Into the ice bucket
By Todd M. WernstromWith this column, I put down my wine writer pen. Never again will I render paid opinion for public consumption - assuming some of my opining was actually consumed in the first place. I leave knowing that I have no more left on which to pontificate. After all, how many more ways can I whine about the loss of terroir in the face of globalization, and the like?
It's not as though I haven't enjoyed the last eight or nine years since quitting the practice of law. I have, and sometimes immensely so. But I'm just not comfortable telling anyone what they ought to drink or not drink any longer.
That is, not unless I'm willing to put more behind it than just a few thousand words from issue to issue. So I recently formed a wine import and wholesale company, and am only waiting for the go-ahead from the New York State Liquor Authority to start putting my money where my mouth has long been.
The move, one that some would term lateral, some downward and others upward, seems a logical one, at least for me.
Morley Safer gave me and untold millions of Americans an incentive to give wine a real try when he outed the French Paradox. I started modestly, that's for sure. Sutter Home reds were about my speed; I didn't want to invest unless I decided to put the beer bottles aside on most nights. I learned the old-fashioned way: Room temperature was taken literally - not a good move for someone living in South Florida. I distinctly remember that first glass and not loving it, but not hating it either. It seemed to offer something that I perhaps had been searching for. Wine was grown up, and as a recent law school graduate, so was I, in theory, anyway. It was time to move past wearing baseball hats backward and ending sentences with "dude."
I tried to immerse myself in the subject by reading books, magazines and newspaper columns - my BuyLine colleague Fred Tasker's Miami Herald articles chief among them - but mostly by pulling corks. That last one is about the only thing I managed to do that would have had the "experts" nodding approvingly. But, like most newbies, I pretty much ended up drowning, figuratively, in the material. It was virtually impossible to keep my Fumés straight from my Fuissés, not to mention my reserves from my estate growns. A trip to the wine store made my palms sweat. What if the salesperson figured out how truly lost I was? What if she made a recommendation and after I tried it and didn't like it, she asked me about it? I ended up changing wine stores like underwear; maybe even more often. And let's not even bother with the restaurant experience.
Slowly but surely, things started to click. After being turned on to the wonders of Burgundy (particularly, the whites) by two long-obsessed friends, I did what some consumers do, most don't bother with, but all would benefit from: I started to pay attention to what I was pouring down my throat, and most important, I began focusing on place names, first and foremost. It didn't necessarily become easier, but it did imprint on me that wines from different places ought always to taste and smell different from each other. To say that you like Burgundy is meaningless; Chablis has nothing to do with Beaune, which has even less to do with Mâcon. There's really only one way to learn what your preferences are: Try a lot of wines from a lot of places, and then start narrowing things down.
Some years later and somewhat forearmed, it seemed that I had as much to add to the "conversation" about wine as the next guy, so why not get paid for it? While Wine News was neither my first nor only get-paid-to-swirl-sniff-and-sip stop, it has certainly been my most formative. Editing and writing duties aside, it has been the thousands upon thousands of wines that I've encountered here that have brought me to the place I am now. Without having the privilege - and make no mistake, meeting the people I've met, traveling to the places I've gone and being exposed to just about every important region's wines is nothing less than that - to exalt and dismiss so many wines, I would never have been able to be so sure that I know exactly what I like and exactly why I like it. (Plus, the magazine brought my genetic predisposition for Champagne out of dormancy.)
My career began like that first trip to the candy store - there wasn't a bottle I would refuse to take home or a winemaker lunch or dinner I would pass up. But as the years went by, I often found myself rolling my eyes at pitches about "hot" wines, even "hotter" packaging and "star" winemakers. I mistook my earnest beliefs about what I valued as being somehow more valid. What I failed to see is that what I might be drawn to, others might be repelled by, and vice-versa. After all, there really is no accounting for taste.
My ah-ha! moment came about a year ago. Soon after moving to New York City, I knew that it was time for something new; I just didn't know what. The prospect of continuing to write and all that it entails was no longer appealing. But I also knew that I wasn't done with wine. At the precise time that I decided to move on, I was left with a perfectly burnished sense of what it is that most matters to me wine-wise.
It's not so much what's in the bottle as it is who stands behind that bottle. Whether made by a co-op, giant corporation or family business, the content of the bottle seems to take on the character of the person or entity that bottles it. This may be obvious to many consumers, but it never really was to me. Without rendering a value judgment about which is better, I know that, for me, it's hard to beat the story of a family that has been planting, pruning, harvesting and bottling wine for generations, or a first-generation entrant who believes that he or she can bottle a little bit of a vineyard without losing that vineyard's DNA.
So once the legal green light is given, I'm off to France and Italy to spend my improving-in-value dollars. Whether the destination appellations where I'll be shopping are humble (Gigondas and Taurasi, for instance) or regal (Champagne and Barolo), there are scores of family wineries that match my criteria. I'll help stimulate our economy by buying American, too - you might be surprised to know that there are actually unknown producers in well-trod Napa Valley.
The wines will be good, of course, but beyond that, the stories behind them will be compelling because everyone's are; they only lack the telling. Having written about the knowns and well-knowns for some years now, I'm in a unique position to do that telling. And I'm certain that all of my work with my fellow editors at Wine News has helped hone my ability to do so. In a sense, I'll be selling a family as much as a bottle of Sancerre or Finger Lakes Riesling. And that's where I've come to after composing many thousands of words and scoring many thousands of wines; and it seems like just the right place for me.
So, if you live in New York or happen to be in town, maybe you'll come across an Ice Bucket Selections wine at a restaurant, wine bar or wine store. If you do, you can be sure that it won't merit the breathless praise of a Screaming Eagle. It will simply have merit, though hopefully, not just in my opinion.
Todd M. Wernstrom is the executive editor and frequently writes about French and Italian wine.