Wine

Ive had this conversation a couple of times but wine has a lot of parallels with record collecting/audiophiles. Some people like lo-fi or field recordings and some people don't like that style. You may have to put in the work to search out the best of the bunch. Or just be surprised by the bottle.

I'm OK with a lot of wine surprises, but draw the line at wine that veers strongly to kombucha.

yeah, cremant de loire/bourgogne/jura... all that stuff is sooo tasty

natural wine can get back to me when it makes up its mind about what it is.

i'm totally willing to try a bottle here and there but there's a crazy amount of variance under the natural wine umbrella. and it's falsely being presented as a black/white thing with conventional wine by a lot of enthusiasts which doesn't ring true. the farming practices and limited intervention make a ton of sense to me, but i'm definitely not convinced that spontaneous fermentation is always the right answer.

i had a natural rosé at a tasting last weekend and it started off innocuously before diving into a weird slate and graphite rockiness. it was interesting, which is the most i can say for several nws i've had.

I personally like super minerally/rocky/ashy wines or still wines with a surprise bit of petillance. But best is to just ask whoever is selling it for a descriptor.

The natural wine vs crafted wine battle has gotten kind of funny recently though. People are getting angry!

Are USA wineries putting out natural wines? I doubt many of the good French ones make it out of the country.

Yeah, natural wine is very big. I like Clos Sauron, La Clarine Farms, Division. Some do tend to taste reduced and off balanced though.

Oh and Bow and Arrow. I was just looking at one of the natural wine bar menus in NY (the one James Murphy owns) to see what he's carrying. It is mostly french though on most natural wine bar menus.

Donkey & Goat is good

they made the weird rosé i tried

i think all the natural wine I've drank so far has been french

if you like super minerally wine (and are in the UK), I recommend M&S costa fresca sauvignon blanc

Wtf is natural wine

Just imagine if the viniculture and vinification is done in the "purist" way possible to produce wine.

From the Guardian article posted upthread.

This was a so-called natural wine – made without any pesticides, chemicals or preservatives – the product of a movement that has triggered the biggest conflict in the world of wine for a generation.

Also can include using wild yeasts for fermentation.

Donkey & Goat is good

― Tapes 'n Tapes of Osho (Sufjan Grafton), Friday, May 18, 2018 3:03 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they made the weird rosé i tried

― call all destroyer, Friday, May 18, 2018 3:08 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

have not had that. I guess I should say the pet nat is good.

Thanks nick

Taking my WSET Level 2 exam today. I don't come from a wine background before the last few months, so it's felt quite a jump and I'm more than a little nervous. My head is completely overflowing with grape varieties and regional facts... fingers crossed they all come together this afternoon and I remember my Burgundy from my Bordeaux from my Beaujolais, my Clare Valley from my Central Valley, my Gamay from my Garganega etc etc.

Sparkling, sweet wine, sherry, port and spirits to study this morning first though.

Wow, good luck!

good luck ! where did you do the course, out of interest ?

Thanks! Just home and sadly I found the exam quite difficult. Currently trying to assuage my disappointment and not to dwell on the things I know I got wrong (having checked the book afterwards). We shall see in 2 weeks how it all pans out when the results come.

I did it at my new(ish) workplace (been there a year now), a spirits, wine and beer specialist shop here in Glasgow. One of our managers teaches WSET Levels 1, 2 and 3 (and maybe beyond if we get interest). I work in the web side of things and don't have booze experience previously (whisky is all I really know, and how to pack boxes and take photographs), but I really love the job and have discovered quite an interest in wine especially, so I'm super keen to get some decent knowledge.

Ah, well the good thing is that the questions you know that you missed you will never, ever forget again. But good luck!

I did my WSET advanced (Level 3, I did it online except for the test) a couple of years ago right after I passed Certified Sommelier with the guild (I did the Certified Wine Specialist test too with Society of Wine Educators to keep up with reading). I have been putting off doing the diploma because not everyone offers it, I need to do it online and I can't coordinate being somewhere for the orientation and tests. I am sure you have other resources locally, but feel free to email me or discuss study methods or books to read here.

Thanks Yerac, that's good of you and an impressive résumé. In terms of reading materials... so far my meagre library consists of the Wine Folly book, a battered old edition of Jancis Robinson's Oxford Companion To Wine and the WSET Level 2 course book, so I'm definitely open to suggestions.

I didn't feel like Level 2 was difficult per se, rather that it was a lot of factual info to absorb in a short time (2.5 contact days over 3 weeks as the fully taught course we did, with the exam being the afternoon of the final week). I wish I'd started studying more beforehand, but of course everyday life intervened. Anyway, it's all good, I learned a lot whatever happens. I'll try to keep actively learning and drinking and have a very long-term eye on Level 3 in a year or more, perhaps.

I feel I want to be supportive of others research/practice in this field.

good luck with your oenophile studies everyone, something i keep meaning to get into but never quite bother to allot the time.

I've had lots of good natural wine

― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Friday, May 18, 2018 9:41 AM (three months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've drank lots of natural wine since this post and have had a much more mixed-bag experience including crazy variance between bottles, and the dreaded kombuchay-style

xpost Wine knowledge is cumulative, so even in downtime and I am not actively studying I try to read books (not reference books) or watch wine centric movies or listen to podcasts. I would highly recommend checking out Wine and War (so much about WWII I didn't know!), Champagne, Adventures on the Wine Route, The Widow Clicquot, Reading Between the Vines. These are books that have more of a story and give more frames of reference instead of just memorizing facts.

Besides any study guides that WSET gives you, I think I have only used the World Atlas of Wine and then all the study guides on the Guild Somm website (but more for when I was taking the certified somm test because they are more focused on producers, service and they have different tasting criteria). I am kind of only pursuing WSET over Court of Master Sommeliers now because I don't really plan on working as a full time sommelier (except randomly) and they are getting stricter and stricter about who they are allowing to do the Advanced test. I am pretty terrible at geography, so I actually have all of the delong wine maps framed on my walls. I used to study them while brushing my teeth or talking on the phone. Where I am/was there was always a lot of people who were into wine

I only really got into wine about 4? years ago, so it definitely is a big learning curve especially if you didn't have exposure to french or german or haven't traveled to some of these places before. Traveling has definitely also helped me sort out geography.

I've drank lots of natural wine since this post and have had a much more mixed-bag experience including crazy variance between bottles, and the dreaded kombuchay-style

― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Monday, 20 August 2018 21:21 (yesterday) Permalink

i wonder if that's because it's been summer? the lack of preservatives mean they're more sensitive to temperature change

I got my WSET Level 2 result yesterday and it turns out my worrying and over-active self-criticism was rather unfounded... I passed with distinction and got 94%! Really delighted.

Well done!

Congrats!

Congrats!

All round to krakow's ...

congrats!

Thanks everyone!

djh... I could do with help dealing with my growing stash of bottles that won't last without proper storage (nothing special though, I'm afraid), as my partner is not a big drinker, so friendly ilxors welcome here.

brain, you motivated me to revisit what I was doing with wine. I finally enrolled in the wset diploma. A place in philly allows home study (which I had no clue about before) so I only have to show up for exams of which they sometimes allow you to take more than one section in a day. I hopefully will be half done with the diploma by next summer (and before they change the curriculum).

Recently drunk:

Lots of Envinate reds. I love these so much, have stocked up on Taganan tinto, Benje and Migan.

Benevolent Neglect Syrah. Super impressive, powerful, maybe not the longest finish considering the nose. Picked up a few bottles at £28, seemed really underpriced, now I see them selling for ~£50 which seems about right.

Le Coste Litrozzo rose and red from the fridge, wringing the last enjoyment out of the summer weather here.

Have really enjoyed Terre di Faiano Primitivo (from Waitrose, currently £7.50 but usually a tenner), recently.

Xp summer's just starting here so yesterday we had a bottle each of the litrozzo white and rose in the backyard

I am going to be on the lookout for the Envinate wines. I don't think I have come across any (also the closest wine shops to me suck). I also need to drink more primitivo/zinfandel but I always tend to skip right over it in stores.

They are v hard to find here (London). I got most of them sent from a Spanish shop - gourmethunters. Don’t know where you are but they deliver pretty extensively and the prices are great. Picked up a load of stuff from Sextant, Calek, Jordi Llorens etc too.

We have a spanish only wine store here that will likely carry it. I'll check it out.

Yep, they have it. https://despanafinewines.com/search/?q=envinate

Great stuff. The Albahra is nice but maybe not as interesting as the others. I find the Migan really beautiful.

congratulations to krakow!!

i had a bottle of pet nat last weekend and my wife liked it so much she called up borough wines and ordered the last six bottles they have in storage. it does feel like wine is ripe for a craft-beer style revolution on the same scale as the what american breweries have done w ipas, unfiltered beers etc. people are open to weird flavours! some people even drink saisons ffs!

Hasn't wine gone through that revolution? I thought we already had the natural wine backlash.

haha yeah that's true... i guess it depends on who you're talking to.

tracer which pet nat was it?

Hasn't wine gone through that revolution? I thought we already had the natural wine backlash.

― Yerac, Sunday, September 16, 2018 7:54 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

natural wine is like a blip on a blip on the radar compared to what beer has done.