Email your wine recommendations, commentaries or retailer reviews to "james@ureviewcalgary.com". If you have comments based on the posted submissions please send those as well. We'd love your feedback.

Boutique vs. Mass Market...U Decide! by James Bell

Canadians love beer more than anything but more of us are choosing vino...must be all that "it's good for your heart" stuff we read. It used to be that wine was drunk by your parents on holidays and when you were old enough to drink...wine was pretty far down on your list of things to try. Nowadays it seems that wine is becoming a drink of choice and you'll see more and more people in bars hauling glasses of the "juice" through crowds. It's a fact that there is more wine on the market than ever before. Anyone can afford a decent bottle of wine these days...and by decent I am referring to wines without screw tops (though some high end producers no longer use corks...but I digress). Having stated this...why drink mass produced wines when there are so many wonderfully handmade wines available to us? I believe the answer is simple. It's about marketing and a producers' ability to make a buck at a given price point without worrying as much about quality.

I don't wish to come across as a wine snob when speaking about mass produced, "designed for the global marketplace" wines. If you like your Wolf Blass Yellow Label, Little Penguin, Yellow Tail or your California wine du jour (whatever the Wine Spectator likes this month) then good on ya. A good wine is a wine YOU like no matter what anyone tells you. I started drinking mass marketed wines and they helped lay a foundation for the development of my palate. Fortunately I was spoiled and lucky. I had friends with much better palates and cellars full of great wines they were willing to share. This is how I learned what 5, 10, 20, 30, even 40 years can do for a wine. Age is a wonderful thing! Wines and patience go hand in hand...and patience is rewarded. Unfortunately we're an impatient lot. We want gratification NOW not years from now and hence the mass produced wines we drink are meant to be consumed within a shorter time span because they aren't made to improve over time. We refuse to wait and the producers know it and they know us...better than we know ourselves. Enter Marketing 101, dicussions of price points, etc.

Do yourself a favor if you think I am just a wine snob writing to convince you that my affection for smaller production wines (And BTW, I still drink cheap stuff too) is superior to the mass produced products. Rent Sideways or Mondovino and learn a little bit more about the wine industry. Or go to a specialty store and ask questions. If you ask a retailer what else you can buy given your budget (exclude wines you normally drink) you may be pleasantly surprised. You may even find some bottles that have been aged! And one secret that wine retailers will not talk to you about...there are A LOT of politics in their industry and they are often held hostage. Many times a store will only get the super-duper-great-vino IF they agree to also buy the crappy stuff that the wine rep cannot sell elsewhere. It's about playing the game. If you want my best wine....help me move my "other" stuff and maybe we can do business. Guess who buys the "other" stuff....? I feel for the wine stores in this regard which is why I do my homework on what I buy and who I buy it from. Boutiques wine stores, contrary to popular opinion, are NOT more expensive than "Lenny's Liquor" on the corner. 

As I wrote above, there is more wine in the market today than ever. You can certainly choose to drink the mass marketed, mass produced products and if you enjoy them and you're happy then so be it. Just consider that for centuries wine has been an art form and while certain companies try to become the "Starbucks" of the wine world I am all for supporting the smaller producers who care about making top quality products on lands their families have owned for generations. There are great stories to go with their wines and I am much more interested in these producers than a cool label on a bottle of something the rest of the herd is drinking. My advice is simple. Find yourself a good wine retailer and put your budget in their hands. Calgary is the best wine market in North American right now and you'd be crazy not to take full advantage of it. Cheers.

The submissions below come from restauranteur, foodie, and fellow wine freak, Fred Konopaki. Fred was a co-founder of the Belvedere and is primarily responsible for the wine cellar that won them a series of accolades and awards. Fred can now be found serving up Calgary's finest BBQ at the Palomino.

Raise Your Glasses!

I’ve been renovating my new house over the past month; I have a baby on the way, my first. And I’ve been drinking a lot of wine. Rather than use a customary wine glass, lately I’ve been quaffing out of a cheap tumbler - because power sanders and crystal, unequivocally, do not mix. But neither do Pinot Noir and plastic, because when you really think about it the pleasures of wine tasting are inextricably linked with the qualities of the glass itself; the glass is the instrument used to convey the message hidden in the wine.

When assessing a wine, tasters are looking at three key factors: colour, aroma and taste. And when it comes to stemware these factors are in turn affected by the shape and size of the serving vessel, and to a lesser extent the serving portion. Compare wine glasses to a pair of headphones for your iPod: those little white ones will do the trick in a pinch, but if you’ve ever rocked your iPod with a set of high-quality ear goggles you’ll know where I’m coming from. It’s the same with wine and wine glasses; you will get much more sensory input from a fine wine glass.

In the 1950’s Austrian Professor Claus J Riedel (REE-del) was the first to understand the relationship between the aroma and taste of a wine and the glass from which it is served. In 1961 Reidel introduced the first line of wine glasses created in different shapes and sizes and tailored specifically to varietals. Since then the line has expanded immensely: among many others there are glasses for Old World Cabernet, New World Cabernet, Syrah, Zinfandel, American Chardonnay, French Chardonnay (Burgundy), Riesling, Champagne etc. In short, a glass for every wine.

The shape of the glass is responsible for the quality and intensity of the bouquet as well as how the wine flows into your mouth. Riedel’s theory holds that because each grape varietal has its own characteristics each wine glass should be tailored to bring out those characteristics in the most dramatic way possible. Riedel even goes so far as to suggest that old Cabernet is different than young Cabernet is different than American Cabernet is different than a Cabernet-based Bordeaux - and that each should have its own unique vessel. Sound far-fetched? Well, maybe a bit extreme but I can assure you that it is true. As you bring your wine glass to your lips your taste buds are on alert. In a varietal-specific Riedel glass the wine is directed to the appropriate areas of your tongue that account for the perception of the four tastes: sweet, salty, acidic and bitter. This in turn gives you the different taste pictures of the wine you’re drinking.

From my personal experience I find that I use my olfactory sense far more than my palate when judging the provenance of a wine or the grape varietal. Here the size of the glass is important, allowing the taster to “nose” through the various layers and nuances of aroma, down past the fruity and flowery notes to the more earthy tones below. A larger glass allows for the development of these aromas, especially when swirling the wine around the bowl. For red wines your glass should be a minimum of twelve ounces but ideally twenty or more (I’ve seen Riedel Red Burgundy glasses that will hold an entire bottle of wine!). Whites, being a little more restrained, benefit from a slightly smaller vessel - under twenty ounces but definitely more than twelve. Try swirling a white around an eight ounce restaurant glass and you’ll see what I mean.

The last consideration is portion size. Whenever possible, whether at home or in a restaurant, fill your glass no more than one third the total volume, one quarter is even better. This will allow you to better judge the colour of the wine as well as provide ample room for swirling and “nosing” your wine.

Here are the glasses you need at home. The first is a balloon-shaped glass with a larger bowl and an open mouth. These are great for Pinot Noirs from America or Burgundy, as well Barolos from Northern Italy. These glasses have excellent aeration qualities that these tightly knit wines often need. For most other reds a glass with an oval-shaped bowl that narrows at its mouth is perfect. For whites model your choice after the oval-shaped red glass but slightly smaller; when inhaling the aromas of a delicate white wine you don’t want to lose even the tiniest nuance by using a massive glass. Lastly, everyone should have a few Champagne flutes kicking around because, face it, you don’t drink enough Champagne!

Two more points and it’s back to my sanding. One: you don’t need to spend a ton of money on Riedel; try to find glasses made by Speigelau or especially Lara. They’re inexpensive and very good. Second: the next time you order a ten dollar glass of wine in a restaurant and they put it in a dreadful glass, please say something. If you don’t do something about apathy who will?

(send your wine questions to bigfred@shaw.ca)

Pull the Cork! - November 2006

Imagine that you've just purchased a shiny new PDA, unwrapped it and tried to get it to work only to realize that it's defective. You take it back to the retailer and exchange it for a new one which works perfectly. Fine; you're happy with that. The retailer in turn sends it back to the manufacturer along with the other defective PDA's they have under the counter. And the manufacturer gets boxes of them every year; in fact almost seven percent of their products are faulty resulting in millions of dollars of lost revenue. Do you think they would let this go on? Well, wine makers have been allowing this to happen for years and you, unwittingly, are the victim...and the cause!

The source of most defects in wine is cork taint and it costs the wine industry over ten billion dollars a year. Recent estimates by wineries indicate that anywhere between three and ten percent of wine bottled with a cork stopper is defective. The culprit is a chemical compound called TCA or 2,4,6-trichloroanisole. Sounds scary huh? Not really. Have you ever put your nose to a glass of wine and noticed it smelled a little "off", kind of like wet cardboard, mold or maybe your Golden Retriever after a bath? That's cork taint and most people don't even know it's there. It's caused by a reaction between mold and chemicals: mold present in raw cork bark, oak for wine barrels, barrel racking, winery walls etc., and chlorine which is used as a disinfectant in wineries. The human perception of this chemical is about five part per trillion, but even imperceptible amounts can suppress the wonderful aromas and fruit characteristics in a wine. In all likelihood most of us have had more than a few bottles like this but, not knowing the cause, simply chalked it up to a bad wine that we'd never try again.

Cork has been used as a stopper for over three thousand years but it wasn't until the 1600's when a young monk named Dom Perignon (you've heard of this guy) started using corks in the bottling of his champagne. Corks really came into their own in the 1700's when the first production facility was opened in Spain. Natural cork, however, is an ancient technology that has had it's time; it's like using smoke signals instead of your Blackberry.

The not-so-new kid on the block is the screwcap or Stelvin closure as it's known in the wine industry. The basic screwcap was patented in England in 1889 and the Stelvin brand was introduced in the 50's by French manufacturer La Bouchage Mecanique. As a wine closure Stelvin really made a name for itself in Switzerland during the 1970's and by 1995 the Swiss were using sixty million of them a year. Screwcaps are now so popular that there is a backlog of five months just for production; or at least they are in some parts of the world.

In North America and the old-world wine making countries of Europe it is consumers, not the wineries who are their own worst enemy. Reluctance to adopt this new technology can be linked directly to consumers’ romantic fantasies about cork: screwcaps don't allow the wine to age, screwcaps make the wine look cheap, pulling a cork is sexy, etc. But the truth is this: the Stelvin closure always works, corks do not. Yalumba in Australia experimented with the screwcap in 1976 but chose to abandon the project in 1984 only to revive the screwcap again in 2000. (In fact, most Aussie winemakers have been bottling wine for their own consumption with screwcaps for years!) Chateau Haut Brion, one of the world's greatest wine producers, bottled a portion of the 1971 vintage with screwcaps and found, seven years later, no difference between those bottles and others closed with cork (except for cork taint in some bottles of course) but also chose to abandon the screwcap. In both instances it was consumer pressure that won out.

Recently, however, the rest of the world has begun to see the light. In New Zealand, long a leader in the use of screwcap closures, wines bottled under Stelvin outsell those stopped with cork. In fact, usage of screwcaps there has gone from one bottle in a hundred in 2000 to seven out of ten bottles today, due in large part to consumer acceptance. The movement has reached Canada as well; Tinhorn Creek began using Stelvin in 2003 on some higher-end reserve bottles and the VQA (Vintners Quality Alliance of Canada) has officially approved of their use for all wines in this country.

So the next time you’re picking up a bottle of wine for that dinner party or barbeque put your biases aside and grab the bottle with the screwtop; you know it will be perfect. Besides, what if your host doesn’t have a corkscrew?

Previous Submission from Fred:

Wine Service Temperature at Calgary Restaurants - September 2006

I’m a serious wine drinker. Some would even say sophisticated. And living in Calgary I’m surrounded by many others just like me. As a city of a million people we are fortunate to be blessed with the largest selection of wines in Canada and the many people who drink them are often extremely knowledgeable. We have some serious collectors with money to burn and in all probability the highest per capita number of sommeliers. We have amazing restaurants and wine boutiques managed by various people who could run circles around their colleagues from Vancouver and Toronto. So why is it I can’t get my $14 glass pour served at the proper temperature?

If you have over one hundred or more wines on your list, if you use decent wine glasses (there’s another article to be written on THAT topic but let’s save it for another day), if you have a sommelier on your payroll, if you’ve spent over a million dollars building your restaurant, I would say you’re pretty committed to the program. Yet time and time again I’m forced to drink whites just above freezing and reds so warm they taste like paint thinner! When confronted with this information everyone agrees but so far nobody seems to be willing to do more than pay lip service to the problem.

I could cite many examples but one will suffice. Recently I was in the mood for a killer red. You know the one: rare, expensive, sexy, ethereal. Can’t you just taste it? Well, for me on that day it was a 2001 Rostaing Cote Blonde. A very serious bottle. I was dining at the Living Room (my favourite patio!) in Calgary with friends and I really wanted them to try one of those wines they would never order nor could justify spending over two hundred dollars on. Now I’ll list some of my main offenders later but the Living Room is at or near the top of my list. I just knew this wine was coming out of a cellar that should be but isn’t climate controlled - and I was right. This poor bottle of one of the Northern Rhone’s finest had to be pushing 75˚ F! Not only was it undrinkable at that temperature it must also have been deteriorating rapidly. And the Living Room has a cellar FULL of great, expensive wines just like this one. All I could do was call for the ice bucket, a request often met with disdain from servers and smirks from diners who think I just got off the combine.

So why does it happen? With glass poured whites the bottles are most often stored in the same bar cooler as the beer. These coolers usually run at around 2-4˚ C (35-38˚ F) which is ideal for beer I suppose but effectively kills the aroma and flavour of most whites. It would be like eating frozen pizza. Red wines are most often left out in the open at room temperature which in most Calgary restaurants is 21˚ C or above. The results of serving reds so warm are vapid wines with pronounced alcohol on the nose and palate. Imagine trying to choke back a bottle of Aussie Shiraz at 16% alcohol. You might as well pour yourself a glass of gasoline! As far as bottles coming out of the cellar I still have no idea why someone would spend so much money on wine storage and inventory but forego the added expense of a cooling unit; it’s truly beyond my comprehension.

Ideal long-term cellaring temperature is 13˚ C or 55˚ F. If you have any intention of laying bottles down for aging you’d best pay attention to those numbers. Now you could drink any red or white straight out of the cellar at that temperature but you might be better off with a few slight adjustments. Here are some basic guidelines:

Champagne 7˚ C 45˚ F

Whites 9˚ C 48˚ F

Rosés 12˚ C 54˚ F

Pinot Noir 16˚ C 61˚ F

Other Reds 18˚ C 65˚ F

I could go into even more detail but for the most part these numbers will work for most wines. If you’re unsure of the temperature and you’re really serious about it go to a wine shop and buy a wine thermometer. It fits down the bottle neck and will give you a quick idea of where you’re at.

So, faced with our dilemma, what do you do? For ice-cold whites, cup the bowl of the glass in the palm of your hand and swirl it around to warm it up. If you’re served a bottle that’s too cold ask the server to pour less in your glass and avoid the ice bucket they present at all costs; leave the bottle on the table to warm up. As it does notice how the wine opens up as it gets warmer; it’s like a flower coming to bloom.

For red glass pours, frankly, you’re screwed unless you can convince the server to chill the bottle or at least your wine in a small carafe. A lot of places use a serving carafe to better monitor portion control so often you’ll be in luck. Seven to ten minutes on ice will make all the difference. It you’re ordering a bottle out of the cellar ask the server what temperature the cellar is. Watch their head explode when they tell you the cellar doesn’t even have a thermometer in it! Place the bottle in an ice bucket with AT LEAST AS MUCH WATER AS ICE. This is crucial: ice alone will not do the job. Ten to fifteen minutes should do it.

Now a word to all you winos out there: If your wine is being served to you at the wrong temperature you MUST make a point of talking to a manager. You’re paying money for it so why just sit there and complain about it to your table? Do something! If your entrée came to the table cold you would say something. If we all do it enough times hopefully we can evoke a change. And then I can drink red wine by the glass again.

To you restaurateurs who call yourselves wine professionals: Get your shit together! Start serving wine at the correct temperature or take all those so-called wine awards that are hanging on your walls and toss them in the dumpster. Just get off your wallets and put in a system that ensures the wines you present to the consumer offer the most satisfaction possible. The wine geeks will love you for it because they’ll know you truly care. As for the folks out for the night, or maybe just getting into wine, they might not realize the wines they are drinking ARE at the ideal temperature but they’ll sure enjoy them more if they are. And that’s the point.

The Good

• The Belvedere: Whites by the glass a tad cool, red served out of a temperature controlled unit. Perfect! Cellar bottle temperature about 65˚ F.

• River Café: Whites good, reds at room temperature but not too warm. Cellar perfect.

• Teatro: Whites good, reds at room temperature but not too warm. Cellar perfect.

• Brava Bistro: Whites and red pretty good. Bottles a little warm.

• Divino: Whites freezing, reds pretty warm. Cellar bottles perfect. Gets a pass based on an exceptional wine list orchestrated by the inimitable Brad Royale, Calgary’s best wine educator.

The Bad

• Murrieta’s: White glass pours too cold, reds too warm. Cellar at room temperature.

• Tribune: Whites too cold, reds almost undrinkable. Beautiful cellar with no climate control!

• Il Sogno: Whites too cold, reds too warm. Bottles way off.

• Wildwood/Bonterra. More of the same. Ho hum…

The Ugly

• Living Room: Whites too cold, reds undrinkable. Cellar hot.

• Cilantro: Whites too cold, reds abysmal. Cellar passable.

• Vintage: White and red glass pours way off. Can’t bring myself to order a bottle of anything.