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Avalon Recommends:
Order the This is the best guide, bar none, to Oregon's wines. Insightful articles, interesting reviews, in depth interviews- you'll find them all here. Worth every penny if you're interested in Oregon wine.
The OWR is published
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Tasting Tips OK, who do I think I'm kidding? I mean, does anyone really need tips on tasting Oregon wine? Just pull the cork, pour the vino, and swallow . . . doesn't that just about cover it? Well . . . yes and no. Tasting wine is a different thing from drinking wine. Tasting is the process of evaluating the different sensory experiences from a wine, and is generally done to make some sort of an evaluative judgment about the relative qualities of the wine being tasted. Drinking is generally the act of enjoying the flavor of wine, often within a social or culinary setting. Believe it or not, there is actually a process to tasting that can increase your drinking enjoyment of Oregon wine. Most of us don't usually "taste" wine in the formal sense---we open, pour, and drink. But tasting and drinking go together, in fact they should go together---it's just that "tasting" requires more attention than "drinking," and to get the most out of "drinking" Oregon wine you should first take some time to "taste" Oregon wine. So let's start tasting! Tasting Tip #1: Take tasting seriously . . . but not too seriously. Tasting doesn't have to be daunting. You don't have to go into the guts of organoleptic theory and practice in order to get the most out of your Oregon wine. Don't ruin your tasting experience by rabidly concentrating on each procedural detail of the book-learned tasting process. You've probably read those hoity-toity tasting procedures in the wine books. They offer good and valuable procedures for carefully considered professional-style wine tasting. I'm going to presume that you can do your own version of the swirl, sniff, sip, and spit routine---that's not what these tasting tips are about. If you need a brushing up, my favorite books on the subject are How to Taste by Jancis Robinson, Essential Winetasting by Michael Schuster, and Pat Simon's Wine-Tasters' Logic (the latter two were reviewed in depth in Oregon Wine Report #8). The first tasting tip is that all you really need to do is invest a little attention and give a little concentration to your Oregon wine. Taking the intent of tasting seriously---not obsessively---will do two important things for your ultimate enjoyment of Oregon wine: tune your mind and condition your palette to the wine. It starts before you even open the bottle . . . it starts with the wine you choose. Taste Tip #2: Think about the wine you've selected before you open it. Don't just pull the cork! Take the bottle you've selected in your hands, read the label, and go back in your mind to past experiences with the varietal you're about to open, and even past bottles from the producer you've chosen. It only takes a moment, but recalling your previous encounters with similar wines starts to focus your awareness and put you in a more receptive frame of mind for what is inside the bottle. For instance, last night I opened a bottle of Chardonnay from Belle Pente, a smaller high-quality Oregon producer. I paused before I opened it to remember the last time I'd had a Chardonnay from this producer. I remembered what I thought of the wine: crisp, spicy, refreshing. Then I recalled the most recent Chardonnay of any kind that I'd had and how it tasted and what I had eaten with that wine. I began to create in my mind an idea of what I was about to taste. Mind you, it wasn't a specific expectation . . . I wasn't setting myself up for disappointment by creating a mental image of the perfect Chardonnay. Rather I had put in my mind a generalized sense of what the "Chardonnay experience" was like. In other words, I was now more focused, even eager, to accept what the wine offered me. I wasn't distracted by non-wine thoughts; I was ready for the wine! For Oregon wines, I believe this tasting tip to be extra important. Oregon's most famous wine is Pinot noir, but a Pinot is not a pinot by any other name. Pinot noir differs dramatically in style from region to region and winemaker to winemaker. Taking that reflective moment to mentally place the Pinot you're about to taste within its context will result in a better tasting experience. Oregon Pinots tend to have a different style than California Pinots or Burgundies. Knowing this, you can start fine-tuning the framework of your mind's expectation more accurately when you take that moment to think before opening. You can remember that as a generalization, most Oregon Pinot noirs you've had have tended to be of lighter style than the Californians . . . perhaps a bit more tart, and even more elegant than their southern cousins. Or perhaps you've found them to be fuller and more fruity than many Burgundies, or lacking the French earthiness. Contemplating your previous Pinot experiences first, will give you a more focused context within which to start tasting the contents of that bottle you're about to open.
OK, so pull that cork and pour that wine. Go ahead and do all the basic things that help you with the wine: look at the color, smell the aromas, swirl it in your mouth . . . whatever works best for you. But don't do it just once and consider yourself done. Don't rush the tasting experience. Linger over the wine. While there may be a certain poetic appeal to this advice, there are sound reasons to not just sip and spit (or swallow, as the case may be) and they are particularly applicable to Oregon wines. Wine changes as it is exposed to air and as its temperature shifts. If you take a red wine from the cellar, immediately open and taste it, you will miss out on much of what the wine is. Indeed, you will probably misjudge the wine entirely! If you take a white wine from the 'fridge, immediately open and taste it, you will likewise be doing the wine an evaluative injustice. Take a Southern Oregon Bordeaux-style blend, for instance. Often these wines can have a weedy or herby character upon opening, especially if they are rather young. But let the bottle sit open overnight and frequently the wine will taste much softer and fruitier the next day. Similarly, many Willamette Valley Pinot noirs just about require many hours to show at their best---more than once I've had my initial judgment of a Pinot changed significantly when I re-tasted the wine a day later (in fact, tasting the same wine over two days is standard practice in the Oregon Wine Report's reviews). Of course, the relative youth of the wine under question has a lot to do with how it will change over time. But in nearly every case within my scope of experience, Oregon's best wines tend be at their best NOT upon opening, but after a few hours of rest and exposure to air. So take that time. Taste it once immediately after you've opened it. Taste it again a few hours later. Even taste it I third time a full day later. The resulting experiences will tell you much about the wine's personality, and help serve as a guide for how and when you might want to serve it. Taste Tip #4: Take tasting notes. The more wines you taste over time, the more useful written notes will become. Oh, I know it's a bother, and it seems like an artifact of pretension . . . but if you're serious about enjoying your wine it is useful to keep a record of your perceptions. Written notes can help you get more out of your Oregon wines by enabling you to more accurately compare similar wines tasted over large distances of time. It is hard enough to remember what you had for dinner last Tuesday, let alone exactly how you felt about Abacela's first vintage of Tempranillo. With notes to refer to, you can more reasonably compare Abacela's 2000 version to their 1997 release---which means you have a tool to deepen your overall knowledge (and therefore appreciation) of Oregon wines. Similarly, your written notes will prove quite insightful when you get past all this tasting stuff and on to the serious subject of drinking your Oregon wine! If your tasting notes are with you when you finally drink the wine at a meal, it will give you an easy benchmark to see how the wine changes with the food---as it inevitably will. Your notes can also serve to give your dinner companions a context for them to evaluate the wine when they first taste it at the table---and provide some interesting conversation as they all react to the Oregon wine you served. Taste Tip #3: Know when to stop tasting and start drinking! OK, I'll admit it: It is 1:00 pm and I'm tasting wine (a 2000 Pinot noir from Shea Wine Cellars, as a matter of fact). The fact is, I probably taste more wine than I actually drink. Hey, it's my job! But Oregon wine tasting isn't your job. The whole reason for recommending all this tasting stuff is so that you can enjoy your Oregon wine drinking more. That's because when you take the time to be attentive to the wine, as our tips are designed to help you do, you become more cognizant of its different aspects: the layers of flavors, the pleasures of textures, the subtleties of aroma, the length of finish. By tasting these qualities in a discrete process separated from the hurly-burly of a dinner party or social setting, you are better able to detect them, characterize them, and set them in your mind. As you then start drinking the wine, especially with food, all those complexities that you've discovered will evolve like the shifting reflections of light on a jewel. Simply downing your jewel of a wine without having gone through a tasting process first is like viewing its sparkling light through dark sunglasses. But as important and useful as tasting is,
it is only a means to an end. The more you pay attention to what you taste
in your Oregon wine, the more you will enjoy the sensory and social aspects
of actually drinking it. And, at some point you need to move on from your
tasting process, take all that new found sensory input, and be able to
say: "Enough tasting already, let's party!"
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Past columns by Cole Oregon Wine touring at Thanksgiving Oregon 2001 Harvest- Broadley Vineyards Oregon 2001 Harvest Update part 2 Oregon Wines for Romance The
Best Bets in Is Chardonnay going to become Oregon's Best Wine? Is
Pinot gris Life
Beyond Pinot Noir The
Promise of "Wineterview" The Price of Value and the Value of Price
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