Learn About Wine from America's Wine Expert
Who needs a tony summer house or a European vacation to savor the last few weekends of summer? Here’s how to have a vacation in a glass:
Who needs a tony summer house or a European vacation to savor the last few weekends of summer? Here’s how to have a vacation in a glass:
Watch my Pottery Barn video on how to make scintillating sangria.
Read my Food Network column about sizzling wine types for BBQ and my column about sips for sultry summer nights.
Aspen Food & Wine Classic: The Fantasy Island of Gastronomy – The small plane swoops over a carpet of verdant hillocks, touches down, and deposits its passengers into a land of sun, magic, and enchantment. A return to Fantasy Island? Not unless Mr. Roarke is the debonair Jacques Pépin, the canopy-topped island wagon has been replaced by roving Lexus sedans, and Tattoo’s bell tower has morphed into white event tents.
This year’s Aspen Food & Wine Classic – the closest there is to a Fantasy Island of Gastronomy – lived up to this billing, offering a fantastical array of celebrity chef demonstrations, haute sips, and unexpected indulgences. Where else do you find the country’s newly-named Best New Chefs ladling up their signature treats (Stephanie Izard’s sublime goat stew among them), José Andrés merrily presiding over a spit-roasted pig at his party, or cowboy chef Tim Love serving up steak for a late-morning breakfast?
This year marked my fifth Aspen and, appropriately enough, found me doing five appearances. Two of them were as a contestant in the first-ever Iron Sommelier challenge, a light-hearted food-and-wine pairing competition dreamed up by wine czar and Best Cellars founder Joshua Wesson. Josh asked us to dress as a superhero, so I packed a loaded ‘stache and reprised my alter-ego, “Mark Diggler,” whose first appearance was in this Drink Bravely video about Valentine’s Day wine. Along with Josh, my fellow contestants, master sommelier Laura Pasquale of importer Palm Bay International and the Little Nell’s Vilma Mazaite, were formidable competition; Vilma emerged victorious, as detailed in this cover story in the Aspen Times.
Then it was on to teach my other seminars, “Beat the Heat: Wine with Spicy Food” and “How to Drink Wine Like a Pro,” both packed to the rafters with spirited grape nuts. Always looking to give my audiences a special experience, I ended each seminar with a taste from bottles I won at the auction of Bernie Madoff’s wine collection, which Morrell & Co. had conducted in May, the proceeds going to Madoff’s victims. Despite news reports that Madoff’s collection was third-rate and overpriced, I had discovered a few enticing and relatively affordable lots: 2005 Mulderbosch Sauvignon Blanc and 1997 Antinori Guado al Tasso, both affixed with nifty seizure tags from the U.S Marshall’s Office. And, anyway, when else do you get to drink the historical equivalent of Al Capone’s gun – and share it with 150 of your closest drinking buddies? Knowing that every good experience needs a t-shirt, or some sort keepsake to flaunt, I had special cards made that certified that the card holder “actually tasted Bernie Madoff’s wine” and that they “now, unequivocally and forevermore, drink bravely.”
I also attempted the wine educator’s equivalent of walking a high-wire and sabered a bottle of Champagne at each seminar. As demonstrated in this video, the art of saberage shouldn’t be attempted at home, or perhaps anywhere, if one is interested in preserving life and limb. Thankfully, the bottles sheared open as intended, a few unsuccessful attempts notwithstanding, and one of the Classic’s ace volunteers, Grafton Smith, happened be a pro photographer and was there to capture the knifework you see at the top.
For me there’s no better feeling than leaving audiences educated, entertained, and – if the stars align — exhilarated. I’m grateful for the generous media reviews in the Aspen Business Journal, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, in Kelly Hayes’ column in the Aspen Times, NBC’s The Feast, and the Denver Westward.
The following is a run-down of the wines I presented at Aspen Food & Wine, all chosen for their ability to achieve the kind of fulfillment for which even Mr. Roarke would noddingly approve:
IRON SOMMELIER
2010 Flora Springs “Soliloquy” Sauvignon Blanc
2008 BenMarco “Espresivio” Malbec Blend
BEAT THE HEAT: WINE WITH SPICY FOOD
NV Bollinger Champagne Brut Speciale
2010 Crios de Susana Balbo Torrontes
2010 Hogue Cellars Columbia Valley Riesling
2009 J. Hofstatter Gewürztraminer Kolbenhof
2009 Mt. Beautiful Pinot Noir Cheviot Hills
2007 Terra Andina Carmenère Central Valley
Bonus: 2005 Mulderbosch Sauvignon Blanc (from Bernie Madoff’s collection)
HOW TO DRINK LIKE A PRO
NV Brut Rosé Nature Champagne Zero
2009 Domaine Sigalas Assyrtiko
2010 Scholium Project Rhododactylos
2008 Faiveley Mercurey “Clos des Myglands”
1995 Col d’Orcia Brunello di Montalcino (in magnum)
NV The Chook Sparkling Shiraz
Bonus: 1997 Antinori’s Guado al Tasso (from Bernie Madoff’s collection)
France Faux Pas: Have Speedo, Will Tipple – Mark faces his own potential “Weinergate” when the French force him to don a speedo before swimming in Burgundy, France. After he does so reluctantly, he seeks post-humiliation succor in Bargain Burgundy, which can be found in less-heralded Burgundy villages such as Savigny-les-Beaune and Mercurey.
View the video here. Read a blog about the Parisian “Speedo Police” here.
Wine Collector Reflections: Twelve Different DRC’s, Courtesy of a Maker of Moments
This collector, of course, prizes wine and enjoys watching it evolve through the years. I suspect that he also digs the intellectual complexity and maddening elusiveness that surrounds red Burgundy, his bottle-borne Emile Flöge. But even more than this, he derives quiet pleasure — a delight that registers foremost in his eyes – from sharing his formidable collection with others, including those who can’t necessarily rattle off how many bottles are in a Nebuchadnezzar.
In this way, he fulfils the almost talismanic potential of wine to be both an accessory and a catalyst for life’s great gatherings. When else do we find reason to get together as a happy tribe, experience new sensations, and, well, get a bit buzzed to boot?
This wine collector – this maker of moments — is all the more uncommon given that many wine enthusiasts (myself included) are guilty of not often enough stepping aside from our daily maelstroms to break out the good stuff. Like dutiful investors, we buy and hold, waiting for just the right moment to justify opening our good bottles for loved ones. We wait to seize a moment that often never happens.
So your mandate, fair reader, as is mine, is to use wine to become a maker of moments among your own tribes. Doing so with special bottles heightens the occasion, but it need not involve great expense or effort, certainly nowhere near that which comprised the rarefied tasting described below. It can be as simple as hosting a gather to introduce you friends to the pleasures of Petite Sirah or Chinon or American sparkling wine.
In Oldman’s Brave New World of Wine, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, himself an accomplished maker of moments, emphasizes that wine is really just a means of “breaking bread” with others and reflect on a the time and region evoked by a particular bottle. While relaxing with his bandmates in a scene from Rush’s award-winning documentary, Alex Lifeson, another wine-passionate “Braveheart” with whom I spoke, offers this playful insight: “It’s so great to drink wine. It tastes fantastic. And it makes you feel funny.”
Wine need not be any more complicated than that, although three weeks ago, the aforementioned wine collector organized a tasting that was a bit more serious, though no less spirited. He brought together a group of eighteen friends, most of whom were not wine pros, to taste twelve different bottlings of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, also known, in venerated tones, as “DRC”. If red Burgundy is the wine type that arguably inspires the most ecclesiastical reverence among connoisseurs, then the vineyards of DRC are wine’s most sacred spot, its Swayambhunath Stupa. Drawing from tiny vineyards in the Burgundian village of Vosne-Romanée, DRC is the source of almost impossibly nuanced and long-lived Pinot Noir, able to display a haunting complexity that transcends words and most mortals’ bank accounts. For each of four vintages – 1990, 1999, 2000, and 2005 — we tasted bottlngs from three DRC grand cru vineyards, La Tâche, Richebourg, and Romanée-Saint-Vivant.
It should be noted that to actually own wines of this caliber, and also be willing to share it on the scale that the collector did, supplying more than enough for both a blind tasting and a sit-down dinner, is a level of largesse that would astonish even the most coddled wine collector. It is the unlikely, moment-making intersection of exquisite taste and extraordinary generosity.
No matter what the “wine grinches” say, Mark Oldman declares that it’s fine to pair wine with artichokes. Broadcasting from the verdant fields of Castroville, California at the height of artichoke season, Mark explains that a tangy, acidic white wine such as Sauvignon Blanc or Gruner Veltliner will offset the sweet effect that the artichoke has on wine.’ Watch the video.
Get a free copy of my acclaimed booklet:
Billionaire Wines and
Their Less Expensive Substitutes
