My ex-husband, Mike, has the same five CDs in his car he had when we met twelve years ago. I can recite his grocery list like the pledge of allegiance. When Mike establishes a habit, Katrina-like force could not breach his levies. The other night, we’re having dinner at his favorite Chinese restaurant, an upscale place, with no splinters in their chopsticks. Mike starts to order his usual wine, an oak-beglobbed red, once the epitomy of high-status, now a sad cliché. Not to mention that Ovaltine would do a better job washing down the sweet-sour, firecracker-hot food in front of us. But, Mike always orders it because it’s the most expensive wine on the list and therefore the best, right?
It’s a logical strategy. He’s is a suave guy. His shirt-cuffs are monogrammed. He stands up when you come back to the table from the bathroom. But he’s got a lot on his mind, what with making the world safe for country-clubs and capitalism. He’s too busy analyzing the federal budget to wade through piles of wine literature. How’s a guy to keep up?
“Drink what you like!” goes the rallying cry of the anti-snob movement. Sure. Look like an idiot. Humiliate yourself on a date. Take the boss to dinner and order white zin. Listen, your tastes are your business, but there are times when it’s useful to know what the cool crowd is drinking. Consider it a life skill, like tipping, carving a turkey, or fending off stampeding elephants with an umbrella.
Though it’s fashionable to pretend otherwise, there are indeed such things as cool and dorky wines. I took the question to an assorted in-crowd of master sommeliers, opinion-making wine press and early-adaptors. What wines, I asked, are hotter than hot? What do sommeliers drink and discuss in breathless whispers when they’re alone with their own kind?
Here’s what I learned. What’s not cool is money. Forking over wads of cash to have giant, manly, trophy wines decanted is so over.
The concept of the moment is terroir-wine. Wine from, say, a single, half-acre vineyard on a precipitous mountainside in East Fraxistan. Weeded, harvested, stomped and vinted by one old guy with callused hands and the artistic sensibilities of a concert violinist; so in-tune with life’s cycles that the grapes talk to him. He has to be into some sustainable-earth cult involving ancient amphorae, lunar cycles, rune-casting and babbling in tongues. The wine should be quirky, perhaps with a putrid smell you have to get past before you suck it in, gurgle loudly, and proclaim it: “pretty funky stuff.” Funky is good. It speaks of earth and of the fine line between disgusting and delicious. A line the general public, with its bland, corporate taste, is too cowardly to approach.
Cutting-edge regions:
Spain: Innest of all, and busting out all over with terrific wine. Whites include albariño from the Rias Baixas (say Bay-shez) region and verdejo and viura from Rueda. Reds include tempranillo (in Spain they say “ill-ee-o,” not “eeyo” like you’d expect), monastrell and garnacha from Montsant, Priorat, Bierzo, Yecla, Alicante and, well, that’s probably enough to write on your cuff for now.
Portugal: Instead of Port, the thing is dry table reds from Douro. Also, Vinho Verde, once just a chugging wine, has gone hip.
Italy: Like a Fed-Ex guy on meth, Italy just keeps delivering. The hottest regions right now are Friuli and Veneto at the top of the boot, Marches at the calf, Apuglia in the heel, and kicked out in front of the toe, all of Sicily. The hippest grapes are native ones you’ve never heard of, and Italy’s got them up the ying-yang. Start with lagrein, fiano, nero d’avola, aglianico and anything beginning with the letter “v”.
Germany & Austria: Minerality is a good buzz-word to toss around, and you won’t go wrong using it on the dry, aromatic whites from these countries. Riesling, sylvaner, and grüner veltliner are the main players.
Hungary: Tokaj is hot as a pistol, both dry wine made from furmint - a sort of riesling impersonator - and the legendary dessert wine they’ve been making since long before it occurred to anyone in Sauternes, whose quality is measured in buckets of sugar, or puttonyosIf you happen to live west of New York and east of California, you’re not going to trip over a lot of this, but it’s still good to know.
France: Would you believe…Chablis. This is the in-crowd’s version of chardonnay: steely, minerally, non-oaky and affordable.
Also on the bus: sauvignon blanc from South Africa, malbec and torrontés from Argentina, and no doubt a few other wines whose champions will have fired off volleys of outraged emails to me before you even finish this sentence.
Finally, my team of advisors all agree, the hippest wine thing you can do right now is choose screw caps over corks. A few years back, who woulda thunk it? Cool. It’s the new hot. And vice-versa.
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