COLUMN: Want Some Cheese with that Wine?

By Tobin Barnes
People wish they knew more about wine.

Not everybody, but a lot maybe.

Feel like they missed out on this now-important aspect of their social educations. Sometimes even feel inadequate about it. Don’t know when to drink whites or reds. Boo-hoo. Don’t know how much to pay for a bottle without looking like a rube. End up paying an arm and a leg and still don’t like what they bought. You know, stuff like that.

Why this wine-knowledge thing is so socially important, I’m not exactly sure, but I’ve felt it, too.

It’s not like people are crying in their beer, wishing they knew more about THAT drink. People tend to drink the beer they like and not get too snooty about it. If someone’s drinking a Bud, it’s not like others are looking down their noses at him. Other hand, Busch Light? Maybe.

Oh, I suppose you could smell beer, admire the bubbles, measure the foam, take a sip, then spit it out into a bucket like wine. But for most, that’d just be wasted time and wasted beer. After all, one beer tastes like another after the first one.

Not sure, but same’s probably true about wine, too.

Of course, knowing a lot about wine necessarily means you’ve been drinking a lot of wine. That could be a problem, too.

Nevertheless, as I indicated before, people often admit they don’t know as much about wine as they’d like. So when they get near wineries, they tend to go on wine tours. Anyway, that’s what we’ve done several times--once in the Santa Barbara area and twice in the Sonoma/Napa Valley area.

Can’t really say I know much more about wine after those tours than I did before. Oh I guess I know how to hold a wine glass now (by the stem so your body heat doesn’t warm up the wine--now ain’t that getting touchy?), how to swirl the wine around a little to admire the color, and how to stick your schnoz into the glass a ways to fully appreciate the aroma.

Again, I suppose you could be doing this with beer, too, but I haven’t seen many who think it’s necessary.

Invariably, at the end of these tours, they let you sample some of their varieties. Generally, I tend to like the ones that taste most like fruity soda pop and dislike the ones that don’t, despite the indications that the non-sweet wines might be some of the best. So you see, I just don’t get it yet, despite several tours.

I guess I probably need to drink more wine, but like I said, that could be a problem, too.

My last wine tour was in April when we were in the San Francisco area. We drove around the Sonoma Valley and made a few stops. The most impressive place was the Benzinger winery.

During the tour, they told us that the big hillside framing the north boundary was an extinct volcano, which they seemed to think is good for the grapes. They also told us they use French oak for their barrels rather than Bulgarian oak, which is another good choice, but not as good as French.

At that point, I wondered whether someone who really knows their wines could take a sip of a Benzinger, spit it out and say, “Hmmm, they must have used French oak for their barrels. And, wait a second, was that a hint of volcanic ash along with the subtle taste of fruit and saffron? Well, I believe so.”

As you might imagine, this kind of stuff was way over my head, but what really impressed me, in addition to the truly beautiful setting of the winery, were their organic cultivation practices--something they called “biodynamic” farming.

What made me think of this again was a recent Newsweek article that featured the Benziger winery: “Mike Benziger is a grape healer,” the article said. “At his Sonoma, Calif., winery, he uses tinctures of stinging nettle, chamomile and dandelion to boost his vines’ immune systems so that they can fight bug infestations. Cows and sheep roam the vineyards, depositing natural fertilizer and kicking up the soil, helping aerate it. Predatory birds and bats nest in boxes overlooking the vineyards because they help control pests, and Benziger keeps his land hospitable to wildlife.”

Well, that’s really nice, isn’t it?

So even though I’m pretty sure I couldn’t taste the French oak or the volcanic ash in the Benziger wines, and didn’t spend too much time admiring the color swirling in the glass, I can certainly appreciate the effort such dedication to the environment requires when it seems too many just spray on more chemicals and could care less.