The WSET / ISG Challenge Number 3: Valpolicella

Today we put the tricky one first. If you got it right, give yourself a pat on the back because Frank was being downright devious. And if, like me, you’re always on the lookout for some interesting new pairings, here are a couple that surprised me from Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page’s exception book What to Eat with What You Drink: curries, eggplant, and quiche. Naturally pastas, pizza, and prosciutto are high on the list.

Now here come the answers.

Which of the following wines is made from the same grapes as Valpolicella?

a. Barolo

b. Barbaresco

c. Barbera de Alba

d. Bardinolino

Answer: D. This one is a little tricky. Barolo and Barbaresco use Nebbiolo only. Barbera de Alba is given away with the Barbera, a grape grown in the Piedmonte region of Italy – as are the Barbaresco and Barolo. Barbera is used in Valpolicella up to 15%, but Barbera de Alba does not use the other varieties used

in Valpolicella. Bardinolino (shown right) is in the Vento region as is Valpolicella and all the permitted grapes are the same as Valpolicella.

Which is not a grape used in the production of Valpolicella?

a. Corvina

b. Verdicchio

c. Rondinella

d. Molinara

Answer: B. This one should have been easy. Corvina, Rondinella, and Molinara are grapes permitted in this DOC. Corvinone, which at one time was considered to be a clone of Cornina, is another allowed variety. Molinara is considered the lesser of the varieties and is no long a mandatory component for Valpolicella but is allowed. Verdicchio, however, is a classic white grape and thus not used in Valpolicella. FYI: Verdicchio is also a wine region in Marche of central Italy.

FYI: These are actual practice questions from Frank’s WSET and ISG studies. Let us know how you’re enjoying them and using them.

1982 Vignaveja: An Elegant Old Vintage

Old wines are always something of a mystery. Case in point, the bottle of 1982 Vignaveja we’re about to uncork. What is going to happen when I open this vintage? Will it be dead, oxidized, or will it be a wonderful old bottle full of life still?

This particular bottle is actually Susan’s – a semi bribe and pay back for some editing she did for me at very last minute. The “fee” was two older bottles of wine from my cellar preferable at least one of them a Gaja that she’s always wanted to try. However, she very graciously decided to share this bottle with me. Wonderful woman.

There where problems from the start. A very long cork that really didn’t want to allow itself to be removed from the bottle where it had rested for quite sometime – almost 27 years to be exact. With a lot of work, we finally managed to remove the cork although in many pieces – many, many very small pieces.

As we decanted the wine – surprisingly there was just a little sediment in the bottom of the bottle – a wonderful smell of fruit and leather filled the room. The color was a deep dark red, also very surprising. But would it hold up? Sometimes with older wines, I’ve had them die as soon as soon as they get hit with air.


The colour, too, was amazing for its age – a deep red with a brick red rim and no hints of orange or brown at all. How long would the color last?

Mentally, I was trying to do a WSET tasting note – impossible. Each sip, every glass changed by the minute. The first glass started out as dried roses, dark cherry, and vanilla. Half way through, a little bit of smoky notes made an appearance. The second glass became all about leather and tar, truffles and forest floor. There where still some tannins, but with the corners rounded off, then pure silk. The acidity was present all the way through. Very long finish, quite amazingly long, in fact. The third and final glass started out all truffles, mushrooms, saddle leather, and earth. Then suddenly, with an ounce or so left in the glass, it died and became all sherry notes and acid.

Still, there’s no question this was an amazing wine – Nebbiolo (seen left) again showing remarkably well for its age. Apparently it originally sold for less than $30 although I could find very little about this vintage on the web. Wine Spectator rated the 1983 at 94 points. If any one has any information on this wine, we’d love to hear about it.

Susan’s Note:

Okay, sure I’ll often do Frank’s editing for free but this one was a bit “extreme” – half an hour to take care of some promotional material that should have been at least a four hour job – so I figured it was the perfect opportunity to snag the Gaja I’ve had my eye on for over a year. Success at last.

But I have to confess that somehow this wine would have been much diminished if drunk solo. Just like the older Barolo that will likely be the cost of his next extreme edit.

Wine, Romantic Encounters, and WSET

I think Frank is having an affair. He mutters her name constantly – sometimes lovingly, sometimes not so much so. Her picture appears in books on the coffee table, on the dashboard in the truck, even pinned on the bathroom mirror with some unintelligible scribbles and notations below it. I know he sometimes even takes her to bed.

Like all relationships, there is a definite up and down cycle to his infatuation with this woman. As his WSET exam gets closer he finds her more frustrating. At other times, he finds her charming, witty, and distinctly sexy. But he relies on her totally and without reservation. “I just can’t be without her,” he’ll sometimes confess.

I suspect that if Frank ever actually met her face to face and in person, he would give her the traditional European greeting – three kisses on alternating cheeks – right, left, right. He might even hug her.

Tonight Frank writes the vinticulture portion of his WSET Diploma exam. Perhaps when he’s done and the marks are tallied, he will close the Oxford Companion to Wine and Jancis Robinson will be forgotten for a short while. Perhaps. At least until it’s time for the next exam.

Crazy for Spanish Wines: Tempranillo Meets Toro

We have both been busy lately – a little too busy actually and, regretfully, not much of it to do with wine. The wine shelves are almost bare, dirty laundry piling up, and unanswered emails clogging our inboxes.

However, somewhere in the blur that has been this summer, I did manage to attend – survive might be a more accurate description – an intensive weekend seminar with Pancho Campo (left) and Javier Arana (right) from the Wine Academy of Spain. This was one jam-packed weekend of learning more about Spanish wines. Trust me, there is nothing quite like tasting a big, bold Rioja red at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. Susan would have been in heaven.

The classes ran an exhausting eight hours a day over Saturday and Sunday. During the two days we learned about the climate, topography, history, food, and culture of Spanish wine regions – all 20-plus of them. We tasted more than 45 wines including a couple of big, fat reds from Toro, one of Spain’s lesser-known regions. Made from Tempranillo (that here the Spaniards call Tinta de Toro), these wines are huge and tannic and cry out for roast pig on a spit.

On Monday, we subjected ourselves to a multiple-choice exam and a blind tasting exam – six wines, five questions on each wine. The multiple-choice questions were difficult, but the blind tasting… well excruciating is probably a slight understatement. Several of the 23 participants are working sommeliers already, one woman teaches the entry level WSET training, others have years of experience in the wine industry – all agreed this was the toughest course they’d ever taken.

I passed and am now an official Spanish Wine Educator. But one thing I learned, I’m definitely going to have to drink more Spanish reds.


SUSAN'S NOTE:

Shell-shocked is how I’d best describe Frank on Saturday evening after the first eight hours. He was up at 5:00 am the next two mornings to follow the time honoured tradition of cramming – every book on Spanish wines off the shelves and open.

I still haven’t quite found an accurate descriptor for how he appeared after emerging from the exam, but he was positively vibrating. For several days, he’d just shake his head and look a bit – well, stunned is what comes to mind – every time he poured a glass of red wine and stared into its depths. He was convinced he’d failed the blind tastings miserably.

About a week later, we were at a wine event where we ran into four of five of the participants from the class. Now you have to appreciate, Frank is extremely diplomatic, so it took a few minutes of conversation before he actually asked the first woman how she thought she’d done on the blind tasting – this was, after all, a well respected local sommelier and wine rep with many years of experience. She flashed a devil-may-care smile, threw her hands up in the air, and announced “I blew it – totally, absolutely, completely blew it.” She proceeded to list off the mistakes she’d made. As we walked toward the next table, Frank raised his eyebrows ever-so-slightly and mutter “humph” – that was it, just “humph.”

By the time we’d talked to two more people who had apparently also made significant numbers of wrong calls, Frank was looking much more chuff. The “humph” was replaced with “well, I’ll be damned.” In the end, though we’re still waiting for the actual certificate, the Academy sent an email to say he’d passed with a significantly above average mark on the theory and a solidly above average one on the tasting. Okay, so if he doesn’t boast, I’ll just have to do it for him. But you can be sure I’ll be reminding him frequently that to fill the lack in his education, we need to raise a few more glasses filled with Spanish reds – especially those big, fat, tannic Toros that we’re still trying to track down.

FYI: The seminar was a joint effort between the Society Of Wine Educators and the Wine Academy of Spain and was offered in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, and Vancouver. If you missed it, we’ve heard it will soon be offered on the East Coast.

Ode To Terrior and Tasting Notes

I hate tasting notes. Okay, maybe that’s too harsh. I dislike tasting notes – intensely.

Actually, I’ve written hundreds of tasting notes. I’ve written them on restaurant coasters, on the back of business cards, on program guides, and on god only knows what else. I have also spent many evenings in class writing tasting notes and have committed to memory the WSET systematic approach – I’m sure I can now write a note so anyone who has taken the WSET program would be able to pick out the wine I’m describing.

And I read other people’s tasting notes. Books on evaluating wine fill my bookshelves – lots of pages and hundreds, more likely thousands of hours of reading. I peruse glossy wine magazines, newspapers, and the Internet although many of those entries make me want to cry – bad grammar and a total lack of information. I’ve discovered Wine Spectator even has a game: match the wine with the tasting note plus a silly tasting note generator – fun for a while but the novelty wears off soon.

The problem with most tasting notes is that they don’t actually tell you anything. They don’t put the wine in any context. Is it typical of its type or region? Is it a wine for sipping or one that needs food to be enjoyed more fully? And is there something horribly wrong with saying whether you actually liked it or not?

Most tasting notes are all very politically and technically correct. You put the wine in a glass – preferably the same ISO glass every time so you have a benchmark for comparison. You go through the list for whatever system you use, dutifully comparing what’s in your glass against a series of standards. At the end of the exercise, you allocated points or stars or say it is – or isn’t – technically correct.

Sure, what you’ve just written will remind you, at a later date, whether the vintage you just had tastes like black pepper and blackberries, whether it has some sweet vanilla overtones, or perhaps the zing of lime. But when you get right down to it, most of your efforts have basically been useless.

Where in all these notes is the soul of the wine, the “Ahhhh” that is a truly outstanding wine? Where in these notes is the terroir, the art of the winemaker, the joy and pleasure?

Give me some indication of how the wine affected you. Did you love it or hate it? Was it perfect for sitting on the front porch on a sunny afternoon? Would you buy it for your wife or for yourself? Is this a wine you would take to Mom’s for dinner?

The notes I write for myself tend to descriptors and adjectives that aren’t techno or politically correct. They are about the people I had the wine with, the food or the music that went with a particular bottle of wine. My favorite Amarone I describe as “Sophia Loren dressed in silk and eating black cherries.” Another I describe as “Callas hitting a perfect high C in a Rossini opera.”

Emile Peynaud, writing in his book The Taste of Wine, is able to put techno and art together. He talks of how Bordeaux tasters describe their wines with references to their mistresses, while those from Burgundy use analogies about their wives. Alas, this style of comparison is no longer seen as “correct” although his techno notes still set a benchmark in the wine world.

Most of the wines I drink for pleasure are ones that come from a special “someplace” or are made by small wineries. I guess I am looking for the art of the winemaker. Maybe one day I will find a way to put that in a tasting note.

Missing in Action?

I know Frank is still alive. At least, I’m pretty positive he is. We’ve even managed to have a few semi-conversations over the past few weeks – mostly punctuated by a look that’s a cross between shell shock and “oh my god, I can’t believe this is happening.”

The question is more, where is he? A couple of weeks ago he was in Spain. Prior to that, it was Germany, and now I think he’s somewhere in Greece – or was that the Land of Oz?

He’s also become obsessed with spirits – of the high alcohol kind rather than the mythic variety – and sometimes mumbles numbers like mantras. New oak, old oak, residual sugar, time in the barrel, cases produced, altitudes, acres cultivated – numbers spew from his mouth with but a few words of encouragement from me or anyone else for that matter. It’s probably a good thing he usually locks himself in the living room, because some folk’s sanity has come into question for less.

Now okay, I confess Frank isn’t actually in all those countries physically, but as his WSET exam gets closer –like 11 days away, although who’s counting – he might as well be. Every study session he focuses on a different area of the world, flipping back and forth between reference books at a speed that makes my head spin. I admit his “homework” often makes for some fascinating wine tastings and comparisons but pretty limited conversation. I’ve temporarily given up hope of prolonged philosophical discussions and resigned myself to two-hour dinners being a thing of the past. And lunch… well, who needs to eat when there’s Jancis Robinson to keep you company? (She does have a delightfully wicked sense of humour though.)

So if our postings get somewhat erratic over the next few weeks – please hang in there with us. And while Frank is still in shock over the fact that the past 22 week of this advanced level have flown by so fast, two hours ago he found out what’s involved in the diploma level. One hundred and four weeks plus days of exams. Think I’ll stick with helping out with the homework side of things.