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It’s also like cooking.
But wine is not like baking.
Beer is like baking.
Have you ever cracked open a classic IPA? Have you ever cracked open a few hundred over the course of a couple of years? I have. They’re delicious and they always taste the same.
Have you ever baked a carrot cake? I have. They’re delicious. And they always taste the same.
Making beer is like following a cake recipe. If you add just a smidge too much baking soda, do not fluff the flour enough, or mix the batter too much your cake is ruined. Beer is the same. Once a brewer finds a recipe for his IPA, he sticks to it. Beer and baking are all about consistency.
Why is wine like cooking? Because making wine is like cooking a chicken. You can roast, pan sear, poach, braise, grill and fry a chicken. Each preparation is uniquely different and each can be delicious. You can take a single grape, say Chenin Blanc, and make a still wine that is anywhere from bone dry to dessert sweet. You can also make it sparkling. Depending on what the weather was like that year, the wine can taste like ripe fruit or wet river stones. Or both at the same time. The grape is the same yet the outcome is dramatically different.
Making wine and cooking a chicken is all about heterogeneity. It’s what makes cooking decidedly exciting and terrifying, sometimes all at once. And this is where the sex part comes in.
Wine is like sex because wine can be breathtaking, engaging, beautiful, long, full-bodied, complex, catch you off guard, and leave you wanting more. It can also be short, disappointing, austere, weird, lacking depth and character, bitter and make you regret everything in the morning.
Wines from California with ripe, jammy fruit and high alcohol are often described as slutty. Wines from Burgundy, France, can be described as sexy, mouthwatering, ethereal…a once in a lifetime experience. Like good sex, good wine can ruin you (in the best way possible) for the rest of your life.
But what makes a wine good? Why compare it to something as profound as sex? This is where wine becomes infinitely interesting.
Good wine is broken into two parts. The first is concrete. The second is a bit harder to classify and is largely based around feeling.
Firstly, a good wine, much like a chicken, needs to be ‘raised’ correctly. No one wants to eat a chicken that is pumped full of growth hormones, never sees sunlight and is constantly stepping in its own fecal matter, which necessitates the need for serious antibiotics. You could call this ‘producing’ chicken rather than ‘raising’ them, which is why I love the French.
There isn’t a word in the French language for winemaker. The word they use is Vigneron, which translates to winegrower. And when a wine is transferred to barrel to be aged? They don’t use the word age, opting instead for élevage, which translates to ‘raising.’
And all of this implies a very hands-off approach to wine.
Terroir is the next, and possibly the most important word in the whole world of wine. It doesn’t have an exact translation into English but basically means ‘a sense of place.’ A wine that expresses terroir expresses where its from, making it truly unique. Chardonnay grown in California will never, ever taste like Chardonnay grown in Chablis, France because the soil in Chablis is full of fossilized sea shells and nowhere in California does that exist.
And this is a good thing.
It means that there are people out there making wine that isn’t homogenous. This wine expresses something more than it’s just from France. It’s wine from a particular place: Chablis. It becomes interesting. It isn’t oaky and big and bland. It’s complex and full of life. This is the hallmark of a good wine – its distinctiveness.
The second part of what makes a wine good is all about the drinker. It’s what I like vs. what you like.
There is a chef in New York City named Eric Ripert and he owns one of the most important restaurants in the city – La Bernardin. La Bernardin is a seafood restaurant that has been awarded 4 stars from the New York Times, holds 3 Michelin stars, has won SEVEN James Beard Awards and sits at #18 on the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. If you ever get to New York and don’t go there, you shouldn’t be reading this blog.
Eric also has Aldo Sohm as his beverage director who was awarded the highly-coveted title, “Best Sommelier in the World 2008,” by the World Sommelier Association. Aldo oversees a wine cellar of more than 15,000 bottles from over 900 selections. He knows wine. Eric knows fish.
And yet, when Eric sits down to eat a delicate white fish, his go-to wine is red Bordeaux.
BORDEAUX!
Eating a delicate fish with red Bordeaux is like eating chateaubriand with motor oil. It isn’t done!
Even Aldo has said numerous times that it kills him to watch his chef sit down and have what might be considered one of the worst food and wine pairings of all time.
And yet, who cares?
Why does it matter?
At least Eric knows what he likes and he’s comfortable enough with who he is to live that out. He’s not looking for constant approval from his insanely talented wine director. Or anyone else. And I like that. I need to be more like that.
So wine is like sex and it’s also like cooking. And when you pair all three in the same night you end up pregnant with your surprise third child…trust me on this one…
Sam works at Les Merchands Wine Bar & Merchant and they sell wine. You can contact Sam directly to get some of that wine with all sorts of terroir and sex appeal.
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