Absolutely nothing doing on the poker front. Had two meh photos but will leave them out.

This was the scene that greeted me last week as I attended the Guild of Sommeliers’ Bordeaux tasting in San Francisco. Was I right to be intimidated? Eight unlabeled red wines in front of me, two Master Sommeliers beyond them, and almost zero time to study over the past two and a half months (more on that later). I didn’t know it was going to be a blind tasting, but I was game.

The Master Somms talked a little bit about Bordeaux’s place today. It is certainly not the trendy choice among Sommeliers like it was ten or fifteen years ago, and the general consensus is that the price of the top wines are prohibitive (especially in todays economic climate). All the same, the wines coming out of Bordeaux are very good and there is a lot of value to be had for your guests. Not only that, but Bordeaux will age really well and develop into something interesting and worthwhile ten to fifteen years after bottling. This holds true even for the less expensive wines. The wines in front of us were from different communes of Bordeaux, and to be clear, no one was (or is) expecting us to be able to tell the difference between different communes in a blind tasting. Perhaps right bank from left bank, but everything after that was at the level of detail where you are dealing with wine making decisions instead of terroir. Sigh of relief from everyone in the room, and we were off.

I was pretty much lost during the blind tasting portion. The biggest indicator, the MS hosts hinted at the beginning, was the color of the wines which could tell if the wine was Cabernet dominated or Merlot dominated or somewhere in between. I don’t know if I had stage fright or what, but my nose pretty much froze up or my confidence froze up. My notes as I went through the wines devolved from detailed to generalized, and it was somewhat unpleasant to be in front of eight wines that seemingly tasted so much alike. I think this is a reflection of how much effort I have been putting into tasting and working through the CMS tasting grid (very little).

Things were much clearer going through the wines as a group under the direction of the MS hosts. They talked a little about tasting markers they had to differentiate between communes, and I will dutifully post them here:

St. Emilion: Broader texture of flavor. Plum, cocoa, and leafy fern.

Pomerol: More concentrated and weighty but similar to St. Emilion in flavor. This is the commune most likely to get confused with a New World wine because they are generally the most rich and fat. Can be a half point higher in abv than left bank communes.

St Estephe: Firm and focused but not on the same level as Pauillac in that regard. Dark fruit, soy sauce, and coarser, rustic tannins.

Pauillac: Silky and powerful. Lead pencil is a key marker.

St. Julien: The most elegant and full of finesse. Soft and pretty. Roasted chestnuts.

Margaux: Elegant but powerful like Pauillac. The most floral. Rose.

Pessac: The most gravelly and gritty on the palate.

In general, all of the Bordeaux varietals (come on, shout them out: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, Petit Verdot!) are marked by the presence of methoxypyrazines, which give off the vegetal, grassy, jalapeno or bell pepper like aromas. This is one flavor compound that humans can detect in the most miniscule amounts, and is fairly stable throughout the winemaking process. As the grapes get riper, they lose this flavor compound. But it usually remains present in Bordeaux wines because of the climate. California wines of the same varietals generally shed a lot of these characteristics because the grapes ripen so well there. You can also think of the wines in terms of them being “brooding,” “soft,” “mascline,” or “feminine.”

I have to say, three days ago I found myself next to a giant fern and found it to be odorless. I did not taste it. All the same, I think I understand that trait. I grew up in a house with a fern just off the front porch, and I know that smell really well. I associate a cool, damp, fecundity with ferns and can almost feel the swirling mists of New Zealand as I imagine the smell. It is more blunt than a pine forrest with a duller rustling of leaves in the wind. There is a softer but altogether primal feel to it. It is The Lady Chatterly’s Lover read by the characters in Lord of the Flies. I am thinking of it as the last wisps of pyrazines leftover as the grapes ripen more on the right bank, giving a fruitier, higher alcohol wine than what is made across the river.

As far as some of the other markers, I am happy to try and learn from them, but I think the work involved in blind tasting is much more personal. One of the MS commented that chestnuts (roasted?) was a big tell for him in identifying St. Julien. I couldn’t smell anything like that. I am not sure how many times I have smelled roasted chestnuts in my life, to be honest, and maybe it is more of an East Coast thing. There was an article on the Guild site about flavour chemistry, and the last part of it talked about how subjective taste is. The author mentioned in a somewhat offhand way that the flavor compound responsible for the pepperiness in Syrah is called rotundone, and about a fifth of all people cannot smell this. I am sure this set off a lot of anxiety throughout the online somm community. I will just quote myself from the comment section of the article:

“This is a great article and I am looking forward to what comes of future experiments in this field. The last part about everyone having different sensory thresholds for different aromatic chemicals is at the same time troubling and freeing in regards to blind tasting. Everyone, or almost everyone, on this site is concerned about their ability to blind taste, and it is only natural to worry about your own thresholds in this respect. However, I think it is important to remember that there are plenty of other pieces to the blind evaluation equation, and your mind, your ability to deduce, is just as important as your palette. Also I think the latter part of this article puts the focus, rightfully, on the individual interaction with wine and creating a sensory context over time. I think it is very interesting and often helpful to read through lists of varietal markers, but it is probably far to easy to fall into a trap where studying these lists becomes more important than actual time spent with wine. My own, limited, experience with blind tasting has been frequently uncomfortable and produced very uneven results. Even more frustrating is the conversation afterwards where I seemingly “missed” important markers that other people in the group picked up on. I think these conversations can be important, and certainly everyone feels lost at different points in blind tastings—we shouldn’t be fixed on results alone. What is liberating is the knowledge that I need to be working to an extent on “what Syrah tastes like to me,” rather than what Syrah tastes like.”

Oddly enough, the Bordeaux tasting coincides with a Bordeaux project of my own. We don’t have a sommelier position at my restaurant, but I have been doing the best I can to go above and beyond my position as bartender and act like one. One of the things I really wanted to make happen was an expansion of our offerings from Bordeaux. We have a few core items that all the restaurants in my chain have to have, but not much beyond that. The California Cab category is bursting at the seams, naturally. I pushed to do a Bordeaux wine dinner in order to get some more Bordeaux on the list, and the managers gave it the go ahead. It has been very exciting as I am playing a big part in working with our wine reps to select the wines and organize the evening. I set the tone early on saying that I wanted to do a dinner that was on the affordable side. Looking through the catalog, it would have been very easy to end up with a dinner that would have had to be $175 per person. They really did deliver, though, and we ended up with five quality wines at reasonable prices. Five courses, five wines, $100. Everyone wins in that scenario.

I did take a little flack from one regular in particular since we aren’t doing any classed growths. It is something I come up against again and again, that the Bordeaux classification system (which dates from 1855 by the way) is the ultimate measure of the wines. What I am very comfortable with is our regulars walking away from the wine dinner thinking about Bordeaux in a different light, as solid, reasonably priced wines. We are sticking mainly to the 2005 vintage, which I think is more friendly to a new world palate, but I think that makes the most sense. We can’t just stuff fern leaves down our guests palates and expect them to come back for more. And that is my ultimate goal: to get our guests more accustomed to drinking Bordeaux and to get our staff to be more comfortable selling Bordeaux. If we are successful over the holidays doing this, then we can move on to Burgundy and then Spain. As bad of a reputation that Bordeaux has in some circles, it does have a reputation large enough (call it brand recognition) that people perk up a bit. In my mind, that makes it the ideal place to start. We have already booked forty slots and that has all been through word of mouth. We plan to cap it at sixty, which would make it the biggest wine dinner ever. If we win in Bordeaux and can follow up with a win in Burgundy, then I think we can go anywhere else in the world and our guests will give us the benefit of the doubt and come along with us. Spain. Chile. Piemonte. I think this is exactly what we should be doing as a restaurant, and it is what I am the most excited to be a part of.

Interestingly enough, we had the Sommelier/General Manager from a very well respected restaurant in San Francisco come in. He brought with him, incidentally, a Bordeaux.

He had some very interesting things to say about the state of the Sommelier profession at the end of the night. He is one of two Somm/GMs that I have met, and according to him, we will see more and more of that. He said the job of a Sommelier ten and fifteen years ago doesn’t exist anymore. More and more Somms are asked to justify their salaries. Once they train the staff they are shown the door unless they have something else to offer because in the recession, everyone is looking at the bottom line. If you are being outsold by your staff and managers (whom you trained), then what good are you? (To back it up, I heard one of my regulars who is part owner of a restaurant ask someone if they had any candidates for a GM who “would also need to overhaul the winelist,” since they just lost their GM.) It is a fairly Machiavellian outlook, or maybe nowadays it is just Darwinian. If you want to survive you have to prove your value to the owners on the bottom line. I can think of a lot of exceptions, and he is probably exaggerating when he says the position “doesn’t exist.” But I feel like there is probably a grain of truth in what he is saying.

As far as advice, he told me to “love wine,” and study and work my way through the CMS. There are a lot of wine and spirit distributors who are hungry for Advanced and Master Somms to work for them as wine specialists and educators, and they will pay for you to continue your studies and travels.

There were a couple of other interesting things he mentioned. His restaurant has about fifteen wines by the glass, and he opens another fifteen to twenty every night for menu pairings. He also tastes every open bottle every night to check for quality. They dump their wines after having been open for two days. We brought up the Argon gas which has been so successful at our restaurant in cutting waste, but he said he thinks the wine still suffers after two days. ”I can’t really put it into words,” he said. ”When you taste a wine, it is just like a trumpet sounding on your palette. With the argon gas, after two or three days, it is like that trumpet is muffled. You can still hear it, but it is suppressed.” He admitted, or came close to admitting, that he would still pour it, though. Their inventory is four times the size of ours.

As far as the wine he brought in, there was an amazing amount of fruit for a 25 year old wine. I decanted it and he insisted I pour myself a good bit. Tasting it over the next two hours, I was really amazed at how it changed, softened, mellowed. I liked it much better in the second hour than the first. I needed a steak to go with it…