Young Winos of LA

I can’t help but suspect that any overlap which exists between the readership of this blog and the viewing audience of the ABC comedy Cougar Town is probably on the smaller side (and not just because the readership of this blog is on the smaller side, which is putting it politely). As I understand it, Cougar Town is billed a show about a 40-something divorcée with a predilection for dating younger men. However, as the hilarious compilation video below clearly demonstrates, it’s really a show about a 40-something divorcée with an unbridled and fanatical thirst for fermented grape juice.

The broader social trend ostensibly being depicted in Cougar Town — namely, Americans’ increased consumption of wine, particularly in casual and unpretentious settings — is one that tends to receive applause from nearly every corner of the wine world. Certainly, any presentation of wine as an accessible commodity to be enjoyed by all is a welcome departure from that hackneyed depiction of wine as the sole purview of the elitist, antagonistic wine snob whose arcane knowledge of vintages and varietals merely fuels his own superiority complex. The emerging wine culture portrayed in Cougar Town, however, seems to represent the opposite extreme, and I find myself worried that wine’s well-deserved reputation for complexity and intricacy is being lost in this nascent wave of empowered suburbanite bacchanalia. Wine is delicious, yes, and it’s good for getting you drunk, of course — but those two virtues must always be complimented by a healthy dose of context and understanding for all of wine’s enjoyment potential to truly be realized.

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Since transitioning our communications to Facebook, we’ve been made aware that several LA chapter members are having trouble receiving the weekly e-mails.  We don’t want anything to interfere with your ability to get your drink on, so we’ve prepared some instructions to ensure that you receive all of our urgent dispatches.

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The time has come for the two-week championship finale of our fifth semi-annual March-adjacent pseudo-sports-themed blind tasting tournament. For the past four “March Craziness” meetings, we’ve clawed our ways through challenging and diverse matchups of similar and/or frequently-confused wines. Now it’s time for two rounds of balls-out championship play, in which we draw on the blind-tasting skills we’ve picked up over the last few weeks (as well as the palates we’ve developed over years of drinking) in our efforts to be crowned the official Young Winos blind tasting champion. Next week, we’ll be tasting red wines, but this Tuesday we start with the whites.

OFFICIAL RULES:
The three varietals we’ll be tasting on Tuesday night are Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, and Chardonnay. Every bottle must show up in a brown paper bag. (If you don’t have a brown paper bag, then hide the bottle under your shirt or something, and we’ll give you a bag when you arrive.) You’ll write your name on the bag, and you’ll stash it in the fridge so that no one learns what it is. We’ll pour them one at a time, taste them in silence, submit our guesses, and reveal the bottles as we go. At the end of the meeting, points will be tallied. (more…)

Every “old world” varietal (i.e. most of the major ones) tastes significantly different when grown in the “new world,” where the climate, the winemaking practices, and the laws governing wine production are nearly always drastically different than in the old country. The Rhône grapes, however, do a better job than some other prominent varietals of maintaining their essential “old world” character when grown in warmer climes, particularly the reds; a great Grenache / Syrah / Mourvedre blend from California will ideally display a lot of the same earthy tobacco notes endemic to its French forefathers. Or will it? Perhaps our palates only perceive earth and tobacco on when Rhône-inspired reds when tasted against a backdrop of Zinfandels and Merlots. On a recent Wednesday, we decided to find out for good. (more…)