Secret Ingredients (49 page)

THE RED AND THE WHITE

CALVIN TRILLIN

B
efore we get onto the question of whether experienced wine drinkers can actually tell the difference between red wine and white, I should probably tell you a little something about my background in the field. I have never denied that when I’m trying to select a bottle of wine in a liquor store I’m strongly influenced by the picture on the label. (I like a nice mountain, preferably in the middle distance.) When I was growing up, in Kansas City, Missouri, I didn’t know about people drinking wine at meals that were not being eaten in celebration of a major anniversary. I assume that my neighbors would have been as startled as I to hear about such carryings-on. Years later, after I’d moved to New York, a newspaperman in my home town did me a great favor, and when I wondered aloud what I could get for him, a friend in New York—a sophisticated friend, who considered himself something of a gourmet, now that I think of it—said that a case of wine was always appreciated. I phoned the newspaperman’s son-in-law in Kansas City to ask if he could find out, discreetly, what sort of wine was particularly fancied in his in-laws’ house, and the son-in-law got back to me with a question of his own: “Does Wild Turkey count?” These days, I do drink wine, although if I’m at a meal at which drink orders are being given by the glass, I am likely to say to the waiter, “What sort of fancy beer do you have on tap?”

I have spent a certain amount of time in the company of wine cognoscenti, but I wouldn’t claim that I have distinguished myself on those occasions. Many years ago, for instance, a winemaker I know was kind enough to invite me to the “barrel tasting” of California wines that used to be held annually at the Four Seasons restaurant, in New York—an event that was considered a very hot ticket in the wine game. At the table, many glasses of wine were put in front of us. Then someone who had his mouth very close to the microphone talked about each wine in what I believe scholars would call excruciating detail—the type of vines that had been grafted together to produce it, for instance, and how long it had been in stainless-steel vats or oak barrels. Displaying manners that I thought would have made my mother proud, I drank what was placed before me—not noticing, as I glanced around to see whether more food was ever going to appear, that everyone else was just sipping. I have since heard two or three versions of what transpired that evening, but they do not differ in whether or not I fell asleep at the table. Particularly considering my performance at the Four Seasons that evening, it’s perfectly possible that some people asked to sum up my knowledge of and attitude toward wine might respond “Ignorance, tempered slightly by philistinism.”

On the other hand, I have, in a manner of speaking, worked in the wine industry for a number of years. An old friend named Bruce Neyers makes wine in the Napa Valley. I think it would be too much to say that I’m an adviser to Bruce in his business, unless suggesting that he put a mountain on his label counts. Thanks to the miracle of the fax machine, though, I act as a sort of volunteer copy editor of the announcements that he sends out to his regular customers—what people in the trade would call his “offering letters.” Bruce, a wry man who grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and assumed through college that he would spend his life as a research chemist for DuPont, tends to discuss wine in straightforward terms even when he’s addressing the sort of wine fiends who do close readings of offering letters. Still, I can’t claim that I know precisely what he means when he writes, say, “The malolactic fermentation went to completion.” What I bring to my editing task is not expertise in viticulture but a long experience in such matters as comma placement.

If Bruce shows up at my house during a business trip to New York, he is usually carrying some wine, a custom that reflects both his natural generosity and his concern about what he otherwise might be forced to drink. He has never considered my scenery-selection strategy a completely satisfactory way to build a cellar. He has particularly grim memories of a Chardonnay that attracted me with a view of mountains that are apparently near enough the grape-growing region of the Hungarian Danube to be depicted in the middle distance. He doesn’t ask in advance if I’d prefer red or white—presumably because he knows that the question would give me the opportunity to say, “But can anybody really tell the difference?”

Why? Because, as best I can remember, it was from Bruce or one of his acquaintances in the Napa Valley that I first heard about the color test given at the University of California at Davis, whose Department of Viticulture and Enology is renowned in the wine world. I got the impression that the Test was often given to visitors from the wine industry, but since this was about twenty years ago, such details are hazy. I was definitely told, though, that the folks at Davis poured wine that was at room temperature into black glasses—thus removing the temperature and color cues that are a large part of what people assume is taste—and that the tasters often couldn’t tell red wine from white. After Bruce returned from a short course at Davis in the mid-1970s, he had someone at the Joseph Phelps winery, where he then worked, set up a red-white test with black glasses. Bruce got three out of five.

I suppose I am programmed to expect that sort of result. I was raised by a man who, although he had never tasted coffee in his life, once told me that blindfolded I couldn’t tell the difference between coffee with milk and coffee without milk. It has never occurred to me that the software drummers who are in the habit of saying to the bartender “J&B on the rocks” or “Ketel One with a twist” might actually be able to recognize their favorite booze in a blind tasting. Many years ago, when a friend in England began raising chickens and boasting of the gloriously distinctive taste of their eggs, I secretly replaced the freshly gathered eggs in his larder with eggs from a London supermarket, and I try to remind him at least semiannually that he raved about the next omelette to come out of the kitchen. In temperament and genes as well as in geographic origin, I’m from the Show Me state.

For years, I was likely to mention the Davis test whenever the subject of wine connoisseurship came up, even if I happened to be drinking a glass of beer at the time. A couple of years ago, for instance, a pleasant young man who was showing us around a winery owned by an acquaintance of mine in New York State mentioned that, as part of his final year at the Culinary Institute of America, he had gone to Davis for a six-week wine course. Naturally, I asked him how he did on the Test. He changed the subject. But at the end of the tour, after we’d all downed a friendly glass of wine or two and become better acquainted, he suddenly turned to me and said, quietly, “I got three out of seven.”

I know what you’re thinking: Is it possible that a self-confessed beer-swilling ignoramus got interested in the Davis test simply as a way of debunking wine connoisseurship? As another wine-business friend likes to point out, wine is way beyond any other subject in inspiring in the American layman an urge to refute the notion of expertise. (Modern art must come in second.) I’d like to think that I’m above that sort of thing. I took it for granted that experts could explain not only why certain red wines and certain white wines would be difficult for even a connoisseur to tell apart but also why that did not call into question the legitimacy of wine expertise—and could do so, if necessary, in excruciating detail.

Also, it’s not as if wine connoisseurship lacks informed criticism from people who are not beer-swilling ignoramuses. Marc Dornan, of the Beverage Testing Institute, for instance, says to anyone who asks him that rating wines on a hundred-point scale, which is now common practice, is “utterly pseudoscientific.” Tim Hanni, a Master of Wine, believes that most commentary about wines fails to take into account the biological individuality of consumers; he claims that he can predict what sort of wine appeals to you according to such factors as how heavily you salt your food and whether your mother suffered a lot from morning sickness while carrying you. Hanni has said for years that the matching of a particular wine with a particular food is a scam, there being “absolutely no premise historically, culturally, or biologically for drinking red wine with meat.” As a way of illustrating the role played by anticipation in taste, Frédéric Brochet, who is a researcher with the oenology faculty of the University of Bordeaux, recently asked some experts to describe two wines that appeared by their labels to be a distinguished
grand cru classe
and a cheap table wine—actually, Brochet had refilled both bottles with a third, midlevel wine—and found his subjects mightily impressed by the supposed
grand cru
and dismissive of the same wine when it was in the
vin ordinaire
bottle.

An urge to refute the notion of expertise certainly seemed to be reflected in the headline of an article from
The Times
of London about the research Brochet has been carrying on—
CHEEKY LITTLE TEST EXPOSES WINE
“
EXPERTS
”
AS WEAK AND FLAT.
The headline caught the tone of the article, by Adam Sage, which began, “Drinkers have long suspected it, but now French researchers have finally proved it: wine ‘experts’ know no more than the rest of us.” The test of Brochet’s that caught my eye consisted partly of asking wine drinkers to describe what appeared to be a white wine and a red wine. They were in fact two glasses of the same white wine, one of which had been colored red with flavorless and odorless dye. The comments about the “red” wine used what people in the trade call red-wine descriptors. “It is a well known psychological phenomenon—you taste what you’re expecting to taste,” Brochet said in
The Times.
“They were expecting to taste a red wine and so they did…. About two or three per cent of people detect the white wine flavour, but invariably they have little experience of wine culture. Connoisseurs tend to fail to do so. The more training they have, the more mistakes they make because they are influenced by the color of the wine.”

Reading about Brochet’s color experiment revived my interest in the Davis test. I was curious, for one thing, about whether there was a way to compare his results with the results the Davis people had collected over the years—although, as I understood it, the Davis testers, working in the straightforward tradition of the American West, told a subject that he was choosing between red and white rather than trying to sneak a bottle of adulterated white past him. I decided it might be time to visit Davis and collect some statistics on what the Test actually showed. I got the Department of Viticulture and Enology on the telephone and explained my interest to a friendly woman there who is employed to field inquiries from people like me. She told me that as far as she knew Davis had never conducted such a test.

“Imagine that!” Bruce Neyers said, when I told him of my chat with the folks at Davis. He found it unsurprising that an institution with an interest in the distinctions among wines would have difficulty recalling evidence that the most elementary distinction can often not be made. Like a lot of wine people I’ve spoken to about the Test over the years, Bruce thinks it would be easy enough to pick out some unusual wines that might muddy the difference between the taste of red and white; that is presumably what was done in the test he’d taken years ago at Phelps. But even a loaded test might be pounced on as evidence that the judgments of wine experts are, as Adam Sage put it in his
Times
piece, “little more than self-delusion.” When I asked Bruce if he could round up some Napa Valley wine people to take the red-white test, assuming I couldn’t track it down at Davis, he said they might want to remain anonymous, since there were probably better ways to begin a wine-industry résumé than “Although I can’t distinguish red wine from white wine…”