White Bordeaux

The next wine we tasted was a 2005 Chateau Carbonnieux from the Pessac-Leognan appellation of Bordeaux. This was the most expensive bottle we tasted so far at $42. As far as wine goes I guess that is not that much but for someone like me who typically buys bottles wine in the range of $10-$20 at the local liquor store, and most often the grocery store, I was expecting greatness for $42.

The wine was 70% Sauvignon Blanc and 30% Semillon. I do not recall if I ever tasted Semillon but I know I tend to like Sauvignon Blanc so it was another indication I was going to like this wine. On the other hand this is the first white wine we tasted that was aged in oak. I am sure there are a lot of quality white wines aged in oak but the my first thought was of the cheap Chardonnays I have often tasted which I am not a fan of.


The wine had a deeper color, was less acidic and had more body than the previous wines we tasted. Some of that I assume is due to the age and some may also be due to the addition of the Semillon grape in the blend. The wine had a more intense smell than previous wines. I am not comfortable with identifying the various aromas of wine yet but I can say for sure that the smell of the oak came across very strong. My wife who has a much better sense of smell than I do also said she sensed aromas of vanilla, musty and mulling spice. I did sense the drying sensation from the tannins.


So overall what did we think? ... In our first few tastes we really did not like it. This was a 42 dollar bottle white Bordeaux so we tried to warm up to it but we did not get there. We decided that maybe we needed to have it with some food so we broke out a few types of crackers, unfortunately, we had finished some nice cheese we had earlier in the day. The wine actually tasted worse with the crackers. Eventually we moved on to some whooppie pies we had for desert. We tasted the wine again and it actually was not bad. I am not going to suggest you buy this wine to accompany desert but something about the sweetness of the whoopie pies made this wine much more palatable than with the saltiness of the crackers. As I learn more about food and wine pairing maybe I will understand why.


This brings me to another issue I have with our current method of tasting. In general we are sitting around tasting wine by itself. I know there is an art to pairing food with wine and the same wine may be great with one dish and not so good with another. However, with no food what should we be looking for? When I took a wine tasting class a few years ago the teacher used the term deck wine, meaning that it is a good wine to drink by itself just handing out on the deck with some friends. I think without understanding food and wine pairing our ratings are primarily based on if the wine we are tasting would make a good deck wine.

Tasting wines from the Loire Valley

In the first tasting we did, we tasted a Riesling from the Alsace region of France. Wines from Alsace are similar to wines from the US in that they are named based on the grape varietal. Alsace is the only region in France that uses the varietal in the name. Once you move out of Alsace the wines are named based on the region where the grapes are grown. Specific regions, or appellations, are legally defined and protected geographic regions. In France these are protected by the Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC).

In the next tasting, we tasted two wines from the Loire Valley region of France. The Loire Valley actually has over 70 appellations under AOC control (87 according to wikipedia). Of these the best known, or at least most available in the US, are Pouilly-Fumé, Muscadet and Sancerre. Pouilly-Fumé and Sancerre are made from 100% Sauvignon Blanc. Muscadet is made from 100% Melon de Bourgogne.

In you are interested in reading an incredibly detailed description of the regions within the Loire Valley you can read the Loire Wine Guide on the thewinedoctor.com.

The two wines we tasted where the 2007 Sauvion Muscadet de Sèvre-et-Maine and the 2007 Pascal Jolivet Pouilly-Fumé. We like both wines and in our inexperienced opinion the Muscadet was dry and light bodied. The Pouilly-Fumé was a bit less dry and was more medium bodied.

First Tasting - Trimbach Riesling

Before getting into the details of our first wine tasting, I want to talk a little about the tasting environment. Maybe after you have more experience you can form your opinion of a wine in any setting, but when you are novice like myself I think the ideal situation is to have an environment where you can really concentrate on the wine.

So what was our environment for the first tasking? 

• 5PM
• my wife was trying to finish cooking diner
• I was trying to entertain our 2 and half year old son

Ideal? Probably not, but we had some ambitious drinking plans for that night. It was New Year's eve and we were planning on tasting the 2007 Trimbach Riesling and then drinking a bottle a champagne. We opened the bottle, tried to taste and think about the wine while everything else was going on. Bottom line - it did not work. We decided to just drink a glass or so with dinner and then revisit the wine again after our son went to bed.

Now that it was quite in the house we sat down together at the kitchen table to taste the Trimbach Riesling again. This Riesling was from the Alsace region of France. As described, but not expected, this Riesling was not sweet like the German Rieslings I have tasted in the paste. It was actually rather dry. The thing that stood out to me the most about this wine was the acid. When I first sipped it I really felt the acid on the side of my tongue and cheeks. Overall, on a scale of 1 to 5 I gave the wine 3 and my wife gave it a 2 and a half.

We were a little behind schedule but we did manage to have some champagne as well.  We did not finish either bottle but I think we made a respectable effort and most important, by the time the ball dropped at midnight, I was feeling pretty happy.

Tasting worksheet

Before we got started with the first tasting I wanted to have a page to take notes about the wine we are tasting.  The Windows on the World book actually has an example of a sheet Kevin Zraly uses in his class.  His sheet is based on his 60-second wine expert tasting method.  The basic idea is that you should focus on the wine for 60-seconds after you swallow it.  You can read the details in a post he made on Gather.com.  I had two problems with this tasting worksheet.  The first problem is that it was in the physical book so I could not easily print copies.  The second problem was that I wanted a few more descriptors on the sheet to help me as a novice and to hopefully make the process a bit more consistent as I taste multiple wines.


I searched the web and found a lot of examples of tasting notes and scoring sheets.  Some were very basic and I did not think I was ready for scoring.  The Wine for Newbies site pointed me to De Long's Wine Tasting form.  This seemed like the best form for me so I printed a couple of copies in preperation for my first tasting.  You can download a copy from their site.  They also sell a hardcover book version on Amazon that contains additional information to help you get started with tasting.


At some point I may try to create my own form that combines a bunch of concepts from many different forms I saw, but for now I will stick with the De Long form.

Buying wines for the first tasting

Class one in the Windows on the World book is about the White Wines of France. The chapter ends with suggested wine tastings for ten wines broken into five different parts. I expect most of the tasting to be done by just my wife and me so we decided to do each part on a different night in attempt to avoid a lot of unfinished bottles. Based on our schedules, young son, etc. these five tastings may take a while, but like I said in the introduction, I am planning to work through this book slowly.

I wanted to prepare for the first two tastings so I needed to get some wine. One of the reasons I decided to use this book and not just pick up where I left off with Adrea Immer's book was that I assume since her book was about five years old her tasting recommendations would be out of date. For these tastings I need to get: 

• Trimbach Riesling 2007
• Muscadet, Marquis de Goulaine 2007
• Pouilly Fume, Jolivet 2007

Now the big test - can I find these wines?

I happen to be lucky enough to live in state where I can buy wine at the grocery store and even the gas station. I decided to skip both of these options while searching for these three bottles. I went to a bigger liquor store that I considered to have a big selection. To my delight, when I went to the French section the Trimbach Riesling was easy to find. Unfortunately, they did not have a single Muscadet and none of the Pouilly Fume's on the recommended list.

I came home and decided to use the internet. My first stop was Wine.com. Wine.com had two pages of Muscadet's listed but they were all sold out. After a couple of hours on the internet I found a site named Gary's Wine & Marketplace. They did not have the Marquis de Goulaine Muscadet but they did have a Sauvion Muscadet which was on the other recommended list. They also had the Jolivet Pouilly Fume. For good measure I decided to also buy a Sauvion Sancerre since it sounded good when I read the information about the wines of the Loire Valley. The good news was that I now had my wines for the first two tastings. The bad news was that I had to pay $20 to ship three bottles of wine which was about 25% of the total cost.

In the future I hope to find a better local source or figure out how to get a deal on shipping.

One additional note, after I already purchased my wines from Gary's I found a site named wine-searcher.com. According to their about page, the site has " 3,541,969 offers from the price lists of 15,822 wine merchants." I was able to find the Marquis de Goulaine Muscadet using this site. The site also makes it very easy to see the prices of the same wine from multiple merchants.

Introduction to my wine blog

This is a story of a wine novice trying to learn a little about wine. This is actually my second or third attempt at this depending on how I count. The first attempt was from a book named "Great Wine Made Simple," by Andrea Immer. I thought was actually an excellent book and I really liked her approach. The book starts out by teaching you about what she calls the big six varietals which are Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Merlot, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Sauvignon. This was great introduction and taught me that there was lot more than Merlot and Pino Grigio. Unfortunately, I never really made past that chapter in the book. That left my wine world at the six varietals plus one or two others learnt about on my own.

My second attempt to learn something about wine was really more of a social exercise than a real attempt to learn something about wine, at least that is how it turned out. My wife and I signed up for a wine class at the Boston Center for Adult Education (BCAE) with another couple we are friends with. It gave us an opportunity to get together once a week and sample a bunch of wines. The one thing I can say that I learnt in that class was that wine has many strange smells and tastes...or least that is how they are described. I remember when the instructor explained how the wine smelt like a barnyard or wet rocks. Well, I don't particularly care for the smell of a barnyard and don't know what wet rocks smell like. I don't want to do any disservice to the BCAE. I think it is great institution and I would recommend the class to anyone in the Boston area. I had a great time at the class I just don't feel I know much more about wine today because of it.

Now to my third and current attempt to learn something about wine. I was sitting in a bookstore one day and came across the new addition of the "Windows on the World Complete Wine Course," by Kevin Zraly. I thought that would make a good Christmas gift for me so I asked Santa for it and low and behold I got it. So my plan, at least for today, is to work my way though this book, slowly, and hopefully learn something about wine. So far, from what I have read I like. In the first few pages of the book the author talks about the smell of a wine. He explains that when asked what the wine smells like he prefers not to use subjective words and instead says "the wine smells like a French white Burgundy." He suggests that over time and through lots of practice you should try "to 'memorize' the smell of individual grape varieties." This approach seems to make a lot of sense to me because I would rather spend my time drinking and smelling wine as opposed to hanging out at barnyards and rock quarries to memorize those smells.

So why blog about it?  At the least it is way for me to keep track of what I did and learned through the process.  And maybe, who knows, someone else will learn something from it or find something useful.