Wine by Numbers

An excerpt from Pass the Polenta, by Teresa Lust, published by

Steerforth Press of South Royalton, Vermont.

You can always turn to numbers when it comes to drinking wine. At a corner in a trendy restaurant, a man in a double-breasted Armani suit, a thin leather tie, and pointy Italian shoes runs a finger down the price column of the wine list, and stops at the highest number. Three digits? All the better. "I'll take a bottle of this Montrachet," he says, snapping the list shut with a flick of the wrist and flashing the gold of a fat Rolex. You'd like to inform him that he has botched the pronunciation: the name does not rhyme with hatchet, but you sense he would not welcome the correction.

Across the room a fastidious old woman, bespectacled and tight-lipped, her high-collared blouse fastened with a cameo pin, scans the same column of prices looking for a suitable wine on the opposite end of the scale. She gives you a frown of disapproval, then a sigh, and says, "I'll just take half a carafe of the house rosé."

Other diners know better than to let dollar signs dictate their wine selections. Consumer's guide ratings, not price-tags, are the numbers that direct them. A savvy lot, these people have done their homework, memorizing text from guides such as The Wine Spectator and The Wine Advocate. These publications, part Bible, part Farmer's Almanac, part society rag, lead readers through the confusion of vineyards, vintages, and varietals to Truth in fine wine.

Enlightened readers have learned that steep prices aren't always a sign of quality, for expense can just as easily reflect an aggressive marketing campaign. They cringe to see fine wine go to waste on unappreciative palates, shake their heads at poor fools who fritter away money on overvalued wine to nurse equally inflated egos, and they count their blessings for a liberal wine education. Yes, these wise consumers know wine buying can be risky business. Why tread on unknown oenological turf when the experts, trained to judge wine on both technical merit and artistic impression, can spare your palate the disappointment of a bad tasting bottle? With a swish and a gurgle of wine over tongue, these masters rate the contestants on 100-point scales, culling the bad from the good, the naughty from the nice.

Their taste buds have perfect pitch. In a sip of Cabernet they do not merely detect mint, they can distinguish peppermint from wintergreen. With one taste of Burgundy, they'll note a hint of plums. Not just any plum, but damson in particular. The butterscotch overtones in a well-balanced Napa Valley Chardonnay could earn it a score of 94. But the burnt-sugar flavor that lingers in the Sonoma bottle warrants a twelve-point deduction.

Wine critics accompany these ratings with detailed tasting notes, allowing the buyer to know a wine's attributes before ever opening a bottle. Voluptuous, ripe, and full-bodied, they write. Intense, evocative nose. Dazzling legs that go on forever. You can't help but wonder if they've been sampling wines in bottles or wenches in brothels. Yet consumers trust the verdicts of such finely honed palates without question, and don't you think they should, if the best their own taste buds can muster is bitter, sweet, sour and salt?

I have to admit I found these wine guides indispensable when I worked at an upscale restaurant in California. We had what you might call a serious wine list. Wines rare and pricey, a candy store for connoisseurs. Any given night I might uncork the likes of La Tâche or LaTour from France, not to mention some of the finest boutique wines the Napa Valley had to offer. Because I kept abreast of the current wine literature, I could ask diners how they enjoyed their Chablis premier cru, with its steely character, elegant personality, luscious fruit. Could they not smell the apple blossom in the nose? They replied, yes, now that I’d mentioned it, they did. And I bit my tongue as I decanted a young Cabernet. Infanticide! Though its fruit was lush, a wine with such brooding, muscular size and backward bouquet needed at least five more years in the cellar. Indeed, I knew so much about these wines, I forgot I’d tasted precious few of them. In fact, personal taste was a criterion I’d completely overlooked.

That is why the owner at the wine store in Yakima stumped me when she said she preferred the Russian River Ranches to the Les Pierres. We were talking about the Chardonnays of Sonoma Cutrer winery, of course. Everyone knew that the Les Pierres vineyard consistently reigned supreme in the wine guides, but she said she thought the Russian River Ranches tasted better. Tasted better? I dismissed her silly notion out of hand. Who cared what she thought? Les Pierres made the critics swoon.

I fondled the bottle, studying its label in the dim light. Surely she'd read about its copious quantities of honeyed fruit and toasty oak. All the critics preferred it to its wallflower sister from the Russian River Ranches. How could she think otherwise? And here I thought she'd know her wines.

I had stopped at the wine shop late on a gray November afternoon while home visiting my parents in Washington. I'd lingered over bottle after bottle, searching for a classy California Chardonnay for the next night's dinner, but just browsing, really. Wooden crates of wine, stacked one atop the other, lined walls of crumbling gray stone. Four claw-foot mahogany tables crowded the room, displaying an assortment of fine bottles, placed label-up on their sides like spokes on wagon wheels. I noticed I was her only customer during the last few minutes before closing.

She said it again. "Yes, the Russian River Ranches is a far more memorable bottle for me. What's the occasion?"

"I need a really special wine. I'm preparing pasta e vongole tomorrow night."

"Ah," she said. "Spaghetti with clams." She pursed her lips, accenting cheekbones chiseled despite their sixty-odd years. She wore a black wool sweater, as dark as her wispy hair. The dim light gave a soft luster to the strand of graduated pearls around her neck. "You're thinking of the Les Pierres? I think it might overpower the meal. I've got just the number, though. An Oregon Pinot Gris. Would you like to try a taste?"

I followed her across the room to the cash register. She lifted an opened bottle of wine from its terra-cotta cooler, showed me the label and poured a couple inches into a glass. I held it to the light and inspected the wine's clear, straw-colored hue. I stuck my nose into the glass, inhaled, and smelled ripe fruit. Apples, I thought, as I sipped, although I'd have been hard-pressed to tell whether they were Gravensteins or Pippins.

"Very nice," I said. "Um, how much does it sell for?"

"Eight twenty-five."

"How come so cheap?" I asked, disappointed. I'd been prepared to shell out thirty dollars for a Chardonnay.

"Not cheap, a good value," she corrected me. "Those who think only an expensive wine can be a good wine have a great deal to learn."

I said yes, I knew, and I told her about the man in the Armani suit. She smiled. I sensed she'd met up with a few of these characters herself. My eye caught sight of a bottle of Bordeaux on the table. I wanted to say that a sip of that Bordeaux was no better than a tea bag in the mouth, didn't she think, and could she believe how the winery's standards had plummeted in recent years. If she'd read the October Wine Spectator, certainly she would agree.

Oh, I did love to sound erudite among the wine cognoscenti. But at that moment, in the presence of her eight-dollar Pinot Gris, so light and fruity, so unassuming, I realized my words would fall flat with a thud. So I took another sip and asked, "Since you don't pay any attention to price, and you don't put much faith in the critics, just how do you know a fine wine?"

She looked at me, eyes wide, puzzled. "Why, I prefer to judge a wine by how it tastes."

She glanced at her watch. It was past five o'clock. "Would you like to try a red Rhone?" Without waiting for a reply, she walked to the front door, locked it, and placed the "Closed" sign in the windowsill, then disappeared into the back room.

As I waited in silence, I looked at her vast treasure trove of bottles and thought what an unlikely operation she ran. Certainly a shrewd wine dealer would not approve of her strategy. A broker for whom Bordeaux futures were a commodity, no better, no worse, than pork bellies or lentils, would pack his bags in an instant and move to a metropolitan area. He'd hang a sign out a window in Seattle or San Francisco, or at least some quaint tourist town like Mendocino, somewhere easily accessible by deep-pocketed city sophisticates.

He would know that if you wanted to make a profit, you did not open a boutique in a redneck apple-town like Yakima, amid rows of fruit warehouses and a dusty, vacant train station. You did not try to do business on the block known to be the promenade of the town's dozen or so whores. Not with an inventory like hers, you didn't. Perhaps you sold chewing tobacco and cigarette papers, but not Burgundy and Graves. Likewise, you did not talk your customers out of thirty-dollar Chardonnays and into eight-dollar good values. And you did not close up shop in order to share an old red with a young snip.

But if wines were your passion and not just another stock option, you did. Yes, I thought, you did these things and probably more.

She emerged with a dusty old bottle, a wedge of cheddar cheese, and a box of salt crackers, which she placed by the cash register. Then she upended an empty wine crate, set it down by her desk, and motioned to me to have a seat. The wine was a Vieux Télégraphe Châteauneuf-du-Pape, ten years old. I wondered whether I could resist the temptation to see what The Wine Spectator had to say about it. As she opened the bottle, I noticed her hands, terribly crippled and disfigured by arthritis, but still able to wield a corkscrew with a bit of coaxing. She seated herself in the Windsor chair behind her desk and poured us each a glass of the Rhone, dark and inky, with the shades of brick-red that wine acquires with age. We toasted to fine wine.

The wine tasted earthy, spicy, felt heavy in my mouth, smooth as it slid down my throat, warm as the south of France from which it sprang. The flavors lingered on my tongue long after I swallowed. I took another sip and the taste intensified. It was, truly, the first time I'd let my own palate taste a wine. Across from me, she smiled, eyes closed. I broke off a corner of cheese, set it on a cracker and wondered when she would speak.

"Don't misunderstand me," she said. "Price lists and hundred-point scales are all well and good, especially for wine brokers and investors and the like. But when it comes to actually drinking the wine, a five-point scale will do."

The lowest grade a wine can score, she explained, is a One. A One indicates a wine you would rather spit out than swallow, a wine you'd be hard-pressed to toss into a bowl of salad greens, let alone drink from a glass. In fact, the word "vinegar" comes from the French phrase vin aigre, or "sharp wine."

A One is not so common today as it was once. Almost every commercial wine is at least tolerable upon release. Vintners have access to such an array of technology: centrifuges and filtration systems, sterilized steel tanks and genetic clones — it is quite difficult to make a truly bad wine. Not to say it can't be done.

I described to her the way the wine in the chalice at Communion made your mouth pucker and your tongue go numb. I figured it must be a One. My mother once asked our priest if the church might take up a special collection to improve the quality of the house pour. Perhaps a fruity Chianti or a light Beaujolais might better serve the parish. After all, it was the Blood of Christ. He reminded my mother, politely, but firmly, that Communion was a Holy Sacrament and not a cocktail party.

She agreed with me, that wine sounded just like a One. She picked up the Rhone and tilted it in my direction. "Mmm, please," I said, sliding my glass across the counter.

"And then there is the wine I call a Two," she said. "A wine is a Two when a glass of it is better than no wine at all." Open a Two and find a readily drinkable wine, to be sure, but if you had your choice of ten wines, it would probably do no better than ninth pick. Just the sort of wine, I thought, I drank with my friends in college. Our options were few, our wallets were slim, yet we needed a cheap wine to wash down good swill. Yes, more than once I'd found myself quaffing a Two.

She turned in her seat and pointed to a crate of young Burgundy. "Don't go thinking an expensive wine could never be a Two." A rare bottle of red may strike the perfect balance of acid and oak, tannin and fruit, but the point is moot if, to you, it tastes like Robitussin. The palate knows what it likes, not the pocketbook.

She explained she often thinks of a cheap Two as cooking wine. Lavish restaurants love to go napping their seared filet mignons with sauce bordelaise made from some twenty-dollar bottle of Cabernet, but a fine claret is best sipped from a goblet, not sopped up from a plate. After the marinating and braising and saucing are all said and done, just about any old wine will do. But do cook with at least a Two, for when you feel like simmering up a coq au vin or boeuf bourguignon, you can douse the pot with a Two, then pour yourself a glass. It takes the drudgery out of standing over the stove to stir.

She paused to take another sip of the Rhone, raising her eyebrows over her glass. "And that is why," she said, "I prefer to do my cooking with a Three." A Three, she told me, is everyday wine. Young, fruity, and cheap. In France they have two names for it, perhaps because they drink so much of it: vin du pays, which means "country wine," and vin ordinaire, "ordinary wine." In Italy they call it vino da tavola, "table wine."

A Three is meant to accompany the meal, which is the real reason to drink wine in the first place. Wine heightens the flavor of foods, it piques the appetite. Any Frenchman worth his salt will tell you that without wine, even the best-laid table seems incomplete. But when a flask of wine appears at supper, even the most humble repast can satisfy.

No one minds if you spill a little Three on the table when you pour. No harm done, no precious dollars gone to waste with every drop. And the stains in the tablecloth? Such a good, hearty meal deserves a little memento.

As I listened to her words, I realized I already knew how to drink a Three. You can swig a Three with anything, anytime. Drink it from mismatched stemware with a pot of spaghetti and a loaf of crusty garlic bread. From thick glass tumblers with a take-out pizza on the floor of your living room. Straight from the bottle with cold chicken, blue cheese and apples at a picnic in the woods.

She informed me it's even permissible to say a Three tastes like grapes, an accusation you would never make of a finer wine, she said with a wink. For when the fruit of the vine comes into the hands of a skilled vintner, wine-making goes from industry to art. A master seduces his grapes, enticing them to give forth essences of black cherry, blackberry, and cassis. Or strawberry, chocolate, olives, hazelnut, and tobacco, not to mention vanilla, apple, pineapple, melon, leather and fig.

She stopped, out of breath. I told her she forgot plums and mint. She gave me a grave look. "You understand, then, what an insult it would be to a vintner to say his creation tasted simply of grapes."

I reached across the counter and topped off our glasses. She gave her wine a swirl in the glass, peering deep into the vortex. "These premium wines are what I call Fours. A Four is a wine that you wish you could drink more often than you do." Unfortunately, she explained, the bottle is either too expensive or too rare, or you happen to be one of those poor souls who does not drink enough wine. When you taste a Four, you want to drink it down fast, because you can't get enough of it. Instead, you force yourself to ease it down slow, because you want to savor every drop.

With a Four, it doesn't hurt to let the food showcase the wine. "If every night I could go home and sip a glass of old Bordeaux, I would need just a few slices of good bread, a wedge of cheese, a pear perhaps, and I would go to sleep a happy woman," she said.

She set her glass down on the counter and we sat in silence for several minutes, thinking about pleasant dreams and old Bordeaux. Finally she said, "Four points will suffice for almost all the wine you'll ever meet, but there will come a time when you will stumble on a Five."

The measure of a Five goes beyond flavor, beyond age, beyond price. It goes beyond the bottle, even. You might say a Five is a Four's leap to immortality. It takes more than mere flavor to make a wine a memory. The company, the setting, the food, all have to be just right. No oenologist, with his tools for measuring brix, and specific gravity, and oxidation, can ever calculate the dimensions these other components add to wine.

You probably won't recognize a Five when you first taste it. Only later, usually during the course of the bottle, but sometimes after days of reflection, will you come to understand that you have savored a Five.

She leaned closer to me. "Drinking a Five for the first time," she said softly, "is not unlike the first time you make love. The wine may in fact be a bit flawed, but it will seem perfect. You will never be able to drink another bottle without thinking back on the first time you had it."

A bone-dry Pinot Blanc might become a Five if old friends drink it on the beach with raw oysters shucked on the spot, eaten raw, sand and all. If a couple shares a bottle of Champagne in the midst of the Mojave to toast the desert bloom, most likely they’d say that bottle was a Five. "My first Five was a '45 Talbot," she said with a hint of a smile. "But I am a woman of discretion and that's all I'll ever disclose of the memory."

She picked up a cracker and snapped it in two. Our glasses stood side by side, only a ruby droplet remaining in each. When had we finished the bottle? I checked the time, quarter past six, and told her I really should be going. I decided to buy a bottle of her Pinot Gris. She was right, I said, its light, tart flavor would pair beautifully with my clam sauce. I thanked her for sharing the Châteauneuf-du-Pape. So rich. So rare. So perfect. Such a pleasant way to spend a blustery afternoon. And by the way, what did she think of it?

"This old Rhone?" she asked, slowly tapping a gnarled finger on the side of the bottle. "From now on, I think it is a Five."