by Fredric Koeppel
The Commercial Appeal I was at a tasting in New York a few weeks ago, one of those events where producers and their products are arranged at tables around the edges of a room and 200 or 300 members of the press and trade jostle for position as they try to taste wine, make notes and spit without getting wine all over themselves. We spit out the wine so that, tasting 50 or 60, we don't get knee-walking drunk.
Juggling these tasks, I overheard a young man trying to explain, with all the authority he could muster, the process of tasting wine to someone who, when I looked around, turned out to be, I have to say, a woman of substantial presence and beauty.
"Hold the glass like this," he said, gripping his glass by the stem. "Or, you can do it that way," he said, when she grasped the glass tightly by the bowl. "Swirl the wine in the glass, oops, careful, ha-ha. Notice the transparent drops that cling to the inside of the glass. Those are the legs. They're extremely important in evaluating wine. Every wine has a signature set of legs."
I didn't feel it was my place to butt in here and say, "Hey, Jack, that's a crock," but a crock it is. The Myth of Legs has bamboozled many a novice or even experienced wine drinker.
"Legs"--the slightly viscous, transparent residue that runs down the inside of a glass after the wine has been swirled--indicates two things: Wine contains more water than alcohol, and alcohol evaporates faster than water.
It would require several paragraphs to explain this phenomenon fully, but the short version is this: The contention between the surface tension of the wine and the interfacial tension that acts between the wine and the inner surface of the glass draws the liquid up the inside of the glass to the point where, exposed to air, the alcohol evaporates, the surface tension of the remaining water intensifies, and the water forms a drop that clings to the glass and slowly slides back down.
Legs may be an indicator of a wine's alcoholic strength because the higher the alcohol content, the faster the alcohol evaporates, but they are not a measure of a wine's viscosity, nor do they have any bearing on the quality or the pedigree of the wine. What Americans call "legs," by the way, the English call "tears," surely a symptom of the gulf that divides our cultures.
Anyway, let's look at a few other myths about wine.
All wines age and its corollary, Old wines are worth lots of money.
I frequently get telephone calls and E-mails from people who ask some variation of this question: "I have this old bottle of wine. When should I drink it and how much is it worth?" When I ask what the wine is, they'll say something like, "It's a beaujolais from 1972. I found it in a closet."
My answer? "Toss it."
The truth is that 95 percent of the wine made in the world is designed to be drunk, fresh, clean and tasty one hopes, within a year or two of harvest. The wines that receive so much attention in the press and that command high prices from collectors and restaurants--Bordeaux Premier Crus, Burgundy Grand Crus, Napa Valley cult cabernet sauvignons, the legendary vini da tavola from Tuscany and Piedmont, Australian "icon " wines (as they call them Down Under)--account for a minuscule portion of the wine available to consumers, most of whom shouldn't bother about such expensive, ageable, status-endowing products.
While fine old wines from great vintages may sell for heart-stopping prices at auction, a bottle of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild from a bad year or from a good year but killed by improper storage isn't worth any more than last fall's flat and flavorless beaujolais nouveau.
Smelling the cork in a restaurant will tell you if the wine is bad.
Actually, smelling the cork, whether at a restaurant or at home, won't tell you anything about the quality of the wine; corks generally smell like, you know, cork. The waiter or sommelier hands you the cork so you can examine it for signs of mold or breakage and make certain that the date stamped on it concurs with the date on the label; it's a way of preventing fraud. Unfortunately, many waiters don't know this and act as if by not smelling the cork the clueless diner has committed an unforgivable gaffe.
(It's true that most inexpensive wines will not have a date stamped on the cork.)
Opening a bottle to let it breathe will improve the wine.
Look at it this way: The opening and neck of a wine bottle are about as big around as a dime. That's not much space through which to let into a full bottle the oxygen that will aerate the wine and soften its tannins. It's far more profitable simply to pour a glass, thereby aerating the wine far more than opening the bottle would.
If you're about to serve a starkly tannic, mouth-singeing wine, you can pour it into a decanter or back and forth from one decanter to another a time or two; that process will aerate the wine nicely. Leaving a bottle open all night may, of course, substantially alter it.
Occasionally when I take a bottle of red wine to a restaurant, the waiter will ask, first thing, if I want the bottle opened "so the wine can breathe." (Wine doesn't breathe, of course; it's not alive.) I say "No," and the waiter will return in a few minutes and ask again, and I say, "No," and by my third refusal the waiter will be getting a little nervous. Finally, I say, "We'll just wait until the entrees arrive." That way the burden is on me, not the waiter, who can ascribe my recalcitrance to eccentricity.
White wine and champagne can be refrigerated indefinitely.
A big "nuh-uh" to that one and a tragic story.
I saved three bottles of champagne for the Significant New Year's Eve 1999, Krug Grand Cuvee, Taittinger Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs 1990 and Bollinger Grand Annee 1990, three superb examples of the champagne-maker's art and about $350 worth of bubbly. I saved them in the refrigerator for a year, thinking, "Hey, they're cold, no harm'll come to them."
Boy, was I wrong.
After working on a special New Year's Eve dinner for three days, it finally came time to open a bottle to celebrate with friends and family before sitting down. Guess what? The Krug was flat and dull. The Bollinger was flat and dull. Only the Taittinger was viable.
The reason seems to be that long-term storage in a refrigerator, where the temperature tends to be 38 to 42 degrees, can, over time, dry corks and cause them to shrink (despite the fact that refrigerators are fairly humid). Even the elaborate foil and wire device intended to keep the cork in the bottle can't prevent seepage of the carbon dioxide that makes the bubbles without which champagne and sparkling wine would not be what they're meant to be.
So if you're going to keep champagne for a while, store it at 50 to 55 degrees, in a dark, vibration-free environment and chill it in the refrigerator to drinking temperature, 40 to 45 degrees, before you drink it. The alternative is to buy champagne soon before drinking it. The same caveat applies to any white wine.
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