People keep blogs so that they can confess the details of their lives to strangers, right? Well, here’s my confession: I don’t know much about wine.

White is cold and red isn’t. Most pinots beat most merlots. California is better than France is better than New Zealand is better than California (Wait, I forgot South Africa). Grapes and all that.

Make no mistake, there’s wine I like and wine I don’t like, and I definitely wouldn’t categorize myself as “not a wine person” — but at a restaurant I always try to find someone better-qualified to order wine.

So, as when our great liquids-themed junket came to a stop at Wagner Vineyards in New York’s picturesque-but-seriously-kinda-chilly Finger Lakes region, I was apprehensive. I’ve never done a wine tasting before, and pretty much all the terminology I know comes from watching Sideways. (It’s also why I don’t buy merlots, but that’s neither here nor there.) Thankfully, we needed lunch and they had both a restaurant and a microbrewery. One steak sandwich and one $3.50 glass of surprisingly-good doppelbock (not the world’s most audacious brew, but it had a solid flavor as memory serves) later, and I was very slightly less nervous.

Still more thankfully, the basic tasting of their flagship wines was $1/person. It’s always comforting to know that even if you screw up completely you’re not out that much.

I was travelling with a serious wine person (winie? wino? whatever), so a lot of the tasting consisted of me watching what he was doing mimicking that poorly. Here’s what I learned.

• Smelling the wine is important. Protip: when you don’t know what you’re talking about, limit yourself to grunts. “Mmm!” = “This is good.” “Hmm.” = “Doesn’t smell like much.” “Yuck” = “Rubbing alcohol.” (not that that last one happened.) People who know more than you will use terminology (”fruity”, “flowery”, “oaky”) that you can rip off and use later.
• Washing the glass before switching between really different kinds of wine (after one particularly weird wine, I actually washed my mouth out too — of course, Dandan bought a bottle of that stuff and you’d better believe I helped her drink it that night).
• It’s okay to dump the wine out out if you don’t like it or you’ve just made up your mind. In fact, you should probably do that occasionally or people will think you’re an alcoholic. (Wait - the goal wasn’t to get tipsy for $1?).
• All the other groups will be conspicuously drunk already. At 1 PM. At a winery that you have to drive to. Actually, it’s worse than that — a minibus full of kids (at least they weren’t driving) showed up as we were leaving — it was someone’s 21st birthday, and both the birthday boy and his 15 friends were dressed in fine New Jersey attire. That’s the singular reason we had to get out of there in a hurry.

So how was the wine? Umm… I rather liked the dry riesling, and would have picked up a bottle or two if the bus full of guidos hadn’t showed up. The Gewürztraminer was pretty good too. (Why this place made mostly German wines I’ll leave up to you and a climate map.) The “ice wine” was made the cheap way (put the grapes into the freezer), which conveniently made it cost $20/bottle instead of like triple that, but it also meant that they couldn’t call it ice wine. Whatever, it was a good desert wine. Everything else I’ve forgotten about, which could be a commentary on me or the wine.

On a more general note: the Finger Lakes wine country is a pretty place to visit, and there are a lot of picturesque small towns and dozens of nice wineries. I’m not sure I’d recommend going in March like we did, but the good news is that you pretty much get wherever you are to yourself.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 10:42 am and is filed under Review, Traveling, Wine.