My Geek is Showing

As
a wine professional there is a part of myself that only
comes out every once in awhile, and only with certain
colleagues. It’s a little similar to Dr. Jekel and Mr. Hyde.
My Mr. Hyde is the wine geek. This past mid-July I had the
pleasure of attending the Society of Wine Educators annual
conference in Eugene, Oregon. And for that week, the wine
geek did roar. For I was a wine week with a plethora of
other wine geeks and, being in southern Willamette Valley,
in wine geekdom. For those of you who are geeks of the grape
reading this, the term wine geek needs not any explanation.
If you are unsure if you have made the crossover to this
elite set of wine professionals, ask yourself the following
questions: Do you have unquenchable passion for the subject?
Do you read the latest edition of your favorite wine
magazine and memorize the latest updated law, just for fun?
Ever made a corny joke that only someone with solid wine
knowledge would get? (For example, “Dom Perignon, now there
was a great blind taster.”) Lost track of how many wine
books you have?

If you have
answered yes to these questions, especially if you have made
jokes, welcome to the unofficial circle of the wine world.
And it was while in Eugene that I reacquainted myself with
my wine geek. I even got to play in a competitive trivia
pursuit game developed by a Swedish sommelier. I came in
second with my teammate, respectably behind two Masters of
Wine candidates.

Overall, the
participants at the conference were great. All aspects of
the wine world were represented, ranging from North America,
Europe and even Asia, with all kinds of wine professionals
at various levels of education. And the lack of pretension
and eagerness to share and learn was infectious. The
seminars themselves covered topics such as classroom
teaching techniques, focused wine regions, alternate
closures, enology, using perfumer’s kit to reproduce a
wine’s bouquet, food and wine pairings, and the list went
on. There were just tons of tidbits of information I came
across that I found fascinating. If any wine geeks out there
want to grab a beer sometime, I’d be delighted to tell you
all of them. For example, in the 2-day Bordeaux seminar we
looked at a copy of the infamous handwritten Official
Classification of 1855. One of the chateaus is actually
written in with a different handwriting, as if it was
“penciled in”. It had not originally been included in the
classification and it was during the actual Exposition
Universelle (the 1855 World’s Fair in Paris) that the
brokers were appealed to by the chateau in question. When
they realized they forgot to include the chateau, it was
added during the actual fair. What is the chateau? Chateau
Cantemerle.

I also learned
more about micro-oxidation and pneumatage. Micro-oxidation
is a technique for adding very small bubbles of oxygen
during fermentation that are meant to be absorbed to soften
the tannin and make the wine approachable earlier than it
otherwise might be. In pneumatage you add large bubbles that
don’t get absorbed into the wine, which softly breaks up the
cap during fermentation. The result is the ability to get
full extraction from grapes without hard tannins that can
occur during batonage. Though they’re mentioned in the movie
Mondovino, neither of these techniques will be listed on a
wine bottle. If you want to taste the results, you could
sample wines from Benton-Lane Winery, which sponsored the
seminar I attended. Compare their Estate Pinot Noir, which
underwent pneumatage, to their “First-Class” to which they
did not – instead using pigeage.

How many times a
week do you have someone ask you what you think of
screwcaps? The next person who asks me is bound to get more
than they bargained for because I attended a seminar about
alternate closures, including screwcaps, plastic corks and
glass capsules. We heard about the history of cork,
extensive pros and cons for cork versus screwcaps and
improvements in the cork industry. And it settled the
question for me about whether oxygen gets into the wine
through a cork – yes.

Next year’s
Society of Wine Educators conference is in Monterey, around
this same time of year, and I’ll be going back. Anyone want
to join me on a wine geek trip?