Notes From The Bottom of a Glass (or Two)

I’ve always been interested in alcohol. From a fairly young age, in a house where drinking was pretty minimal outside wine with dinner on special occasions and my father’s occasional summer beer, I’ve been interested. Partly because there is something inherently grown-up about a beverage that has an age requirement attached to it, and partly because the smell of the alcohol provided a very distinctive odour profile that is unique to its forbidden little family, I found myself fascinated by the idea of drinking.

For a very long time, there was a bottle of Advocaat in a little cupboard of the kitchen. It may have been there for a long time, because my parents didn’t particularly enjoy it, or it may have simply been that there weren’t a lot of occasions that called for a thick, rich, heavy version of eggnog. It was sweet and intense and when my brother discovered it, we were keen to surreptitiously try it. Far from the bitter tastes of beer or the acidic curl of wine, this went down very easily, and while I can’t claim we were actually struck with remorse for our sneaky behaviour, the guilty twinge of stolen liqueur kept our sampling to a minimum. How extravagant it seemed, to have a whole tablespoon of the forbidden stuff! We were daredevils, I tell you.

There was another source of ready alcohol in the house, and that was dark rum. Although it was never explicitly forbidden to us, my associations with it were purely baking-related, and mostly Christmas baking at that. I would no more think of drinking the rum straight than I would the vanilla extract which I used weekly in my chocolate cupcake frenzy of baking. It simply didn’t occur to me that this was something that anyone would pour into a glass to enjoy.

We didn’t have a television for most of my childhood and adolescence, and until babysitting allowed whole new vistas of entertainment, much of the commercialized views of drinking were fairly foreign to me. I didn’t see ads for beer or wine, or stronger spirits. I was aware of my parents’ disapproval of drunkenness, and there was that unfortunate sleepover when my friend’s stepfather came home drunk, belligerent and scary, but since his character was similarly loutish when he was sober, I didn’t really connect the drinking with the temper. I had plenty of real-life examples of people enjoying a drink without getting drunk, and that was the connection that remained.

Special dinners would see a bottle of wine come out, and occasionally, if we were good, we would be allowed to have a teensy liqueur glass half-filled with the dinner wine. I remember the first half-glass quite clearly, although I don’t remember the occasion. I remember that the wine was red, and that I was nervous that I would spill it on the white damask tablecloth. I remembered the first, decorous sip – my intention was to appear ladylike, but my strategy was solid, as I was not entirely prepared for the strength of the flavour or the lack of sweetness. Still, never one to risk stepping backward, I soldiered on through dinner, mostly drinking from the large glass of water – sometimes immediately after the wine, which I tried very hard to make seem coincidental. My nonchalance was probably less effective than I thought, but no one said anything, and I felt all terribly grown up.

When I was in my teens, my mother developed an appreciation for apricot brandy. A single, small, discreet glass at bedtime became something of a custom. The sweet brandy was something I could embrace enthusiastically, although I was not generally included in the ritual. I would occasionally have the tiniest splash into a liqueur glass for myself – partly because I had no great need for more, and partly to demonstrate that I could be responsible with alcohol. By this point, on the occasions of wine with dinner, I was upgraded to an appropriately sized glass, and my parents seemed to have accepted the idea that I was not about to rush headlong into alcoholism at the earliest chance.

In all honesty, while I didn’t miss the opportunity to get riotously drunk a few times in my first years away from home, my budget precluded any sort of regular drinking, decorously with dinner or not. There were a few bottles of wine received as gifts, and the odd splashy dinner date. By the time I had been at university for a couple of years, I started meeting people who were far more serious about alcohol than I was. To wit, they knew something about wine beyond the white-with-chicken/fish, red-with-beef myth that permeates our culture. Around them, I started drinking wine with more thoughtfulness. After university was done, I headed of to Europe for the better part of a year, and this is where I fell into the habit of daily wine with dinner.

I say “fell into the habit” because that is exactly how it was. Whatever one theorizes about the omnipresence of alcohol in Europe, there really does seem to be wine at almost every meal in France and Italy. As a shoe-string traveler I was constantly strategizing to make the most of my limited funds, and one of my favourite ways to stretch the francs, lire, pesetas, or marks was to go to nice restaurants at lunch time and avail myself of the prix-fixe bargains – most of which came with a glass or carafe of the house wine. In many of the regions that I traveled, the wine that would arrive would be red, unless otherwise specified, but that suited me. I had already developed a clear preference for red wines.

The provenance of the wine was sometimes a little hard to determine. Small restaurants and cafes would serve what they got locally from various wineries – literally surrounding and above the towns, in some cases. “Hill wine!” was the response I got to one enquiry about where the wine was from. This was accompanied by a vigorous gesture in the general direction (I suppose) of the winery. In the nicer restaurants, there were of course wine lists to select from – more often at dinner than at lunch, and most of them meaning nothing to me – but I had such good luck with the house wines that I often would defer to the restaurant’s judgment. The one thing that I was sure of, was that the restaurant wouldn’t serve anything as a house wine that they weren’t happy to drink themselves.

Wine with dinner these days is a simple adventure, but it seems to terrify a lot of people. I’ve had the good fortune to be in a monthly wine club for the past eight years, and I’ve learned a lot about wine, and a lot about people, including myself. The single most important thing that I learned is this: people like different things. It sounds simple, but it flies in the face of the notion of wine drinkers all being unregenerate snobs that coo around the same extortionately priced bottles and dismiss anything inexpensive. If you are simply looking for a nice bottle of wine to go with dinner, you only need to know what you like – and you can’t really learn what you like by reading other people’s reviews, you have to drink the wine. Once you know what appeals to you, it’s much easier to decipher the enigmatic reviews, or make your own best guess based on grape varietals or origin.

Side-by-side tastings are the very thing to help you discover whether you like the characteristics of a particular type of wine, or whether you simply had a Chardonnay that was so unpleasant that you wrote off the entire grape in error. If you then taste seven Chardonnays in a row, and note the differences that come from style and climate, you get a much better sense of whether you’d want to pick up a Chardonnay for dinner (and, if so which one), or whether a Pinot Gris is really more to your taste. When I first started going to the wine club, I was a little nervous because I didn’t know much and I was afraid that I would like the “wrong” wines, or that I wouldn’t recognize the excellence of good wines. An education in wine, I thought, meant that everyone with any sort of class, taste, or palate would inevitably gravitate toward the same wines. This is quite wrong. After eight years in the wine club, those of us who are long-time members still have quite different ideas about what makes a good wine, and often gravitate toward different characteristics. The one thing that has changed, is that we can all readily identify the crummy ones, usually on the first sip. The one thing that hasn’t changed is that I still am not any kind of expert.

People, generally, are terrified of picking out the wrong bottle. It is amazing to see how often a confident wine shopper will be shadowed or even waylaid by nervous strangers hoping to get the inside scoop to allay their fears of a potential wine faux-pas. There are, of course, classic food pairings, and some common sense guidelines that will help. The most simple and logical advice for pairing wine with food is that one should not overpower the other. A rip-roaring, foot stomping Australian Shiraz is not the best choice for a plate of scallops, and an ephemeral Sauvignon Blanc will feel like water next to a braised lamb shank. Duck, goose, pheasant – these do better with a good Pinot Noir than anything white, if you like Pinot Noir (and can find a good one), or even a Chianti, which really isn’t only for spaghetti. It is more important to have a wine that you like, than the wine that the food pairings recommends.

When I first started drinking wine, what I could smell and taste was mostly the alcohol. It took practice to learn to reach beyond that and detect the flavours that I had read about in magazines. The way to learn about wine is to drink wine. If you keep drinking long enough, judiciously enough, you can’t help but learn a little.
 

November 2005