On Winning Louis Roederer Emerging Wine Writer of the Year 2012

Something rather remarkable happened to me on Monday. At about 11:30 PST — 8:30-ish London time — I received an email from David Honig, publisher of Palate Press, consisting of three words. “You won” in the subject line, and “congratulations” in the body. I hadn’t been able to fly to London where the Louis Roederer International Wine Writing Awards were being presented; the trip would have cost me about fifteen percent of the annual pittance I make as a graduate student, and that clearly wasn’t happening. David, who went on behalf of Palate Press’s nomination for wine website of the year, offered to accept for me should the necessity arise. I had planned on not winning, partly because I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but also partly because I don’t see what I do as being that award-winning. So, when David’s email arrived, I was truly surprised. It even occurred to me for a moment that it might be a mistake or a joke, but that’s not David’s style. I’ve been doing even more than my usually generous amount of smiling ever since.

I’m honored, naturally, and humbled, and astonished, and delighted. But I also feel as though my winning this award says something about the position of wine science writing in the the wine writing world. From my very first article for Palate Press, I’ve written almost exclusively about wine science: microbiology, flavor chemistry, article critiques, and the like. Doing so, I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider in the wine writing world. I can’t relate to most other wine writers’ experiences about press trips to Portugal or interviewing a great sommelier or trying to tell the story of this beautiful South African Pinotage. Researching an article, for me, doesn’t involve tasting and talking; it involves hours of reading scientific journal articles. It’s nearly impossible for me to compare my writing to people more in the mainstream; we’re talking apples and oranges, in some ways.

Most importantly, it’s hard to judge whether what I’m doing is valuable. I can say that I’m one of the few people trying to talk about wine science to the lay-wine enthusiast. I can say that I think doing so is important. But I can’t say whether anyone else agrees with me.

The other finalists for Emerging Wine Writer of the Year are all splendid writers — including my Palate Press colleague Evan Dawson — but they all write something closer to the mainstream of wine writing. That I was chosen among them says something about wine science writing as much, and perhaps more, than it does about my own skill. It’s a validation, at least by this group of people, that the science of wine is potentially as interesting and important to the wine enthusiast as is the personal narrative of wine, or the economics or architecture or politics of wine, or tasting notes. It’s a statement that wine science writing has a place in the greater mission of wine writing. Even if I sometimes feel peripheral, I’m still sitting at the table. It’s a good place to be.

Let me have won the Roederer, then, not just for myself, but for the greater cause of wine writing. And, maybe, even for every writer who takes the risk of doing something different because it’s what she loves.

Because the air is very smoky here today

The sky is innocent enough but the dust, the dust is coming from some place I’ve never been and calling me to a place that is only a memory, and a collective one at that. I’m solidly focused on trying to place one foot in front of the other, calmly, resolutely, to make it look like this is easy, to make it look as though I’m not trying to ignore the horses cantering and the cattle grazing and the women in long skirts going about their business through my mind. But then a guitar comes from an open door, a guitar and a voice, and the only reason that I know the door is open is the music because I’m still staring resolutely at my feet, but “steeeel guitars from Memphis on the way to rock ‘n rollllllllll…” makes me look up, and back, briefly, and I see the figure in the worn jeans and sturdy belt and pale cowboy hat the color of a steer you might rope at the county rodeo and smoking what I’m certain must be Marlboroughs And I stop in my tracks for a moment, an instant, short enough that the kid behind me thinks that I’m still walking, because I hear the man in the jeans and the belt and the hat asking me the whereabouts of the young buck cowboy I lost years ago and who owns the horses he saw cantering and the cattle he saw grazing and whether I’m friends with the women in long skirts going about their business. But it’s a quarter to nine o’clock and I keep walking as though I don’t know the answers to his questions, no, sir, you’ve got the wrong girl.

In Response to Mr. Gray on Wine Lists and Mr. Dawson on corkage

I somewhat belatedly read my fellow Palate Press columnist Evan Dawson’s article on corkage and then, also somewhat belatedly, The Gray Report post in which W. Blake Gray (also a fellow Palate Press columnist) responded to Dawson. When I realized that I had more to say about the topic than was going to fit tidily into a comment on either piece, I thought that I’d continue the chain by responding here. Please don’t think that I’m trying to steal either Evan or Blake’s thunder. Everything I’ve seen tells me that both Evan and Blake are great guys and even better writers, and I couldn’t steal their thunder even if I wanted to.

 

Blake asks the pertinent and (characteristically) punchy question: should a wine list educate or is the wine list just a price list? His question is prompted by realizing that he (an experienced wine writer, no less) doesn’t recognize most of the offerings on the wine list Jeremy Parzen has compiled at Sotto, which Dawson used as an example of a particularly thoughtful and interesting list. Since Blake can’t order based on familiarity and is given only the most general information about the wine – name, vintage, red or white, “bold” or light, and a very general idea of place (it’s an Italian restaurant; most of the wines are also Italian) – he has three options.

1. Ask the sommelier for advice. Blake dismisses this option as impractical because the somm isn’t always there and takes a long time to arrive table-side when he or she is. And while some servers are reliable sources of knowledge about the wine list, most are not.
2. Choose a wine based on price.
3. Bring his own bottle from home (which is the original connection with Evan’s article on corkage.)

The fourth option, which Blake didn’t mention, is to pull his smart phone out of his pocket and use his favorite wine app to look up tasting notes on the list’s mystery wines, but I’m going to give Blake the benefit of the doubt and guess that he’s too much the polite diner to unholster a cell phone at table.

 

Both Evan’s and Blake’s articles caused me to reflect on how narrow an audience they’re really addressing. We’re all addressing a narrow audience when we write about wine; most people don’t care enough about wine to read about it for fun, and that’s especially true of the geeky stuff I prefer. But Evan and Blake are writing to people who, additionally, live in sizable cities with significant fine dining restaurants AND who eat out at such establishments often enough to think about bringing their own bottles from home. I suspect that this does, in fact, describe most of the readership of Palate Press and The Gray Report, but it definitely doesn’t describe me. Blake lives in the San Francisco area. ‘Nuff said. Evan lives in Rochester, NY where I also once lived and so which I can attest is definitely not San Francisco, but it still has some reasonable restaurants. It unquestionably has restaurants whose wine lists surpass the boundaries of my wine knowledge.

 

I live in Pullman, Washington, a town the size of which is overstated by its 30,000-somethingish population estimate. Pullman is a small town on the Washington-Idaho border, smack-dab in the middle of wheat- and lentil-farming country, that just happens to have a sizeable university (Washington State) stuck in the middle of it.  It is, therefore, a peculiar blend of redneck farm community and partying college town. I love it. I love living in a town where I have a field ten minutes from my door and where I can’t go to the grocery store without seeing someone I know, but which has the critical mass necessary for cultural events. And a decent library. But what we don’t have are restaurants of the caliber that Evan and Blake assume are the norm. Pullman restaurants are largely designed to feed college students, which means neither fine dining nor notable wine lists. I’d qualify one restaurant in town (the lovely Black Cypress) as “fine dining” – two if I include the nearby Idaho town of Moscow – and its short but satisfactory wine list favors Washington and Oregon enough that I can reliably identify every glass and bottle. I’ll guess that at least some other readers can relate. We don’t all live in San Francisco or New York or even Rochester.

 

Back to Blake’s question about whether the wine list should educate or can be just a price list. As much as I enjoy the former, I’m honestly okay with the latter, which brings me to my second point about narrow audiences. On the rare occasions when I find myself within range of a good restaurant, I don’t have a lot of money to spend there. I know that more expensive bottles generally carry a proportionally lower markup and are therefore a better deal. I often know that some of the more expensive bottles are hard-to-find treasures, and sometimes I know that they’re really yummy. But none of that matters when you’re a grad student who’s functionally living below the poverty level.  I DO use the wine list as a price list. I don’t make a selection based on price alone – there are usually a few options around the lowest price point and I can rule out bottles that I know I don’t like or that are inappropriate for what I’m eating or that are horribly overpriced – but price still ranks as the most important factor in my decision. Hand me Jeremy Parzen’s beautiful wine list at Sotto and I’ll have no trouble making a decision even though I’m woefully incompetent at Italian wines. I want something red, and I want something bold – because I’m eating a braised oxtail dish, let’s say – so I go to that section of the list. The least expensive bottle is something called a syrache, which sounds a lot like syrah and I know that I’m hit-or-miss on liking syrahs, so I move to the second least expensive bottle. This one says “di Sardegna” which I’m pretty sure means “from Sardinia” and I’ve heard a lot of interesting things about Sardinian wine. Sold.

 

The worst thing that can now happen is that I don’t like the wine which, at a restaurant of Sotto’s caliber, is more likely to mean that I simply don’t care for it than that it’s poorly made. (If the bottle is clearly flawed I would send it back, but I’d also say that I’m more confident than the average consumer about my ability to identify wine faults.) Whether I like it or not I’ve probably learned something. It’s possible that the wine isn’t a good representative of it’s type and that I’ve therefore not learned anything that I can generalize beyond this specific wine, but that also seems unlikely in a restaurant like this with Jeremy Parzen running the wine show.

 

Actually, I’m much more likely to order a beer or stick with water regardless. Obscene markups on restaurant wine lists bother me so much that I rarely drink wine in restaurants even when I’m not the one paying. At less schmancy places with little or no wine on offer I feel fine bringing a modest but interesting bottle of my own. I won’t bring a bottle to someplace like Sotto unless the bottle ranks comfortably in price with their own list AND rocks, and since I have no such bottles in my cellar I won’t bring one. So I’ll drink water or, if the beverage manager has been thoughtful enough to put together an interesting beer list with a few curiosities, I’ll order one of those. Beer is usually an obviously better deal and, if I’m lucky, I’ll find keg- or cask-only offerings that I couldn’t try at home, all for less than the least expensive glass of wine on the menu, and almost universally more interesting.

 

I would be overjoyed to find a wine list full of things I’ve never seen before with clear, accurate, and interesting descriptions of its contents.  But, if I did find such a list, I would:

1. Be tempted to rudely bury my nose in the wine list rather than attending to my dining companion, should I have one;
2. Take 75 minutes to place my order because it took me that long to read the list and I forgot to look at the menu; and
3. Still order wine based primarily on price.

 

So, in the end, perhaps it’s better that the wine list act as a price list rather than an educational tool. When I go out to eat, I want to enjoy the meal and, hopefully, the pleasure of good company. I might not do either of those things very well should my attention be caught by an educational wine list. I can learn about wine at home, and that’s probably the best place for it.

 

I know that most people reading Evan’s and Blake’s articles aren’t like me but, if there are any who are, know that you’re not alone. To Evan and Blake, thanks for the thought-provoking reads. And I envy you getting to eat in those restaurants.