the truth about seven wine misconceptions
Adventures Of A Black Belt Sommelier
Seven common wine myths debunked
Well, welcome back to adventures of a black belt symbol, eh? There are a lot of misconceptions or myths about wine. I could make a list with dozens, but I've picked out the seven that I think are the most commonly held that I want to quote, de bloke unquote, I'm just going to take a few minutes and tell you the truth about these seven myths about wine. So you'll know the reality. First myth is that the legs are an indication of a wine's quality. Legs refers to the way the wine sheets down the side of a glass after you swirl it. And the perception among a lot of people is that the broader the legs, the higher quality the wine, but causes the legs to be broader or wider is viscosity or surface tension. And that is a result of either high alcohol or sweet or sugar, residual sugar in the wine. It is nothing to do with quality. The sodium blog is not or recently, it's not going to have broad legs, but they could be incredible fabulous wines. A sotern or port is going to have very broad legs because of the sugar. That doesn't mean it's automatically high quality. It's just an indication of either high alcohol or residual sugar. So a dry low alcohol wine is not going to have broad legs. A sweet or high alcohol wine is going to have broad legs. It has nothing to do with quality. It may tell you a little bit about the style of the wine, either going to be if it has broad legs, it's either going to be high alcohol or sweet. It doesn't tell you anything about quality. That's myth number one. Myth number two is, champagne should be served in a flute. If you own flutes, I would strongly suggest that you either turn them into candlesticks or whatever you want to do with the blood visors and stop not using them for champagne, not real champagne. Maybe with a low quality sparkling wine, they're a good idea, I guess, but champagne does not taste as good in a flute as it does in a regular wine. I use a tulip shake glass for broad champagnes or just broad champagnes, and I use what's commonly referred to as a peanut oil glass for long-to-block champagnes and rosé champagnes because rosé champagnes are generally predominantly peanut oil, so why not use a peanut oil glass for the rosé? It's just because scientists say 70% of what you taste is what you smell in a flute. If the wine's in a flute, you can't smell it, so therefore you can't taste it. If it's in a broader glass, a bigger glass, like a tulip glass for the broad champagnes, then it just tastes a lot better. If it's in a peanut oil glass, or broad-to-block rosé champagnes, it just tastes a lot better because it enhances the aroma and bouquet of the wine. Trust me on this. Now, again, we're talking about quality wines. It's not an issue in the amount of time. The conception is that if in a regular wine glass, the wine will go flat, well, not in a good wine, and you shouldn't be drinking pad wine, so the wine's not going to go flat and the amount of time it takes you to drink it, it's just not, and if it's a decent wine, or even if it's not a decent wine, I don't think it goes flat at the amount of time it takes meat to drink. Well, that's not true. I wouldn't drink it if it's not a decent wine, but anyway, try this out. You'll find that champagnes served in a better, more purposeful wine glass tastes a lot better than they do when they're served in a flute. Screw caps are an indication of low quality. This is just not true. The Brakovic is at Fumo River, where the first premium winery to change the screw caps, and they did that, well, they told me in a Zoom wine tasting I had with them a couple of years ago that they did that because they experimented with course screw caps for years, and what they found was when they finished their wine was, of course, every bottle was different because every cork was different, and that was a nightmare because their wines are high quality and relatively expensive, it was a nightmare to them that the idea that their mates vineyards shard in a, every bottle was a different wine. They didn't want that. They wanted that every bottle to be the same one, and the screw cap is a more reliable way of doing that. Personally I believe most wine should be finished with a screw cap. I'm not saying that first-growth bordeaux and Grand Prix burgundes and really fine barollos and obronas and Napavelic air mates should be finished with the screw cap. Although plumpjack years ago started putting half their bottles in a case with screw caps in half of course, and people really wanted the screw cap, I think most, and that's an expensive wine, I think mostly because of the novelty of it, but I'm not saying that Grand Prix burgundes, first-growth bordeaux or extraordinary barollos or Napaveli, really fine Napavelic air mates should be finished with screw caps, but I think all rosays, well with the acceptance of Chatham, it's hard to maintain tall B.A., and Lopez, the radio, all rosays should be finished with screw caps. Almost every single, so we're going to walk in the world. Most Pinot Noir, not the best, but most Pinot Noir, most gamate, most Merlot, would be better served with a screw cap because the screw cap is a 100% reliable successful closure where with quark it's about 90% successful, so screw caps are not an indication of low quality. They are an indication that the winery cares that every bottle be sound and not flawed because of a bad quark. Some screw cap wines aren't very good, some screw cap wines are really good, and some screw cap wines are somewhere in between, but you can't generalize the quality of the wine because of screw cap or fork, if you have a really expensive wine as a winery and you can test every single quark for a quark paint, which last time I checked costs about $4 a quark, then quarks can be great because there is no TCA in your quarks, there's no quark paint in your wine, that's great, but that has to be a pretty expensive wine if you're spending $4 a quark to test for a TCA, so don't turn your nose up at screw cap wines. The next myth is white wine should be cold and red wine should be served at room temperature, this is not true, a lot of people tell me they don't like white wine because it's boring, generally I ask them what temperature they serve white wine at and they say they take it out of the refrigerator and pour themselves in the glass, and if you took your favorite red wine in the world and put it in the refrigerator for a couple hours, pour yourself a glass, you're not going to find it very enjoyable, again because 70% of what you taste is what you smell and something is that cold, it doesn't have any aroma, but it has very little flavor, most white wines should be served about 50 degrees, not 35 degrees like your refrigerator is, that's a big difference, sodium blanks, dry reaslings may be a little cooler, but white burgundy, chardonnays, blueberries, semiones, white bordos, 50 degrees is just about right, so the higher the acidity, the cooler, the wine ideally should be served, we're talking about 5 degrees, not 15 degrees, and it's not some kind of, you know, it's not, I think some kind of rule, it's just, the wine will taste better if you don't serve it, so cold, and then red wines at room temperature, it's not, that rule is written when it applied to castles in Europe that are cold and drafty, and red wines are not best served 70 degrees, which is what we keep most of our homes at, red wines ideally are best at about 60 degrees, and that's not room temperature in most people's homes, trust me on this, if you serve, that's why you have a wine cellar or some kind of storage situation that allows you to keep wine at 55 degrees, you take it, then you take it out of the, you pull, bring it up from your wine cellar, 30 minutes before you're going to drink it, and it's 60 degrees and it's perfect, and it will taste better, and again, the higher the acidity, maybe the cooler the wine, so, so peon and wire and wines like that may be a little cooler, maybe they should be, you know, 55 with solar temperature, and Cabernet Sauvignon, bordeaux, et cetera, maybe it should be ideally 60 degrees, but not 70 degrees, so the difference in temperature, ideal temperature between white and red wines is, you know, is for white wines 50 degrees and red wines 60 degrees, so 10 degrees, but we serve them 35 degrees and 70 degrees, that's not ideal, so try that out and see if it doesn't enhance your enjoyment of wine. The next myth is that the older the wine, the better. This is just not true. About 98% of the wine produced in the world is intended to be drunk on release. Some wines get better with age, and that's why wine should, that's when wine should be really expensive if it is capable of improving with time in the bottle, aging in the bottle. That's a very small number of wines of very small percentage of wines. That's, again, the finest wines, first-growth bordeaux, grown through Burgundy's, the best ones from the Rhone Valley, German Riesling's age forever, Borolo, super Tuscans, to high in Napa Valley Cabernet's, but most wine producers know that I think something like 97% of the wine consumed in the world is drunk within three hours of purchase, so they're not making wine to age for 30 years in your wine cellar before you drink it, they're making wine to be enjoyable when you buy it, most wines, most wines. That requires some knowledge to know which wines are best with some bottle age and how much bottle age. There's a difference between the wrong crude Burgundy and coat your own. That's not the same, the coat your own might improve with three to five years of bottle age, a grown through Burgundy might improve with 20 years of bottle age. That requires some knowledge and sophistication and experience, which, again, is why when you go into a nice wine store and they ask you if they can help you, you should say yes and stop saying I'm just browsing or just looking. So that's the next debunked wine myth is the idea that all wine improves with age. It's a very small percentage of wines in the world improve with age. And if you're shopping in a nice wine store where the staff is knowledgeable and passionate and invested in the quality of the wines they sell, they can help you know which wines are mature, which wines are best, the French they appoint ready, you know, at their moment when they should be drunk, ideally be drunk. The next wine myth is that more expensive wines are better. Well, you know, some expensive wines are better. Some inexpensive wines are better. Some wines in the middle are better. Some expensive wines aren't very good. You know, in the early '70s, I was the matredy sole may a manager of a really fine French restaurant. And we had all the first goes bordos on the wine list for amazingly a hundred dollars a bottle as a restaurant price back then. Those I don't really exactly remember, but in 1972, the vintage of the first goes bordos would have had to have been 69 or 68 or 67. Those aren't good wines. Those aren't good wines. They were expensive by the standards at that day, but they, they've 60 has, wines bordos from this late '60s, those weren't great wines. But we just assumed they were great wines because they were first goes bordos. So expense doesn't translate automatically to quality and wine. Some $15 wines are really great. Some $200 wines aren't really great. A lot of wine pricing is based on how much of it is made. So Kendall Jackson, Charlotte, they can't be expensive because they make so much of it. It's really good wine for the price, but they can't be expensive because they, if it were expensive, they wouldn't sell the however many bottles a year they make. Who knows? Three million for me. I don't know how many they make, but, but they make a lot and it has to be inexpensive because they want to sell so many bottles every year. If you make 48 bottles or like the Napa Valley Cabernet I talked about yesterday, the Cela, if you make 150 cases a year, it has to be expensive otherwise why'd you bother? That's your income. If you're winery, there's 150 cases of wine a year. In that case, that wine, $150 bottle seems cheap to me. Can't imagine making 150 cases of wine a year and only charge $150 for it. So a lot of wine pricing is based on the quantity of it that is made. It's also based on how famous the place it comes from. There's a lot of things that go into how wine is priced, but it's not based. It's not automatically quality and again, that's having a relationship with a wine merchant that you can depend on to tell you the truth about which wines are better, which wines aren't better. And then the last myth and this is the great myth. This is the one that the whole purpose of this conversation is this myth and that is that organic wines don't contain sulfites and therefore you won't have a headache the next day. That is complete hogwash. All wines contain sulfites. Clients are naturally occurring and sulfites don't cause headaches. If you don't add sulfur dioxide to wine when it's bottled, it won't be stable in the bottle. But even if you don't add sulfur dioxide to the wine when it's bottled, there's still naturally occurring sulfur dioxide in the wine. And as I said, sulfites do not cause headaches. The main two things that cause headaches in wine are alcohol because alcohol dehydrates you and therefore gives you a headache and histamines in red wines. Some people are allergic to histamines and most red wines contain histamines. Nobody is allergic to sulfites. Sulfites don't cause headaches. Organic wines are great if you want to drink organic wines because it's good for the environment. I congratulate you. I applaud you. If you want to drink organic wines because you think they don't contain sulfites and therefore you won't have a headache the next day, that's not true. I even did a little search today for wine myths and one of the things that came up was a site that said just that the tannins cause headaches. Tannins don't cause headaches. And that you should avoid rosés because they're high in tannins. So you can even do the research and come up with bad information. Roses don't have more tannins than other wines. I mean, there's just, you know, there's so much BS, there's so much BS about wine. So anyway, those are my seven myths about what commonly held myths about wine. And I hope that this has helped you understand wine better and hope this has helped you purchase better wine and enjoy wine more. That's kind of the whole point in the entire exercise of adventures of a bite, but some of it is helping you enjoy wine more. And it all boils down to, as I've said many times, shop at a small wine store that's independently owned and run by people that care about the quality of the wines they sell, shop in that store frequently so they get to know you and get to know your palate. And when you walk in the door and somebody says, can I help you as somebody should always stop saying, I'm just browsing, stop saying, I'm just looking, stop saying, no, start saying, yes, please, thank you. And then tell them I would like today a $20 bottle of white wine that I'm going to serve with this or I wanted $15 bottle of red wine to taste like that or I want a $60 bottle of sparkling wine from this part of the world. And you will leave with a better bottle of wine. And without spending more money, you will sleep with a better bottle of wine that you will enjoy more if it's the right store. That's the bucket, you have to pick the right store. Well thank you as always for tuning in to adventures of a black belt. So I really appreciate it and have a great day. [BLANK_AUDIO]