Chateau Lafite.

I was a guest of the importer for a quick trip around France to wineries in Bordeaux, Languedoc-Roussillon, possibly Champagne, and Alsace.  There was no way I wouldn't take advantage of a great opportunity.  To start the trip, we were almost bumped to another flight due to mechanical issues, but that was followed up by an upgrade to first class to Atlanta.  The overnight to Paris was epic.  As in tediously long and dark and everyone fell asleep.  Except me.  I'm 6'6" and I don't really fit in a normal airplane seat.  And when the person in front of me leaned back their chair, I could no longer see the tv screen I had been watching.  So, I watched a few other passengers’ screens that were left on, though without sound since my screen wasn't in sync with theirs.  Travel is very glamorous.

By the time my quick turnaround in Paris had gotten me to Bordeaux I hadn't slept in 48 hours. But we had an appointment at Chateau Lafite and I didn't travel that far and that long to miss that.

In the parking lot of the Chateau were a half dozen or so vintage sports cars.  I don't remember what they were, I just remember someone told us that they were very rare and very expensive.  And the group of car enthusiasts was visiting the Chateau that day.  I felt a little over my head.

We walked through the vineyards; you could see the variations in the soil throughout.  The winery director told us that certain types of soil in certain areas almost always produced wine that went into the 'first wine' of the estate, others usually to the 'second wine'.  These were vines that were just a few meters from each other, yet different enough to produce profoundly different wines.

We then made it into the barrel rooms.  The wines sit for the first year in a simple room.  Stone walls, dimly lit, with a library of old bottles locked up behind an iron gate in a room off to one side.  It smelled of earth, and wine, and something hard to describe.  One of my traveling companions, who had visited before, remarked that the smell was so distinctive to this place, and was exactly as they had remembered.  The second year the barrels are moved up into what can simple be called the Cathedral of Wine.  A white stone room, circular with pillars supporting the ceiling.  The floors were stone and the smell was different, but distinctive.  It was like going to church.

We tasted the current, but unreleased, vintage in a small and clinical looking room with spit sinks built into the table.  The wines were fantastic but so hard to really appreciate in that setting.  A bit like hearing a symphony on cassette. It didn't give them the proper perspective and space.  Lunch, however, was a different thing.

The Baron, as Baron Eric de Rothschild is called, was not able to join us.  But the managing director of the winery did, and after meeting in the drawing room of the chateau, we were seated at a round table in the slightly less formal family dining room.  A small opening in the wall in the corner of the room which led to the kitchen would open, and from there the staff would retrieve our lunch to serve us.  Being in Bordeaux we had steak, perfect with the Cabernet dominate wines of the estate.  We drank more than couple of vintages, including a few that were just entering their prime after a couple of decades.  And with dessert we had the Sauternes produced at Chateau Rieussec, which is part of the Lafite empire.

After lunch we sat in the living room and were offered a taste of the Chateau's own Armagnac and Cognac.  It would be rude to refuse, and for good measure we made sure we tried them both at least once if not twice.  I think I liked the Armagnac best, but by then it was hard to tell.  This is where the espresso comes in.

We were scheduled to head into the city of Bordeaux and have a tasting to learn about the other wines of the Lafite portfolio.  Not, as I had hoped, to take a many hour-long nap and sleep off the meat and wine and brandy.  Nothing could save me.

Perhaps a little espresso?  I hesitated only a second, and while I don't remember if I even liked the coffee, I had two.  Anything for survival.  We made it through the day and even recovered enough to want a beer later that afternoon.  I had just embarked down the path of espresso.  I’ve found that I really enjoy good espresso, no doubt amplified from later working with Italians for many years.  When the day is perfect for espresso, and it seems like party to mostly cloudy and not raining seems to bring out the subtle fruitiness of well roasted, not burnt, espresso, I find it to be as nuanced and delicious as a great wine.

And I find I like to have it most mornings to kick start the day.  It’s too bad I can't have first growth Bordeaux with lunch every day too.

Iberia

The sun was just starting to shine through the windows facing east across the Tarmac.  It was peaceful and empty, a bit like a dream that was exacerbated by the complete lack of sleep on the overnight flight from Seattle to Lisbon.  I've heard that Lisbon is a beautiful city, but sadly all we saw was the airport.  Modern, clean and very European.  And completely empty.  Then we flew a short commuter flight to historic Oporto to begin our quick tour of some key wines of Iberia.

Oporto is old, dirty and still very European.  It made me wonder if they had heard of pressure washers, because the city really needed a good going over.  Although it might take a century to finish and it would render the city completely unrecognizable.  Across the Douro river from the city sit the large warehouses of Vila Nova de Gaia, the home to the port shippers and their untold bottles, barrels and years of one of the longest-lived wines.  Large neon signs with familiar names lit up the sky; Sandeman, Taylor, Croft, Noval.

In the morning we went to visit Porto Barros.  We walked past large barrels filled with old Colheitas going back to at least 1900, but sadly there was no officer to taste that rare nectar.  Then up to a sun dappled room with large table to taste all the current bottlings of white port, tawnies, rubies, vintage dated, Late Bottled Vintage, a few more recent vintage Colheitas, and 10, 20 and 40-year tawny offerings.  Barros is a Portuguese owned company, and unlike the British or internationally owned port houses that tend to focus on vintage and other ruby ports, the tawny wines and their finest expressions, single vintage dated Colheitas that are typically bottled after 30 years or more, are their favorite wines.  But to be fair, Port for breakfast is a new experience for most, though it helped calm our nerves for the coming drive.  We loaded into the van for the long and winding trip on the road up the Douro river valley to where the grapes that become these legendary wines grow.

The steep hillsides of the Douro River Valley are covered with vineyards on small farms, or Quintas.  The vines are terraced with steps a meter or so up from the last, and often so narrow that no tractor of any kind could be used.  For those slim shelves of earth, the grapes are harvested by hand and put in baskets, then carried to the end of the row to be picked up for transport to the small stone building used for the crush.  Dozens of different grapes grow at different altitudes, with five main grapes used in most ports and often now in amazing table wines as well.  At most Quintas there are large stone lagares where the grapes are crushed, often by foot, or in some cases with a machine that mimics the foot action and used silicone feet that are molded from real feet.  From there the juice is put in tanks or barrels and then the winemaking begins.  But we were there in February, so the vineyards were barren and windswept, with cold dusty breezes swirling up the terraces in the mid-day sun.

The roads along the edge of the valley are nearly as narrow as the vineyard terraces, and guard rails are not as common in the Douro as we would have liked, but our next destination was to continue up the Douro into Spain where the river originates and changes to be called the Duero, to the small town of Toro.  There are not many towns around, but the large statue of a bull confirmed we were in the right place.

"The Rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain" is a well-known song from My Fair Lady, but it turns out to be not true of the region around Toro.  (The Spanish phrase is “La lluvia en Sevilla es una maravilla” (The rain in Seville is a miracle). In the summer, the oppressive heat and winds turn out intense wines from low bush trained vines.  In the past, the harvest was set to be a specific date, and had nothing to do with the ripeness of the grapes.  Farmers would watch their grapes usually withering in the sun and produce high alcohol raisined wines from the local co-op.  Or if a storm came right before harvest they would end up with plumped up, watered down lower alcohol very ordinary vino de tabla.  But then the Farina Family led the charge to change the practice and start harvesting when the grapes were ready, and to make wines with balance and finesse.  They call the grape Tinto de Toro, elsewhere in Spain known as Tempranillo, and while still robust and full bodied, the wines reflect the soils where they live.

Lunch at the winery was a bounty of local foods, with a beautiful stewed chicken dish with the feet sticking out to remind you that this was a homemade meal.  Knowing that in Spain dinner starts very late, we felt comfort that we could eat heartily and rest for a good while before we'd be asked to eat again.  And when we entered the restaurant in the nearby town of Zamora at eleven that night, we were still the first people to be seated.  By midnight the restaurant was just starting to fill up and was completely packed as we headed home to sleep.

I wanted to be able to spend time in Madrid to see the sights, especially the famous Museo de Jamón, but when you are on a wine trip you rarely get to spend time in cities because that is where the wineries aren't.  We got to see the airport and fly to Barcelona.  But there it was our luck to get to actually have some free time.

We had half a day to spend in the city as we'd be going to visit the Cava producer nearby in the morning.  We took the metro just as we would in any cosmopolitan city in Europe, and my limited Southern California learned Spanish was challenged by the Castilian Spanish pronunciations, and completely baffled by my first hearing Catalan.   Catalan evolved directly from Latin, and sort of sounds like a cross between French and Spanish, though it is not.  Thankfully riding the metro in a city with people from all over the world you can figure your way around by just following the maps and guides.  We had time to visit the famous La Sagrada Familia cathedral started by Antoni Gaudi, which is still under construction a hundred and thirty plus years after they broke ground. Many other Gaudi designed buildings dot the city nearby.  We ate dinner at a restaurant right on the water in the port, the first time I'd had little baby octopus (in my salad), among the many things that started my palate down a much more adventurous path in life.

The Cava producers in the surrounding Penedés region began producing sparkling wine with the same methods as their French counterparts in Champagne around 1860, but instead of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, they mostly use the local grapes Macabeu, Perellada and Xarel-lo.  The Sumarroca Family produces both Cava and still wines, and after a tour and tasting we sat down at their large family dining table for a lunch of local foods, Jamón, house cured olives, roasted peppers, fresh cheese and other delights.  Thankfully after all the food, all that was required of us was to get to the airport and fly south to Andalusia, the home to the wines now called Sherry.

Sherry is produced in an area that is in the triangle created by the towns of Jerez (from where we get the name "sherry"), Sanlucar de Barrameda, and El Puerto de Santa Maria.  At the white washed and red tiled roofed guest house of Antonio Barbadillo we sat out on the veranda eating impossible piles of meltingly sweet and succulent Jamón Ibérico, bright and fresh olives, fragrant cheeses, and washed it down bottle of nicely chilled Palomino.  Palomino is the grape used to make most Sherry wines.  Not often seen outside of Spain due to its short aging potential, but in its natural state it is a light and refreshingly simple white wine.  Chilled and perfect for an afternoon on a sun filled, dry and windswept hill overlooking the just starting to awaken for the spring vineyards.

We later toured the Barbadillo Bodega in the town of Sanlucar de Barrameda, the only town where certain bodegas with exposure to the salty air from the sea can produce the fresh, salty,  and delicate sherry called Manzanilla.  If another building is built between the sea and the bodega, the yeast called Flor that develops on the aging wine will not have the briny quality to become a Manzanilla, and will instead remain a delicious but less exciting Fino.  An immense warehouse with high vaulted ceilings filled with thousands of barrels stacked high and far as we could see, with louvered windows to let in the breezes. Sherry is aged though a system called the Solera, where some wine to be bottled is taken out of the oldest barrel in the Solera, then some younger wine is taken out and put in the older barrel, and again at least a few more times from younger barrel to older barrel each time leaving some wine behind until you get to the youngest barrel where new wine is added to some of the previous.  In essence, you get bits the oldest wine in every bottle, and many Soleras have been going for generations for the more full-bodied wines.

Most types of Sherry come about because of the Flor that grows on the top of the wine, as the barrels are not completely full.  It is like a thick white blanket of yeast that changes the wines over time.  And since the wines are fortified and oxidized by time, they are nearly immortal, the exceptions being the light Manzanilla and Fino wines that should be consumed within a week or so.

By contrast, the sticky and often sweet Pedro Ximenez Sherry, made from the grapes of the same name that are allowed to dry in the sun to concentrate the sugars and flavors, will last long after it is opened, and we had the chance to taste a 100-year-old example of it.  A bit like molasses, or perhaps old motor oil, it was thick and viscous and really delicious.  Especially when poured over a small bit of vanilla ice cream.  The very old Fino we tasted was a bit more like drinking old brandy, but something that we were lucky to get to do.   We also ran through the gamut of all their wines, from young not quite developed examples of the Sherries as they age for their first few years, and Amontillado, Oloroso, Cream, and every style of Sherry in between.

Dinner was even later than we had been eating so far, as it seems the farther south you go in Spain the later everything starts.  We sat in a large banquet at a beachside bodega, with barrels of Manzanilla behind the bar from which they poured us numerous Copitas of the briny refreshing wine.  A huge platter with an immense pile of large, head on shrimps started our meal.  I'm not a big fan of shrimp, though if they tasted this fresh and clean and just caught from the ocean just across the beach every time I would be a huge fan.  It was very late, and the young son of our tour guide fell asleep on the bench behind us, but we pressed on with a memorable serving of Rapé, the local name for Monkfish, served with a beautiful saffron infused sauce.  That and more sherry made for a very late night.

Our trip was over but we took an extra day to spend in the city of Sevilla.  Just being tourists, touring the cathedral and the Real Alcazar, and for some reason having pizza for dinner.  I think we pushed our palates and bodies a bit too far with way too much Jamón, wine and travel. On our trip to the airport we noticed the streets were packed with people at six in the morning.  We assumed they were up early, but then realized since it was Sunday morning, they were really just keeping the party going from the Saturday night before.

While there is still so much more to explore in both Portugal, such as Vinho Verde, Alentejo, Lisboa and the south, and certainly major regions in Spain to see, Rioja, Ribera del Duero, Rias Biaxas, Priorat, and countless others, we managed in one week to visit wineries that produce the four major wine types, Porto, Still Wines, Sparkling Wines, and Sherry.  It was a great way to start to dip our toes into the wines of Iberia.  But only just a start.