Sicily: Final Wine, Final Thoughts

February provided me with one more day to wrap up my month enjoying the wines of Sicily. I have a dessert wine review, and some final thoughts. In the past 18 months I've enjoyed 7 Sicilian wines--and three of them I popped open in the last 30 days. So I am far from an expert in the wines of the region. But I've been really impressed with the quality, diversity, and value coming out of Sicily. (the symbol of Sicily--the trinacria--photographed by John Lee)

As I reviewed my tasting notes, I realized that I have a misperception or two to erase as I continue on this journey through Italy. The first is that not all Italian reds are big, bold wines. Sicily is no exception. From the delicate and floral Frappato, to a 2003 Cos Pojo di Lupo that I enjoyed in a restaurant, to the 2004 Firriato Nero d'Avola Chiaramonte I picked for my blogger pack at domaine547, Italian reds are as likely to be herbal with good acidity as they are to taste like drinking red velvet. This is one of the reasons why they are such great food wines.

The second is that not all Italian wines are red. I'm only two months in, but I already know that the whites of Italy are going to be the big revelation of the year. If you can put the omnipresent Pinot Grigio aside, a white wine lover can get an awful lot of bang for the buck trying indigenous Italian white varieties. The Italian white that I had this month cost around $11, and delivered delicious, distinctive flavors for a very attractive price. Why? Because its a blend of chardonnay and a grape you've never heard of before. Low recognition (and hence demand) means big value.

I'm just starting to look for sparkling wines other than Prosecco, and for Italian dessert wines. Here I'm still meeting with mixed success and would appreciate any help or advice that you have to offer. I tried a Sicilian dessert wine, the 2004 Colosi Malvasia delle Lipari, which I found on sale at a local retailer. ($17.99/375ml, K & L Wines on sale; available from other merchants for between $23 and $30)The wine was peachy-amber in color, with aromas of honey and apricot. The flavors of sweet fruit (mostly apricot) had a slightly cloying honeyed aftertaste. Even on sale, this represented poor QPR in my opinion as there wasn't enough acidity to counteract the sweetness. It is better with some nutty cookies or shortbread than on its own, but this was not a wine that made me want to rush out and buy more.

Overall, I'm astounded with the range, versatility, and affordability of the Italian wines I've had--and was especially impressed this month with Sicily's bottlings. If you are on the hunt for good value wines, look for Sicilian labels on your local store shelves. I think you'll be pleased with what you taste.

Next Month: Campania

Wine's Gender Gap?

We hear a lot about the gender gap these days. Women are from Venus, men are from Mars. Men are for Barack, women are for Hillary. Women like white wine, men like red. (photo Moët is Murder (or "Where Wine Comes From") by Bitrot)

While I have to respect the fact that in some households there is tension about wine choice, there is nothing, and I mean nothing, that gets my blood pressure on the rise faster than the notion that somehow women have to be treated "special" to get them to buy, drink, or understand wine. Wines named after clothing, beauty products, derogatory names, sexual come-ons--we've seen them all, with press releases that announce "wine especially for women." Richard the Passionate Foodie reports that the most recent advanced market studies have concluded that older women can be convinced to buy wine by putting some flowers on the label.

Flowers.

They're kidding, right?

Alas, no. This kind of bizarre thinking on behalf of wine marketers is fueled, I think, by the "I only drink chardonnay" and "White wine is wimpy" nonsense that you sometimes overhear in restaurants and bars. I always want to walk over, remove the wine list from hands of the people engaged in such conversation, and tell them to order martinis and/or daiquiris and be done with it. Turns out this wine gender gap is so treacherous, entire articles have been written to try to guide couples across it. Try beaujolais--your wife will love it, and never notice it's not chardonnay. Try a BIG chardonnay--your husband will thank you for introducing him to a high alcohol wine that's not zin.

Here's what I think: this is not about gender, it's about fear. Women are afraid to try something new and red in case they get either the hard sell ("you don't love this wine? You have to love this wine? It's HUGE!"), the dismissal ("I can't believe you don't know enough to know this is a great wine"), or the disappointment of drinking a wine that is so alcoholic that they wake up the next day feeling dreadful. Though, ladies, you need to check that nice chardonnay you're drinking--they often have more alcohol than the reds. Men are afraid to try something new and white in case they get the "real men don't drink white wine" speech from a friend, because they found they liked zinfandels in 1976 and haven't wanted to appear ignorant about wine since then so order the same thing over and over, or because they actually can't taste anything that isn't a 15.5% alcohol red (these are the same people who say "white wine is so THIN" while drinking a German Riesling Spatlese).

I'm all for people liking what they like, and then drinking it. But I put it to you: how do you know you only like chardonnay if that's all you drink? And don't reply that you tried an Australian cab in 1992 and didn't like it so you called it a day. Where's your spirit of adventure?

What I'm not for is marketing tactics based on fear. We're being told this all boils down to whether we have XX or XY chromosomes. Fiddlestix (a line of damn fine wines made by a woman that includes both reds and whites--you should try them). This is not about whether you are a man or a woman, or like reds or whites when you go to the wine store. It's about how to get a fearful wine consumer to buy a wine despite the terror they are going to do something wrong. Slap a flower, a man in a cowboy hat, or a fuzzy animal on a wine label and it turns out that their fear evaporates.

I don't buy it. Their fear hasn't gone anywhere. Thank you Marketing Geniuses. You've actually made the fear of wine worse by explaining it away as a gender issue.

Ooh La La! Affordable French Champagne

I'm off to a late start with my project to drink more French champagne this year. It was one of my New Year's Wine Resolutions, but Italian wine and weird varieties have definitely taken center stage here at GWU$20.

Finally I managed to make bubbles my top priority, and went around the shops looking for something that wasn't a big name on sale, or my trusty (but not creative) Veuve Clicquot with the orangey-yellow label. I took some advice from the folks at Chronicle Wine Cellar, and picked up a bottle of NV Beaumont des Crayeres Brut Grande Reserve ($26.95, Chronicle Wine Cellar; available elsewhere for under $30).

Beaumont des Crayeres is actually a cooperative venture that winemakers in the Champagne region began in 1955. More than 240 "partner-members" provide grapes for the wines, often grown on very small family plots near Epernay. This combination of small plots and a single, larger house style was intriguing to me because it seemed to me (based on my very limited knowledge, to be sure) that Beaumont des Crayeres is halfway between the big Champagne houses and the smaller houses where a single grower is able to put out a very small amount of limited production wine.

The combination yields very good results, if my bottle of Grande Reserve is representative. Made from 60% Pinor Meunier, 25% Chardonnay, and 15% Pinot Noir, this was an excellent QPR Champagne for under $30. It had, as I hope the picture shows, a very dynamic small bead that filled the glass with vapor trails of bubbles. It was pale straw in color--much paler than you would expect--and had shy aromas of biscuit and citrus that you slowly emerged from the glass as it became a bit warmer. The flavors were full of bread dough, lemon, and a bit of stone. the overall impression of the wine was one of clean freshness, and every sip made you head straight back to the glass (and the bottle for more).

This wine was a definite rebuy, and if I had the space I'd buy a case and keep it on hand for a whole year's worth of impromptu celebrations. After this success, I think you can count on seeing some more Champagne reviews shortly.

Wine Book Club #1: Vino Italiano

Welcome to the first edition of the Wine Book Club. Today, wine bloggers and their readers throughout the blogosphere will be discussing Vino Italiano! by Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch.

David McDuff, of McDuff's Food and Wine Trail, is the leader of this discussion, and he posed some wonderful questions to help us write our reviews. They are so good that I'm just going to go ahead and answer them and contribute to the discussion here and elsewhere on the web.

First and foremost, I think that Vino Italiano is a terrific book if you want to expand your knowledge of Italian wine. The book is divided into regional chapters, and each one opens with a "scene setting" vignette about life in the region, and the role of wine in regional culture. Then there is a discussion of leading makers, grape varieties planted, and specific wines. The authors cover reds, whites, sparklers, and dessert wines. At the end of each chapter their is a regional recipe to accompany the wine courtesy of either Lidia Bastianich or Mario Batali. By the end I felt like I had a much better grasp of the geography of Italian wine and the specialties of various regions. The wine regions that I want to know more about turn out to be Liguria (where Genoa is) and Calabria (at the heel of the boot) for no other reason than the wine sounds so unique and interesting. I find now that I am much more confident in the Italian section of the local wine store, and it was terrific to feel that I could pick up an Italian wine from somewhere other than Tuscany or the Veneto and know what I was getting myself into (at least a little bit).

There are, however, also scads of native Italian varieties--and that's where I still don't feel confident. Perhaps it's because this is the kind of knowledge that really only sticks when you've had a wine made with a specific grape. I read all about Frappato prior to WBW #42 --but without tasting the grape it didn't have a whole love of sticking power. Going back and reading the information about Sicilian grapes after I tasted it, however, made the material stick.

That said, Vino Italiano is more a reference book than a ripping good read. It's the kind of book that you'll probably refer to again and again to figure out where the Valle d'Aosta is, or what the flavor characteristics of Nero d'Avola are, but you aren't going to come away thinking that there was a great story to be told and remembered. But the overall message is clear: wine is part of daily life in Italy, and it's woven into every meal, every social occasion, and every moment.

Where the book really succeeded for me--apart from imparting lots of useful information and becoming my go-to book on Italian wines--was that it did inspire me to go out and look for specific wines. I haven't found all of them yet, but I'm looking forward to finding a Pigato from Liguria. And right now, as I type, I'm sipping a dessert wine from Sicily, which I bought because I read about Sicily's reputation for sweet wines in Vino Italiano. I'll have more to say about that wine at the end of the week.

I'll be interested to hear what others have to say about the book this month. Don't forget to join in the discussion by leaving comments on any wine blog, over at McDuff''s Food and Wine Trail, on Facebook, or Shelfari. The book for April will be announced on the first Tuesday of March by host Tim Elliott of Winecast, so stay tuned for the next installment (and yes, the book is shorter).

Open That Bottle Night: Vincent Girardin Echezaux

Saturday was Open That Bottle Night, the one night of the year when Wine Street Journal critics Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher urge you to go into your closets, cupboards, wine fridges, and cellars and pull out a bottle of wine you are "saving for a special day." Sometimes they're old bottles. Sometimes, they're bottles you set aside to celebrate a specific event. Sometimes they were gifts that you couldn't bear to open because they were so special.

The wine I drank for OTBN fit into categories 2 and 3. It was given to me by a dear friend in July of 2006 to celebrate a major career milestone: turning in my second book manuscript. This is the kind of thing that you just DO, you stick it in the mail and go home and eat chocolate. So this wine was very special to me and even after the book came out I couldn't bear to open it.

Open That Bottle Night to the rescue!

The bottle in question was a 2003 Vincent Girardin Echezeaux. I know, I know, I could have opened this for OTBN 2018, but I opened it now. And I'm not sorry that I did, either. This wine was just spectacular, and I loved the way that it tried to find 100 ways to say cherry -- iron-inflected cherry, herbal-inflected cherry, mushroom-inflected cherry, cherry blossom. The wine had a beautiful color, too, as this picture showed, which only added to the pleasure that I had in drinking it. After it settled down a bit it evolved into a cherry and truffley set of aromas and flavors wrapped in a silky package. There were also interesting meaty and gamy notes in both the aromas and the flavors. There was a slightly sweet aftertaste--like cherry essence--and smooth, smooth tannins.

I have to admit that I wonder what this wine would have become in another 5 or 10 years, but I'm glad that I took the plunge and drank my special bottle of wine. You can read what others opened up by checking out the WSJ forum dedicated to Open That Bottle Night. If you missed this year's event, just open that bottle anyway, and start uncorking all the memories that you've stored away.