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Today we have a conference preview from Don Kinnan, CSS, CWE, who tells us about his upcoming session, ““Exploring the Backroads of the Cote d’Or (Part 2),” to be presented as part of the 41st Annual Conference of the Society of Wine Educators, to be held August  10 to 12, 2017, in Portland, Oregon.

When is the last time you had a glass of Romanée-Conti?  When is the next time you will have a glass?  For most of us, those are easy answers—NEVER!

Burgundy’s crown jewel unfortunately is affordable only to the rich and famous, and that leaves most of us out.  At $12,000 a bottle for recent releases, Romanée-Conti is slightly outside my budget.  However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t regularly satisfy my addiction to fine Burgundy wines, both reds and whites.  The secret is to seek out less famous and less glamorous appellations, or as we have phrased it, “explore the backroads of La Côte d’Or.”

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At this year’s SWE Annual Conference, we will continue this exploration by delving into the Côte de Beaune.  Specifically, we will visit the villages of Monthélie, Auxey-Duresses, St-Aubin, and Santenay.  Each of these villages produces wines that are extremely popular among the locals—and these are the folks who know where true value lies in the current sea of elevated prices that affects today’s Côte d’Or wine market.

While these four villages do not boast of any grand cru sites, they are blessed with abundant premier cru and village-level vineyard acreage.  Perhaps you already know a bit about them.  Can you identify which village is the correct answer to the following questions?

Test Your Knowledge! !

1. Its white wines are often referred to as “junior Meursault”
2. It is the home of a special pinot noir clone and a leader in Cordon de Royat vine training.
3. 76% of its wine production is premier cru.
4. Its best premiers crus are extensions of Volnay-Caillerets and Volnay Clos des Chènes.

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(The answers are at the end of this article)

During my session at the SWE Conference, you will learn the answers to these questions and much more—particularly just what it is that makes the wines of these villages worth seeking out.  Because of their relative obscurity compared to the “big names”, their distribution is limited in the United States.  However, thanks to the internet and on-line shopping, access is possible, unless you live in a state with prehistoric wine laws.

Here are a few village factoids to whet your appetite and impress your friends.

• Monthélie is the smallest producer of the 4 villages, producing 49,000 cases annually, with 87% of that being red wine.
• Auxey-Duresses produces 57,000 cases and has one third white wine and two thirds red wine.  It is also the home village of the prestigious Domaine Leroy.
• St-Aubin has an annual wine production of 82,000 cases, with 77% being white wine.  It is the 4^th largest white wine producing village in La Côte d’Or.
• Santenay produces 140,000 cases of wine annually, with 82% being red wine.  This production gives it the #6 ranking in wine production among all La Côte d’Or villages.  It also is the home of Burgundy’s only casino.

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With all of this information, you already know more about these villages than 99% of your wine geek friends.  Now all that remains is to attend the session, learn even more, and, most importantly, taste the 7 wines from these appellations.  See you there.

Answers to quiz questions:

1. Auxey-Duresses
2. #2: Santenay
3. #3: St-Aubin
4. #4: Monthélie

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About the speaker, Don Kinnan, CSS, CWE: For 35 years, Don Kinnan has been engaged in the fine wine trade and for most of that period has been an active member of the SWE.  He was the co-chair of the society’s CSW-founding committee and is currently serving on the SWE Board of Directors. Don spent 20 years as Director of Corporate Education for a major fine wine importer and is presently the Burgundy Specialist and Lead Instructor of the Wine Scholar Guild’s Master Burgundy Certificate program.

Don’s session, “Exploring the Backroads of the Cote d’Or (Part 2)” will be presented on Saturday, August 12^th at 3:00 pm, as part of the 41st Annual Conference of the Society of Wine Educators, to be held August  10 to 12, 2017, in Portland, Oregon.

Photo credits: Don Kinnan; photo of Don Kinnan by Tenley Fohl Photography.

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Today we have a conference preview from Adrian Bridge, the CEO of the Fladgate Partnership and The Yeatman Hotel. Adrian gives us a preview of his session entitled ““Mature Tawny Ports: The Art of Aging and Blending.”

Taylor’s aged Tawnies—10-, 20-, 30- and Over 40-Year-Old—are not only as significant a part of the business as Late-Bottled Vintage Port, but they have grown in importance, a trend which seems set to continue as more and more people discover them. Already the 20-Year-Old is the most popular pouring Port in restaurants in the US and the 10-Year-Old is the leading aged Tawny in Britain. Back home in Portugal, Taylor’s has been adding to its stocks of maturing Tawnies since the mid-1990s, so much so that Tawny stocks now top all other styles.

Aged Tawnies are blends of the wines of several different years, each batch blended to match the last (and labelled, incidentally, with an age which is a guide, not a mathematical calculation). A bottle of Taylor’s 10-Year-Old bought this year will taste the same as one bought last year and one bought in five years’ time.

Being more delicate in taste than bottle-matured Ports they start life in the same way.  What makes them different is the way they’re matured. But first, they have to be chosen.

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Early in the new year samples of the 200 or so Ports from the previous harvest—from Taylor’s own quintas and from farmers with whom it has contracts (some dating back a century)—are sent down from the Douro to Vila Nova de Gaia for tasting, categorising and classifying into the various styles: potential Vintage, Late-Bottled Vintage, 10-, 20-, 30- and 40-Year-Old Tawny, and so on.

So far, so simple; but the classification tasting is anything but simple. Aged tawnies are blended not at the beginning of their life, but at the end, which means that the tasters—David Guimaraens, head winemaker and his team—are not only assessing quality now, but predicting the outcome of wines that will remain in cask for years, if not decades.

The aged Tawny process starts, then, with the tasting of the new wines—always blind, every morning over a period of several weeks at the beginning of each year. “We’re getting into the soul of the wine, really getting to know it, which is why we don’t do more than about 20 a day. It’s the only time we see all these wines together like this,” says David Guimaraens. Their notes and scores are fed into the computer and matched up to each wine’s vital statistics (origin, quantity, chemical analysis) to produce a complete profile, one sheet for each wine.

So what does make a 10-Year-Old or a 40-Year-Old? Ports selected for a 10-Year-Old Tawny are likely to be from the same group as for Late-Bottled Vintage; those destined to be 30- and Over 40-Year-Olds are likely to be from Taylor’s own quintas and to be material of Vintage Port quality which hasn’t made the final cut. A future 40-Year-Old might be slightly lighter in colour than the wines selected for the Vintage; it might be more delicate, perhaps a bit more floral; it might come from a very good part of the quinta, but one that doesn’t produce quite the intensity required for a top Vintage Port.

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It follows that just as Taylor’s doesn’t have the quality to produce a Vintage Port each year, it doesn’t set aside port for 30- and Over 40-Year-Old Tawnies every year. The aim is always to have suitable material for 10- and 20-Year-Olds, but nature can thwart even this: 1993 produced no aged Tawnies; and 2002 yielded nothing suitable for 20-Year-Old and above.

Selecting the right quality and style is only the beginning. The Ports destined to be Tawnies are stored in the company’s lodges in Vila Nova de Gaia and the new temperature- and humidity-regulated facility in the Douro. Here they are nurtured and guided so that they develop in keeping with the Taylor’s Tawny style. Key elements of this are freshness, fruitiness and finesse; complexity and nuttiness, too; but always avoiding the more oxidised ‘Douro bake’ character which comes from ageing in the hot, dry conditions of the Douro and from racking and refreshing the wines infrequently.

Racking, separating the wine from its sediment (including the colouring matter; hence the final tawny colour) and aerating it, is done more often early on, gradually reducing to annually. Refreshing a Tawny—“giving it something to chew on” (to translate an evocative Portuguese expression)—is, as you might expect, the blending in of some younger Port. Both procedures are critical in the evolution of aged Tawnies.

Alongside the racking and refreshing team, another is kept busy in the cooperage repairing casks. ‘The casks stay with us forever,’ David says (as do many of the staff, as it happens). Oak is used because its tight grain allows the ideal slow oxidation, but it’s always well-seasoned, never new. The last thing anyone wants is the sweet vanilla taste of new oak; port has enough flavour and sweetness of its own. Size matters, too: most of the Tawnies are in pipes (casks of 600-640 litres), but any that need refreshing may be moved from cask to large vat to slow the ageing.

Photo via http://www.taylor.pt/en

With selection and classification at the beginning of the year and quality control ongoing, what remains is the all-important blending in November, the quiet after the storm of the harvest period.

Blending the aged Tawnies is thus anything but whimsical or random. It requires exceptional tasting skills, but also a dab hand with a calculator. As David and his team pick their way through 50 or 60 potential components for the 10-Year-Old, lined up round the tasting room with the age of each written in front on the counter, they are calculating both the average age and the quantity that will result: 140 pipes of number three (the age of which is  seven years, ten month)—“lovely zing and bite”—76 pipes of number 27 (aged ten years eight months); four pipes of 51 (20 years three months years)—“for complexity”. It takes a couple of mornings to do the 10-Year-Old; less to do a 40-Year-Old because there are fewer possible components. But the 40-Year-Old will have a wider variation of age. The current Over 40-Year-Old may contain some wine from the 1930s, but with younger wines to bring the age to within a few years either side of 40.

Blends chosen, the blending itself is done, the finished tawnies are bottled and within months they’re shipped. The rest is our job: drinking them.

Click here to download the Tasting Notes – Taylor Tawny Ports

Photo of Adrian Bridge via http://www.taylor.pt/en

About the speaker: Adrian Bridge is the CEO of the Fladgate Partnership and The Yeatman Hotel. Adrian has worked for Taylor’s since 1994 and in 2000, formally took over the role of Managing Director of the Taylor Fonseca Port Group. Having been instrumental in the group of buying the assets of Borges Port in 1998, he further expanded the company with the purchase of Croft Port and Delaforce Port in 2001, from Diageo. The subsequent reorganization of the group, to form The Fladgate Partnership, and repackaging of these brands has helped the group to become a leading supplier of Port in the major premium markets of the world. Adrian is the creative force behind The Yeatman, a project that he started in 2006. He was involved in every detail of the project: design, branding and launch of the hotel.

Adrian’s session, “Mature Tawny Ports: The Art of Aging and Blending” will be held on Saturday, August 12, 2017 at 4:45 pm as part of SWE’s 41^st Annual Conference, to be held August 10 – 12, 2017 in Portland Oregon.

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Today we have a conference preview from Tim Gaiser, MS. Tim has been one of the top-rated speakers at our conference for many years now, and his sessions fill up fast! This year we are lucky enough to have Tim presenting two sessions, which he will tell you about in his own words, below.

I’ll be doing two sessions at the conference this August in Portland. My first session, “Insights: Best Practices for Teaching Professional Tasting,” will focus on strategies for teaching tasting. I find teaching tasting to be one of the most rewarding things I do as a wine professional—but it can be one of the most frustrating as well. Everyone is wired differently and I need multiple strategies to teach any group, much less to coach an individual student.

These strategies include memorizing a tasting grid; improving recognition and memory of common wine aromas and flavors; calibrating structural elements (acidity, alcohol, and tannin) consistently and accurately; and deductive logic—putting sensory information together in order to make good conclusions in a blind tasting. In this past year I created a survey with the intention of collecting best practices for teaching tasting. I sent the survey to over 50 fellow Master Sommeliers and all were generous in sharing their strategies. This session will focus on strategies taken from the survey as well some of my own. To help illustrate the strategies we’ll taste through a flight of four outstanding wines. Join me as we deconstruct the best the practices of teaching professional tasting.

My second session, “Hungarian Furmint: Ancient Grape, Modern Wines”  will focus on Furmint, arguably Hungary’s greatest white grape variety. Furmint has been the primary grape used in the production of Tokaji, one of the most remarkable, historic, and complex dessert wines of the last several centuries. In the last decade a new generation of winemakers has been using Furmint to produce some of the most exciting dry white wines found anywhere. Join me as we take a tour through the history and vineyards of Tokaj and Csopak, and discover the brilliance of dry Furmint by tasting an outstanding flight of wines.

Tim Gaiser, MS

About the speaker: Tim Gaiser is an internationally renowned wine expert and lecturer. He is one of 175 individuals worldwide to ever attain the elite Master Sommelier wine title.  Over his 25-plus year career, Tim has taught thousands of students in wines and spirits classes at every level as well as developing wine education programs for restaurants, winery schools and wine distributors. He has experience in all phases of the wine industry – online, wholesale, retail, winery, and restaurant – including stints at Heitz Wine Cellars in the Napa Valley and Bix and Cypress Club restaurants in San Francisco, and Virtual Vineyards/the original wine.com.

Tim has written for a number of publications including Fine Cooking Magazine and Sommelier Journal. He also writes for numerous wine and spirits clients including Champagne Perrier Jöuet, Wines of Germany and the Portuguese Cork Quality Association. Gaiser has served as the author and lead judge for the Best Young Sommelier Competition and the TopSomm Competition, the two major American sommelier competitions. Considered one of the leading wine tasters and educators, Gaiser was recently featured in the Think like a Genius Wine Master training product, created by the Everyday Genius Institute.

Tim’s first session, “Insights: Best Practices for Teaching Professional Tasting” will be held on Friday, August 11, 2017 at 8:45 am. The session on Hungarian Furmint will also be on Friday, August 11, at 3:00 pm. For more information, see the website of the 41^st Conference of the Society of Wine Educators to be held on August 10 – 12, in Portland, Oregon.

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Today we have a conference preview written by Meridith May, who is bringing several panels of experts from The Tasting Panel Magazine and Somm Journal to our August Conference in Portland. Read on to learn more about these fascinating sessions! 

Since I took over The Somm Journal, we have opened doors to thousands of new readers from all aspects of the wine industry. Our audience continues to grow at breakneck speed, from wine buyers at restaurant and retail to winemakers, F&B Directors, distributors and importers.  From this perspective we are thrilled to bring in three panels to SWE’s August conference in Portland, and proud of the panel moderators we have gathered together. It will be thrilling to observe and learn from the panelists and we plan to document these panels in word and image in our October issue.

On Thursday, August 10 at 10:00 am, spirits expert/mixologist Jeffrey Morgenthaler will moderate our panel entitled “Deconstructing Spirits.” Jeffrey will question his panel of brand experts on what goes into creating the flavor profiles, the distillation processes, and the ingredients of eight different spirits – which the attendees will taste along with the panel.

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We will “Dig into Unique Terroir” on Friday August 11 at 3:00 pm with moderator Eric Hemer, MW, MS – Senior VP of Education for Southern Glazer’s. Eight winery representatives from regions such as Victoria, Australia; Navarro, Spain; Rias Baixas; Mendoza, Argentina and Alto Adige will taste their wines with attendees and dive deep into how terroir affects the character of these wines.

Our third session, scheduled for Saturday, August 12 at 10:30 am, will feature a “Coached Blind Tasting” program. While attendees attempt to blind a flight of wines, they will be coached by moderators Bob Bath, MS/Head Beverage Professor at CIA Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, and Somm Journal’s Deputy Editor/Advanced Sommelier Allyson Gorsuch. While the attendees taste and write down their guesses, the two coaches will give hints about the regions and varietals. When time is up, papers will be collected and each winery’s representative will “reveal” their respective wines and discuss the details.

All of these fascinating sessions will be presented at the Society of Wine Educators’ 41^st Annual Conference, to be held August 10 to 12, 2017 in Portland, Oregon. See you there!

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Today we have a post from wine educator and author Jim Laughren, CWE. Jim gives us a sneak peak at his session about orange wines, which will be presented as part of SWE’s 41st Annual Conference in August of this year.

Orange, aka amber, aka skin-fermented, aka macerated, aka off-white—white wine made like a red with days, weeks, or months on the skins and stems—is either the new “love-to-hate-‘em” or “dang-that’s-intriguing” or “wow-this-is-really-superb-savory-unexpected” wine kid on the block. Its resurgence began with a gush of “natural” and “non-interventionist” hoopla that was too often shorthand for funky, nasty, BAD tasting wine. Try a dozen, if you could find them, of these nouveau ancient bottlings ten years ago and chances are excellent that at least half of them were, hmmm … questionable, at best.

No matter that orange was likely one of the two original wine colors (the other being red) as folks in the Neolithic were less obsessed with whisking the juice from its skins and stems and producing that star-bright white of which we have become so enamored. Simpler folks, simpler times and all that. Despite all the “advances” in equipment, technique, storage, bottling, and so forth, these ARE wines the ancients would recognize, at least as far as taste is concerned.

Whipsawing our way back to the present, orange winemakers have become more concerned with delicious and drinkable. In fact, it’s now rather easy to find orange wine that has been made in qvevri, amphora, tinaja, wood, concrete and/or stainless steel. Winemakers are plying the better tools of their trade, along with skin contact, to produce a new “generation” of orange wines that are at least alluring, if not downright delectable.

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What fruit they offer is more in the peach, pear, apricot, tangerine spectrum. And yet, depending on the specific wine, they are redolent of earth and herbs and tea and seashell and dried flowers and, thanks to their very noticeable tannins (such an organoleptic disconnect: white wine and tannins) coupled with their rich savoriness, orange wines are a nearly perfect food match with almost everything.

So join me, explorers and skeptics alike, and let’s put these autumnal-colored babies to the test. It’s all balderdash until it hits the old olfactory epithelium anyway. A little history, both ancient and recent, a lot of color, and a lovely lineup of orange for your tasting pleasure. Hope to see you in Portland!

Jim’s session, “Orange Wines: How a Collection of Contemporary Winemakers are Putting Some Skin in the Game” will be offered on Thursday, August 10^th at 1:00 pm, as part of the Society of Wine Educators’ 41^st Annual Conference, to be held in Portland, Oregon.

About the speaker: Jim Laughren, CWE, is committed in his educational endeavors to chop off the highfalutin’ right after the first “i” and present wine and all its glorious permutations in a manner that’s friendly and welcoming to all.  He is the author of A Beer Drinker’s Guide To Knowing & Enjoying Fine Wine, named a Kirkus ‘Indie Book of the Year’ in 2013 and has a second volume, 50 Ways To Love Wine More, scheduled for release later this year. Like many of us, he travels frequently to wine regions around the world and enjoys introducing new drinkers to the pleasures of the sacred juice.