Don't Be a Menace to Sonoma While Drinking Your Wine in the Parlour

Special thanks to Corrado from Corrado's Wine Diary for posting this little detour from the norm!

So Cheron asked if I’d rap a bit about how I taste and rate wine. Some background first. I would say I’ve been serious about wine for about 2 years, corrupted by this little site called wine.woot.com. My typical daily drinker is in the $12 - $18 range. The most expensive bottle I own is $120 (Retail value, Mondavi Cabernet Reserve). The most I’ve ever paid for a bottle of wine is around $60 (2006 Ty Caton Tytanium, Iron Horse Q Pinot Noir). My “diamond in the rough” wine is a 2005 Morgan Twelve Clones Pinot Noir, purchased for $18. Best Pinot Noir I’ve had under $30.

All that background wasn’t intended to be showy. My point was to give you, the reader, a paragraph glimpse at the wino writing this. Wine.Woot built my cellar and Vaynerchuck (tv.winelibrary.com) helped build my vocabulary. What follows is an unintentionally vino-erotic, blow-by-blow description of how I taste & rate wine.

I've pulled a bottle of Woot Cellars “Tøøthstejnn” (Sangiovese blend) from the cellar (55F; love winter in Vermont!). I paid about $10 for this bottle and purchased it about 2 months ago. Narcoleptics may want to simply skip to the next blog post or watch the dust collect on the nearest flat surface.

First thing I do is pull off the tin cap on the wine (I usually have to cut the plastic ones off) I've noticed that you can tell a serious winery (or at least one that wants to be serious) by whether or not they splurge on the tin caps. I've never had a better-than-average/good wine with a plastic cap. Sorry, off topic… (how's that dust lookin'?).

Next very important step is to remove the cork with my kick-ass double-action wine decorkerizer (note that this does not apply to screwtop wines). I check the cork for condition and see if there's anything cool printed on it. I sniff the cork and comment to self that I'm being retarded. Sniffing a cork is like Sex on Cinemax – all show & completely meaningless. I check the inside of the neck for schwag. If schwag = yes, strain into decanter, else proceed directly to glass selection.

My default tasting glass is a Waterford Mondavi Cabernet glass for meatier reds and a Spiegelau Vino Grande Burgundy glass for lighter bodied reds. I pour a bit of wine into the glass, swirl, sniff, ponder, swirl, sniff, taste. Assuming the wine is fine, I pour a proper amount (1/5 to 1/4 bottle) into the glass. Party on, Wayne!

Now the fun begins. I note the color, clarity, opacity, and saturation of the wine. This is where I try to come up with a new way of describing "red." Clarity is rarely an issue. I can’t recall the last commercially produced wine I had that had clarity issues. Opacity and saturation are different in my book (I haven't yet resorted to giving hue and gamma comments). For the Tøøthstejnn, I would say it’s wine.woot-website-theme red, bearing the typical moderate-bodied appearance of a Sangiovese. Colors out toward the edges getting more earth-toned. Color score: 5/5.

Now that I've dicked around the wine for 5-10 minutes, it's had a chance to open up a bit and ready for some serious schnoz action. A few vicious swirls and into the glass with the nose. I begin thinking of different ways to say, "smells like wine." Sometimes I get absolutely nailed with something obvious. Most of the time it's repeated trips back to the glass to try to tease out a few things. Fruit I'm decent with. Spices, not so much. I just realized that I tend to close off my right nostril with the glass and sniff with only my left; tried sniffing with my right nostril and didn't exactly get the same things (time to get out the pledge yet??). For the Tøøthstejnn, I'm kinda lost. I'm getting a lot of musty/woody aromas (socks?), some black raspberry, and wine (no, @&*%$... dammit, where’s that Thesaurus?). I'd probably give the TS a 10/15 on the nose. While it is fairly aromatic, it's got a pretty one-dimensional nose and doesn't do a lot to wow me.

After all this work, I'm now hella thirsty! To quote the great Paul Masson, I will drink no wine before its time… and IT’S TIME TO GUZZLE WINE! Since I've been writing for a few minutes, I take another sniff and decide that there's some kind of Tootsie-roll or molasses thing goin' on in the back ground. Beaming with pride at having pulled that out of my ass, I taste. I take a bit in, gently caress it around in my mouth, roll it around on my tongue (down people! I'm married!! Get back to dust patrol!), try to aerate a bit by sucking in air without drooling wine or aspirating it into my lungs (both of which occur at some point while learning to do this and are equally entertaining to those around you). Here I really just to figure out what's going on and what I want to pay attention to on subsequent glugs.

For the second taste I pay a lot more attention to what's going on. How does it feel? What's going on? Does it start off with a bang? What seems to happen between the instant you take a sip through the 10 seconds or so you move it around your mouth, to the instant you swallow, to what's left afterwards, how long it lasts, and if that finish continues to evolve new flavors after the wine has reached Mr. Tum-Tum.

For the Tøøthstejnn, I'd say it starts pretty big on flavor (dried cranberry), but doesn't really take off from there and coasts on through the mid-palate. Mr. Tannin and Mrs. Acidity wave their hands out the window to say, "Hey, we're here, but just passing through!" leaving a plume of earthy dried fruit that lingers on the palate quite pleasantly. Flavor I'd give 7/10 and Finish 8/10 or a total of 15/20 for Parker's scoring. I break them up because, well, I do. I typically like to describe each independently and always ended up scoring that way in my head so... voila. (Can you write "Pledge me!" on your coffee table yet?)

Now onto the BS portion of the show. Aging potential? I'm still way too much of a novice to be taken seriously with any predictions. I think I can tell when a wine will improve with age, but knowing when it should peak and when it will die, I'll leave that to the pros. I break Parker's "Aging/Potential" category down into "Potential" and "Overall" ratings. Potential is where I describe what I think the future holds for the wine. Low potential means peaked or past peak. High potential means the wine will be better in the future than it is today. Overall is where I steal 5 points for my subjective rating of the wine and put it all together.

For the Tøøthstejnn, I'd give it an aging potential of 3/5, which is my default for, "I don't know, but it's a new vintage, so it can probably drink well for a few years, but it's drinking pretty damn well now." As an overall, I'd give it a 4/5. I can see where some folks would review it as 'watery' but I've had similar northern Italian reds that have a similar mouthfeel. This is not what I would call a "lush" wine, but it has good flavor, very nice balance, and doesn't have the fakeness you're likely to get from $10 wine (like the bottle of wine my in-laws brought to Thanksgiving dinner this year).

My Corrado-rating puts the Tøøthstejnn at 87 points, my 'gut rating' would have been 88 (where I would expect it to come out if I took the time to rate it properly). A better nose and fuller flavors could have pushed it up towards 90, but it's a solid 87+ wine today.

...and now my glass is empty, it's time to go fill my 375ml swing-top bottle, put it in the fridge, and enjoy the second glass of wine for the night. Come back tomorrow night! We’re going to do… FRACTIONS!