Liquid

Meat Your New Drinking Buddy

Sibling Rivalry

Be the wine

It’s fun being a spectator, but you have to be in the game to be a real player. Wine doesn’t offer too many opportunities to do that, and so most people stick to drinking the stuff. Which isn’t too bad, except that it’s a little like football being all about tailgating, rather than what happens on the field.

Sure, you can get in on the money side of things: working in a store or restaurant, schlepping boxes around for a distributor, and so forth. But — to torture the analogy a little longer — that’s manning the concession stand or riding a desk in the front office. The actual game is the one played with the grapes. And that means making wine.

Ever wonder what that’s like? Boston University is offering you a chance to find out. You’ll visit Turtle Creek Winery in Lincoln four times over the growing/winemaking season, getting your hands on everything from a just-sprouting vine to a freshly filled bottle. The seminar starts on May 2, runs through the end of September, and costs $150. Visit www.bu.edu/foodandwine/seminars/tastings_demos.html for more details. For once, it’s OK to drink the homework.

For more on wine, check out Thor’s blog at www.stuffboston.com.

Radical Radikon

 Sometimes, we crave the comfort of the familiar — a well-loved book that’s been nearly dog-eared to death, the favorite T-shirt that’s been rendered super-soft by years of wear, that nostalgia-inducing song that has somehow found its way onto every one of your iPod playlists. At other times though, only the shock of the new will do. Some players in the wine world evidently agree, as a rising number of producers seem dead set on defying convention with every cask.

A bunch of them are in the Friuli region of northeastern Italy, and their wines have the look and taste of ... well, who knows? Think dense, almost opaque whites that aren’t particularly white, or white wines with the sort of bitterness that’s always been the near-exclusive domain of reds. They’ll grab your attention and make you wonder — sometimes out loud — just what the hell it is you’re tasting.

One of the best among this growing fraternity of weirdness is Radikon, whose Jakot, Ribolla Gialla, and Oslavje bottlings are brilliant and impossible to ignore. They stand out in another way, too: the winemaker believes the standard 750 milliliters is too stingy for a single evening’s consumption, so he’s upped his standard bottle to a full liter. We think we’re in love.

Radikon wines are available at The Wine Bottega (341 Hanover Street, Boston, 617.227.6607).

Wine on a dime

Put The Zing Back Into Spring

It’s spring in New Zealand. (What? No it’s not! Can’t you read a map?) No, I insist. A young country — geologically and historically — New Zealand’s wine scene reflects its people: open, friendly, and uncomplicated. It’s a tiny place, but its mark on the world of wine has been outsized for a while now. It all started with sauvignon blanc from Marlborough, with a flavor like grassy, zingy, fermented chile pepper that pinned your ears back when you tasted it. Then it was pinot noir, especially from the Central Otego — a region that, not long ago, was mostly fruit farms and desolate, rocky slopes. These days, residents can hardly stumble out of bed without stepping on newly planted vines.

Meanwhile, Marlborough “savvier” (as the locals call it) has changed. The classic style still exists, to be sure, but there’s a new swagger and sophistication to the best bottles, and few are better than the Dog Point Sauvignon Blanc, which hints at that old-school intensity of flavor while adding an intriguingly sandy texture and complexity to the mix. You don’t have to travel to another hemisphere to have a taste; pick up a bottle ($22.99) at Martignetti Liquors (1650 Soldiers Field Road, Brighton, 617.782.3700) or Cambridge Wine & Spirits (202 Alewife Brook Parkway, Cambridge, 617.864.7171).

Challenge Accepted

Some people delight in the unfamiliar and are immune to the comfort of the common. When that set of people intersects with an interest in wine, there can be problems. Because, to be honest, most restaurant wine lists just aren’t that interesting. The same names, the same grapes, the same prices...yawn. It’s all just too tedious.

There are the exceptions: a well-aged bottle at a good price, wedged into a lineup of the tried-and-true, or the sudden appearance of a memory-laden bottle, tasted years ago in an Italian seaside town, now pouring in a North End trattoria. But for the truly adventurous, it’s the walk on the winy wild side: discovering an obscurity that has, for some reason, become a passion — or is it a fetish? — for whoever’s written the wine list.

At Erbaluce (69 Church Street, Boston), Charles Draghi’s Italianate haven of eccentric traditionalism in Bay Village, that passion — given the neighborhood, we probably shouldn’t call it a fetish — expresses itself via Valtellina, an eccentrically traditionalist wine from Lombardy that you’ll almost never see on a restaurant’s list. At Erbaluce, there are eight of ’em. That’s right, eight. Want to drink on the edge? Here’s your chance.

Sweet Dreams 2.10.09

 

“Sweet,” usually it’s a compliment, unless it’s delivered by a date who’s just about to explain that, despite you being “a really nice person,” he or she is not sufficiently attracted to invite you up for an epilogue. And yet, when it comes to wine, label something “sweet” and people suddenly seem to lose their thirst.

That’s a shame, for several reasons. One is that an awful lot of the most popular wines in this country are ... well, they’re not dry, though their producers don’t exactly go out of their way to tell you this. “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the cabernet go down,” as a drunken Julie Andrews once sang. The jokes just write themselves, don’t they?

Vine trails

Last issue I told a story involving serial killers’ caves, 10 centuries of cobwebs, spitting, and mistresses. And yet, when I sat down in front of the computer I had intended to write a column about wine travel. Apparently, I’m not the master of narrative focus.

Let’s try again.

“I’m going to wine country,” people say to me, just before they ask me to do a whole bunch of work gratis. They’re about to ask which wineries they should visit, and if I could recommend some interesting wines — hey, isn’t that what I get paid for? “That’s great,” I’m tempted to reply, “and when you come back, I’d like you do a few dozen hours of free legal work.”

Actually, though, the burden has decreased. Because when Americans say “wine country,” all too often they mean the Napa Valley, and I send them the thing I wrote u  for the last 100 people who asked. (It probably needs some editing by now.)

Deliverance

Danger on the wine trail

I expected to be arrested. Or fired at. Or set upon by dogs. I was driving down a semi-rural road at a speed that would have been mocked by passing toddlers, stopping every few dozen meters to peer at mailboxes, gates, and doorways. A few shouted imprecations came from behind closed shutters and I hurried along, unable to understand the words but quite clear on their meaning.

Wines Without Borders

When it comes to certain regions and cuisines, versatile vino is key

Can't buy my love

The mystery of great wines that aren't on the shelves 

The Rhys 2006 Pinot Noir Swan Terrace, from the Santa Cruz Mountains, is as delicious a New World pinot as I’ve ever tasted. It tastes like tiny wild berries on a rocky promontory and smells like the deep forest, with beautiful balance and a long finish. It’s a really gorgeous wine.

And you can’t buy it here.

Label Chaser

One of the most useful college lessons is that an awful lot of what you thought you knew was wrong. Sometimes, it’s just an everyday loss of innocence — the discovery that the world is a lot more complex than you’d thought back in high school — but sometimes, it’s a dawning realization that you’ve been — gasp! — lied to by people you’d trusted.

Of course, there’s also the sort of lying intended to separate people from their innocence … but that’s Jeannie’s column, not mine.

Wine, too, has its shades of gray, its misleads, and its outright lies. Take wine labels. You probably think you know what’s in a bottle of 2005 pinot noir from the Russian River Valley, right? Guess again.

Screw it

Wine openers with a twist