Don's Gillette's Wine Blog
Musings from our store's resident wine guru
Don has over thirty years experience in the wine industry. For the last eighteen years his attention has been focused on the growing local industry. Don has a large following of customers who search out his opinions (never in short supply!) on new releases and on what's currently most distinctive on our shelves. Others seek his insights on wineries and trends that are still under the radar. Read Don's full bio...
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The Distractions of Memory
Nostalgic memories are a comfort to most of us, more so as we get older. But memories get in the way as well and that intrusiveness also seems to grow as we age. The pleasure of new experience and the rewards of new companionships can be blunted or rejected, because of the weight of prejudices and assumptions lodged in our heads.
In the wine trade, each new vintage is a thing unto itself. It is something to be learned and discussed, promoted or sometimes denigrated. This is a business driven by technology and market forces and by fashion and the opinions of reviewers. All these influences guarantee that change comes fast and often, although slower and more important generational changes are steadily at work as well.
The weight of memory adds up. Sometimes I have to force myself to keep a fresh perspective and take-in new data with an open mind. When I am presented with a new wine, my mind can search through a catalog of reasons why it will likely disappoint or please me. Some of the assumptions that come to mind are so outdated as to be silly. I sincerely wish I could get rid of them.
A Brief History of Irrelevant Prejudice
When I first got into the wine trade, more than three decades ago, classy restaurants were assumed to have French Sommeliers. These emigres were widely parodied for their assumed arrogance and reputation for selling through intimidation. Their superior wine knowledge was notoriously useful as a social tool to drive diners into a purchasing corner. Most wine lovers my age can recall hearing dirtiness in a wine being haughtily described as: "a fine expression of terroir."
I had little regular contact with those characters, but came to more-or-less accept the logic of their detractors. I had some encounters with that fabled arrogance and, being in the trade, was at times well aware that the wine being so emphatically recommended was not only mediocre, but extremely profitable.
Today, San Francisco is packed with bright young home-grown Sommeliers, all of whom seem well educated and helpful. For some reason, although I never run into one, I still think of those arrogant French guys all the time.
In the last year I have had to abandon personal grudges against two Napa wineries. The first has for years owned a excellent vineyard and consistently made dirty and/or fruitless Cabernets from it. When asked, I told that winery's distributor to bring in neither a sample, nor its maker. He did both. He was absolutely sure I would see an obvious improvement and want to meet the man responsible. He was right.
Of those two Napa wineries I had saved my most vitriolic criticism for the later. These people spent a fortune in the 1990s collecting legendary vineyards, only to make dreadfully "bretty" Cabs from each. Their reds uniformly smelled like a Thoroughbred after a big race. Again, the distributor ignored my instructions and challenged my assumptions.
I soon found myself congratulating the winemaker, who told me he had spent five years clearing Brettanomyces from the winery's environment. He said that a former GM had ordered his winemakers to: "inoculate all the barrels with bret, to make the wines taste more French."
When tasting through a group of Chardonnays, I sometimes catch myself searching for a particular type of bitterness, or a suggestion of filter-pad aromas. These are problems I haven't seen since the early 1980s. My recollection of them is absolutely useless to me or anyone else. Could anything be more irrelevant?
More of the Same
I grew up in a suburb of LA, and used to walk to and fro from my high school each day. On the way home, I used to stop for a browse and some conversation at the local gun shop. They let me hang out and look at their wares and listen to their conversations with customers. I did this for almost a year, during which the Watts riots broke out.
The gun shop became a hub of activity and the conversations I heard ranged from titillating to downright crazy. Our neighborhood was nearly ten miles from the nearest one with a black resident, but everyone was preparing for some sort of invasion. Discussions about whether one could legally shoot a looter were constant.
I really don't know if the two events are connected, but a few years later I was wheat-pasting posters onto bus benches for the first "Tom Bradley for Mayor" campaign. That election was almost entirely about Race, and Bradley's name later became synonymous with the skin problem we all had to overcome. Maybe now that is becoming just another irrelevant memory, and maybe we should all be grateful that those slow generational changes keep coming.