huevos con vino

I knew I was in trouble as soon as the words slipped out of my mouth.

It was Christmas, I believe, and I was about 20 years old.  I was at my parents’ friends’ house; these friends are like my adopted parents.  We were all sitting down to eat dinner when my friend’s mother asked me if I wanted to try a glass of Georges DuBoeuf Chardonnay.  I accepted.  At that time, I had tried wine before, but I had never particularly enjoyed it.  Wine always tasted like a hot, confused version of Concord grape juice to me, which I recognized as a personal palate problem (it wasn’t the fault of the wine, clearly).  But I had long been fascinated with wine; in 9th grade I created an exhaustive report on the French appellation system and presented it - in French - to the class.  The teacher responded by bringing in escargot for me, which was another personal favorite.  My father had an extensive wine cellar before the bankruptcy, but that’s part of the beauty of a wine collection as opposed to a rare coin collection: You can drink your collection before the collections agencies, as it were, show up to repossess your valuables.  You can’t really spend your rare coins, though…pieces of eight don’t go over well at the gas station.

Anyway, I had this glass of Chardonnay sitting there.  Now, I had seen my parents drink wine before, so I knew that I should swirl the wine a bit, smell it, and then taste it.  So I did.  And before I could stop myself, I exclaimed, “Wow, this wine tastes buttery!”

Big mistake.  Everyone began to laugh because, without knowing it, I had just passed my first critical judgment on a wine, but I did it in a room full of people who consider bottle openers to be some sort of gauche new-fangled toy for rich people.  These folks used to drink “Beer”-brand beer back when you could still buy generic beer.  To them, the idea that a wine could be “buttery” was akin to saying a telephone could be “sexy” or a TV could have a “remote control.”

To this day, whenever I drink wine with this group of friends and/or my own mother, they ask me whether I think the wine is “buttery,” even if it’s a Zinfandel.  Nice.  Since that fateful Christmas dinner, I have learned to be a little more inward with my wine commentary as I taste.  Sometimes, though, you’ve just got to let it out.

I have some really cool wines.  Only a few, actually, but they’re pretty neat.  For example, a few friends and I recently drank a bottle of 1999 Domaine Drouhin Laurène.  As we found out that night, the 1999 Laurène is phenomenally good, so good I want to buy as much of it as I can afford (which is none at the moment).  But if we had gone to a different restaurant that night, it’s quite possible I would have enjoyed the wine far less than I did.

In the Seattle area, there are a number of restaurants where you can bring your own wine.  Even a casual neighborhood eatery like Costa’s Opa lets you bring in your own wine, for a small fee ($12 in their case).  But the way each restaurant treats the bottle you bring can be quite different.  The night we drank the 1999 Laurène, we went to Ray’s Boathouse.  Ray’s is a Seattle institution…I really mean that; I hate the way people overuse the word “institution.”  It’s like saying something is “pretty unique” or, worse yet, “very unique.”  Unique is unique: Something is either unique or it’s not.  You can’t qualify the word “unique.”  Similarly, it seems sometimes that every place more than 10 years old is a local “institution,” like Redhook Brewery in Woodinville.  It’s just wrong to call it that…but with Ray’s, it’s the truth.

Anyway, Ray’s Boathouse features the 2002 Laurène on its wine list for $105.  That’s really damn expensive, although it’s a fair markup for a wine that costs $60 direct from the winery (a 75% markup, to be exact).  I paid about $42 for my 1999 Laurène, and Ray’s charged me a $15 corkage fee to open and, crucially, decant the wine.  The sommelier was very interested in the wine as he had tried other vintages, but not the 1999.  He treated me and my wine with a great deal of respect, even though his restaurant had a more recent version of the exact same wine on their list.  In short, I was quite happy with Ray’s and their handling of my wine.

And finally, we arrive at the point of this post.  I have only tested the corkage situation at three local restaurants so far, and every time I brought a bottle of Domaine Drouhin so the essential wine remained pretty much constant (two Laurènes, one Classique).  Here’s what I found out:

• Bistro Magnolia in Ravenna - $10 corkage fee, no sommelier, no decanting
• Ray’s Boathouse - $15 corkage fee with sommelier and decanting
• Cafe Campagne - $20 corkage fee, no sommelier, no decanting

Now, I really like all three of these restaurants.  For the money, Bistro Magnolia is fabulous: You can get lamb for under $20, which is pretty impressive.  They charge the lowest corkage fee, but they also seemed unaware as to how to handle a bottle of wine.  That’s cool…for $10, I don’t mind.  Then again, decanting would have been helpful for my young Pinot Noir, but it aerated nicely in the big wine glasses.

As I said, Ray’s was a class act.  But their food is the most expensive of these three restaurants, and they have a sommelier, so you’d expect a high level of service.  At $15, their corkage fee is a damn bargain compared to Cafe Campagne.

I enjoyed Cafe Campagne; their cassoulet is justifiably famous in Seattle (you can get it to go, in fact).  But their wine service was pathetic: $20 corkage fee and no decanting?  Yes, it’s true that Cafe Campagne is the cheaper sister restaurant of the Campagne Restaurant upstairs, and the big sister has a better wine list.  Still, why not charge $10 or $12 as your corkage fee if you’re going to open the bottle and walk away?  The Cafe Campagne wine list features lots of inexpensive wines and a few over $100, so they aren’t making their big bucks from wine sales.  I understand why they probably want to dissuade people from bringing in their own wines, but still…for $20, I’d expect to have my wine decanted, particularly when it’s a 1999 Laurène.

Anyway, I am curious to know about other corkage fees for Seattle-area restaurants, and whether any places in particular encourage customers to bring in wine.  I’m not talking about bringing in Sutter Home and expecting white glove service, obviously, but for a $60 retail bottle of wine I would expect a decanter.  That’s all I want, really…a decanter.  I don’t think that’s a lot to ask when you’re paying $20 to a restaurant just to have a bottle opened.  The thing that restaurant managers need to remember is that, given the choice, I wouldn’t buy a bottle of wine for 75-200% above market price.  I would just get something else, like a $4 pint of beer, rather than spend $100 on a $40 bottle of wine.  So if they think I am depriving them of a sale when I bring in my own wine, think again.

POSTSCRIPT (3/5/06): I went out to The Cellar Bistro on Capitol Hill last night; their corkage fee is $15 and they use real decanters.  Interestingly, though, when I called to ask about corkage I was quoted a cost of $5…the chef had answered the phone, apparently, because he told me to say “the chef says it costs $5″ when asked about the corkage fee.  That was awesome…we had a bottle of 2001 Paolo Scavino Barolo and it was well worth the $5 fee.

A month or two ago, a couple of my current wine interests converged.  One of my recent interests has been to track down unusual 100% varietal bottlings, made from grapes such as Carignane and Petit Verdot that rarely receive unblended release.  As a relatively recent convert to the virtues of wine, I wanted to avoid starting my tasting career with, say, Merlot and Chardonnay all the time.  In wine, as in everything else, I relish the unique.  I’m working on my wine snob dialect, by the way.

So, in the spirit of finding something different, I happened across a winery named Jessie’s Grove.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I think the Lodi Valley is the next big “discovery” among the casual wine drinkers of the US.  Of course, I might be a year or two behind the curve in coming to this realization, but hey, I’m new here.  I found this review of a bunch of Lodi-sourced wines and one of them really caught my eye.  Within this review, their discussion of Jesse’s Grove (sic) sounded very interesting to me.  Unfortunately, the review misspelled Jessie’s Grove, so it took me a little while to find their Web site.  I’m glad I did.

I ordered two bottles of 2003 Carignane from winex.com at the unbeatable price of $9.99 each.  They have since run out, unfortunately, but that particular retailer seems to have lots of other interesting wines that I want to try.  About a week after I placed my order, two bottles of Jessie’s Grove Carignane arrived at my doorstep.  I wasted no time; I took a bottle with me down to my mom’s house near Portland, OR.  She and my stepfather love wine, although they aren’t quite as discerning as some folks…but they’re easy to please, and that’s fine with me.

Here are my sketchy tasting notes from that night:

“Very closed at first, quite acidic but with an interesting aroma…needs time to open up, but when it does it’s a lot like a good pinot noir, but a bit different too, more primitive…raspberry and other red fruit flavors are in there…at the end it smelled like a campfire but in a good way.”

Two things were certain about this wine: It needs time to aerate and open up its range of flavor and aroma, and it is well worth buying at $14.85 for the 2004 release.  The number of cases is low, too: only 426 for the 2004 release and even fewer for the 2003 release. 

So this wine combines a bunch of personally appealing features:

• Exceptionally good price for a wine made from grapes picked from 110-year-old and older vines
• Very limited availability, particularly outside the Lodi Valley area
• Predominantly made from an uncommon grape, although it is blended with some Petite Sirah and Syrah (but not too much)
• Most importantly, it tastes delicious, quite like a smoky, primitive Pinot Noir

Now, the only drawback to this particular wine is its availability outside of the winery.  As the “Randy’s World of Wine” review points out, Jessie’s Grove Carignane is hard to find online.  A quick search of wine-searchers.com and winezap.com reveal only the winery itself as the point of sale for the 2004 Carignane.  Darn…but hey, at least it’s available somewhere.  I highly recommend it, especially if you want to show up at a dinnery party with an entirely different wine that will become a point of discussion.  I can see drinking this wine with a barbecued pork tenderloin or a roasted red meat of some kind…the smoky aroma and flavor will really surprise you!

I am preparing a much larger article, or series of articles, on the subject of statistical and methodological validity of wine rating systems.  It’s a major undertaking…so major, in fact, that from my literature reviews it seems few people have tried to tackle this subject before.  Basically, my mind started churning on a simple problem: If many wine critics and reviewers agree that the 100-point system is flawed, and if there are several competing systems out there to quantify wine quality numerically, which system is the best?  When I say “best” I mean, which system is the most accurate and repeatable among many critics?

Here’s a list of the journal articles and books I was able to track down that appear to relate to my subject:

• Ashenfelter, Orley, and Quandt, (1999), “Analyzing a wine tasting statistically”, Chance, New Directions for Statistics and Computers, 12 (3) , 16-20
• Lindley, Dennis V.  (1993), “The analysis of experimental data: The appreciation of tea and wine”, Teaching Statistics, 15 , 22-25
• Amerine, Maynard A. and Roessler, Edward B.  (1982), “Wines: Their sensory evaluation”‘, W. H. Freeman & Co (New York)

Of these three, only the Ashenfelter and Quandt article seems relevant to my topic.  Happily, I discovered the Liquid Assets Web site (run by Ashenfelter and Quandt themselves).  At this site, the journal article listed above is provided, along with several other relevant articles.

Interestingly, Ashenfelter and Quandt seem to have focused on comparative wine tastings as their method of choice.  Additionally, they focus on using advanced statistical analyses to check the wine tasters’ results against one another; they developed a software program, in fact, that conducts these analyses and generates a final report automatically.  As they put it, ”The primary goal in the analysis of a wine tasting is to determine the extent to which the conclusions that have been drawn are likely to be reproduced on another occasion.”

All of this makes sense to me, but what I was hoping to find was a statistical analysis of wine rating systems, not blind tasting results.  Blind tastings tend to involve judging wines against one another, whereas individual wine tastings and ratings simply assign a score to each wine.  This score then becomes the widely printed and reprinted quantitative measure of that wine’s quality.  But how accurate is this sort of assessment?

That’s the question I want to answer using statistics, sound methodology, and survey design techniques.  I learned all about this stuff as an engineering masters student, so I know how to design a study, for example.  Because of this background, my interest in this topic was piqued when I read Robert Parker’s description of how he scores a wine.  He and I agree that the 20-point systems don’t make sense, and to that I would add the Wine Spectator’s 16-point system (85-100 points possible in printed reviews).  But I have some questions about Parker’s system too, questions that I will investigate in another blog entry in the next few days.  In the meantime, you can see how he ranks his wines here.

As far as I can tell, there is one really decent wine bar in the Seattle area, and that’s Portalis in Ballard. 

That’s it?  Really?  That doesn’t seem possible…but in terms of finding places that serve more wines by the glass than beers by the pint, and that use Riedel-type glasses, then yeah, I think that’s about it.  There’s another place in the Kirkland Park Place shopping mall, but of the 4 times I tried to go there I never actually made it inside (closed, closed, too busy, too busy + bachelorette party at 6:30 PM).  So that place is dead to me.

Another question, though, is about the clientele at the typical Seattle wine bar.  They remind me of people who read the New York Times, in print, in a public place so other people can see that they are reading the New York Times rather than the insipid Seattle Times.  They remind me of people who work at Microsoft and drive Porsche Boxsters and wear Content Management Server polo shirts and don’t seem to see the irony of their cheap wardrobe and $50K car.  They remind me of people who aren’t really my friends and who don’t really share my tastes or philosophical beliefs about reality, humanity, or anything else that matters.  In short, they remind me of stereotypical wine snobs, and in that sense I am like them, I suppose, because so many people who don’t drink wine seem to associate “wine” and “snob” irrevocably.

I didn’t see this sort of thing in Oklahoma City at the Metro wine bar…granted, that place was totally empty the one time I went in.  Okay, so that’s not fair, never mind.

But really, I don’t want to drink wine in a place where the conversation at the next table includes a hands-free mobile phone, and the perfumes and colognes of the other customers make my Cabernet Franc smell like, well, a French cabaret.  Bad pun, sorry.

So, with these snobbish predilections in mind, I am open to suggestion with regard to places in and around Seattle where a man can get a glass of good wine in a good atmosphere.