Thank you.
The following program was made possible by the Wine Institute,
Scheffelin & Somerset Company, Cobrand Corporation,
the Portuguese Trade Commission, Napa Valley Ventners Association,
Sonoma County Wineries Association, the German Wine Information Bureau,
the American Ventners Association, and Frederick Wildman & Sons Ltd.
For a complete list of underwriters, please contact South Carolina ETV.
Picture this. You're in a social setting,
surrounded by what we might call wine lovers,
the kind of people who call themselves enophiles.
How do you survive?
First and foremost is to hold the glass by the stem.
Holding it like this is okay for anchor steam and Monday night football,
but it's not okay for serious wine tastings.
So I can just start swirling the glass as I condescendingly look around the room.
Once you've caught someone's eye, hold the glass out,
tilt it slightly to observe its color.
Then begin swirling the wine again and bring it back towards your nose.
Take a deep whiff of the wine, careful not to snort, that's painful.
If you want to look like a true wine geek,
hold the glass by its face with your pinky extended and do that one nostril thing.
And then take a deep taste of the wine.
Remember to savor it. We're not doing wine shooters here.
It's a complex beverage.
And if you like the wine, use some kind of catchphrase like,
ooh, that's very complex.
If you don't like the wine, never say anything crude,
just say something like, hmm, interesting, or my, that's different.
And in the end, remember that wine is a beverage
that's been enjoyed for thousands of years,
and don't let some techno bourgeois lead us to yuppie bar
trying to intimidate you about wine.
That's easy for Kim Caffrey to say.
She knows her way around a wine shop or a wine list.
But even in a city filled with wine and food fanatics, like San Francisco,
you find people intimidated by the subject
and by the snobbery that can go along with it.
There are a lot of people out there that try to impress you
and they want to be wine snobs.
You know, they start popping out all these words
and they have this technique.
To take it so seriously and to say it's, you know,
it's mysterious yet naughty.
Oh, you don't drink Cabernet?
They start swirling it and talking about sugar content.
So we struggled with the names of the regions, the grapes,
even how to read the labels.
The label, if it's fancy, especially if it's like a French wine,
I mean, I kind of get shy away from that, you know.
What was intimidating to me is I couldn't tell from a region
or possibly a grape.
So I'd be confused about, like, the Bordeaux region or, you know,
a grape or a wine that came from the region.
Coping with wines from faraway places
with strange sounding names can be a challenge.
It's a Voglio.
Something like that.
Garçon, Gewürzen and Ramineer.
I'll not take it, thank you.
How is wine categorized and sold?
How do grapes become wine?
And how do you figure out what you like
and how to talk about what you like?
In this program, you'll learn the answers to these questions.
To become knowledgeable about wine
doesn't mean memorizing the thousands of grape varieties
or the names of all the wine-producing regions of France.
You can start by getting familiar
with the way wine is categorized and sold.
Generally, there are two ways wines are identified.
Varietally, meaning the name of the grape variety they are made with,
or the place that they are made.
Let's start with varietally labeled wines.
Winemakers throughout the world use hundreds
of different grape varieties to make different types of wine.
But there are some grapes that stand above the rest.
Familiar grapes like Cabernet, Merlot, Chardonnay
are joined by the less famous but no less noble grapes
like Syrah, Riesling, and Gewurztraminer.
Some wines are made with just one grape.
Other wines are made from different grape varieties blended together.
These blended wines range from a French Bordeaux
to a Spanish Rioja to Champagne.
A blended wine is a wine that's made from several grape varieties
such that no particular grape variety dominates the wine stylistically.
Varietal wines express the personality of a single grape variety,
the personality of Cabernet Sauvignon, the personality of Chardonnay.
But not all wines are named after the grape.
Some are named after the plot of dirt or place that the vine grows.
Take the Chardonnay grape, for example.
In California, a wine made from Chardonnay is called, yes, Chardonnay.
Compare that to the wines of Europe or what some call the Old World.
A Chardonnay from France might be called a Burgundy
after the region where it was grown.
If we followed the European lead,
we'd have to say we were having a glass of Napa.
But no matter what they call it or how they label it,
it all comes from grape juice.
The basic process for making wine is pretty simple.
Squish the grapes and let them sit undisturbed for a while.
Our ancestors have been doing it for 10,000 years.
It's a little more sophisticated now.
Every year, winemakers harvest their grapes by hand or machine.
The grapes are then crushed and destemmed.
The juice, now called free run, is drained off and collected.
Then the skins are pressed to collect additional juices.
It's at this point where processes for making white and red wines diverge.
Oddly enough, you can make white wine from red grapes.
You just leave the skins behind before they have a chance to color the wine.
The juice, along with some yeast,
goes into either a stainless steel vat or a smaller oak barrel to be fermented.
Fermentation is simply the turning of sugar into alcohol.
Yeast, little single-celled plants like the kind that make bread rise,
are added to the juice.
In the process of reproducing, the plants turn sugars in the juice
to alcohol and carbon dioxide.
For red wine, the process is equally simple.
After the grapes are crushed, the skins are left in the juice
anywhere from a few days to a month while it ferments.
That imparts color to the wine and also astringent compounds called tannins.
The skins are then discarded and the wine goes into barrels
or stainless steel tanks for aging.
The winemaker may add some bacteria to reduce the amount of malic acid in the wine.
It can go through a second fermentation to mellow the flavor.
Before the wine is bottled for the consumer, it has to age.
Most white wines are aged in stainless steel vats,
which let the fruit flavors come through loud and clear.
Some fine red wines and some whites like Chardonnay are aged in oak barrels,
which can impart vanilla and toasty flavors and aromas to wine.
The wine can age anywhere from three months to three years at the winery.
After barrel or vat aging, the wine is drained off the residue.
That's called racking.
And it's treated to get rid of any cloudiness.
That's filtering.
And this is where sulfites might be added.
All fermented products contain naturally formed sulfites.
Wine is no exception.
And so every wine has natural sulfites in it.
Most winemakers, myself included, add small amounts of sulfur.
This protects the wine from oxidizing and going bad on you.
This level of sulfur, because it's natural in wine, is actually very, very, very small.
I've heard it said you could get more sulfur from a glass of orange juice
than you can from a whole bottle of wine.
This is a very, very, very minor thing,
except for people that have allergic reactions to sulfites.
And that's why it's put on a label to let people know, those particular people.
Then the wine is bottled and put away someplace cool to age,
or it's released for sale.
Winemaking is the marriage of tradition and technology.
While modern technology replaces some time-worn techniques,
it is the two together that make the living drink we call wine.
But drinking wine should be about what you like, not what you should like.
Even the people that make it will tell you that.
I always tell everybody that I talk to is, either you like it or you don't.
And if you don't, spit it out.
And I would certainly never drink a wine that I didn't like.
I don't care who made it.
If you stick it in your mouth and it tastes good,
it is by definition good wine and you should enjoy it.
It's a little bit like your mom's cooking.
When you're growing up, you eat your mom's food,
and then you get out of the house, you start experiencing things,
you start to develop your own tastes, spices that you like, things like that.
And I think wine's the same way.
But we're not talking about your mother's meatloaf here.
To figure out what you like, you have to taste, taste, taste.
Which is why people congregate at wine tastings,
which actually shouldn't be called wine tastings at all.
It should be called wine smelling, because what can you taste in life for things?
Sweet, sour, bitter, and salt.
And salt for our purposes in wine doesn't exist,
so we're only down to three possible tastes in this wine,
whereby when it comes to wine, I read statistics that people can smell 10,000 different smells.
And those smells have to be released by the liquid,
which is why we see people sloshing their wines as if their lives depended on it.
It becomes such a habit that they find themselves swirling their morning coffee and orange juice.
So the idea is to pick up a glass of wine, really swirl it, release those aromas,
stick your nose into the glass, and begin to smell.
And ask yourself, okay, what am I smelling?
Oftentimes when I'm talking about wine, I really refer to the aroma wheel,
which was developed by a woman at the University of California at Davis.
And what it does is give you a language and a common language for everybody to be able to describe wine.
At the center of the wheel is where you start.
The first one is, do I smell fruit?
Do I smell vegetative smells, nutty, caramelized, et cetera?
So once you define at that level, oh, gosh, I'm smelling a lot of fruit.
Well, what kind of fruit?
Ask yourself, is it citrus, is it berry, is it tree fruit, et cetera?
And so once you've identified, gosh, well, it's really more fruity.
Well, then fruity is a nice term, but what is the next level?
So once you've identified that, well, then when you go to actually taste the wine,
that follows through into reinforcing the flavors in your mouth.
And that's as simple as it can be.
The connection between food and wine will take you back to biochemistry 101.
You know what melted butter smells like, and you pick up a glass of wine
and you put your nose into it and you have that really buttery character coming out.
Well, it's exactly the same molecular compound,
and that's why we're able to describe wine in food terms.
So now we can smell a wine and not embarrass ourselves.
But Master of Wine Mary Ewing Mulligan gives us a how-to on the entire wine tasting process.
When we talk about tasting a wine, we're actually talking about much more
than what happens when we put the wine in our mouths and we drink it.
We're talking about actually a three-step process,
which involves looking at the wine and then smelling it and then tasting it.
The reason we look at it is that wine is very pretty.
Every wine has a different color,
and sometimes you can learn something from looking at a wine too.
The way to look at it is to hold a glass against a white background,
and sometimes it's convenient you have a white tablecloth,
but other times you don't.
It's enough to have a white napkin or even a white shirt sleeve to look at the wine against,
and you hold the glass at an angle, and in this case we see that we have a red wine.
You can see through the wine easily to the napkin, to the texture of the napkin beneath it.
This would suggest that this is probably a medium-bodied red wine, not an extremely intense red.
It's amazing how much you can gather from the color of a wine
what its intensity of flavor will actually be in the mouth.
And then you take a sniff, and you can do it again and again,
but your nose gets tired very quickly,
so at a certain point you have to stop, smell something else,
just stop smelling for a moment, and then you can pick it up and smell it again.
And then you taste the wine.
First, you put the wine in your mouth,
and you want the wine to reach all the different taste centers in your mouth,
the front of your tongue, the back of your tongue, the roof of your mouth, etc.
So to do that, usually you sort of chew the wine around a little bit in your mouth.
The other thing you want to happen when the wine is in your mouth
is exactly what happened when you went like this with the glass,
which is you want to vaporize the aromas of the wine while they're in your mouth.
And the reason you want this is that that way you can actually taste the flavors better.
The language of wine goes beyond what you're smelling and even tasting.
There are also the concepts of body, texture, and the balance of a wine.
You pay attention, you start to be able to distinguish what's going on in the wine.
You notice whether it's hard and firm or whether it dries your mouth out,
which is what tannin does.
You notice whether it makes you salivate after it dries your mouth out,
which is what the acidity in the wine does.
You notice whether the wine is soft and velvety or whether it's firm,
whether it feels round, whether it feels light in your mouth,
whether it feels heavy in your mouth, etc.
These are all different impressions you can get from tasting wines.
It's more than a little maddening to hear experts talk about wine
and not know what they're getting at.
Heavy wines, light wines.
If I put skim milk, whole milk, and heavy cream on the table,
you could tell the difference just by color.
You could see the difference between skim milk, whole milk, and heavy cream.
Put it in your mouth, think about it.
What is skim milk like?
Light goes down, it's real quick.
You get the heavy cream, it coats your mouth.
It's fuller in body.
The ultimate goal of the winemaker is balance,
the harmony between all of these factors, acids, tannins, sugars, and alcohol.
The flavor, the feel, should be in pleasing proportions
so that no one element draws too much attention to itself.
When you taste it, there don't seem to be any rough edges to the wine,
no angles or elbows of flavor that sort of get in your way as you're tasting it
and jar you.
The wine is smooth and agreeable.
Ah, but like all living things, wines can turn ugly.
It's important to know when something has gone wrong so you can send the bottle back.
One of the things that can make a wine bad is its cork.
The bacteria that's in the cork filters into the wine and all in the smell.
Again, it's all in the smell.
It kills the fruit.
You don't get the smell of the fruit, and that's what I'm looking for,
is the smell of the fruit.
It actually comes across as a wet, dank, cellar smell,
but you don't get any of the fruit.
By the way, when they give you the wine to taste before serving your fellow diners,
the wait person is not looking for your opinion on the wine.
I think when they're giving the taste to say is the wine sound, is the wine is not turned,
is this the way you remember the way it tastes?
Is there something wrong with the wine?
If there is, then of course we'll take it back right away.
But the restaurant and its accompanying wine list present a whole other problem.
The long list bound in leather, the pretentious wait person,
the expensive mistake waiting to happen.
If you ever go to a restaurant and one of those people approaches you
who has that chain around their neck and a little tasting cup there,
your obligation is to immediately kill them,
because I think that's done more to intimidate people about wine
and putting wine together with food,
because who is this person to tell me what I like or don't like?
But there are some tips that will help you enjoy the meal and wine
without resorting to homicide.
You've got a group of friends that you're having dinner with at a restaurant.
You're going to order two bottles of wine.
You order one, finish it, and order the second one.
Well, order the two right away.
The wait staff usually doesn't mind to put more glasses on the table.
They like it because you're ordering wine,
and you can compare and talk about it.
We've come upon this wine by the glass,
and I think to me that is the best invention for anybody
to be able to just not invest a whole lot in a bottle,
but to be able to taste a number of different wines
and decide for yourself which one you like.
Navigating the walls of your local wine shop can also be tough.
You walk in, where do I start? You get a wall of wine.
Good as the 93 is.
You've got this variety of prices. Why am I paying $20 versus $5?
Your supply is gone.
No kidding.
There are so many wines out there that I wish I knew every single wine out there.
You don't need to know it all. Just ask questions.
You kind of have to ask yourself, what kind of wines do I like?
Do I like them dry or do I like them sweet?
Do I like them heavy-bodied or light-bodied?
Do I like them red or do I like them white?
Just some very basic questions,
and then your retailer should be knowledgeable enough to lead you through.
Finding what you like doesn't necessarily mean spending a mint.
There are so many great wines out there at a good price.
I'm talking even below $10. There's good wines out there for that price.
Very affordable prices that you can experiment and try with,
because obviously you can't go and experiment on a $20, $30 bottle of wine. No one can.
What about all the magazines and books that rate wines?
A lot of people use them as a guide when they're purchasing wine,
but sometimes they might limit you, too.
I get so nervous when people come in the tasting room with a famous wine-writer book in hand,
and they'll say, I only taste 90s, 90s or above.
I almost can't afford them wine because I find that such a limiting idea
that all your tastes in wine are going to be judged by someone else.
But the ratings that critics give wine can be useful as a reference.
I think that it's good to look at what other people say about wines.
There are people that spend their whole life, their livelihood,
is based on wine tasting and making these judgments.
Fine. Find a critic, if you will, as you would do with the movies,
as you would do with art, as you would do with theater that you agree with,
and follow that person.
Oh, but what if I don't finish the bottle? What to do? What to do?
Surely leftover Lafitte could be lovely.
You can't finish a bottle of wine. Cork it, put the cork back in.
I lost the cork. It happens to me all the time.
Then take something like Scott towels or tissue, put it in there,
just to keep any air out, and put it back in the refrigerator.
Do not leave it on your countertop in the kitchen because it is warm.
And there's bacteria. The bacteria will grow at a warm temperature,
but it will not grow at a cool temperature,
and that's why we put things in the refrigerator in the first place.
Take wine and put it in there.
But certainly it won't last for long.
And when we're talking about fine wine, and you open the bottle,
you know, really 48 hours, I think,
you want to drink it within a short period of time,
otherwise you lose the flavor.
It's funny, I love the wine until you guys made me hate it.
Just remember the old song,
Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?
A waiter comes into the restaurant, opens the bottle of wine,
presents the cork, and then places the wine on the table
and says to me that this wine has got to breathe for 15 minutes and 33 seconds.
I mean, what are they talking about?
The idea is that by exposing the wine to air,
it opens up, allowing all the flavors to come through.
If you believe in the breathing theory,
that a wine will get better with aeration,
it's not going to happen in this bottle.
You need to take it, put it into the glass,
and swirl it three, four, five, 20 times,
and you'll get a better aeration, better breathing.
And then there's finding a home for your wine.
A cellar like this one is a bit out of reach for most of us.
You don't need a $50,000 cellar,
you just need some place that doesn't change temperature too much.
It doesn't have to be 50 degrees, it can be 65 degrees,
you know, a little cooler than room temperature.
And just as long as the temperature doesn't fluctuate,
it really kills the wines, then it's fine,
and lay it on its side, and in the last two or three years, easy.
Now that we've swirled, sniffed, snorted,
and discussed vinification ad nauseum,
sit back, relax, and actually enjoy a nice glass.
This program was made possible by the Wine Institute,
Scheffelin & Somerset Company, Cobrand Corporation,
the Portuguese Trade Commission, Napa Valley Ventures Association,
Sonoma County Wineries Association,
the German Wine Information Bureau,
American Ventures Association,
and Frederick Wildman & Sons Ltd.
For a complete list of underwriters,
please contact South Carolina ETV.
Thank you.
The following program was made possible by the Wine Institute,
Scheffelin & Somerset Company, Cobrand Corporation,
the Portuguese Trade Commission,
Napa Valley Ventures Association,
Sonoma County Wineries Association,
the German Wine Information Bureau,
the American Ventures Association,
and Frederick Wildman & Sons Ltd.
For a complete list of underwriters,
please contact South Carolina ETV.
Ah, the old world.
The great chateau.
The art of the Renaissance.
The sound of Bach.
Perhaps that's what you think of when you think of wine.
Well, think again, folks.
There's a brave new world of wine out there.
In places like Wairapa, New Zealand,
Constantia, South Africa, and in a valley named Napa
just above San Francisco.
Wines from all these places are lumped together,
if indeed you can lump wine, as New World wines.
Wine experts have likened these New World wines to modern art,
approachable art that can be enjoyed at face value
by people without a smidgen of art history.
Compare that to the wines of the old world,
where breeding is what it's all about.
A red from France might be called a burgundy
after the region where it was grown.
In the States, we'd call the wine a pinot noir
after the kind of grape it's made from.
If we followed the European lead,
we'd have to say we were having a glass of Napa,
which lacks panache somehow.
This time, we focus on the wine-growing regions
of the northern coast of California.
It's generally considered one of the most important regions
in the New World of wines.
In addition to the Napa Valley, the region includes Sonoma
and the counties of Mendocino and Lake.
Of course, in Europe, they call such wine-growing regions
Appalachian.
Here, the experts have tried to use the more egalitarian acronym
AVA for American viticultural areas.
We're probably better off with Appalachians.
The basic things you need to know about an Appalachian
is the type or style of wine that it produces.
And that again goes back to the soils and the climates.
A little bit cooler region, a little less rich soils
are going to make a wine that's a little bit higher in acid,
have a good backbone to it,
but with a nice fairly rounded fruit flavor.
That's particularly good for white wines.
For red wines, you're going to want to find a region
that's a little bit warmer in its character,
and given the richness of the soils,
will give you a little bit different fruit flavors.
What Carolyn Wente is talking about is microclimate.
It's a favorite California buzzword these days,
and it has to do with the unique weather conditions
of a particular grape-growing area.
The French have a magnificent word for it, terroir.
Knowing the microclimate of an area will tell you
if the vintner has chosen a grape variety
appropriate for his region.
Consider, for example, Napa and Sonoma.
The Napa and Sonoma valleys are close enough
to California's Pacific coast to be affected
by the weather patterns that come off the Pacific Ocean.
When it rains hard in Sonoma, it usually rains hard in Napa.
But within their individual regions,
dramatic differences exist in soil, exposure, and rainfall.
Consequently, wine styles and character differ, sometimes a lot.
Which is why you hear wine people
talking about regions within regions.
In Napa, there's Spring Mountain, Howell Mountain,
St. Helena, Rutherford, Oakville, Stag's Leap, Atlas Peak,
Mount Vidor, and Wild Horse Valley.
The region called Sonoma has Alexander Valley,
Dry Creek Valley, Northern Sonoma, Sonoma Coast,
Russian River Valley, Green Valley, Knights Valley,
Chalk Hill, Sonoma Valley, and Sonoma Mountain.
Napa and Sonoma are linked at the south end
by an area called Carneros.
Napa Valley is a bit more unified
because it's essentially one valley
centered around the hamlet of Oakville.
You can drive from one end of the valley to the other in 45 minutes.
When people think of California wine,
they quite often think of the Napa Valley,
but the Napa Valley only grows 4% of California's grapes,
so it is a remarkably small area.
Less than 40% of the size of Bordeaux, for example,
are a wine region in France that we're often compared to.
Thanks to the Pacific Ocean's influence on Napa Valley,
it can be a sweltering 105 degrees during the day
and a mere 50 degrees when the sun goes down.
The combination of warm days and cold nights
is just what all great wine-growing regions like to boast about.
Anyone who knows plants realizes that plants
photosynthesize during the day.
They make sugar and flavor and all these wonderful things,
so you want it to be warm and so that the vines can ripen properly,
but you also want it to be cool at night
because this retains the natural acidity.
The most important types of grapes in Napa are Chardonnay and Pinot Noir,
which do better in the southern Appalachians,
and Zinfandel, Cabernet, and Merlot, which do best in the northern regions.
These generalizations are only a starting point, obviously,
thanks to those devilish little climatic variations.
That's even more true for the sprawling Sonoma region.
So you can start in the southern part of the county
and you can take Russian River or Sonoma, a valley for example.
They're cooler, much more conducive for a Chardonnay or a Pinot Noir
or a cold region variety.
As you move north, you might gain in temperature
and therefore be moving into the reds.
So while there's plenty of Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot in Sonoma,
the region's varied climates and terrains have allowed three other varieties to flourish.
Pinot Noir, Zinfandel, and Sauvignon Blanc.
I think varieties that are grown best and reach their world-class potential
have to be in their optimum growing region.
And here in Sonoma, I think you cover the widest range of those areas.
And it really all starts with fruit.
And so you have to go back to the fields, to the vineyards,
to the soil, to the climate, to the microclimate.
Matt Gallo and his sister Gina are the new generation
at the largest winemaking company in the world.
How many tons did you leave behind?
Now, as a winemaker kissing the ground that I walk on,
that I have Chardonnay and Pinot Noir coming from the Russian River Valley.
That's stable, that's grown, that has years on them.
It's like godsent, but he knew it back then.
He, as you might suspect, was Julio Gallo, Gina's and Matt's grandfather,
who, with his brother Ernest, came to Sonoma in the 30s.
I know my grandfather Julio, he's the one that got people started drinking wine,
a little pink, a little sweet, you know, that whole thing.
He was at the brink of where people weren't drinking wine.
And he was on the cutting edge of that.
Now, sure, we're in Sonoma, we're making world-class wines.
And it's another thing that's been passed down through generation through generation.
Like the Gallos, California wine sage Lou Fappiano has seen it all,
from prohibition to the current fierce competition.
And, as most sages are known to do, he talks about the way it used to be.
During Prohibition, everything was bootleg alcohol.
You didn't wine with a poor man, real poor man, and drink.
Right after Prohibition, my wife and I, we'd go to dinner.
Well, I'd order a bottle of wine because I was in the wine business.
But they'd look at you and say, well, that guy, you know, he's got to be Italian or French.
He's not American, because Americans didn't drink wine.
They drank booze.
Until the 1970s, California's wine industry consisted of a small group of families and wineries, less than a hundred.
It really was a family-oriented business.
I knew the Gallos. I knew the Martinis. I knew the Sebastiani's.
I probably didn't play with them as much as I did the Martinis.
And we were all from different wine regions.
My great-grandfather came over from Italy, and he started making wine in Sonoma.
And he brought the wine on his wagon around the town square,
and people came out with their bottles and got their wine.
The wine there was always a part of the table.
It was a part of the food. It was their lifestyle. It was, you know, family.
Lou Fappiano's family was one of the first in Sonoma County to let the public sample their latest vintage.
My mother ran the tasting room right back here, and we had three barrels there.
And one was 45 cents, 55, and 75.
You had spigots on the barrel, and they'd come in with an empty jug, and then you'd fill it up.
And that's the way they'd go.
It was all out of the same tank, but people would taste, oh, the 175.
Tastes better. You don't do that anymore today, because they've got a lot better taste.
A lot different wine, too.
It certainly was.
In 1976, a panel of French judges—French, mind you—rated two California wines higher than the most prestigious French wines
in a tasting where the labels were hidden.
Since then, Californian winemakers have garnered respect for many of their wines and considerably higher prices, sadly enough.
No more jugs. No more spigots. No more 45 cents a gallon.
California's tasting rooms runneth over with two and a half million visitors each year.
And the wineries run the gamut, from the down-to-earth to chateaux that might have been plucked by a whirlwind out of deepest France.
Better than sex.
Do you have a 92 reserve?
It's still available in our library.
Pour it on your lever and lick it off.
I've seen wine with 100 points.
They're fancy. They've got everything. They're selling clothes. They're selling everything.
I mean, you walk in something, you think you're going into a drag race store or something.
And behind the merchandising, the process of making wine has become more sophisticated and technological than ever before.
Yeah, you have different ways of making wine today.
We never thought in those days of putting in oak barrels.
You never thought now today, it's got to go in oak barrels, you know.
Let's take a look at where oak barrels fit into the winemaking process.
Winemaking is usually divided into two parts.
Fermentation, the process where grape juice turns into wine,
and maturation, when the wine settles down and gets ready to face the consumer.
These processes can take place in a variety of ways.
For example, the wine making process can take place in oak barrels or stainless steel tanks,
depending on what the winemaker wants to do with the flavors and aromas in the wine.
Wood can breathe, allowing oxygen to react with wine, giving it nutty and toasty flavors.
Stainless steel, on the other hand, seals oxygen out, allowing the fruit flavors to come forward in the wine.
A wine that ferments in stainless steel and is moved to oak for aging is called barrel-aged.
And a wine that ferments and matures in oak is called barrel-fermented.
Surprisingly, barrel-aged wines taste oakier than barrel-fermented wines,
even though they've been in oak for less time.
Do you guys get like a butterscotch character?
But all barrels are not the same.
If you put the same juice into barrels made by different coopers with different wood, will the wine taste the same?
Gina Gallo and some wine drinkers experiment.
It comes from the oak.
It's a sweet character, like spicy vanilla character.
You're putting the exact same juice in those barrels.
And the outcome, after the fermentation, after the aging process,
those last couple of months, you're tasting it day in and day out, and you're watching that wine develop.
You would almost bet every dollar you have that there was a different juice put in that made that final wine.
Master of wine Tim Hanai says,
don't worry about whether that rich Chardonnay will go with that grilled salmon.
Instead, think about toothpaste.
You wake up in the morning and you brush your teeth.
Tastes good. You get a toothpaste that you enjoy.
Okay, and it's a good feeling. Your mouth's refreshed.
You go out and you say, oh, I think I'll have a glass of orange juice or grapefruit juice.
That's the cause and effect.
And the potential's there for that to happen with wine.
So the first rule of gastronomy is avoid the combination of orange juice and toothpaste.
The second rule is that there are no other rules.
One only drinks white wine with white meats and fish or red wine with red meats.
You can take those rules and throw them out the window,
because it doesn't matter what the basic ingredient is.
What does matter, for example, is the amount of wine you drink.
Because it doesn't matter what the basic ingredient is. What does matter, for example,
in the white wine with fish or the red wine with meat thing,
is how you season it and how you prepare it.
Another part of the problem is that most of these proclamations
are based on the premise that we all share the same palate.
The problem with wine and food is it says here is right, here is wrong, here is good, here is bad.
And it doesn't take you as an individual into account.
Your personal values of, do you like the astringency of wine?
Well, if you don't, and an expert saying this is what you should do,
then what value is that to you?
But surely madness lies in that direction.
If there's no commonality of taste, does everything go with everything?
The mind reels.
What Tim Hanai says is experiment. Look at cause and effect.
Take a prepared teriyaki sauce and put it on here.
The theory boils down to a few simple rules.
Sweet foods tend to make wine taste stronger,
and salty or sour foods tend to make wine taste milder.
So try your chardonnay now.
Take the salmon, put on a little sweet teriyaki sauce or some sort of a fruit garnish,
and all of a sudden now the acidity comes up and the structure comes into the wine.
But here's how fantastic this whole system is,
because all I'm going to do now is take a lemon.
I'm going to take the exact same fish,
and again take a bite of your favorite side with the lemon.
And try it again.
And with a simple addition of a little lemon juice,
what's going to happen is you build acidity into the dish
that will make this wine very round and very mild.
And if that's what you want, then that's a good combination.
Same bottle of wine, you've made a couple of very simple adjustments to the food,
and everybody can have what they like.
The main ingredient in food and wine pairing is experimentation.
In Chef John Ash's words, play with your food.
Just dig in, have fun, try it with abandon, I guess,
in terms of putting those two things together.
It is that whole idea of sort of saying, well, you know,
take some food over here and you take some wine over here
and you put those two things together and magical things happen.
And it ain't rocket science.
But it may be horticultural science.
Ash has a five-acre organic garden
filled with more than 1,000 varieties of fruits,
vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers.
The garden was developed by Mendocino's Fetzer Vineyards.
The garden is a way for us to teach and educate people about wine
and about flavor and why these things occur in the way that they do.
But the best advice is to listen to your wine.
Put the wine in your mouth, stop, you know, enjoy it, breathe it in,
you know, let it sit on the palate for a few minutes,
and it will almost tell you this will go wonderfully well
with a big lusty red wine, depending on how you season it and flavor it.
Maybe take some good earthy mushrooms like portobello
or even some dried porcini
and make a wonderful sauce to put over a piece of grilled chicken.
That's a red wine dish, that's not a white wine dish.
Mm-mm.
This is for all the cooks in the world.
A night harvest in California's Mendocino County.
Here, they work in the dark when the grapes are cold.
We have a tractor that precedes the pickers,
and it has a couple of bins on it and a light system on it,
and the grapes are cold.
We have a tractor that precedes the pickers,
and it has a couple of bins on it and a light system on it,
driven by a generator.
The first time we tried it, we got this fruit that was really cold
and made wonderful wine out of it,
and now harvest all our grapes that way.
At Navarro Vineyards in Mendocino,
they think their wine tastes better if the grapes are picked at night,
and it has to do with the temperature of the must,
the mixture of grape juice, pits, and skins.
With white wine, you want the wine to be delicate,
and if you bite into a wine grape,
you'll notice that there's two astringent portions there,
one of the seeds and the other one is the skins.
And how much astringency the juice picks up
is a function of two things,
the length of time it's in contact with a broken seed or broken skin,
and the temperature of the must.
And if the must is cold,
then it doesn't pick up much astringency when you crush the grapes.
These cool temperatures also lend themselves to grape varietals
that tend not to do well in hotter climates,
things like Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Chardonnay, and Pinot Noir.
In Mendocino, some 50 miles north of Sonoma,
the redwood trees outnumber the tourists,
and the attitude is more laid back.
We didn't want a sort of country club style winery,
and so what we did was really buy a sheep ranch.
And if you think running a winery is not cost effective,
raising sheep is about as uncost effective as you can get.
I think we were really interested in being farmers in the beginning,
and so we came up here to grow grapes.
And suddenly we discovered after growing grapes
that the day the grapes get ripe, the price drops.
And so the solution then is to make wine.
They decided to specialize in a grape varietal
that originated in Germany and neighboring Alsace, Gewurztraminer.
There is a big misconception that all Gewurztraminer are sweet,
and what we're looking for is a lot of spice and a lot of flavor,
but not necessarily sweetness.
The winemakers of Navarro took an ancient variety of grape
and produced a thoroughly modern American wine.
It has the unique stamp of the people and the place and the time where it's made.
One of our young students told us that his family had been making wine since 1163.
Ted said, well, how was the harvest in 1311?
We have such a different sense of the history of winemaking.
Coming from Berkeley in the 60s,
Bennett and Cohn brought the idealism of the times to Mendocino
and tried to make them work within the structure of their winery.
We couldn't control everything that was happening in the world,
but we could cultivate our own garden.
And that meant that maybe there wasn't housing enough for everyone in the world,
but we could have a vineyard that supplied low-cost housing for our workers.
Maybe there wasn't adequate health care everywhere in the world,
but we could provide a working environment where all our workers had health care.
These winemakers find a kind of spirituality in their vineyards
and in the giant redwoods in their backyard.
When you make wine from rotten grapes and it's beautiful wine,
and when you sit under one of these trees,
I know there's something bigger than me going on in the world.
This is my cathedral.
Old hippies.
MUSIC
This program was made possible by the Wine Institute,
Scheffelin & Somerset Company,
Cobrand Corporation,
the Portuguese Trade Commission,
Napa Valley Ventures Association,
Sonoma County Wineries Association,
the German Wine Information Bureau,
American Ventures Association,
and Frederick Wildman & Sons Limited.
For a complete list of underwriters, please contact South Carolina ETV.