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.
A few days ago, a Young Winos member posted a Slate article on the LA chapter’s new Facebook group (which any LA-based Wino who wishes I would e-mail him or her more often would be well-advised to join). The article, entitled “Drink Cheap Wine,” purports to illuminate the numerous reasons why drinking inexpensive wine is as good as, or perhaps even preferable to, shelling out serious green for serious white and/or red. While the Young Winos have always been ardent proponents of seeking out bargain bottles, we’re more than a little skeptical of the logic by which the author arrives at his ostensibly sensible thesis, and we’d advise our readers to calm their nerves with a humongous glass of something alcoholic before diving into this one.
With regular Slate wine columnist Mike Steinberger presumably still rocking a nasty hangover from his indulgent survey of super-sweet German Rieslings last month, the “cheap wine” op-ed was penned by Slate contributor Brian Palmer, who’s lent his everyman voice to numerous topics (recent articles bearing his byline include “Can You Be Scared Enough To Pee Your Pants?” and “I Just Want an Escort — are there any who aren’t prostitutes?”). Palmer attacks the sacred cows of the wine world with iconoclastic gusto, insisting that wine critics are about as useful as Latin instructors and no more relevant, that a wine’s price is no indicator of its quality, and that a wine’s quality is tantamount to its drinkability. The Winos love a healthy dose of iconoclasm, and we love the idea that wine should be cheap. What we don’t love, though, is faux-populist, simplistic and misleading tirades against the basic truisms of this delicious vice of ours. (Might want to top off that humongous glass before proceeding.)
It’s the first Young Winos meeting of the new year, and what better way to usher in a new annum than by breaking free of old habits and trying something new? In all of our 225 weeknight tastings thus far (yes, I know, I’m also pretty floored by that obscene number), we’ve never actually devoted our attention to what would seem intuitively to be a topic of great potential: wines from where people are from. Los Angeles is a destination for young people from so many parts of the country — wouldn’t it follow that they’d all have hometown wine favorites they’d like to share with their fellow ex-pats in LA?
If we lived in Europe, that would undoubtedly be the case. Local winemaking is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years in every part of the continent climatically amenable to viticulture. It might’ve been the case in the US, too, were it not for Prohibition, a horribly destructive period in our nation’s cultural and culinary history. Vines were torn up, fields replanted, wineries razed. Following Prohibition’s repeal, cooperatives in California operated by Italian immigrants (Gallo, anyone?) flooded the market with jug wine, sweet wine, and cleverly marketed concoctions like Thunderbird and Ripple; later, the ’60s and ’70s would usher in a new breed of California wineries (Robert Mondavi, Heitz, Stag’s Leap, Jordan, etc.) devoted to achieving excellence in varietal wines, particularly Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon. Sadly, all of this was at the expense of nationwide local winemaking, which was slower to rebound from Prohibition and adjust to the changing palates of American consumers. (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…)