AnuvaBlog

No one means to become a wine snob, it just sort of happens. One day you wake up and find it hard to just enjoy a casual glass of wine with out analyzing it from a critic’s perspective.

The other day for lunch I ate a Chez Pauline in Recoletta. http://www.chezpauline.com.ar/chezpauline.htm  Known for tea and not for wine, was clearly my error and not theirs. All the same I asked what wines I might enjoy with my croque madame and leafy green salad.

I was offered two options; Norton Classico blanco or tinto. http://www.norton.com.ar/  The same internal struggle stirred inside me again. I wanted a glass of wine, and ignored my conscience.

Yes, I have had the displeasure of drinking Norton before. And yes 10 pesos per cup seemed awfully high, possibly more than the cost of a bottle in the supermarket. But, I refused to let myself be snooty and decided to give it another go.

Norton Classico taste like stems and nail polish remover. Not even delicious boxed wine juice. Yet people like me still order it and drink it begrudgingly. I enjoyed my sandwich and after 2 sips left the glass stare me in the face for the rest of the meal.  Filled to the brim and mocking me, “yes you should have ordered beer” I thought about a question someone asked during a tasting.

When ordering wine in a restaurant when is it acceptable to send it back?

Only if the wine is flawed.

If you chose a wine and did not like it, it is best to drink it but not order it again. Like my Norton which may be the worst wine in Argentina, shame on me for falling back into it’s tannic acidic trap. Each wine is an experience, and you won’t love everyone you try.

However if you suspect your wine is flawed consult your waiter or sommelier.

What do I mean by flawed or “corked”?

If a wine tastes “off” or damp, funky, moldy like wet socks, you probably received a corked bottle. It is not often that this occurs, but it does happen for many numbers of reasons; oxidation, sulphur, sediments etc.  Check out this article on the Wine Doctors website for more information http://www.thewinedoctor.com/advisory/tastefaulty.shtml

In proper conduct the restaurant should take the bottle back and bring you another bottle of the same wine. Chances are the second bottle will not have the same error.

This goes for wine shops as well. Don’t pour that bottle down the drain. Take it back to the store you purchased it at and asked for a new bottle. Imagine going home like a carton of milk. Ready to enjoy cereal your pour and find sour curdled revulsion. Anyone would have just cause to return and ask for a replacement.

As I finished my meal and signaled for the check I saluted sir Norton for having tricked me again. He knew complaining about his corner cutting charms would only bring disappointment in another inherently disturbing glass.

The “Vinos y Bodegas 2008″ fair was this last weekend here in Buenos Aires and many a person turned out. One of the things that always amazes me about the vast majority of Argentine bodegas (wineries) is how few of them do any blending. All of them have a Malbec and most have Cabernet, Syrah, Chardonnay, Merlot and maybe some Bonarda, Torrontés, Pinot Noir, Tannat, Sauvignon Blanc, or other varietals, but they sell them only as that: varietals.

Certainly varietals make for great wines and also play to that genre categorization feature that people tend to like in their products (i.e. knowing what they are going to get), but it leaves out the possibility for more personalized “winemaker” wines. I love it when you get a wine like Don Juan where the winemaker explains to you how many iterations he went through in determining the 70/11/10/9 split of Malbec/Syrah/Bonarda/Merlot. This is what makes great wine.

I think that for starting out and for understanding each of the varietals and how typicity works, that single varietal wines are fine. More than fine. Many are great. I would have to say that blends often take the best aspects of many wines that a winery or winemaker does and brings them together to form a masterpiece.

Sometimes you just have to go back to the basics. Friends, food, wine.

So we invited over some people, pulled out some of our wines and had a relaxing and lovely evening. One of the greatest things about wine is its ability to be talked about and at the same time talked over.

To illustrate: the evening began with many questions about our wines and our wine club (like what is Don Juan? How did Anuva start? What does the word Anuva mean? etc.) and then progressed into a conversation over many different things, the most notable of which, in my mind, is powers of ten.

Most of you I’m sure know that powers of a number, mathematically, indicate that that number is multiplied with itself the number of times of the power. For example 10^4=10×10x10×10, or 7^3=7×7x7. The importance here is that when talking of powers of 10, once passing 2 powers of 10 or so, a human’s ability to really comprehend how big those numbers are loses touch with reality. (To exemplify this, try laying out 10 paperclips (10^1), then 100 (10^2), then 1000 (10^3). It’s very easy to write the number 10^3 but much less easy to really grasp how much that number really means).

This subject came up in relation to Alan Greenspan’s book The Age of Turbulence. In the book, Greenspan talks about how he was happy to learn that the U.S. Government used the same notation on their financial documents as the big companies that he worked for in his private consulting business. On these documents, when a figure listed as “$0.1″, this was to indicate $100,000,000. The reason for this is simply to save paper. Writing all those zeros takes up a lot of room and also.

But more importantly, this indicates, in my mind, a very big problem with how people like Greenspan, and other central bankers, view as significant figures (definition here). If people like him use 0.1 to denote 100 Million, and then 0.01 to denote 10 Million, etc., they are completely out of touch with reality. What I mean by out of touch with reality, is that since 0.1=100 Million Dollars, and 1.0= 1 Billion Dollars, and since the vast majority of the figures they are going to be dealing with would look something like “10.4″, or “16.75″, or “1.245″ at the most, this means that they do not care about anything in the 100’s of thousands of dollars (and perhaps in the Millions as well since I don’t know if they carry their figures to 3 decimal places).

As we drank our wine, we pondered what it would be like to have 100’s of thousands of dollars not be important on the financial documents of the people making the most important financial decisions in the world. I do understand, of course, that the 100’s of Billions of dollars that they deal with are much more important than the 100’s of thousands that I deal with , but I can’t help but think how much the way they simply write the numbers could affect their thinking. $100,000 could feed a lot of people, buy a lot of books or clothes, or provide other forms of care for people in need.

This is where wine took us last night.

We had cracked open a bottle of Don Juan Reserve for ourselves on Monday night, as we had some friends in from out of town and wanted to show off some of our best stuff to them. After opening the 3rd bottle (because they loved it of course), we realized that we weren’t going to finish it as we had to work the next day.

Routinely, as I’m sure is the case for many of you, we open wines especially on weeknights to have a glass or so with dinner and we are left with 1/3 or 1/2 of a bottle. Que pena! We don’t want to throw this wine away. The best strategy for preserving opened wine is the shove the cork back into the bottle as far as it will go and then lye it down in the refrigerator. This will help to slow the oxidation of the wine and make it last longer.

We have experimented with our classic wines (like Mayol Bonarda and Cavagnaro Malbec) and have found that these wines are still very drinkable up to 48 hours after opening. With our reserves (like Don Juan and Cavagnaro Reserve), this number goes up to 96 hours.

Once you pass these points, though, you are better off cooking with the wine. More on what to do with very leftover wine in future posts.

For those of you who may be a little more new to the wine drinking experience–not just to Malbec, Torrontés and Bonarda–a good glass, wine glass, or crystal glass may not seem that important. Now, I’m not saying that you need to go spend 50 or more dollars per glass on specifically Pinot Noir glasses and then only drink your Pinot from there. What I am saying is that there is a reason that good glassware is considered good.

First, the shape of the glass is very important. The curve of good glassware is specifically crafted to allow aromas and perfumes to be better captured by the glass. If one were to simply drink wine from a lowball or highball glass, the subtleties and richness of many wines with great scents will be lost.

Second, the size of the opening at the top of the glass is important. Red wines, especially heavily oaked reds need more contact with oxygen in order to open and fully express themselves. Hence red wine glasses tend to be larger than white wine glasses.

Third, good crystal cleans easier and more completely than plastic or glass and also does not dissolve at all in the wine, leaving you with only the wine and its characteristics. To illustrate this, everyone knows that if you leave water in a plastic bottle for a while, especially in the sun, you drink it and get a very plastic taste.

Speaking of cleaning wine glasses: one should only use very hot water (Yuji makes a game of trying not to burn himself as scalding water is streaming from the faucet–sounds fun to me!)… no soap/detergent as this will leave a soapy flavor and smell on the glass and contaminate your wine. To disinfect, use a small spray bottle filled with alcohol and rub the glassware down.

Now, this may sound excessive but it all depends on how much of the ritual you like to incorporate into your wine drinking. I am simply here to inform and do not pretend to abide by these procedures 100% of the time. Far from it. But when I get a good wine (let us say, Cavagnaro Reserve Malbec), I will surely spray my glass and wipe it down with alcohol to get rid of detergent smell and clean with hot water.