If you’re following our Instagram at all, you may have seen that I (Teresa) have had an amazing opportunity to make wine under the direction of Ed Shaw.  Anytime you can make wine with a mentor, you’re ahead of the learning curve.  

It’s just Merlot.  

But this is Ed.  

Ed’s mistakes earned awards.  In fact, one time he accidentally entered a wine he didn’t even like into a competition and won gold.  Ed, to me, is kind of the Chuck Norris of wine.  If Ed walks past the grape section in the Produce Department of a grocery store, the grapes start fermenting out of respect.  Wine is known as an antioxidant that is meant to help fight cancer.  Ed’s wine actually cures it.  

If you haven’t met Ed, here’s my take on him…

I haven’t seen this but apparently he was the guy waterskiing on one ski with a pack of smokes rolled up in his sleeve and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and NONE of the smokes ever got wet.  

He also has a toy poodle.

He makes award-winning wine that our dear friend described as ‘chewy’ — not that it has  a bite, but because it has some heft to it.  

He also likes to cook with his fancy-pants sous vide.  

He’s like old-school new-age and I can’t keep up with all of this.  

Ed wears the coolest clothes, sourced from the best places, and has an outfit for everything.  And he was a big-wig lawyer who flew via Concordes to his destinations.  (I keep calling them Corsairs, which makes more sense to me…)

Yet Ed is no diva.  

Ed’s famous quotes include, “If you want to make a million in the wine industry, start with 10 million.”  

And, when I asked if I could grab enough Merlot to make a 5-gallon bucket of wine said, “If you’re going to mess with a little, might as well do a lot.”  

The Dude Abides

And so began my apprenticeship into wine-making.  

I will tell you that all of my life I’ve wondered what might have happened if I’d taken advantage of the education before me — as an employee of Kiona Vineyards in the early years (John Williams swears I was their first employee) — I had easy access to Scott Williams and every aspect of wine making from viticulture to eonology.  

Let me be a lesson to you:  I thought I wasn’t smart enough, refined enough, you-name-it-enough.  Don’t do that.  I haven’t asked Scott this, but I’m 99% sure that if I’d expressed my interest in wine-making, he’d have supported it. But I was in my late teens, early 20s, and had No.  Friggin.  Clue.  

Here’s another tangent — Scott was my first tax-withholding boss.  And, from that time forward I held all other bosses to Scott Williams’s standard.  He was 26 and if I wasn’t his first employee I was sure as heck a very, very early one.  And he was the best boss I’ve ever had.  Which is remarkable for a 26 year old managing a 16 year old.  And, Scott has employees who’ve been with him since the same time I started. You can draw your own conclusions about Kiona Wine, but the Williams family and Scott are Top Notch Human Beings.  

So, anyway, 35 years later I’m finally dipping my toe into the wine, so to speak.  

To say I’m excited about this is an understatement.  It’s Merlot.  If you haven’t heard me wax poetic about the wonders of Red Mountain Merlot then I am not sure that we’ve ever spoken.  Have we met?

Red Mountain is well-known for its Cabernet Sauvignon.  Great!  Our C.S. is awesome.  Woo!  

But Merlot.  Merlot is the red-headed step-child of bordeaux varietals and I think it’s due to 2 things:  

1. Can we get over the movie Sideways once and for all?  The quote is taken completely out of context and seriously if you’re letting a B-grade movie determine your wine preferences… you need to taste for yourself.  (that’s fancy-speak for grow a spine)
2. you haven’t tried a Red Mountain Merlot.  Seriously.  You might say, “well, I’ve never seen Sideways but I tried a Merlot and it was blah.”  Try Red Mountain Merlot.  

Red Mountain is to Merlot as Technicolor was to the Wizard of Oz.  Okay, or maybe it is to Merlot as Pink Floyd was to the Wizard of Oz.  Either is a good metaphor.  

Anyhooooooo

So here I sit with an amazing mentor and some world-class wine that is my DREAM varietal from my DREAM spot.  Special bonus points for being from a vineyard on my parents’ original plot of land.  

Me?  Weepy?  

Maybe a little. 

Can I just say that I think Ed is even a little misty-eyed over the project?  You know what Ed gets misty-eyed over?  Not a damn thing.  Ed’s a lawyer, a father of two boys, a German.  Ed’s eyes don’t see mist unless he introduces it when applying contacts.  One time he wasn’t well and I actually called a physician to convince him to go to the E.R.  Which he did, and he bloody-well drove himself (with me in the back seat to take the car home in case he needed to stay the night).  He wasn’t fuckin’ misty-eyed over that, let me tell you.  Blind rage?  yes.  Mist?  No.  None.  He may have had some deep-seated hatred directed at me at that point.  

I didn’t want to badger Ed with my wine-making dreams because I know I’m analytical and if I start down a path there’s likely to be 8 billion questions to follow.  Why not malolactic fermentation?  Should the temp be wavering?  How much yeast and what kind?  What about a tiny barrel to age the wine?  Are flies necessarily bad?  How long should I stir the wine each day?  Is twice a day enough or too much?  What is the square root of 17? and so on. 

Ed smiles, and he answers every question.  I’m going out on a limb to say he even seems to enjoy it.  I have to try really hard not to ask more questions because I’m pretty sure that his tolerance has a low threshold.  “Just make the damn wine” I imagine him muttering.  

This is the cool thing: wine makes itself.  Seriously.  I tend it but all of the magic happens when I’m sleeping or just anywhere but near the wine.  I wake up, stir it, check the brix and boom… it’s gone and fermented most of the sugar away while I slept.  

I seriously wonder if a wine-maker’s role isn’t to just get the hell out of nature’s way.  

I guess that’s a question for Ed.  

It’s a small lot and I can’t even begin to describe to you the hopes and dreams I’ve projected onto this experience.  

I mean, heck.  It’s just Merlot.  

So often we have guests on our tours say in hushed tones, “we don’t actually know that much about wine”.  I feel like it’s a sign that the wine industry still hasn’t quite shed the stigma of snootiness.  (cue: Alan Rickman in Bottleshock.)

I’ve also tasted wine elbow-to-elbow with ‘people who know stuff’ — sommeliers, wine makers, servers — and had that same feeling that I needed to know the right terminology in order to justify my preferences.  

Well, here’s a term for you: horse puckey.  

In the privacy of our own home we might just top off a wine glass (well over the suggested fill level) in order to save a trip to the fridge, drop an ice cube in a glass of Riesling, or gag a little over the idea of red wine and chocolate.  

And we are unashamed.

However, there are some good reasons behind “wine tasting rules and etiquette” and I figured I’d share a few tasting tips with you so you too can taste with confidence and unashamedly defend your preferences…

Basics:

1. Hold the glass by the stem.  The stem is specifically there so you don’t warm the wine with your hands.  If you hold the bowl of the glass, you’ll be warming the wine.  Maybe you like it like that, I don’t know.  It does change the flavor of it. 
2. Perfume should be avoided.  This is as much an etiquette thing as it is about your own tastes.  Your cologne will affect the taste of the wine — not just for you, but for everyone else in the room.  Wearing scents of any kind to go wine tasting is like farting in a bakery.  Or, I guess, farting in a tasting room.  I mean, if you have a medical condition or something, you at least have an excuse for excessive flatulence, but there is no medical condition that requires you to wear perfume.  I’m glad we’ve had this talk.
   

   I can barely smell this wine, all I smell is some joker’s cologne!

3. Lipstick = bad.  That stuff doesn’t come off the wine glass.  And then, this always happens: you turn your wine glass and sip and end up with a lipstick smudge on your nose.  
4. When you are waiting for the next pour, set your glass on the bar.  Take your hands off it if you have to to keep yourself from moving the glass.  
5. No touching!  Do not touch the bottles on the bar.  Don’t try to pour your own, or in any way “help” staff with their job.  
6. Sip, swirl, swish, gargle, spit — whatever.  It’s all good.  
7. Personal blends: do not.  Finish (dump, spit, or swallow) your tasting before moving on to the next pour.
8. Stay in order.  There is a reason the wines are poured in a particular order.  Typically tastings go from dry to sweet, light to heavy bodied.  So on Red Mountain you’ll start with a dry white (if the winery has whites), on to sweet white, then rose, then light to heavy bodied red (or dry to “sweet” red), then non-fortified dessert wines, then fortified wines.  Once you’ve gone through the line-up, some tasting rooms will allow you to revisit at which point it’s fine to jump around.
   
9. Go easy on the descriptives.  Yeah, so just today I tried to describe the difference between my favorite wine at Frichette and the others.  All of their wines are amazing, I’d be proud to serve them to anyone.  I just have a real leaning toward their Cabernet Sauvignon (Club Only!  Wooo!).  I made the mistake of saying that the Cab was the “Hugh Jackman” of the lineup, and the others were Brad Pitts.  As in, they are all fabulous and, like Huge Jackman or Brad Pitt, I’d love to have them in my cellar.  I should have just shut up though because then I thought maybe that was insulting, given Brad Pitt did leave Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie and according to not very good sources he is kind of a big ol’ stoner.  So there I was casting all of those aspersions on innocent bottles of wine.  It’s the kind of comment that’ll wake me up at 3 am 10 years from now and force me to write a long-winded apology to Shae.  I hope we’re still friends then.  So, I said all that to say “be careful how you gush”.  

Bad Wine:

If you taste something you hate, no problem (but don’t say out loud that you hate it or that it’s the Jack Nicholson of their offerings). 

However, there are some flaws that can occur and if you don’t speak up you won’t get a real taste of the wine.  Two common ones are:

1. “Corked” wine.  Smells musty, like a wet dog or old newspapers.  It’s harmless and the wine is drinkable, it just sucks.  Corked wine is the result of corks’ natural fungi coming in contact with chlorine (sometimes used in sanitation of equipment).  The tasting room staff should pick this up before ever serving it but for whatever reason a corked bottle may just make it to the tasting bar.  
2. Oxidation.  If a wine appears dark in color and/or smells a bit like vinegar, it’s probably oxidized.  

I was at a function once where the wineries in attendance had to use licensed servers employed by the venue to pour their wines.  You could go from table to table and the winemaker would stand next to the table while the server poured.  I got a glass of badly corked wine.  

I figured the winemaker wanted to know, so I rushed back with my glass and said, “Can you smell this?  What do you think?”  He was mortified and dumped the glass and asked the server to pour me another.  She grabbed the same bottle and began to fill my glass again.  

“No, that needs to be poured out and open a new bottle.” he told her.  

“Nobody else complained about it” she stated, flatly.  

He went pale.  

I don’t like to suggest a flaw if I find one, I’d rather ask the staff to identify it and make the judgement on their own.  If you have people standing around and you suggest “corkage” they’ll start to smell wet dog stank on everything.  Give staff the opportunity to pull the bottle and repour for anyone at the bar. 

Here’s hoping those tips will help you the next time you are wine tasting.  I welcome your own tasting tips in the comments below!