Thursday, November 06, 2003

How sweet it is. . . . .   Last night I was pouring for an event at one of my client’s restaurants (you mean, all I have to do is stand in place and pour wine for a few hours, and I get paid a little extra cash?  Sign me up, I’m the girl who just bought a dining room table!!!)  Actually, it is always interesting to see who shows up to these things – I just consider it 3 hours of prime people watching.  Last night it was a group of mostly very young (many just out of college twenty-somethings), mostly very casually dressed people, some of whom didn’t drink at all (and worst of all made a big deal out of detesting the taste of wine – “oohh, bitter!” squealed one chippy at the taste of the very sweet Riesling) and many of whom decided to just drink beer.   It was interesting to watch, though, and it made me think of myself at their age.  I had been working in restaurants long enough, and cooking at home long enough, to have already become very interested in food and wine, despite my relative lack of knowledge.  I think at this same gathering I would have been interested to taste through the different wines and give all the flavors a try, filing them away for future reference (hm….California pinot, light, a bit sweet, not unpleasant to taste, but maybe too sweet. . . Pouilly fume, dry, crisp, intense. . . .the Cabernet blend has a bit of green-tea flavor, which balances it, keeps it from being heavy. . . .).  Actually, who am I kidding, I’m sure I would have been comparing notes on who did what at the Halloween party and who knew whom in college, too.  But I hope I would have been taking an interest in the wine, somewhere.  Hey, I’m a geek – I probably would have.   What I thought was most interesting overall was the immediate response these guys had to the wines.  They liked the sweet ones. I thought a couple of the guys were especially brave to admit, right in front of me, the blonde wine-pouring chick, and their friends, that they wanted a wine that was white and a little sweet.  They had a definite preference for the Riesling, which they drank with no fear of being considered, well, a bit fey.  I actually preferred them, simple palates and all, to the guys who just drank Amstel light because they didn’t even know where to begin with the wine and weren’t willing to try.  But y’know, these Riesling-drinking guys hit on something that is really true – most Americans  enjoy wines that are light and a little sweet!  Some Californians have figured this out (look at Caymus with their Conundrum – there’s a wine that is a work of marketing genius – it has sweetness that isn’t too heavy, and lots of flavor. . . . 4 out of 5 average Americans will LOVE this stuff!!) while others have remained fixated on the sweetness and forget about the lightness and make big sweet wines with a lot of oak that are actually kind of gross (so many Californian chardonnays.)  As soon as they can cut back on the oak and lighten up the wines a bit, voila!  No doubt people will go back to Chardonnay.  (The winemakers, at least those who are running purely for-profit ventures, will figure this out soon.  They have to – after all, they’ve planted so much chardonnay and they have to sell it, somehow!! If no one drinks it oaky and heavy, eventually they’ll start making it less oaky and lighter, have no fear.)   But you know, this is actually the root of California wines – we started out with chenin-based jug wines that were lightish, sweetish, and pleasant.  Sure, they weren’t going to win any wine awards, but people liked them (hey, Boone’s Farm built the Gallo fortune) and some of them weren’t bad wines.  Now that everything is supposed to be “dry” the young’uns just ain’t drinking wine like they used to.  Not that I’m advocating for people to drink Boone’s Farm (yuck) but it will be interesting to see if California can come down off its “Emperor’s New Clothes,” “Fine Wine” high-horse and make something that these adorable twenty-somethings will actually drink.  Used to be, they would start with white zinfandel.  But that is soooo not cool these days. . . .   Meanwhile, on the home front, for some reason it has been all Burgundy, all the time, around here.  No sweetie-rich wines for these wine guzzlers geeks!  I guess since we can’t seem to sell any of those 2000-vintage generic Burgundies to our customers, we’ve decided that we have to drink them!!  (ah, the real life of the wine importer emerges – we sell the good vintages and drink the less good.  And presumably cook with the truly bad). True, they aren’t the super-ripe charmers that the 1999’s were, but they do have a certain oh-so-drinkable lightness. Because Pinot Noir doesn’t have to have the ripe candy fruit to taste good.   Sometimes these “off” vintages can have a lot of immediate charm.  And sometimes, a few years later, they surprise you by suddenly flowering into something really charming and pleasant.  Not deep, but fragrant and pretty and above all nice to drink.  So Bourgogne Rouge 2000 it is, right now, at our house.  Not that you’ll probably find any yourself in your good local wine shop, since the good local wine shops seem to be leaving all the 2000 BR for us.  <sigh>   PS  I made some wonderful pumpkin ravioli, from a recipe in last week’s NYT. (would link to it, but now (of course) it’s archived.  Rats!).  Will therefore have to post the recipe, and my notes on making it, when my stupid shoulder stops acting up (which always happens in November, after two months of extreme work stress and lugging wine all over creation Manhattan. . . and EVERYTHING makes it worse, including going to the gym, typing, riding in a car, raking leaves <hee-hee, there was lots of that last weekend>.)  But I’d recommend trying the recipe if you need a long weekend cooking project (it took me 2 hours, not including roasting the pumpkin, but for that I made 50 water-glass sized raviolis that are DIVINE.  I have 25 in the freezer to impress people with at our next dinner party. . . . or, more likely, for a treat one night when neither of us feels like cooking, in case that night ever comes.)       9:28:46 AM    comment []