If you can’t see the video below, please click here to watch it.

I suspect our first grape chemistries will start to trickle in just as our kids settle into school.  For the first year, I will be in charge of assessing the sugar and acid levels; I decide when to pull the gun and haul in our fruit.  And it makes me queasy.  I am going to rely heavily on our growers to help guide me through my first solo harvest season.  Harvest – you cut the cord (or literally cordon), and your babies leave the mama vine and suddenly become your responsibility.  I have spent months cold calling, begging, letter writing, and baking to procure the finest quality fruit from the best known growers in each region.  And now I have to do everything I can to not f*#$#*k it up!  It really hit home when Mark Pisoni said, “I will send you chemistries when you’re down south and fruit samples when you’re up north.”  Crap!  I can’t even identify “melon” or “pear” correctly in a finished wine let alone chew a grape, spit the seed and divine when it’s “done.”  Bruliam is growing up fast.

It’s hard to imagine that just two years ago we selected our first grapes from a pre-fab, drop down menu, with no real knowledge about how to make wine.  This year we are sharing vineyard space with some of the best respected names in the business.  Our barrels have been selected, wine plans detailed, and specific yeast strains ordered.  And now we wait.  The end of summer is always bittersweet, but I look forward to officially becoming your winemaker.

Fining agents are added to wines to react with and mop up undesirable wine constituents.  Examples of those unwanted components might include brown discoloration, overpowering tannins or murky hazes.  Sometimes winemakers fine their wines proactively, so that hazes don’t form down the road in the bottle.  As you can imagine, chalky, murky wine is off-putting to consumers.  The problem is solved by mixing specific fining agents into the wine that react on contact.  The undesirable stuff (be it protein or protein-polysaccharide conglomerates) is bound up as a precipitate that can be filtered out and tossed away.  The resulting wine is alluringly sparkly and brilliantly clear.  Particular fining agents are selected specifically to gum up exactly what needs to be removed.  Protein-based fining agents are chosen to reduce the bitterness and astringency of excessive tannin polymers.  Since most proteins have a net positive charge at wine pH, they are the perfect agents to tie up unwanted tannins with H-bonds.  It all sounds pretty benign on paper until I reveal what is behind door #1…

 animal hooves, albumin, and fish swim bladders 

Let’s say it collectively and get it out of our system, “EEeeeww!”  Animal hooves and hides are the source of gelatin, raw egg whites provide albumin, and sturgeon swim bladders are the active ingredient in isinglass, a collagen protein.  (Oh yeah, I almost forgot.  The EU banned the use of ox blood years ago because of mad cow disease).  Yes it is true.  Animal derived protein products abound in the savvy enologists’ arsenal of tricks.  Other gross outs include polysaccharides mined from brown algae and insect parts (specifically the positively charged chitin derived from their exoskeleton).  You see, winemaking is a pretty ancient art, and our forefathers exploited everything in nature to achieve stability and clarity.  These fining agents predate silica beads and synthetic polymers and continue to work really well even today.  Frankly, most consumers would rather consume a hermetically sealed, perfectly formed hamburger patty from the supermarket than knowingly drink hooves and hides.

For most winemakers today, the core of this contentious debate is not whether to ban certain solvents or quit fining wine but instead how best to disclose this information to consumers.  Copious consumer education is required if “full disclosure” becomes government mandated.  A label proclaiming your wine may contain “potential allergens including but not limited to raw eggs, animal products and fish parts” is not only off putting but also overblown.   Never mind that only minute amounts, if any, of the fining agent is retained in the finished wine as a negligible residue.  It is the possibility of a theoretical allergen that drives the labeling frenzy.  Used correctly, fining agents are dosed at the smallest possible aliquot to achieve clarity and stability, with each molecule sticking to its respective partner.  And again, the fining agent+unwanted solute aggregate is removed from the wine before bottling.  An early study funded by Australia’s Grape and Wine Research and Development Corporation concluded that residual allergens are indeed negligible in finished wines. 

Sometimes fining represents a last minute decision, a way to comb through and polish a wine just before bottling.  In this scenario, the wine labels would have been approved and printed far in advance of this winemaking choice.  The wines could not be bottled and re-labeled without deep financial consequences to the winery.  A blanket consumer warning on all bottles of wine represents the other extreme.    Ironically enough, warning labels would be slapped on bottles at wineries that don’t employ any fining procedures, freaking out consumers unnecessarily.  Or maybe it becomes more information overload, yet another “food warning” consumers scan without mentally processing.  In any event, the thorny labeling issue is sure to invite consumer outcry from vegans and lawyers and folks afflicted with “allergies” like headaches after they drink too much at parties. 

To be sure, life threatening food allergies are not a joke.  So perhaps a clause about eggs, fish or milk proteins is warranted.  But one must tread thoughtfully.  The Situation may crave raw egg protein shakes, but it’s a tougher sell for premium pinot noir.  Once you riff on algae and horse hooves, the romance is gone.  With potential legislation looming and Australia and New Zealand already required to disclose “allergens,” niche discussions about potential wine allergens are sure to find their way to Wikipedia soon.

To date, Bruliam has not employed fining agents in our winemaking strategy.  We are not opposed to using any natural materials that might make our wines better.  As with all of our winemaking choices, we will post our decisions here on our blog.

Unfortunately the study of wine necessitates spit, gross but necessary.  A few weeks ago, when I attended the Pinot Days festival in San Francisco, I spent 4 hours trolling from booth to booth with my red plastic spit cup.  I never really dwelled on the content of that icky plastic spittoon until recently.  Nestled within last week’s reading assignment, my UC Davis syllabus contained the following gem.  The author noted that the murky mixture of spittle and discarded wine will “cause “clots” in expectorated wine samples.”  To imagine a flocculating coagulation of spit + wine protein floating like an island in a frothy merlot sea will kill an appetite.  Even mine.

As it turns out, there is a considerable body of academic research concerning wine and saliva.  Who knew?  One researcher went so far as to measure how much spit your mouth produces after sipping, swirling, and spitting out a mouthful of wine.  In case you were curious, saliva production revs up after 10 seconds and peaks at 20 seconds.  After that your mouth kind of peters out and dries up without the “additional stimulation” of water or a saltine (Lesschaeve and Noble).  Better yet, researchers have identified a “new [spit] protein.”  Investigators invited folks to drink wine and grape seed tannin solutions and then analyzed their spit eight minutes later.  Spit study revealed a novel protein peak, presumably a conglomeration of icky saliva goo stuck to wine funk (ibid).

Most of this research derives not from pranksters and lovers of all things gory and gross but instead from folks studying the sensory analysis of wine.  Much is rooted in the study of wine tannins.  Tannins are of course the stuff of fuzzy purple teeth.  Tannins are what make those big cabs and syrahs so mouth drying and “puckery.”  Tannins are responsible for what the cabernet crusaders call “astringency.”  I am talking about when your tongue gets rough and sand-papery, your cheeks are sucked dry, and your lips crack after swigging too large a gulp of $12 cabernet.  Have you ever had the sensation that the more cab you drink, the more prickly your palate feels?  You’re not crazy.  Actually, research proves that unpleasant feeling is cumulative.

As you slosh back glass after glass, the tannins accumulate, and their effect is compounded like the vig you owe the bookie.  Researchers can actually test this by asking judges to keep sipping vino at specified intervals while continually rating the intensity of the astringency.  The fancy term is “carry over.”  Please tell us, sirs, is your tongue (a) barely brambly, (b) chapped and coarse or (c) harsh and coarse-grained like a scouring pad?  Does the NIH fund those scorecards?  By the way, increasing the time intervals between sips to 30 seconds “considerably reduced” the sand paper effect of each subsequent sip (ibid).

There happens to be logical physiology to explain why your mouth feels like a pumice stone.  Tannins, which are promiscuous chemical chains, like to hook up with any available proteins, whether intrinsic to the wine or not.  Saliva is chock full of proteins, including proline-rich ones, which are particularly attractive to polyphenols (i.e. tannins).  When you sip a tannin-heavy wine, the tannins stick to your salivary proteins and gum them up.  You feel your salivary flow rate drop, and “oral lubrication” decreases.  This is friction in your gums and postulated to be the mechanism of astringency.  (By the way, this is also the premise of protein “fining.”  You mix your immature wine with a protein solution to suck up the extra tannins before bottling).

The next time your host serves some young, outrageously tannic behemoth, your best bet is to pace at one swig/minute.  At least you’ll overcome the tannic carryover until you’re able to dump the remaining drops in a nearby planter.

Works Cited:

Lesschaeve, I., and A. C. Noble. 2005. Polyphenols: factors influencing their sensory properties and their effects on food and beverage preferences. Am J Clin Nutr 2005 81: 330S-335. http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/81/1/330S.

By now you all know that blending is the art of winemaking.  As you blend, taste, and spit, you strive to craft a composite wine that outshines each component individually.  What one wine lacks in aromatics is complimented by another that smells divine but lacks tannin.  And so it goes.  Last week, for the first time, Brian and I faced the quality vs. consistency dilemma.  Last year being our inaugural year, we had no benchmarks to match (other than the bottles of cult pinot noir we hoped to emulate).  Our 2008 Santa Lucia Highlands bottling offered ripe berry aromatics, sweet floral notes, and a killer structure with ample tannins and body.  This year’s batch from Doctor’s Vineyard had to measure up.  As we tasted through different blends, some were decidedly lovely but lacked the grip of last year’s juice.  We changed directions and re-blended to achieve greater year-to-year consistency.  We added more of the 667 clone to flesh out the body and amp up the tannins, plus a tad of the heritage Swan clone for those sweet aromatics. 

In the end, I think you will be thrilled with the results.  The Santa Lucia Highlands has the same ripe blackberry/raspberry profile with that wonderful underpinning of savory smoke and spice.  And it’s got muscle to boot.  Our Sonoma Coast offering has a great nose of fruit and earth and some pretty strong tannins.  Our Anderson Valley pinot has a trademark cranberry nose and a velvety smooth finish.

For now, the wine will meld in the barrel for another two months before bottling.

We were welcomed by a trio of wood laminate desks surrounded by plentiful office cabinetry.  I would not have been surprised if a perfunctory front desk attendant had asked me to take a number and then handed me a clipboard of blank insurance forms.  In an adjacent room, another laminate wood desk/table was set with four open wine bottles, resting comfortably at room temperature. 

An uninspired tasting room attendant begrudgingly poured us a cursory sip from the first bottle of pinot noir, explaining we were lucky to be at the winery tasting a proprietary blend destined mainly for restaurants across the country.  Note to self: do not order this wine the next time you dine in Des Moines.  But hey, kudos to them; at least it was consistent.  The pinot was just as I remembered it, a cherry cola / cherry Triaminic hybrid, and warm too.  A cloying artificial red fruit taste stuck to my cheeks’ insides.  Not even the warm sauv blanc (served last) could wash the flavor away.  Talk about a long finish. 

When Brian and I inquired if we could buy a chilled half bottle of the white to go with our picnic lunch, I was politely informed the winery lacks the alcohol license that permits guests to drink wine on their patio.  Who knew?  I washed down a homemade sandwich with the water that had been baking in my minivan; the dashboard thermometer up-ticked to 93 degrees.  As we retreated to the patio, I noticed the tasting room manager swap out the warm sauvignon blanc for a cold one.  I hope the next visitors have a better experience than ours.

To be fair, the winery offers an expanded tasting of their single vineyard designates, which I presume must be booked in advance.  Brian and I were only allowed to press our sweaty noses against the glass partition dividing the insurance claims cubicle from the good juice on the other side.  While Wine Wednesday was kind of a bust, I have to give this label props for consistency.  Every year the winery blends that restaurant bottling to embody the essence of a cherry Vicks cough drop.  This approach is one, well-practiced side of the blending equation.  The flip side is blending wine to produce the best concoction you can muster.  Ideally both goals are the same.  Other times consistency and quality are mutually exclusive.

Brian and I frequent different local wineries for different reasons.  Some we visit for the awesome wines.  Others have gorgeous grounds that afford us a brief respite from reality as our kids run amok, and we gulp down a perfectly quaffable libation.  But it’s rare to seek out a spot that offers neither. 

Still I’d be an imbecile to bitch about it.  A bad day of wine drinking is still a pretty good day.

Happy summer to all.  We at Bruliam Wines are thrilled to announce the highly anticipated return of our greatly lauded summer fluff series.  Good Morning American brings you a summer concert series, and I spew discordant logorrhea, every single week.  Rejoice loyal readers; “Wine Wednesdays” are back.  Even my mom told me last year’s were great, and she and my step-dad are avowed teetotalers.  (Take that you crummy wine blog award judges!).  Summer 2010 promises an expansive look at northern Sonoma County wines with a decided emphasis on the Russian River Valley.  We vow to cover as many wineries as we can between 9 am and 2 pm (preschool hours) or until Child Protective Services squelches our penchant for retrieving the twins mildly buzzed.  And trust me.  I’ve completed over eight years of post graduate study in areas wholly unrelated to enology, so I am uniquely qualified to be your tasting guide.  After roto-rooter sinus surgery as a teenager, the ENT promised my sense of smell would be permanently dampened.  I cannot identify mulberries, sarsaparilla, or gooseberries.  After scoring a rare seat in Cornell University’s ultra-popular “wines” course my senior year, I dropped the class before it started.  And so went my only formal wine tasting curriculum.

In previous blind tasting flights, I have demonstrated my incompetence again and again, with both domestic and foreign wines.  If asked to compare three wines blindly, two identical and one different, I am certain I could not distinguish the different wine from the others with any more accuracy than chance alone.  I generally can detect whiffs of raspberry and blackberry because I buy them in bulk containers at Costco.  Although I also consume copious amount of chocolate, descriptors like “cocoa nib” and “raw cocoa bean” routinely elude me.  So dear readers, prepare yourselves to meet yet another internet wine expert.  Trust that my mellifluous wine analyses are accurate and reliable today.  If I were to re-taste the same wines tomorrow, they might be different.

Before summer even started, a wine that was new to me elicited a gluttonous moan of joy followed by gulps and slurps.  It happened to be a Dutton Goldfield pinot noir from the Green Valley appellation.  (To be exact, it was the 2007 Dutton Goldfield Sanchietti vineyard pinot noir.  Don’t even try.  It’s sold out.  The winery literally sold the last two bottles the day before our visit).  This wine happened to be part of a pinot pack we’d snagged for cheap at a wine auction.  The other bottles hadn’t been particularly memorable so I had no real expectations for this one.  I was happily surprised by it’s rich, layered aromas of berry, spice and smoke.  The flavors were integrated; the mouth feel was grippy with good palate weight, and the finish smooth and long.  It was a Wow! wine, and the riot in my mouth inspired the first Wine Wednesday of the season.  (OK, I cannot believe I just wrote something so cheesy).

The Dutton-Goldfield tasting room is located in southwest Russian River Valley in Sebastopol.  The tasting room is lovely, spacious, and brand new.  Self-anointed “world’s most reliable taster,” I couldn’t wait to find out if I still liked their wines the second time around.  Happily, I did.  I thought their gewürztraminer was insanely and unapologetically aromatic.  It took me back to being a tween playing dress up and sneaking dabs of “exotic” perfumes like Shalimar.  The wine was heady and potent, with tropical fruit, jasmine and honeysuckle.  I kept thinking of that passage in The Sound and the Fury where Quentin is overpowered by the pervasive smell of honeysuckle.  But we are here to talk about pinot.  I especially liked their Freestone Hill pinot noir for its complexity and core of “baking spice” layered atop berry fruit.  I use “baking spice” as a wastebasket term when I smell cinnamon/cardamom/mace/nutmeg, the players in banana bread or pumpkin pie.

If you do decide to visit, you could bundle the trip with a visit to equally illustrious pinot producer Merry Edwards, just down the road.  Even if you don’t trust my wine reviews, and I use “review” loosely and humbly, I can identify a picnic table in a lineup that includes end table and pool table.  So I can relate with confidence that the Dutton Goldfield tasting room houses a lovely outdoor patio with shady picnic tables.  Pack a basket and savor your pinot al fresco.  And ladies, I won’t tell if you dab on that gewürztraminer in a pinch.  It’s sure to attract the likes of Steve Heimoff or James Laube across a crowded bar.

Almost all red wine and many white wines experience oak contact en route from fermentation to bottle.  Usually this is in the form of oak barrel aging, but cheaper alternatives like oak chips are also available.  Untangling the mysteries of wood barrels is a thorny process.  Fundamentally, oak can be classified as used or new, French or not.  But within these overarching categories, there are innumerable details that may affect the outcome of the finished wine.  So let’s begin where it all starts, with a tree.

The most highly pedigreed oak hails from France.  Premium French oak derives from specially designated forests in special parts of France (Alliers! Nevers!).  The trees are sawed in a particular way, and the planks are planed and dried.  Only then do highly trained coopers (i.e. barrel makers) use heat to bend individual wood staves into picturesque arcs.  The arching staves are placed within the metal hoops that stabilize the barrels.  There is no glue, no nails, and the barrels are water tight.  Besides using heat to bend wood, there is another byproduct of direct flame heating, a residual char affectionately called “toast.”  Toast comes in different levels, ascending from low to medium to high.  Each cooper does it a little bit differently, and you order barrels by cooper and toast level, custom wood for your premium juice.  It’s like designer jeans, with minute permutations changing the fit just enough that ladies care, and the men are confused.  Trained tasters can totally taste the difference between wine aged in a Francois Frere barrel vs. Seguin Moreau vs. Remond.  You could too if you had all 3 wines lined up in a row. 

Some scientists believe these differences have more to do with barrel age and duration of oak contact than with the origin of the barrels themselves.  So I have some more explaining to do.  The char lining the barrels contains unique chemical compounds that are neither intrinsic to grapes nor generated by fermentation alone.  In other words, crispy Cajun barrels give the wine somethin’ extra you can’t get anywhere else.  When you put wine into a barrel, these compounds seep into the juice and change the texture and flavor and aroma, generally in a favorable manner.  New barrels have more to offer, since the pool of special sauce is finite.  After a year of use, fewer chemicals remain to diffuse into next season’s juice.  After three cycles of use, the barrels are deemed “neutral” and have nothing more to offer than cheap storage, presuming you’ve fully paid off your barrel bills from two seasons ago.  Furthermore, the longer the wine is in contact with the barrel, the more stuff seeps in.  The highest rate of diffusion occurs during the first months of barrel aging.  So one could correctly argue that wine aged for 6 months in brand new French oak has more oaky tones than wine that sits for two years in neutral oak.  But bear in mind, there can be too much of a good thing.  Wine aged in 100% new oak for too long will taste like a Home Depot 2X4.  And some folks turn their noses up at barrel aging altogether.  The tag line “100% stainless steel fermentation and aging” has become a trendy moniker.

Oak aging serves a number of useful functions.  First and foremost, it accelerates the aging process.  Hard edged tannins are softened, vegetal and bitter notes are diminished, and varietal character is enhanced.  The wine is more nuanced, layered and complex.  How can this be, you ask?  Drum roll…and now for the biochemistry (quick and painless, I promise).  The biochemical players comprising the toast can be roughly divided into 3 categories.  (1) Byproducts of polysaccharide pyrolysis.  This means that fire breaks down the sugars in woody cellulose.  This yields stuff like furanic aldehydes, which include guys like eugenol and vinyl-4-guiacol.  Sound familiar?  These are the same players in smoke taint, but to a much lesser degree. (2)  Oaky lactones which tend towards oaky and coconut flavors (3) Decomposition of wood ligins yielding almond and vanilla flavors.  OK, done!  Please, don’t unsubscribe…join the legions of Bruliam fans who tolerate biochemistry once/quarter.

As soon as we finalize the contracts on our grapes for 2010 harvest, we’ll be ordering our custom oak barrels from France.  We plan to keep you posted.

Please find enclosed one extra large pair of women’s underpants and one magenta sharpie marker for you to use to autograph my left buttock.  A pre-paid/pre-addressed mailer is also included to facilitate return of the aforementioned autographed panties to me.  Thanks in advance.  I am really and truly your biggest fan, Mr. McInerney.  I’ve read most everything you’ve written and really liked your last 3 columns for the WSJ quite a lot.  (That first one was tough to swallow – but then again what juices of love are not?).  In case you couldn’t tell, that’s your face on the front of the panties.  I enlarged your dot-matrix portrait at Kinko’s and then used my bedazzler to recreate your likeness with pink rhinestones.  That’s why the panties are XL.  I couldn’t fit your whole face on the sexy, little ones I’d originally bought at Victoria’s Secret.  But no matter, so long as you know that the President of the Jay McInerney for Editor of Wine Spectator Fan Club doesn’t have an extra large ass.  It’s kind of more medium plus.  I am also writing to find out about any upcoming tour dates you might have this summer.  You may recall from my Facebook page that I already have a picture of me and my other boyfriend, Tyler Florence posted up top.  I was hoping to add a picture of the two of us to my ultimate fan link.  By the way, I have tried to friend you like 5 times, and you never respond.  Someone told me that you can reset your preferences to ignore friend requests, but I’m sure that’s not true.  You’re probably just busy writing the next Great American Novel about an impotent white ex-pat who meets a whale, dreams of throwing kids off of a cliff, and moves from Oklahoma to California to drink oaky chardonnay.  (Ha ha get it? “Oakie” and “oaky?”  I graduated with honors in English Literature from an Ivy League college).

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep at night, I imagine you ask me to edit your work for grammatical errors.  After I point out that third comma splice, you look deeply and gratefully into my eyes and wonder out loud how you ever wrote anything before I came into your life. 

I also have this weird recurring dream about the two of us.  We are at a trendy Manhattan bistro sipping Dom rose champagne, oddly enough.  (I guess that first column affected me more than I thought).  You take my hand in yours and whisper, “This is so fruity, like Kyle’s gay dog dry humping Cartman’s leg.”

I respond back, “No, this is fruity like Ricky Martin’s coming out last week,”

Ever the king of wine-centric similes, you quip, “No, fruity like Maksim’s spangled spandex on Dancing with the Stars.”  Just wait until I get to the part about the acid, mouth-puckering like Kate Gosselin’s angry paparazzi face.  Oh Mr. McInerney, you make me woozy.  As an avid reader of US Weekly and People, I really “get” your columns.  You know just how to make a gal feel like a real wine pro. 

Please let me know about your summer tour schedule as soon as possible.  I’d like to book my airfare before it gets too expensive.  I’m a little short on cash after I bought 35 cases of rose sparkler at BevMo.  It’s the closest I’ll get to the Enotheque.

Sincerely,

Your #354 Fan

I recently re-visited the source of my greatest shame and again subjected myself to that most loathsome and tedious of tasks – blind tasting wines before an audience.  I am happy to report I’ve shown very little improvement from my last ineptitude where I failed to link “pencil shavings and cassis” to the vines of Bordeaux.  On this occasion, my only clue was “4 different red wines.”  My mission: correctly identify each grape varietal while Russian gangsters blindfolded me with burlap scraps they ripped apart with their teeth and caressed my brainstem with the trigger of an automatic rifle.  Each bottle was randomly assigned a color-coated wine bag to distinguish it from its neighbor (and presumably make me feel red rage at my infantile green envy when my colleague outperformed me).  While tasting, I made incoherent tasting notes like “hmm- smells briny, like oysters – what is it?” and “berry nose reminds me of pinot but it’s not pinot - what is it?”  And that’s the joke of the game- I had no f*&%&king idea.  Happily I still got the steak and passion fruit mousse prize even though my score was only 25%, dropping me below the bottom third of my graduating medical school class.

Blind tasting wine is all about sensory memories and sparking neural connections between stuff you drink sober enough to recall on cue and what is in your glass right now.  When I marvel how my Master Sommelier pals not only identify varietal but also region, producer, and year of vintage (!!), they are humble and blather about their “taste database.”  Whatever.  It’s still the coolest party trick I’ve seen.

If you want to blind taste wines at home, you probably ought to follow some ground rules.  First you need to pick a theme.  For example, you might taste only merlots, then purchase ones from around the globe and pick your favorite (although I don’t know why you’d ever pick merlot for anything).  Only the most sadistic of men will rig the game so that devouring the glistening, juicy steak crackling before you is contingent on correctly identifying the contents of each bottle.  Instead spare yourself the humiliation; blind taste for fun and choose your favorite.  Generally, the bottles should be about the same price.  This is no caveat of snobbish whim, although it is always entertaining to see if your wino-wonko buddies can pick the boxed wine from a lineup.  I encourage you taste around a similar price point because it helps equalize winemaking techniques that affect taste and aroma.  For example, new French oak barrels are really expensive.  Cheap wines cannot afford to lounge around for 2 years in new French oak.  Instead they settle for used barrels or swimming over a small mountain of oak chips (like the stuff in your bbq smoker).  Furthermore, cheap grapes from hotter climes, like the San Joaquin Valley, have lower acid.  The amount of acid in finished wine affects how you perceive taste, mouth feel, and finish.  (You can always add acid back to unfinished wine, but that trick is costly too).  Across a level playing field, you can select your favorite wine with more assurance and precision.  Lastly, follow the 4 S’s (plus 3 more).  See, swirl, smell, sip, (slosh it around your mouth, then either spit or swallow).  Only the self anointed pros taste in black glassware as to remain uninfluenced by color.  You should not.  Look at the color.  If the wine you suspect neighbor contributed looks brown and murky, tell him to stop being such a cheap prick and pawning off the wine stashed behind the radiator.  Plus, you’ll only lose friends when your colleague screams, “I know it!  Gruner Veltliner!” and it’s actually cabernet.

(Special thanks to our good friends and Bruliam fans who went all out to organize a truly wonderful evening of wine tasting and fabulous food.)