Those are perhaps the most unfortunate words I've had to say in quite a while. I recently went on a little jaunt to the other side of Lake Okanagan, to Summerland, with a visiting friend and fellow wine fiend. We were hitting up our third winery, after a slightly disappointing show from the previous two. This was not because of poor quality wines -I think - but because of samples too small to allow for a proper taste of what they had to offer. How can you check out a wine if the droplet at the bottom is so small as to be almost colourless and effectively indistinguishable from a drop of water? How do you swish?! Well, you just barely do and you'd better sniff that stuff damn hard before you try it, because there won't even be enough of it to spit out. Point being, I understand full well that it costs a good deal to have a tasting room and hand out samples of your wine to strangers, but if you're already committed to the thing, don't stinge! Worse than leaving a bad impression of the winery with the customer, which it might do, it leaves almost no impression of the wine! And it's worse still when they charge you for such a piddling sample! Sorta defeats the purpose, doesn't it?
Er... Well, back to the story, then! We were at the third winery, and were rather quickly filled with hope when we saw the stunning building: think Santa Fe meets mod. Quirky, but it worked. I supposed the unreal view helped. We entered to find an elderly couple raving to the fellow behind the tasting bar about how fantastic his wines are and how they were going to buy a case with everything in it and how they were going to leave him their entire fortune... Well maybe not the last one but they really were going on. So I sidled up to the bar and asked for a taste - and was offered to taste it all. Dandy, I thought. Oh, boy, had I only known what I was in for.
After a rather stingy sample (perhaps it's a trend in that neighbourhood?) of the first two unremarkable wines, I was suddenly given a reasonable size sample of a third wine, a 2006 Sauvignon Blanc/Chardonnay blend priced at a reasonable CDN$14.90. I enthusiastically sniffed - and was horrified by the most potent smell of armpits I've smelled since that time I visited that big and incredibly packed cathedral in Strasbourg in the dead of summer. My nose just about fled my face in fury at being so cruelly mistreated.
Unfortunately, this was shortly after the raving elderly couple had departed with a caseload of goodies, and my friend had stepped out to take a call. This left me eye to eye with the man I have no doubt owned the winery. And so I did it. Putting a carved-in-marble type smile on my face, I grunted Mmm! and took a nice big sip of his armpit wine. It tasted almost impossibly worse than it smelled. He was still staring at me. Nice! I spluttered. Fortunately, his winemaker/sweat extractor chose that moment to call out to him and he turned away - at which point I hastily dumped my wine.
Still more unfortunately, he returned only a moment later, and had poured another sample into my glass before I had a chance to scream and fall to the floor twitching in reaction to my last taste. Tragically, the pit-wine had sufficiently tainted the glass (who knew that was possible?) to make everything he poured into my glass taste rather like a hockey player's skate midway through the 3rd overtime of a playoff game.
Now, I know I'm a fool to have let myself be subjected to such a sense-searing experience, but I was trying to be nice. My bad. At any rate, this tasting experience made me a little curious as to the limits of sweatiness that are acceptable in a wine, and in which wines they are expected. I poked around on the Internet, and found surprisingly little, save some rather amusing tasting notes: intense cats pee aromas - v. v. good! - I could drink this. Yikes! That's more than I ever wanted to know about that guy.
As it turns out, Sauvignon Blanc can often have a sweaty aroma, but it tends to be balanced out by other aromas. For instance, some other guy's notes said: Gooseberry, grassy, bright aromas, sweet herbal flavours, intense, lots of cats pee, quite classic. Musky, sweaty, sherbet, long and persistent. A little sweat never hurt nobody, right? But it's when it's the only smell that it is a big fault, and apparently, according to Tom Stevenson's article, Aromas & Flavours, "an unattractive human-like sweatiness can be produced by a number of compounds: Butanoic acid (butyric acid), pentanoic acid (valeric acid), octanoic acid (caprylic acid), hexanoic acid (caproic acid), 2-methylbutanoic acid, and 3-butanoic acid." There you have it, if you understood that.
Surprisingly, having looked through a good portion of my books this evening as well as Googling the pants off the subject, I haven't come to a good conclusion or understanding of this overwhelming armpit smell. I'm guessing it was bacterial, but I could be way off. I'll follow up when I find a good answer.
15.7.07
Plonk rawks...
when you make it into sangria! I had a couple of pretty harsh bottles of homebrew to deal with following a visit from a friend who works - guess where? - at a homebrew place. Of course, he had brought the bottles in order to get me to see if I could taste the difference between a cold-stabilized wine and one which had not been cold-stabilized. The answer to that question is a thunderous yes. Cold stabilization certainly took the mouth-rending, acidic edge off the homebrew. At any rate, no one wanted to drink the last two bottles, so I went ahead and did this to them:
Ingredients:
2 bottles plonky homebrew
2 oranges
1 kiwi
1 apple
1 cup lychee juice
1 cup orange juice
1/2 can soda water
1/2 cup sugar
Method:
Wash all fruit thoroughly. Peel one orange, and plonk all the separate slices into a large punch bowl. Cut the other orange in half, and squeeze the juice out into the bowl, allowing some of the pulp to fall in. Dig out the kiwi, chop it up roughly and chuck it in with the orange. Slice and core the apple - you can leave the skin on - and pitch this in as well. In a separate container, mix the sugar with 1/2 cup of the wine, and stir until the sugar is dissoved. Add a little more wine if needed to completely dissolve the sugar. Add the the wine syrup to the punch bowl. Now add the rest of that first bottle of wine, and stir. Then add all the remaining liquid ingredients, stirring very well as you go. Put the whole thing in the fridge for a couple of hours, (It's even better and fruiter the second day!) and serve in tall glasses over ice, with orange and/or apple slices at the bottom. A mint or lemon balm leaf to garnish wouldn't hurt either. Enjoy!
Ingredients:
2 bottles plonky homebrew
2 oranges
1 kiwi
1 apple
1 cup lychee juice
1 cup orange juice
1/2 can soda water
1/2 cup sugar
Method:
Wash all fruit thoroughly. Peel one orange, and plonk all the separate slices into a large punch bowl. Cut the other orange in half, and squeeze the juice out into the bowl, allowing some of the pulp to fall in. Dig out the kiwi, chop it up roughly and chuck it in with the orange. Slice and core the apple - you can leave the skin on - and pitch this in as well. In a separate container, mix the sugar with 1/2 cup of the wine, and stir until the sugar is dissoved. Add a little more wine if needed to completely dissolve the sugar. Add the the wine syrup to the punch bowl. Now add the rest of that first bottle of wine, and stir. Then add all the remaining liquid ingredients, stirring very well as you go. Put the whole thing in the fridge for a couple of hours, (It's even better and fruiter the second day!) and serve in tall glasses over ice, with orange and/or apple slices at the bottom. A mint or lemon balm leaf to garnish wouldn't hurt either. Enjoy!
wino goes shopping
In an attempt to get my head around the actual process of winemaking, I decided to take a trip down to Vancouver and go and see the lovely people at Bosa Grape and Juice (not the best website, but the catalogue is worth looking at, and if you're interested, you can buy flash-frozen grapes from the in November.). Now, I'd never heard of this place before I took a short winemaking course in April, at which point it seemed to be the only thing anyone wanted to talk about; since then, it's been Bosa-this and Bosa-that. I was told they would have anything and everything I could possibly wish for in terms of small- to medium-scale winemaking supplies, and so I went to have a look - and lo and behold, the place was a veritable candy shop for the wine freak.
Pretty much as soon as we walked in we were met by the owner, Flori, who took us under her wing and made it her mission to teach us everything she possibly could in the whopping four-plus hours she spent with us. She was immensely informative and helpful, and literally took us around the entire store, explaining what everything was, what it does, and when to use it - and in order! That took skill, considering they had just changed locations and were only semi-unpacked in what used to be a bathroom-tile showroom; that explained the shower in the corner of the showroom. Anyway, the whole thing was rounded out by lots of conversation and a brief interruption by the owner of a new winery located very near us on the Naramata Bench, to whom I was introduced. This proved to me (because sometime I do need proof) that real winemakers do indeed shop there, not just amateurs and dorks like me.
So, the long and short of it is I got all kinds of winemaking paraphernalia - pretty much what I need to take me up to bottling - I'll have to go back for that stuff, there was only so much room in the truck! Although I did get a sulphiter (Ferrari brand, baby! Hah!) and and 82-peg bottle tree. Ah, and I forgot to mention this: I also picked up the necessary equipment for making some fruit wines, AKA country wines, and liqueurs. I'm planning on making my grandmother's recipe for lemon liqueur, and some bizarro fruit wines. Almond wine just sounds like fun, doesn't it?
But back to the story at hand: as my first experiment, I'm going to do a kit merlot (yeah, gross, I know), just so I can get the hang of the basic methodology and then work my way up from there. But at least along the way I can test the wine and learn how to do all that kinda basic stuff, as I now have a pH meter, a hydrometer, etc. No use wasting real grapes just yet. At worst, I figure I can whip up a whole lot of yummy sangira and throw a big party.
Pretty much as soon as we walked in we were met by the owner, Flori, who took us under her wing and made it her mission to teach us everything she possibly could in the whopping four-plus hours she spent with us. She was immensely informative and helpful, and literally took us around the entire store, explaining what everything was, what it does, and when to use it - and in order! That took skill, considering they had just changed locations and were only semi-unpacked in what used to be a bathroom-tile showroom; that explained the shower in the corner of the showroom. Anyway, the whole thing was rounded out by lots of conversation and a brief interruption by the owner of a new winery located very near us on the Naramata Bench, to whom I was introduced. This proved to me (because sometime I do need proof) that real winemakers do indeed shop there, not just amateurs and dorks like me.
So, the long and short of it is I got all kinds of winemaking paraphernalia - pretty much what I need to take me up to bottling - I'll have to go back for that stuff, there was only so much room in the truck! Although I did get a sulphiter (Ferrari brand, baby! Hah!) and and 82-peg bottle tree. Ah, and I forgot to mention this: I also picked up the necessary equipment for making some fruit wines, AKA country wines, and liqueurs. I'm planning on making my grandmother's recipe for lemon liqueur, and some bizarro fruit wines. Almond wine just sounds like fun, doesn't it?
But back to the story at hand: as my first experiment, I'm going to do a kit merlot (yeah, gross, I know), just so I can get the hang of the basic methodology and then work my way up from there. But at least along the way I can test the wine and learn how to do all that kinda basic stuff, as I now have a pH meter, a hydrometer, etc. No use wasting real grapes just yet. At worst, I figure I can whip up a whole lot of yummy sangira and throw a big party.
14.7.07
wineminded: a primer
Ahoy! And to those who have stumbled upon this page: sucker! Ain't nothin' here. Yet. I just started this little blog, and my intention is to chronicle the gestation and birth of my vineyard, and eventually my winery, located in Naramata, BC. Hence the name 'wineminded'. However, the name might be a little misleading, because although it is a very accurate description of me, it will not prevent me from sharing recipes, stories, rants or any other intriguing stuff I might come across. I have no intention of becoming a wine reviewer or critic - there are enough of those on the web - although I will not refrain from commenting on wines I try and find worth mentioning. Althought perhaps I'll change my tune once I've completed the WSET (Wine and Spirits Education Trust) course I plan on taking up in Kelowna this fall! I'll become a complete wine snoot and be unbelievably obnoxious and certain that my palate is more refined than yours... Hum. Prolly not.
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