Click to Show Episode Transcript

Click above to close.0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host Sean Carroll. And this is another special episode of Mindscape. We’re having enough special episodes that you might begin to think that every episode of Mindscape is special and you might be right about that. But this one is a departure, I’ve always wanted to get into not only sort of academic kind of things, but also the realm of ideas out there in the real world involving things like music, which we’ve already talked about, movies and also food and drink. So I always thought it’ll be fun to have an episode of Mindscape devoted to the idea of wine.

0:00:33 SC: Now, wine obviously is a huge topic. There are many, many things you could talk about, but ideally, we’d be able to sort of start at the beginning, give useful information to people who knew nothing about wine or even had had some and hated it, but also give some useful insight to people who are experts and connoisseurs. I think that we have achieved that. This is our very fun episode. Happily, I happen to know Matthew Luczy, who is today’s guest. He is the sommelier at Melisse Restaurant, here in Los Angeles. For those of you who are not locals, Melisse is two-Michelin-starred restaurant, probably the most sophisticated, traditional, fine dining, white table cloths, French-American cuisine restaurant that you can find here in Los Angeles. There’s really not that much competition in fact.

0:01:15 SC: Matthew’s job is both to curate the wine list at Melisse and then to serve the wine in the restaurant. So he’s a very influential person in the Southern California wine world, as you’ll see at a quite young age. He’s also very approachable, very knowledgeable and very much of the opinion that everyone should enjoy wine in their own way. When I asked him to be on the podcast, he was very enthusiastic and he said, “Of course, I have to bring wine.” So yes, we will actually be tasting wine in realtime here on this episode of Mindscape. And because we did that, I thought it would be fun to do another experiment and bring in a third person for the podcast, my lovely wife, Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer. And who I know from drinking wine with her, is much better at tasting wine than I am. She is one of these super tasters, who is especially sensitive to cruciferous-ness and bitterness and so forth. So we have some overlap in our tastes, but it’s a little bit different, so that’s a new perspective. And of course, she’s also written articles about the science of taste and smell and climate change and how it’s affecting wine and so forth.

0:02:21 SC: We have a lot of fun. We start at the beginning, we taste both California wines and French wines and we compare them. And we go from everything like, what you should serve with truffles to what you should serve with cheeseburgers. And I think that it’s an eye opening experience. Matthew has some, he has opinions which is good, that’s what you want in a podcast guest. His opinions are not the same as everybody else’s which is also very good. So you’re gonna learn something, you’re gonna have fun. I recommend, if possible, that you have this podcast on at home with some wine in front of you, if you could. And if you’re in the car listening, then that’s also fine. But be sure to remember some of the things we say, bring them back home because this is definitely one of the more educational and useful episodes that we have here on Mindscape. So, let’s go.

[music]

0:03:25 SC: Matthew Luczy, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

0:03:27 Matthew Luczy: Thank you so much Sean, honor.

0:03:29 SC: This is gonna be an unusual episode of Mindscape for a variety of reasons. One, because just the topic is a little bit different. I say there’s no such thing as what we talk about, but we often do a lot of science and philosophy and things. There will be science and philosophy, but mostly we’re talking about wine.

0:03:44 ML: Yes.

0:03:45 SC: And food in a kind of aesthetic experience that we don’t often get to hear. So that’s great. Second reason why it’s different is we’re gonna be tasting wine. Sadly, the audience is not gonna be tasting wine along with us, I think probably half the audience listens in the car, so they definitely shouldn’t be, but.

0:04:00 ML: Not recommended.

0:04:00 SC: Not recommended, but you know, look, if they’re doing that at home, I will list the wines on the website and they can buy and taste along with us. That’ll be awesome.

0:04:06 ML: Then, highly recommended, in that case.

0:04:07 SC: Highly recommended. Third reason is because we have a special guest, Jennifer Ouellette, famous science writer. Say hi, Jennifer.

0:04:14 Jennifer Ouellette: Hello, everybody.

0:04:15 SC: Jennifer is also, as many listeners will know, my spouse and we brought her here to give us a little bit of an extra opinion about the wines that we’re tasting, famously her palate is much more refined and sensitive than mine. Don’t listen to what I say, but listen to what she says. Of course, I think, I hope that part of our lesson will be that everyone’s palate is different, so that’ll be good, anyway. Matthew, thanks so much for coming. Tell us a little bit about who you are, how you got here. What does it mean to be a sommelier?

0:04:47 ML: Well, okay, so, a sommelier is one that looks after and serves wine in a restaurant. That’s how I would define it. There’s a lot of definitions to it, but I think the restaurant aspect of it is crucial. I got into it young. I definitely had three year headstart as far as.

0:05:08 SC: On the legal age. [chuckle]

0:05:09 ML: On the legal side of it, yeah. Just to make sure I…

0:05:11 SC: You’re from local California?

0:05:12 ML: I’m from central California, yeah. Mariposa, California, right outside Yosemite National Park. Yeah, I got a headstart just to make sure I could do all the testing as soon as possible.

0:05:23 SC: Very good. Cheating ahead of time.

0:05:24 ML: Yes.

0:05:25 SC: And so, wine is a specific thing. Why were you drinking wine rather than the cheap beer that most kids that age would be drinking?

0:05:34 ML: Well, I’ve just always been interested in and fascinated by things with a lot of variables and understanding why things work and always been into music also, so, kind of an artistic side. And it sort of instantly clicked with me that wine seemed to be the most artistic way to go about drinking essentially. And like I said, from California, most of my friends are older than I am and my early mentors were into California wine and that’s where I started. And I was kind of in the formative years while working in a restaurant and not disliking it.

[chuckle]

0:06:18 ML: A lot of people are working in restaurants is, while doing something else especially in Los Angeles. And I was like, “This isn’t bad, it’s fairly easy way to make solid amount of money. And how do I just deal with wine, how do I just isolate that?” And I went to Melisse on a total whim with my best friend. And we just had our minds absolutely blown. He got super into the culinary world, bought the Alinea cookbook and The French Laundry Cookbook, and I spent eight hours making one course…

0:06:56 SC: But he was the food side.

0:06:57 ML: Just to do it, yeah, and then I forked off, and was like, “Okay, how do I be a sommelier?” And specifically, it would really be cool to be the sommelier here. And that literally happened.

0:07:06 SC: It worked, that never works. That’s…

[overlapping conversation]

0:07:07 ML: Yeah, yeah, that actually happened. And so, yeah, I did the testing, the first two levels of the Court of Master Sommeliers, as it’s called, when I was 22. And went to Melisse, so over the course of a couple of years, trying to get hired and I was obviously young and at that point, didn’t have any fine dining experience. And it’s one of those things where, how do you get experience without having experience?

0:07:37 SC: Yeah, right.

0:07:38 ML: How do I break in? Well, go somewhere a bunch of times and bug them until they say yes. You can work one day a week, and then that becomes two, and then that becomes, you’re an assistant, and then someone leaves and you’re the wine director.

0:07:50 SC: I mean, for the people, I think that we have an audience where some people are gonna be wine experts, and some will never have tasted, let’s say good wine, or wine at all. What is it that makes wine, wine? What’s is it that makes it so special? What differentiates it from, on the one hand, gin or scotch, but also for that matter, apple juice or diet coke?

0:08:12 ML: Well, certainly gin and scotch reflect a place, I don’t think they do it to the level that wine does. I really think that there’s an intrinsic locality… Specificity of locality to wine as in like, this vineyard, not going across the street to the next vineyard, like hyper, hyper zoomed in, combined with, that it’s from a vintage, it’s from one year and it changes over time. Some liquors do, but not in the same way that wine does. There’s a life span and a trajectory to it that is fascinating. And again, with so many variables that go into it, there’s a lot of BS that goes into it, unfortunately, and it is also unfortunately, can be an easily pretentious topic.

[laughter]

0:09:04 SC: I have never heard of that.

[laughter]

0:09:05 ML: And, yeah. And I really don’t like that, and wine is fascinating and wine is cool. And some people make it not that way.

0:09:13 SC: Is there anyway to put that in terms of the actual product? I mean, there’s something complicated about wine. I mean that in the good way, not in the bad way.

0:09:23 ML: Yeah.

0:09:23 SC: But there’s something about wine that lends itself to endless variety in a way that bourbon does not.

0:09:29 ML: Yeah, well, so without being a biologist, but from what I do understand about the way wine works, so the grapes that make up wine are called Vitis vinifera, that is everything that you produce wine from forks off of that. So, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Merlot, Syrah, Nebbiolo, Tocai Friulano or whatever it is, it’s all Vitis vinifera.

0:09:55 SC: It’s a type of grape?

0:09:56 ML: Yes. And their berries are about a third of the size I wanna say as of table grapes, like Concord grapes. They’re much harsher if you just eat one in a vineyard, especially red, I mean, there’s… If you don’t understand tannin and you ever get a chance to go walk around a vineyard, close to harvest, you will understand it better. So it mutates easily, and splits off into different, not forms, but like Pinot Noir, Pinot gris, those are linked. The Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Franc are the mother and father respectively of Cabernet Sauvignon, they were crossed, that’s why it has its name. So there’s a level of complexity from the biology standpoint, as I understand it, that is, I don’t know, unique to wine, it seems to be spread out wider with wine.

0:10:53 SC: So these are just the basic facts that grapes come in more varieties than wheat or barley do, is an important part of it?

0:11:01 ML: There can’t just be one form of wheat. I don’t wanna say that, I’m sure, but…

0:11:04 SC: Okay.

0:11:05 JO: Any good brewer is gonna like kill you for that. [chuckle]

0:11:06 ML: Yeah, someone in the comments is gonna destroy me, [chuckle] but I think that part of it… When you’re dealing… Okay, so in either hemisphere, basically the band of 30 degrees and 50 degrees is the Goldilocks zone, as it were of, where you can successfully ripen Vitis vinifera to have sugar levels compatible with fermentation below 30, they’re just getting baked above 50, although this is changing. Above 50, they’re struggling to have the physiological ripeness for the yeast to ferment. And and they’re all… There’s nowhere that makes wine that isn’t pretty.

[laughter]

0:11:50 SC: That’s also nice.

0:11:51 ML: It really is, like, any wine region you wanna go, even if you’re not into it, just go and eat there, and hang out there, it will be a good time.

0:12:00 SC: I think that one of the things that gets in the way of people who are not wine experts is that it is complicated, right? I mean, this is the benefit, this is the wonderful thing…

0:12:06 ML: Yeah.

0:12:07 SC: But it’s also intimidating.

0:12:08 ML: Yes.

0:12:08 SC: So, besides red and white, what are the basic ways in which we should classify different wines in our heads? Like you know, high alcohol, low alcohol is an obvious one, full bodied, less full bodied.

0:12:22 ML: Yeah.

0:12:23 SC: What else is going on?

0:12:24 ML: Well, so I do think about this in a binary way, and I think it’s helpful for understanding, especially if you’re beginning. So, let’s take red just to… For now. You mentioned alcohol content, that definitely is a factor, that’s really more of a factor of climate and winemaker decision, which we’ll get into. But with red wine, the way I look at it, the first fork in the road is, is it thin-skinned or is it thick-skinned?

0:12:53 SC: Okay.

0:12:53 ML: So, thin-skinned varietals are Pinot Noir, Gamay, Grenache, Saint-Gervais, Tempranillo, and Nebbiolo, those are the main ones. There’s other like funky ones, but those are the six main ones. And then, everything else is thick skinned, so Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Syrah etcetera.

0:13:14 SC: And this is strictly a matter of what grape varietal it is?

0:13:16 ML: Yes.

0:13:17 SC: If you know the varietal, then you know whether it’s thick or thin?

0:13:19 ML: Yes. Grenache is the funky one that people don’t think is thin skinned, but depending on where it’s from, it can seemingly wear both hats. But anyway, so thin skin, thick skin.

0:13:33 SC: And how does that transform into a feature of the wine that you’re drinking?

0:13:40 ML: Thin-skinned makes the lighter wine, essentially, thick skin will make a heavier wine. There’s another one of the weird thin-skinned grapes is Nebbiolo, that’s the only one where you… It’s basically like… I call it… It’s like Pinot Noir wrapped in fine grit sandpaper. It’s tannic, but light. Usually the thick-skinned grapes are gonna have more tannin structure, but Nebbiolo is this funky one, amazing one, but that’s kind of an outlier. So, thin skin, thick skin, and then the other really major thing to look at is earth versus fruit and that is a function of where it’s from. And the wine world is roughly divided into not quite halves, but two parts, the old world and the new world. Basically, the old world, is Europe, the New World is everywhere that’s not Europe. And…

0:14:31 SC: Quite a Eurocentric choice of language, but that’s okay.

0:14:34 ML: Yeah, yeah. And blanket statement, wines from the old world are grown in a cooler climates, wines from the New World are grown in warmer climates, so they tend to be riper, and the riper grapes are getting, the more fruit driven they tend to be. If the grapes aren’t getting as ripe, they tend to reflect more of the surroundings of the vineyard, the soil type and you’re tasting more of the earth flavors. That’s a generalization. There’s exceptions to anything we could talk about here, somewhere, but basically, old world, new world, that’s how it shakes out. So the matrixes of, is it light or heavy function of the thickness of the skin? Is it more fruit-driven or more earth-driven? Within that you have the variables of what the alcohol content will be. And the other thing that plays into that or that’s a function of all of that, is acidity versus tannin.

0:15:31 SC: Okay.

0:15:33 ML: Again, the binary way I describe this is acid makes your mouth water, tannin dries your mouth out. That is the easiest way to think about it.

0:15:37 SC: Oh, that’s very nice, I like that.

0:15:41 ML: Over steep a tea bag…

0:15:43 SC: Tannin.

0:15:43 ML: And taste it, that’s tannin.

0:15:45 JO: Yes. We’ve all done that.

0:15:47 ML: Over just steep your tea, yeah.

0:15:49 SC: Whereas lemon juice…

0:15:50 ML: That is acid.

0:15:53 SC: Makes your mouth water, yeah.

0:15:53 ML: Yeah. Now, in the context of wine acid… I hesitate to call wines acidic, ’cause it just doesn’t sound great, but acid-driven, bright, racy, high-toned, those kinda descriptors tend to be describing wines that have a higher level of acidity, which makes them brighter, makes them more refreshing, if you will.

0:16:15 SC: Would a chemist go along with this? Would they say that what you are calling an acidic wine actually is more acidic versus basic in the pH scales.

0:16:21 ML: Yeah, ’cause the pH level you measure it. So…

0:16:23 SC: Yeah, it’s objectively measurable.

0:16:24 ML: Yeah, yeah, pH… I mean, like a low pH wine, if it’s three even, that’s acid-driven. And then you’re going up to four… That’s…

0:16:36 JO: That’s a high pH.

0:16:36 ML: Over four, yeah.

0:16:38 SC: High more tannic then?

0:16:39 ML: No, not necessarily, ’cause they’re different and they come together, so they work together. So the tannin level, I don’t know if there’s a way to really measure it from a chemistry standpoint, like there is with pH, but like as we get into these wines, we can talk about how they intermingle, but basically, acid and tannin, you kinda taste them one on top of each other, and if you could magically take away the acid from the wine, you would notice how much less spine it has. It’s called structure, what acid and tannin imparts into wine.

0:17:17 SC: But they’re are two separate sort of properties that kind of do opposite things, right? So the tannic removes the moisture from your mouth and the acid adds it. But in principle, you could have a wine that was both very tannic and very acidic?

0:17:31 ML: Yes. Again, Nebbiolo, that’s it. Nebbiolo was raising its hand somewhere, going, that’s me.

0:17:36 SC: Alright. So we’ve had four things to keep in mind.

0:17:40 ML: Yeah.

0:17:40 SC: Light versus heavy, earthy versus fruity, level of acidity, level of tannicness? Tannin?

0:17:46 ML: Just level of tannin.

0:17:47 SC: Level of tannin, okay, good.

0:17:47 ML: Yeah. And that’s red grapes. White, you get to just take out tannin, because… So the juice of all grapes is clear. The one thing the makes red wine red is contact with the skins. Now there is what’s called Orange wine, which is white wine made like a red wine, that’s gaining in popularity, a lot of funky bars are stuffed with orange wine.

0:18:06 JO: Right.

0:18:06 ML: ‘Cause they’re fine for foodpairing. You see a lot of them in Croatia and [0:18:10] ____, part of Europe, but white, you still have the acid, you don’t have the tannin, you still have body, although it sort of manifests differently. Light, white grapes. Sauvignon Blanc. All this is depending on how it’s made. So you can make a Sauvignon Blanc into a really rich like oaky style of wine, or you can not. So it’s a great varietal makeup with things like Muscadet, Vermentino, Sauvignon Blanc, those are light, zippy, bright, zesty, white wines. Marsanne, Roussanne, those are big, oily, fatter, punchier styles of white wine. Viognier, really oily, also really floral. So white, it kinda has a whole other… You need a different way of thinking about in describing white wine. Chardonnay is one of my favorite topics, ’cause it’s one of the most misunderstood things ever. And this applies to all wine. I have this conversation at the restaurant nightly.

0:19:18 ML: “Oh, are there things you like, things you don’t like?” “I do not want Chardonnay.” “Is it because you don’t like, ‘oaky buttery wines’?” “Yes”. “Okay”. And I always equate this to Good Will Hunting. It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, [chuckle] it’s not your fault.

0:19:29 SC: People have been exposed to a lot of bad Chardonnay, right?

0:19:30 ML: Yeah, it’s not Chardonnay…

0:19:31 JO: Well, and I would also say… People also get exposed to a lot Chablis. I mean, I had a lot of bad white Chablis in college, and it’s turned me off white wine for a very long time.

0:19:41 ML: Yeah, well a lot of that, the California Chablis, as it was called.

0:19:43 JO: Oh, my God.

0:19:43 ML: That is not Chablis. That is not from the Appalachian origin contrôlée in the [laughter] northeastern part of France…

0:19:51 SC: I see.

0:19:52 ML: Not far from Champagne. Chablis is a place, just like Champagne is a place, and… Like, they’re… You see old bottles of California wine that say California Sauterne, California Burgundy, California Chablis…

0:20:04 SC: The old days.

0:20:05 ML: Before the AOCs were formed in 1936 and you can’t do that, but…

0:20:10 SC: I would… We have this beautiful lovely wine in front of us, and now we have a little bit of a vocabulary for understanding it.

0:20:15 ML: Yeah.

0:20:15 SC: But I know because we do have a heterogeneous audience, I want some take-home messages right away. What should someone do if they’re not a wine expert and they kinda wanna be more… Like, they wanna investigate? What are the steps they should take in a wine store, or restaurant, or whatever, to sort of get the basics and find something they like?

0:20:36 ML: I would say find a local wine shop. Get a couple of friends and be honest and go in on a few bottles that have… That are in opposite styles and start down in what it is you do or do not like.

0:20:47 SC: So by wine shop you mean not supermarket?

0:20:49 ML: I mean not supermarket. Yeah.

0:20:50 SC: Yeah.

0:20:50 ML: Not to, you know…

0:20:51 SC: A place where they know and like wine.

0:20:53 ML: Yes. The money will almost always go farther. You will have a staff that’s specifically trained to talk about and sell wine and also usually love wine, minorly helpful. And…

[chuckle]

0:21:07 SC: So get something light body, get something full body, get something earthy, get something fruity.

0:21:11 ML: Exactly, yeah, and split them up. Get what you might think might be too many glasses at the house, but you never have enough.

0:21:19 SC: Never, you never do.

0:21:20 ML: Yeah. And just start learning and pay attention to it, which I don’t mean that to sound sharp, but think about what it is that you’re tasting and think about how you would try to articulate it and try to articulate it. Don’t just… If you don’t know what to say, that’s fine, but make notes, go back to that wine shop, “Hey, this is what I thought, what do you think? Where do we go now? I didn’t like that wine, it really dried all the… It took all the saliva out of my mouth. What does that mean? That Chardonnay that I thought was gonna be oaky and buttery, it was like razor blades, what happened there?” Just be honest, be inquisitive, and I really can’t stress enough, do it in a group, do it with at least, you know…

0:22:09 JO: One other person.

0:22:09 ML: One other person, but just to bounce off each other and people are gonna pick out things that you wouldn’t notice and vice versa and the rising tides, right?

0:22:18 SC: And it is possible to do okay at the $20 bottle level?

0:22:21 ML: Yes, absolutely. I’d say… I’m glad you brought that up, ’cause I think there is somewhat of a break there, just as far as what it costs under…

0:22:29 SC: It’s hard to do well at the $10 bottle.

0:22:31 ML: Yeah. The exception, if you’re in Europe and you ask for the table wine and it’ll be sometimes like €6 for a carafe and it’ll be awesome.

0:22:43 SC: Sometimes.

0:22:43 JO: Sometimes.

0:22:43 ML: Sometimes, but your chances of it being awesome are way higher there than they are here. You’re dealing with the tariffs, and all that stuff, but $20… Like, you gotta be able to spend $20 on a bottle of wine and it’s five drinks. Like, would you complain at a bar if you were paying that for a cocktail? Like, it’s… $20 bucks is where you reasonably should start, and you… Yeah, there is no quality price ratio in the wine world. There are a lot of ways to waste money. I’m really fortunate to work where I do. I’ve got to taste a lot of crazy wines and a lot of them that are really expensive are absolutely worth it, if you could afford them and not feel it. And a lot of them are just a waste of money.

[chuckle]

0:23:29 SC: So, just for the people who might never actually experience this themselves. Is there a difference between a $1000 bottle of wine and a $10,000 bottle of wine?

0:23:40 ML: It depends what they are.

[laughter]

0:23:41 SC: But there can be?

0:23:43 ML: Oh yes, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

0:23:45 SC: I mean, it just seems, I think to a lot of people for whom a $50 bottle of wine is expensive…

0:23:49 ML: Totally, yeah, and it is.

0:23:50 SC: But the idea that once you’re at a $1000… But it is, exactly. But the idea might very well be that at some point there’s a point of diminishing return.

0:23:57 ML: Oh no, you’re paying for micro percentage increase at that point and you’re just paying for what it is. I mean, it is what it is, like, literally. I mean, the most famous winery in the world that tends to basically most of the most expensive bottles of wine sold, the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti in Burgundy, they’re insanely good.

0:24:20 SC: Yeah.

0:24:20 ML: Sorry, [laughter] like, they are.

0:24:21 SC: I think in a physics analogy sort of land, it’s kind of like the large Hadron Collider.

0:24:26 ML: Okay, yeah, Yeah.

0:24:27 SC: Like, it’s very expensive, is it worth literally a million times what some… What you can do for a $1000?

0:24:35 ML: Mm-hmm.

0:24:36 SC: No, but if you don’t spend the billions of dollars, you get nothing.

0:24:40 ML: Do you find a Higgs boson without it?

0:24:41 SC: Yeah, you don’t find it at all, right. You don’t find a 1000th of a Higgs boson, you find nothing.

0:24:45 ML: Yeah, yeah, I love it.

0:24:46 SC: So if you wanna find that at that level then that’s what it’ll cost.

0:24:48 ML: Yeah, and no, DRC is not whatever percentage it is better than whatever you wanna compare it to, but there’s only one DRC. And there’s a lot of things in the middle of that price range and things that are equal to the kinds of money you can spend on those kinda wines that are one-dimensional and you’re tasting the investors’ and the winemakers’ ego.

[chuckle]

0:25:14 ML: You’re not tasting this historically consistent place that is just renowned for a reason. And everywhere across that spectrum, that exists. I mean, more and more and more of my favorite wines are… I call them the beautiful babies from the great producers. In places like Burgundy, where there’s a classification system of the vineyards, where you have vineyards that are classified as regional. Like, it’s from Burgundy somewhere or then, it’s from a specific little village in Burgundy and then… Or it’s from a specific vineyard in Burgundy and then it’s from a really, really good vineyard in Burgundy, the four different levels. What’s called Bourgogne, the most simple of them from the great winemakers is a fraction of the price of the expensive stuff, but you’re still getting that expertise in a simple wine and that’s the golden place to be. Now, some of those can be $50, $60 to start, but you’re drinking $50, $60 wine from people who are making $600, $700, $800, $900 bottle of wine.

0:26:21 SC: Speaking of drinking wine…

0:26:23 ML: Let’s drink wine.

0:26:23 SC: Now you’ve brought four different bottles of wine here. And you have a theory, there’s a system for why there’s four.

0:26:28 ML: There’s a reason, yeah.

0:26:29 SC: Explain the reason.

0:26:30 ML: Lot of reasons. So, they’re all red.

0:26:34 SC: Red, that’s cause I said only red.

0:26:35 ML: Yes, yes.

0:26:36 SC: My fault…

[overlapping conversation]

0:26:36 ML: Sean requested red. That’s fine. No, no. Episode two, we’ll do all white.

[laughter]

0:26:41 ML: So yeah, I wanted to talk about the thin skin, thick skin thing that I talked about, and then also the Old World versus the New World. So the only way to do that successfully is to have four wines, so…

0:26:50 SC: Excellent math skills.

[chuckle]

0:26:53 ML: From a physicist, everyone heard that.

[laughter]

0:26:56 ML: So yeah, I have a Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir versus a Red Burgundy. So I’ve talked about Burgundy couple of times, but without explaining what that is. So that is a region in the Central Eastern part of France, not far from the Swiss border, that makes Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Couple other grapes they grow, Aligoté and Gamay, but for the most part, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, and that’s it. And pretty much the greatest examples of them. That is changing, there is competition that is mounting all the time, but the competition is still bounced off Burgundy. It’s just the… It’s the reference point.

0:27:34 SC: It’s the standard.

0:27:35 ML: Yeah, it is.

0:27:37 SC: Okay, so the California Pinot Noir?

0:27:39 ML: Yes.

0:27:39 SC: And then the Burgundy, also Pinot Noir?

0:27:41 ML: Yes, yeah. If it’s red and it’s from Burgundy, it’s Pinot Noir. No blending, everything here is just one varietal, there’s no blends. The California Pinot Noir is made by a winery named Cobb. And he’s in the Sonoma Coast. So the Sonoma Coast is this big place. It’s like saying, “Oh, where do you live?” “LA County” [chuckle] Okay. It’s kind of helpful, but it could mean a lot of things. So Sonoma Coast, but specifically the vineyards that Ross Cobb is working with are in this little undefined subregion of the Sonoma Coast that they’re working on getting passed through as an official subregion called Freestone-Occidental, that’s just a few miles inland from the ocean. Meaning that the grapes are soaked in a marine layer a lot of the time.

0:28:24 ML: And also in these coastal regions, you have really wide, what are called diurnal shifts, so that’s the difference between the hottest time of the day and the coolest time of the night. And pretty much categorically across the wine world, grapes want that. They want to be stressed, they wanna be bouncing around temperature-wise, but Pinot Noir, specifically, is kind of a nightmare. It’s really finicky, hard to grow grape, requires perfect, perfect conditions to not be either shrill if it’s under-ripe or flabby and sort of no longer a silky, pretty, sexy textured wine if it’s getting too ripe. So this specific little pocket of the Sonoma Coast is great for it. Ross has a really in depth touch, very hands-off wine maker as I call him, and a great winemaker. “I don’t wanna taste what you can do with a wine, I wanna taste the wine.”

0:29:15 SC: The wine, right? So I wanna actually taste this wine. But let me just look forward a little bit, so that our audience knows where we’re going. These two, the first ones, are Pinots; Old and New World, and the next two are?

0:29:28 ML: Second two are Syrah. So again, California and France…

0:29:35 SC: That’ll be the thicker skin.

0:29:37 ML: Yeah, thick skin.

0:29:37 SC: Heavier-bodied?

0:29:38 ML: Yeah, fuller-bodied, especially the California iteration. The French Syrah really is not much heavier than the Red Burgundy’s gonna be but, which they do that on purpose. There’s a couple kind of almost backwards things in this flight that I always like to illustrate, that these wide brush strokes are not always accurate, so… Or there are exceptions to them, I should say. So two Pinot Noirs, both from the 2015 vintage, and then two Syrahs, both from the 2010 vintage. 2015 in California, coming out of drought, string of drought vintages, warm but not really warm, not to the level of ’13, ’14. And then in France, ’15 is really, really widely acclaimed. It’s a little bit of a riper, rounder vintage.

0:30:33 SC: 2015?

0:30:34 ML: 2015, yeah, yeah. But the yields are down as they’ve been in Burgundy for the past, basically, 10 vintages in a row, which we’ll get into later why that’s happening. But basically, the California Pinot Noir, which typically, again, broad stroke California versus France, you’re gonna get a more fruit-driven, heavier style of wine from a warmer climate, and then the European wines typically are more earth-driven and more rustic. And here, they’re kind of backwards. Neither of them is necessarily rustic, but the Burgundy is a little bit more svelte and kinda slick due to the warmer vintage and different wine making styles between them, but both master, master winemakers. The Burgundy is from a producer named Bruno Clair from a specific little village in Burgundy called Savigny-lès-Beaune and then one vineyard called La Dominode, and Dominode was planted in 1908. So the oldest vines in this vineyard date back to then, and basically as vines get older, they produce less juice. So the juice they do produce is more concentrated, tends to give you a more complex wine, tends to give you more age-worthy wine.

0:31:43 SC: It’s literally the same vine, it’s like you take a snip from a vine and plant that?

0:31:47 ML: Replant. You can do that. These… There’s a point where some of them stop producing altogether, so there’s always less and less and less and less of the old vines and they’re replanting other parts of the vineyard, so not every vine in this is from 1908.

0:32:00 SC: That’s the arrow of time at work. I didn’t…

0:32:01 ML: There it is.

0:32:02 SC: We think of individual animals as having a lifespan, but you don’t really think of plants as having a lifespan.

0:32:08 ML: They have a lifespan. Yeah, yeah.

0:32:08 SC: But they do, yeah. They give up at some point. Anyway.

0:32:11 ML: Let’s taste.

0:32:11 SC: The New World. Okay, good. So this is the California Pinot Noir.

0:32:15 JO: The Cobb.

0:32:15 ML: The Cobb Rice-Spivak vineyard, Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir.

0:32:22 SC: And what should we be looking for when we’re tasting this?

0:32:26 ML: What I do is I always smell first and it first it sounds obvious. But a lot of people don’t. A lot of people just go into the glass and just go right in. But obviously our sense of taste and sense of smell are linked and part of, especially when you’re dealing with Pinot Noir, I mean it’s just it is lacy, pretty, feminine…

0:32:46 JO: Floral.

0:32:47 ML: Understated, floral, exactly. I wanna smell all that and this wine smells gorgeous. And more and more…

0:32:55 JO: I’m smelling it right now.

0:32:57 ML: Yeah. [chuckle] Yeah that you know and this I always get kinda like pomegranate, like lavender, again that racy, high tone, bright acidity that you’ll see on the end. You feel it in your tongue, you feel it everywhere really. But the way that the finish sings and keeps going, that is why you need wine that has a fair amount of acidity in it. If you don’t have that you just don’t get the same level of kind of width and breadth and depth.

0:33:29 JO: Yeah I’m actually very surprised this is a 2015. Sean knows that I don’t like younger wines ’cause I don’t like super, super fruity wines. And I feel it’s the acidity here that makes this so pleasurable and so drinkable. It actually allows those lighter floral notes to come out and it kind of softens the fruit component a little bit.

0:33:48 ML: Yeah. Yeah I mean you just have a really really integrated wine and for it to be integrated this well this young, this wine isn’t even technically released yet. This producer’s really adamant about holding the wines back two, three, four years longer than most wineries do just cause he wants them to hit when they’re killing it. Not that this isn’t but…

0:34:10 JO: But it’s gonna age and in a couple years it’s gonna be perfect?

0:34:13 ML: It’ll be better. I mean this a…

0:34:16 JO: This is an amazing wine.

0:34:17 ML: This is a 30-year wine easily. Easily. And the other thing here that I love is the salinity. And that’s another thing that’s a common thread through the wines that I love is here it’s coming from, like I said, that marine layer. Imagine it like you’re eating a perfect dish at a great restaurant. Just ’cause nothing tastes salty doesn’t mean that there’s not salt in it. If you could take it out…

0:34:40 SC: It’s an enhancer right?

0:34:40 ML: You would notice it’s gone. So I think of wine musically and bass middle treble on an equalizer. So acidity is kind of likens to the treble. If listening to a record and you turn all the treble off, you can’t hear it. There’s no definition, that precision is gone.

0:34:57 JO: All about that bass, no treble is not good for wine.

[chuckle]

0:35:00 ML: Yeah. This is a great example of a perfect high end in a great record.

0:35:05 SC: When you say something like pomegranate. So I would not have said that, but when you say it I can sort of recognize it after the fact.

0:35:11 ML: See what happens?

0:35:12 SC: Do you think that… Right…

[laughter]

0:35:13 SC: So there’s a psychology experiment going on also. But do you think that there are literally molecules that would be in a pomegranate that are also in here?

0:35:20 ML: Yes, there are. When we get to the Syrah we’ll talk about Rotundone, so that’s the thing that makes black pepper black pepper.

0:35:26 SC: Oh.

0:35:26 ML: Syrah if it doesn’t smell like black pepper, it got messed up somewhere.

0:35:30 SC: And presumably there is advanced scientific research going on trying to deconstruct a wine like this and try to make it… Try to make us understand why it tastes the way it does.

0:35:38 ML: Slash recreate it in a petri dish. Yes.

0:35:40 SC: Yes. But we can’t. I mean we’re not successful. We can make an impossible burger but we cannot make fake wine yet.

0:35:47 ML: It’s coming.

0:35:48 SC: It’s coming? Yeah?

0:35:49 ML: I mean, as you know it’s atoms. There’s nothin else. It is reducible, period.

0:35:54 SC: There is the atoms, there’s a finite number of arrangements.

0:35:56 ML: As much as I, oh man! Yeah me and friends have talked about this a lot, over a lot of bottles of wine and the moral conundrums of a sommelier. Yeah.

0:36:06 SC: I mean imagine you could tune whatever wine you wanted. That would be kind of awesome.

0:36:10 ML: Oh I’ve imagined it.

0:36:11 SC: Yeah.

0:36:12 ML: Yeah.

0:36:12 JO: The chemistry is very, very complicated but there is in fact a lot of ongoing research, correct?

0:36:17 ML: Yeah.

0:36:17 JO: UC Davis for example, but other places around the world are very much looking at the chemical composition of these for just that reason. The better you understand the chemical components and what’s going on in the chemistry, not just in space but over time, the more you can tailor the flavor profiles to your liking.

0:36:35 ML: Yeah, and the more you’ll learn about if we’re not making wine in a petri dish, the more you could better farm. I mean wine is farming/gardening, however you wanna look at it. But it’s somewhere in the middle of those things. And everything you’re doing has an impact. All prior causes, everything it’s all happening in a vineyard and at the end of the day you can only make great wine from great grapes. You can go the other way, you can mess it up but you can’t just take subpar, lazily farmed, lifeless grapes and turn them into a complex, head spinning beverage. It just doesn’t work that way. So there’s a lot of reasons why that happens. There are variables that we do know about. Like vine age is a big one. I mentioned that with the Burgundy of the old vines, they make less juice. They tend to just have a wine that’s a little bit more concentrated and I look at the structure of a wine again like I mentioned which is acid and tannin and then vine age plays into that as like the charging of the batteries of the wine. Like how long will the charge last essentially?

0:37:48 SC: You mean over years not over since you opened the bottle and started drinking it?

0:37:51 ML: Well both, we can talk about that too. I’m more talking about in the bottle but good wine can take way more oxygen than people realize. I mean I have a couple litmus tests for how much I really like a wine and one of them is how is it on day three. Some wine, some styles of wine are absolutely better on day three. In pairings at the restaurant, I’ll open wines on my way out the door for the next night kind of thing.

0:38:17 JO: And some are vinegar after day three.

0:38:20 ML: Yeah. Exactly. That has to do with structure. And then also the aging of the wine in the bottle. Wine that lasts 40, 50, 60, 70, a hundred years, there has to be, if we’re talking reds, there’s some level of tannin in there, there’s some level of acidity. The grapes have to have structure which I equate to our skeleton. I mean there’s a reason we can sit in these chairs and walk around and that is, the equivalent of that in wine is the intermingling of acid and tannin.

0:38:52 JO: What’s the oldest wine you’ve ever had?

0:38:56 ML: Well, I have two answers to that. One of them is Madeira, so that’s fortified wine from the sub-tropical…

[overlapping conversation]

0:39:04 ML: It’s cheating because it can’t go bad, from late 1700s, I forget the vintage on it.

0:39:10 JO: Late what? [chuckle]

0:39:12 ML: 1700s.

0:39:13 SC: Eighteenth century.

0:39:14 ML: Yeah. It drove a lot of the economy early on.

0:39:16 SC: Older than America.

0:39:17 ML: Yeah.

0:39:18 JO: That’s like “The Billionaire’s Vinegar”, with Thomas Jefferson’s wine, correct?

0:39:21 ML: Yeah, the fake wine.

0:39:22 JO: The fake wine.

0:39:23 ML: We’ve got a couple of those too.

[chuckle]

0:39:26 SC: That’s a whole thing. Okay, but non-fortified?

0:39:28 ML: Non-fortified, late 1800 vintages, Bordeaux, like Haut-Brion from 1898, Lafite…

0:39:39 SC: Are they holding up?

0:39:39 ML: Yeah, you’ve got 20 minutes at most.

0:39:42 SC: You’ve gotta be…

[overlapping conversation]

0:39:44 ML: You know I’m tasting like two ounces if I’m lucky, an ounce here and there and there and that dries out really quick in the glass, but…

0:39:51 SC: Sorry, but that’s an important lesson, right? A lot people think the older the wine is, the more you have to decant it and let it air out and that there’s a point of diminishing returns there.

0:39:58 ML: Definitely. So yeah, oxygen helps till it hurts all the way across the spectrum. So, if you have what are called good or great vintages and I dislike the way of describing them which we can talk about later, because you have to say what that’s for, good or bad for what? There’s poor vintages when they come out that are better to drink young and then “great vintages” usually don’t drink well young because they’re very primary and they’re meant to go the distance, like the Energizer Bunny style down the road, that’s when they’re meant to be drunk, but in those ripe “great vintages” those wines take longer to unpack. So, if you’re going to open them young, decanting them is helpful. I decant more white wine, than I do red at this point, and I think a lot people misunderstand white can handle way more oxygen than most people give it. And I am a bigger fan at this point of just letting red wine slow, slow ox, as they call it, slowly come up in the glass rather than trying to fast forward it.

0:41:01 SC: So, we enjoy how it changes over the course of the meal.

0:41:04 ML: Yeah, exactly. And part of that is I’m pretty OCD about not crossing pours as I call it. So especially if you’re dealing with an older wine, you pour two to three ounces, never more than that, take note. You never want six ounces of wine in a glass if you can, unless you’re just ordering wine by the glass.

0:41:22 SC: Good tip, yeah.

0:41:24 ML: It is just not helpful. You get less out of it in the long run.

0:41:28 JO: That’s interesting, because of course, America there’s kind of like, “We wanna get our money’s worth.”

0:41:32 ML: Oh, sure, yeah. I get it.

0:41:33 JO: And this is a very different kind of aesthetic where to get your money’s worth means you want the wine to be as good as possible.

0:41:39 ML: Yeah.

0:41:40 JO: And that’s not a quantity question.

0:41:42 ML: Yeah, basically, I want roughly 25 ounces of wine in a 750-milliliter bottle to turn into as many wines as I can possibly let it turn into. So if I’m dealing with… That happens more usually with older wines, but if I’m pouring two people two ounces, they get 10 wines if you’re playing along; and also how the empty glass smells is a beautiful thing and that actually is helpful with young wine. If something’s had maybe too much oak put on it or there’s a little bit too much treatment, that’s oftentimes what you smell in the glass. I call it the finish of the nose, so people talk about the palate and the finish of the palate and just “the nose”, but it’s not technically finish of the nose, but I think of it that way, like what are the remnants all about.

0:42:28 SC: Okay, so we’ve enjoyed this…

0:42:29 ML: Yeah.

0:42:29 SC: 2015 California Pinot. I mean, this is a high-level one relatively speaking, but this is more fruity than earthy because it is newer.

0:42:41 ML: More fruit driven that earth, yes.

0:42:43 SC: It’s very acidic, bright, light on the palate. And now we’re moving to the Old World.

0:42:46 ML: Yes, to the Bruno Clair. And I won’t lead the witness, I’ll have you taste it.

0:42:52 SC: Okay, we’re gonna taste it, and who knows what could happen? Anything, really. [chuckle]

0:42:57 ML: At Mindscape, the wine edition.

0:43:00 JO: Ooh, it’s very different.

0:43:04 ML: It’s 6500 miles.

0:43:05 JO: Well, but it’s more in the way they handle the acidity, I think. Because here, the acidity is very front and center and very, very pronounced, and here it’s more blended and smooth and a little more gentle.

0:43:18 ML: Bam. Yep, yep, that’s a relatively warm vintage in a place that doesn’t have a ton of them, and definitely to do with the fact you’re dealing with an old vineyard.

0:43:30 SC: So, this is the one where the actual vines are from 1908?

0:43:33 ML: Part of them, yeah, a block or… I forget exactly what the split is, but there’s 1908 planting, there’s plantings in the ’50s. There’s no… Usually, if vines are… In this part of the world, if they’re under 20 years old, they’re not even… They’ll sell it off…

[overlapping conversation]

0:43:51 SC: Is this a wine that will age more than the first one?

0:43:56 ML: Hard to not say yes.

[laughter]

0:44:01 ML: Although I truly…

0:44:03 SC: We don’t wanna say anything against the first one.

0:44:05 ML: No, I don’t, and it’s not even…

0:44:06 SC: It’s awesome.

0:44:06 JO: But the first one is a lovely wine.

0:44:07 ML: Yeah, it’s…

0:44:08 JO: I’m surprised that they’re both 2015. I would have, and if I did not know, would think that the second was older.

0:44:15 SC: Right. The first one tastes like an excellent 2015.

0:44:17 ML: Yeah.

0:44:18 JO: Yes.

0:44:18 SC: The second one tastes older, right, right out of…

0:44:19 ML: Yeah.

0:44:19 JO: Absolutely, I would drink this with a meal.

0:44:21 ML: Totally. Yeah.

0:44:22 JO: It’s wonderful. But there’s just something a little extra… The edge is off, I guess is the best way I can think of it.

0:44:28 ML: Sure. Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. Yeah, and they’re both… So, you can sort of put wine into three timelines of primary, secondary, tertiary as far as their lifespans go and let’s roughly say… Let’s take the Bruno Clair, I say primary is probably the first… They say in the first 10 years of Burgundy, you taste the winemaker and then after that, you start to taste the terroir, the T word, the infamous word.

[laughter]

0:44:58 ML: So, let’s say 10 to 15 years is primary, maybe 15 to 25 is secondary, and then once you’re past 25 or 30, you’re in the tertiary and you’re shedding fruit flavors as you go and exchanging them for earthy, soil, tea leaves…

0:45:18 SC: Spicy, leathery…

[overlapping conversation]

0:45:18 ML: Spice, yeah, and like leather in old… I would say even old library. It’s like the easiest way to describe…

0:45:23 SC: Musty.

0:45:25 JO: You’re speaking my language.

0:45:26 ML: Yeah.

[laughter]

0:45:28 JO: As Sean can tell you, I love these older, leathery, smoky wine.

0:45:32 ML: Oh, it’s amazing and it’s… Okay, so to circle back on what makes wine, what’s different about it, the time capsule of it. I mean…

0:45:39 SC: Yeah.

0:45:41 ML: When you’re drinking whatever vintage it is, think about what’s going on in the world at that time, it’s mind-blowing and just cool that you can do these parallels to draw and it’s a whole other conversation piece. And it doesn’t need to be old. I’m not just…

0:45:55 JO: Right.

0:45:55 ML: I’m not alienating young wines, just…

0:45:58 JO: Those notes can be there in the young wines, for sure.

0:46:00 ML: Yeah, like, “This is from when we,” fill in the blank, or “when this happened,” or “do you remember that time when… ” That’s definitely a factor in wine that…

0:46:08 SC: So the first seems noticeably more acidic to me. Neither one of them seems especially tannic, or am I missing something?

0:46:14 ML: Yeah, so so these… Thank you for saying that. So these aren’t tannic. Pinot Noir isn’t a tannic grape. If you had a Pinot Noir that was tannic, it would be from oak tannins. So new oak barrels can impart their own tannins which are different than grape tannins. And these wines are both made from wine maker’s that don’t do that, which I think Pinot Noir doesn’t really want to be made that way, typically.

0:46:39 SC: So wine is generally aged in oak, but some of it’s new, some of it’s old? Is that what it is?

0:46:43 ML: Yes, there’s… You can use cement, you can use stainless, and then in oak, there’s French, American, Slovenian, Hungarian, but… Yeah, everything on the table is French. When we get to the Côte-Rôtie, they use barrels that are about three times the size of the barrels that every other wine here is using which are 225 liter. If you just think of a wine barrel, the first thing that comes to your mind, that’s 225 liters, and the bigger you go, the less surface contact with the wine, so the less oak is imparted. And I think both of these are actually pretty similar. They’re about a third new oak each. The Bruno Clair might be 20%. And then the rest of the oak that’s being used has already been used one other time. So it’s not like old, old oak, but… Some of these cellars man, in France, they’re like, yeah, it’s 20, 30-year-old barrel. They have coopers they employ just to… ‘Cause they do not want new barrels. And you walk into these places and you’re like, “Oh, that’s why Bruno Clair smells the way it does. I’m in Bruno Clair smelling it,” and you’re like, “Oh yeah, the mold on the walls is from every fermentation that’s happened in here.”

0:47:54 SC: Yeah.

0:47:56 ML: Yeah.

0:47:57 SC: Alright, let’s move on to our Syrahs.

0:47:58 ML: Okay. So the next wine is from Favia Wines. So this is a husband and wife team, two really, really acclaimed wine makers in California; Annie Favia is the viticulturist, so she’s doing all the work in the vineyard. She’s married to Andy Erickson, who’s the winemaker. And if you combined their resumes, it’s basically every top, culty, hard-to-get Cabernet Sauvignon, predominately out of the Napa Valley. They have friends that own this vineyard in Amador County, not far from where I grew up. And they make it in Napa, and this is a really good example of a fairly full-throttle, fuller-bodied style of California Syrah that doesn’t go over the top. We’ve jumped up in alcohol content here. The first two wines were about 13%, 13.5%. Now we’re at 14.8% and we’re in thick skin varietal with Syrah.

0:48:54 SC: It’s like a completely different beverage really.

0:48:56 ML: No, it really is, yeah.

0:48:57 SC: This is very… Even I would be able to say, “Oh yes, this is a California wine,” right away.

0:49:01 ML: But see, still there’s lift, still there’s persistence, there’s energy, it doesn’t just go away. And that is really the structure that’s what I want in wine. It keeps you coming back to the glass. It makes it infinitely easier to pair with food. If wine doesn’t have acidity, food pairings become difficult…

0:49:22 JO: Right.

0:49:22 ML: Or just not possible at a high level.

0:49:25 JO: Right. I’m getting a very strong like olive-y note and almost…

0:49:27 ML: Yeah.

0:49:27 JO: A prunish note here.

0:49:29 ML: Okay, yeah, so think of what a prune is.

0:49:32 JO: Yeah.

0:49:32 ML: Think of the ripeness level of…

0:49:34 JO: Right.

0:49:34 ML: We’re dealing with riper fruit here. And olive, you see that in Syrah often. I don’t know the name of that compound Sean, I’m sorry.

0:49:43 SC: Neither do I, I’m a theoretical physicist.

0:49:43 ML: Okay.

[laughter]

0:49:46 JO: It’s not overpowering, but it’s very noticeable.

0:49:48 ML: It’s in there.

0:49:48 JO: It’s very prominent.

0:49:49 ML: Yeah.

0:49:50 JO: It’s overpowering. It’s the most prominent note for me.

0:49:53 ML: Mm-hmm. I always like saying, “I’ll remember you said that,” when we get to the Jamet, the Côte-Rôtie, which I find olive in, too, in a different way, in, I would say, a more integrated way.

0:50:06 SC: Well even though this is a high alcohol wine, relatively speaking, you don’t get that burning that you get in the cheap high alcohol wine.

0:50:13 ML: It’s still balanced. It’s still balanced and it’s still young. This is 2010, I don’t know if I said that. Both the Syrahs are 2010. This ties in to how wine ages, but I explained it… The alcohol is never gonna change. Everything else in the wine can shed and change and evolve and congeal and whatever, but you always have this pillar in the middle. So…

0:50:37 SC: So sorry, that’s like unless your bottle is not corked correctly or whatever, the literal amount of alcohol in the bottle never changes. That’s not the chemical reaction that happens.

0:50:47 ML: Yeah, it is…

0:50:47 SC: There’s many other reactions going on…

0:50:47 ML: This is 14.8% ethanol that’s there for the long haul, and that becomes… If the wine’s out of balance, that becomes more obvious the older they get. You see this a lot. There’s this really acclaimed vintage of the Napa Valley, 1997. The wineries dealt with huge yields from the vineyards, larger than they could physically handle. So they had to pick half the fruits, start dealing with it while the other half is in the vineyard getting too ripe, and then bring in the other half. And it got just rock star scores left and right, Parker’s just dealing out 100-point scores, and now most of them do not show well, and you put your nose in the glass and it’s like porty.

0:51:29 SC: Child prodigies.

0:51:30 ML: Yeah. So that never changes. And then when you have lower alcohol wines, they’re just more seamless, and if you’re more seamless when the wines… You wanna be seamless all the way through, right? So you don’t notice it. And if there’s a young wine that’s high alcohol, it’s better young. I just categorically disagree when I look at these drinking windows of some of these big massive wines. They’re like, “Oh it’ll age 35 years.” I don’t… It will physically be drinkable, but I don’t want what it will taste like then.

0:52:01 JO: It might not be as enjoyable. Right.

0:52:04 ML: If you dig that, just dig it, drink it, but they’re, I think, better young. They’re…

0:52:08 SC: So for our non-expert listeners, the best wines in the world, like the classic Bordeauxs, Burgundies or whatever, what alcohol level have they traditionally been at?

0:52:16 ML: I say 13% is a good Goldilocks. Basically, if you’re below 11.5%, the grapes aren’t… There’s just not enough energy, there’s not enough food for the yeast to ferment into alcohol.

0:52:36 JO: Also, there’s a sweet spot that you have to meet.

0:52:38 ML: There’s a sweet spot, definitely. Now, you see… I should say that this is for dry wines. Most wines produced in the world are dry. If you have…

0:52:47 SC: Dry meaning low sugar?

0:52:49 ML: Yes, yes, and there’s no, what’s called residual sugar, so leftover sugar from the fermentation. There’s Rieslings from Germany in the Mosel that are 7%, that are delicious, but they’re sweetness. There’s also acidity to balance it out. They’re deceptively not sweet when you drink a lot of them, but… So those are outside of what I’m talking about. If you’re fermenting a wine to dryness, it’s basically gotta be 11%, 11.5% or else it’s gonna just be razor blades. And then once you get over 14.5%, let’s say, that’s where… Or even in the 15%, depending on what the style of the wine is, that’s where it starts to be noticeable and I start to get off the train. There’s a place in… There’s a subregion in Provence called Bandol, whose wines I love, and they just overlook right on the Mediterranean and back to the diurnal shift, huge diurnal shift.

0:53:43 ML: So it’s a warm part of France, but then you’re on the sea, so they come way down in temperature. And those wines can be 14.5% all day and you’d never notice it. There’s just the integration that they have. But yeah, I’d say… Like I said, the two Burgundies we’re drinking are 13%. The lowest alcohol was gonna be the fourth wine, the Domaine Jamet Côte-Rôtie, which is 12.5%. But you look at old Bordeaux and even the old Napa Cabs from the golden era of when Napa was starting to blow up, late ’60s to the mid-’70s and late ’70s, those are 12% alcohol Cabernets and they age incredibly well.

0:54:22 SC: Yeah.

0:54:23 ML: They’re some of my favorite wines. And then now those… Some of those same producers, a lot of them are in different hands, but they’re making 15%, 15.5%.

0:54:31 SC: But there was a thing…

0:54:32 JO: That seems high.

0:54:33 ML: It’s high.

0:54:33 SC: Yeah, and…

0:54:34 ML: In claiming that, they have wiggle room too. They can lie about it…

0:54:37 JO: Oh okay.

0:54:38 ML: To a degree. They can be like 16%.

0:54:41 SC: And there was a thing not too long ago for big alcohol bomb wines like Zinfandels and Cabs from California would be very high-alcohol. And probably, that’s partly ’cause the American palate is not that sophisticated and they like their booze.

0:54:53 ML: Yeah, so there’s a lot of geo-political things going on in the wine… Maybe that’s not the right descriptor, but there’s a lot of outside factors with that and I think… So critics are a big part of this. It’s just impossible to not talk about it. And basically, when you see the alcohol levels go up and the… Let’s take Napa is a really good example of it. Like I just said, late ’60s, ’70s are 12%, 12.5%. In the ’80s, they started irrigating. So everything was dry farmed before then. And like in most of Europe, it’s illegal to irrigate.

0:55:33 JO: Oh.

0:55:33 ML: So the irrigation…

0:55:34 SC: If you’re making wine.

0:55:35 ML: Yeah, yeah.

0:55:37 SC: It’s considered cheating or…

0:55:39 ML: Basically.

0:55:40 SC: Okay, alright.

0:55:40 ML: Yeah.

0:55:41 SC: No cheating.

0:55:41 ML: And it raises the yield. So basically, the lower the yield typically, the more concentrated the wine, typically the more complex the wine, and therefore, “better the wine”. The higher the yields, the more dilute typically the flavors are gonna be. So in the ’80s, they start irrigating, and then right after that, something called phylloxera hit Napa, which hit the whole wine world, basically in Europe, in the mid-1800s, wiped out the vineyards in Europe.

0:56:09 JO: So it’s a disease?

0:56:10 ML: Yeah, it’s a little microscopic pest that dehydrates the roots and is… Yeah, this is interesting. So American rootstock is impervious to it, but it was introduced into France from American…

0:56:25 JO: Oh.

0:56:25 ML: Or was brought over. But American… It traveled with the roots and then… But it’s impervious to it. So, 99% of the vineyards in Europe are planted onto American root stock.

0:56:40 JO: Okay.

0:56:40 ML: And that happened in the mid-1800s, phylloxera hit. It took them 50, 60 years to figure out how to fix it. In that time, a lot of the vineyards got poisoned. That’s actually part of why you see a lot of organic and biodynamic viticulture happening now is undoing what happened then.

0:56:58 JO: How interesting.

0:57:00 ML: Yeah, really macro-farming stuff. But… So, that happened in Napa. There’s this specific kind of rootstock that was susceptible to it that, funny enough, UC Davis recommended everyone use, and then before they knew that, phylloxera loved it. Sorry.

[chuckle]

0:57:14 SC: Science is messy sometimes.

0:57:17 ML: Yeah, yeah, we’re learning, we’re learning. So, you have irrigation, then phylloxera, so basically a reset button happens. And then vineyards get replanted, so now you have young vines. And going into the early ’90s, into the mid-’90s, this is when the cult Cabernet thing happens, this is when scores are becoming more and more of a thing, Spectator, Robert Parker, all that. And not that that didn’t exist before, but really more into the mainstream, getting into the dot com boom, so there’s money coming into this part of the world that wasn’t there before to that level, and people wanting to own a winery. And you have… The way a lot of these tastings happen where they’re doing the scores is they’re tasting 100 wines in a row. So the only things that pop and get high scores are big high-alcohol wines just ’cause, physiologically, that’s what you go “Wow” to. And it created this thing that I refer to… I correlate it to the loudness wars, which is something that happened in the music industry really in the same time, which is interesting, where basically just as humans, we’re sort of wired to think that louder is better.

0:58:29 SC: It is, obviously.

0:58:30 ML: Yeah, obviously it is. Yeah.

[chuckle]

0:58:33 SC: So you want your song to be the loudest, right?

0:58:34 ML: Yes, exactly, like “Oh, this song is banging.” And then, “Oh, nope. Here you go. Oh, nope. Here you go.”

[chuckle]

0:58:39 SC: Louder.

0:58:40 ML: And you’re also crushing the dynamics out and you’re crushing the nuance out. So you’re paying… You don’t get something from nothing. You are paying for it in one way or another. And the same thing is totally apt corollary to wine; the bigger, the bigger, the bigger, the bigger is not better. And you see the pendulum is definitely evening out. I was just up in Napa a month ago and tasted a lot of the ’15s up there and they’re really pretty, and tasted some ’16s, tasted some ’17s out of barrel and I think that things are… It’s being reeled in, definitely.

0:59:15 SC: There’s probably a whole another podcast episode about the relationship of aesthetics and things happening on different levels, different scales, right?

0:59:24 ML: Yeah.

0:59:24 SC: Like the human mind and eye and palate, apparently, are attracted to complications in all these ways.

0:59:33 ML: Yeah.

0:59:34 SC: The simplicity gets us first, but then we wanna get something a little bit more interesting.

0:59:39 ML: It’s the rabbit hole, yeah, yeah.

0:59:39 SC: Yeah.

0:59:39 ML: Yeah.

0:59:40 SC: Okay, so this one, let’s see, this is the California Syrah.

0:59:44 ML: Yep. This is the Favia.

0:59:45 SC: It’s clearly fruitier…

0:59:46 ML: Yeah.

0:59:47 SC: Than the Pinots, both of them.

0:59:49 ML: Well it’s… It is. It’s also heavier. You’re taking a big step in body. Yeah, you’re like… There’s a concentration here.

0:59:53 SC: Certainly. Heavier bodied.

0:59:55 JO: I wouldn’t call it fruitier, per se. I mean, the Pinots have a little floral quality to it…

1:00:01 ML: Yeah.

1:00:01 JO: Which I think, offsets the fruit. So maybe that’s it.

1:00:04 ML: Mm-hmm.

1:00:06 SC: It doesn’t seem especially either acidic or tannic to me, this…

1:00:09 ML: Yeah, it’s…

1:00:10 SC: California Syrah.

1:00:11 ML: Again, these are all balanced wines at the end of the day, so nothing’s like poking out. That’s totally what I’m going for.

1:00:17 JO: But it’s less acidity.

1:00:20 ML: So I would say that it is actually pretty similar level of acidity, but… Okay, it’s same amount of treble, but there’s more bass.

1:00:26 JO: Right. There you go.

1:00:27 ML: So if I… Again, you take out the treble, you would notice it. This is same thing I touched on with German Riesling, how… Some of them can be… Have sugar levels that would shock you, but you still go… You still pucker at the end of tasting it because there’s acid to balance it out.

1:00:44 JO: Right.

1:00:44 ML: So it almost certainly is… The pH is probably higher than the Cabs, but… Or the Cab and the Bruno Clair. There’s just more oomph to it.

1:00:55 SC: Alright. And the…

1:00:56 ML: And we should, yeah…

1:00:56 SC: Our final…

1:00:57 ML: So let’s go into the Jamet. So this is truly one of my favorite wines that exists, Domaine Jamet Côte-Rôtie, a 2010; 100% Syrah from the Northern Rhone, southern part of France. The Rhone is split into two parts, I can’t call them halves. The Northern Rhone’s really only like the top 20% of the valley, but these vineyards are planted on these really steep, precipitous, terraced slopes that the Romans did a lot of the terracing and we’ve been keeping it up since then. And you have this fairly windy place. So you’re a fair amount south from where Burgundy is, which you think it’d be warmer, and it’s a little bit warmer, but only a couple of degrees Celsius. So you have winds blowing through here which cool down the grapes, and any time you have water in the direct vicinity of vineyards, especially when the vineyards around the water are on steep slopes, it acts like a solar panel. So it’s bouncing sunlight back into the vineyard, so you get a level of ripeness without the heat that you think would be necessary. The best way I’ve heard it explained is this Burgundian winemaker. He said that the sun ripens the grapes, not the heat.

1:02:10 SC: Yeah.

1:02:11 ML: And bam.

1:02:12 SC: I’m not sure if that’s scientifically accurate, but I get it.

1:02:14 ML: Yeah, getting the point across of like this… The things that are making up this wine and the ripening process, it does not need to be hot nor should it be. And this wine, especially on the nose, nothing else smells like Jamet. It has this like peppered beef jerky…

1:02:31 SC: Pepper is the thing I get…

1:02:32 ML: Yeah, so the rotundone, this is what I was talking about was the rotundone.

1:02:35 JO: The smell is amazing.

1:02:36 SC: Rotundone is a chemical?

1:02:38 ML: Compound, flavor compound in black pepper.

1:02:40 JO: An odorant, essentially.

1:02:43 ML: Yeah, Jamet is just lights out…

1:02:44 SC: And it literally…

1:02:45 ML: And it’s floral, and it’s pepper.

1:02:46 SC: Literally is in pepper as well as in this wine.

1:02:49 ML: Yeah. There’s another…

1:02:50 SC: It’s metaphorical.

1:02:50 ML: The other big compound that gets thrown around is pyrazine; that’s in bell peppers and jalapeños and also in Sauvignon Blanc. And you see it often in New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, it’s notorious for it. You just… Other than smelling sometimes like cat piss, which it is famous for, [chuckle] I’m not just talking down on it. It’s a well…

1:03:09 SC: Yeah…

[overlapping conversation]

1:03:10 ML: It’s a phrase in common usage. You can use that in wine scrabble, yeah.

[laughter]

1:03:15 ML: But there’s a bell pepper, jalapeño thing oftentimes in that. And especially, you see it there, Sauvignon Blanc also makes up Sancerre in France, but something about the way that Sancerre, when it grows in the soil types in the Loire, doesn’t produce it in this high level, so you… It’s like… In the sommelier exams when you’re blind tasting Sauvignon Blanc, you’re just praying for a Marlborough, New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, ’cause it’s like, “Nailed it, bam!”

1:03:41 JO: Yeah.

1:03:43 ML: But yeah.

1:03:43 JO: So it’s interesting because… I mentioned the strong olive note and there’s a slight olive note here, but I feel like it’s not overpowering in the same way. I’m getting kind of a leathery and a smoky kinda finish here in addition to the pepper and I think it kind of balances out the olive so it’s not as overpowering.

1:04:02 ML: Yeah, I would say… The way I would articulate that is that… I love Favia. I meant to say that Favia Quarzo Syrah, that is literally the wine that got me into wine. I had a buddy that convinced me to part with $40 11 years ago that I had to think about for two days at the time, [chuckle] and now I’m sitting here recording a podcast with you. So that is the…

1:04:26 SC: You’ve come a long way.

1:04:27 ML: Yeah, that’s a good investment. But that is the wine that started it all. And then Jamet is the wine that got me into French wine. [1:04:32] ____ about Syrah, so it’s hard for me to say Syrah’s not my favorite grape, I guess, but…

1:04:36 JO: There’s a subjective element here, right?

1:04:37 ML: Of course, yeah.

1:04:38 JO: Because Sean can tell you I’m very sensitive to things like olive. There’s an Amarone that I find absolutely undrinkable because it’s like an olive punch to the face.

1:04:47 ML: Yeah.

1:04:48 JO: But if you balance it out, it’s a wonderful note.

1:04:51 ML: Right. Let’s say that in the Favia, the olive is maybe one of three or four things that you smell. In the Jamet, if I sit here for 10 minutes, there’s 10 or 12 things I could probably pull out of this. So it’s in there, but it’s just integrated.

1:05:04 JO: Diluted.

1:05:05 ML: Yeah.

1:05:05 JO: Or integrated, I think, is a better word.

1:05:07 ML: What I love about… Other Côte-Rôties have this, Jamet, I think, has it in spades, is that it’s also floral. So it sort of calls back the Pinots, and the weight class is not much heavier than Pinots. And again, I’d mentioned it that this is the lowest alcohol. This is 12.5%…

1:05:24 SC: And you wouldn’t guess.

1:05:25 ML: No. I don’t know, I… It’s funny, I don’t think about it because, I guess if you’re drinking balanced wines, you’re not thinking about it.

1:05:34 SC: They’re all great and I don’t wanna say anything against any of them, but I’m getting the feeling that the Old World wines are a teensy bit more sophisticated and structured than the New World wines.

1:05:45 ML: Yeah, I mean…

1:05:46 SC: There’s more going on per sip in my experience.

1:05:48 ML: Right. So I think about this a lot in doing what I do and we’re having this conversation in 2019 and we’re dealing with roughly 2000-year chasm of experience difference in Europe versus, let’s say California in this case, but at the same time, in a way, not really. I talked about phylloxera. There have been these reset buttons that happen and the first winery in Napa… Yeah, first winery in Napa, I don’t know if it’s the first winery in California, it had to be one of them, Charles Krug, that’s 1861, so…

1:06:28 SC: It’s a while ago, yeah.

1:06:29 ML: It’s a while ago, and then you have prohibition, you have a couple of world wars to deal with, you have the depression, you have these setbacks that happened in California wine. And then not until the mid-’70s with the, in the wine world, infamous Judgement of Paris, which I could touch on really quick just to give you some context, where there was a tasting organized in 1976 where basically the top Bordeaux producers were sort of pitted against this hand-picked line-up of California Cabernet producers, mainly Napa, but one from Santa Cruz mountains and California won.

1:07:09 SC: Yay, California.

1:07:11 ML: Yay, California.

[chuckle]

1:07:12 JO: Woo-hoo!

1:07:13 ML: Now, what you don’t tell you is that France is lazy at this point and California is hungry. So there’s these other factors. It’s not as easy as like…

1:07:21 SC: [1:07:21] ____.

1:07:22 ML: Yeah. And like I mentioned with the phylloxera thing, France is reeling from that, dealing with that. So those vines that those wines were made from, the French wines in the Judgement of Paris, those are all really young vines. Yeah, there’s Mouton and there’s Haut-Brion, but it’s in this dodgy era of French viticulture when you have California just trying to kill it. So that hunger factor is huge. So I agree with you, although it’s super important to not just talk down on the New World. Not saying you are, but…

1:08:02 SC: No, it is, and in fact…

1:08:02 ML: I love it and…

1:08:03 SC: I think one of the things that is very clear is how much fun it is and how enlightening it is to taste wines like this next to each other.

1:08:10 ML: See, yes, that’s huge. That’s why… Yeah. First thing I walked in, “How many wine glasses do we have, Sean?” ‘Cause we all need to have four. We can’t…

1:08:17 SC: Turns out we have enough. [chuckle]

1:08:18 ML: Yeah, we have enough. See, you can never have too many. Yeah, the context is huge. Just being able to go right back and forth between them, not have one, and then, “Oh, taste this. Okay, dump it or spit or not or whatever. Now here’s another one.” It’s not the most educational way to drink wine. And that is really what I’m passionate about among many parts of wine service, is that look this stuff is really cool. It’s fascinating. And some people mess that up, unfortunately, but it’s objectively… There’s a lot going on. And there is a wine out there for everyone, absolutely. People say, “I can’t drink wine, I don’t like wine, it’s like… ” Well, let’s go in on that.

1:08:57 JO: It’s interesting, I used to be one of those people that said, “I just don’t like wine.” I was never a big drinker. And then I realized it was just that I was drinking really bad wine.

1:09:04 ML: Yeah.

1:09:05 SC: It’s out there. You can get it.

1:09:06 JO: Also, I wanna touch on this, on the glasses, because you’ve picked very different shaped glasses and people can’t see them, but we have sort of rounder, more bowl-like glasses for the Pinots and more the classic…

1:09:20 SC: The narrower.

1:09:20 JO: The narrower wine glasses. And why is that and why is it important?

1:09:25 ML: The glassware thing’s kinda gotten crazy. Riedel now makes an Oregon Pinot Noir glass, a California Pinot Noir glass, a Red Burgundy glass.

1:09:35 JO: They have to make money. [chuckle]

1:09:37 ML: I totally…

1:09:37 SC: I want them all.

1:09:38 ML: I get it. I want them all. But the answer goes… Standard answer is, with the back to thin skin, let’s say more delicate styles of wine, you typically wanna put in a bulb, because that bulbous shape helps contain the aromas versus a Bordeaux glass. Basically, it’s like Burgundy or Bordeaux glass. The Bordeaux glasses kind of funnel out more powerful wines, so they kind of emphasize them more. That’s roughly the way it breaks down. I definitely use different kinds of glassware. You see more and more companies just making the one glass. I think there literally is a company that that is the name [laughter] where it’s just like, “All wine should go in this one.” And I don’t necessarily disagree with that. I’m kinda somewhere in the middle.

1:10:26 ML: I think I could definitely run a whole wine program on three glasses, just one, almost like a smaller version of the Bordeaux glass for bright, clean, crisp, zippy white wines. I would use this exact same glass that we have the Pinot Noirs in for Chardonnays, whether they’re rich and toasty or mineral and clean and Marsanne, Roussanne, those bigger whites. And I also use these for champagne, that’s a huge thing. If I have to go… People ask me like, “What’s your favorite wine region?” I definitely… It’s hard not to say Champagne.

[chuckle]

1:11:00 SC: But this sounds like sacrilege to put Champagne in a Pinot… In a Burgundy glass.

1:11:02 JO: Yeah, ’cause aren’t you supposed to either use the flute or the Marie Antoinette glass?

1:11:06 ML: Yeah, I vehemently disagree with both of the two most popular champagne glass choices. The flute helps you see the bubbles and that’s cool, but…

1:11:18 SC: If that’s what you’re into, yeah.

1:11:19 JO: That’s visually striking.

1:11:19 ML: Yeah, and then the coupe has the legend that’s hard to divorce from it. The coupe is a great martini glass, I would say. It’s better…

1:11:27 SC: Let’s hear you say the legend out loud, it’s supposed to be based on the shape of Marie Antoinette’s breasts.

1:11:32 ML: Yes.

1:11:33 SC: Cool.

1:11:33 ML: I dig it. I like it as a martini glass.

1:11:35 SC: This is a grown-up podcast.

1:11:36 ML: Yeah.

1:11:37 SC: No, it’s a great glass shape, but it gives all the bubbles away, right?

1:11:43 ML: So let’s talk about that. So, the bubbles aren’t going anywhere. Just ’cause you can’t see them streaming… So champagne is a wine that is also sparkling, but it is a wine, first and foremost. It’s also logistically either the hardest or maybe the second hardest, however you wanna view, dry sherry production, but basically it’s a nightmare to make in a really precipitous climate. It’s becoming less and less so, but… The grapes they use predominately are Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier. Those are the Burgundian varietals. So to me, champagne goes into a Burgundy glass ’cause I wanna smell it. Again, the nose is like… Maybe not everything, but it’s… At this point for me, I could just smell all these for a couple hours and be all good. And great champagne… I think a lot of champagne is not enjoyed to the level it could be enjoyed solely to due to the glassware and that people serve it way too cold. We can talk about serving temperatures.

1:12:46 JO: It’s actually a very good point.

1:12:47 ML: Yeah. So most people serve whites too cold and reds too warm.

1:12:54 SC: We definitely had a lifestyle upgrade when we got a little refrigerator for our red wine.

1:12:57 ML: Bam. Lifestyle upgrade, yeah.

1:13:00 SC: Because they were… They’re meant to be stored in dank, cold French cellars.

1:13:04 ML: Yeah, which is the average is around 54, 55.

1:13:08 JO: And we’re in California.

1:13:09 ML: Yeah, right.

1:13:11 JO: It never gets that cold here.

1:13:13 ML: So what goes along with that, storage temperature and service temperature are two different things. Storage temperature… The caves in Champagne and the caves in Burgundy and the caves in Bordeaux, I’m sure there’s some difference, but at the end of the day, let’s call it 53 to 55. Typically, you see lighter, brighter, cleaner white wines served cooler, and then richer white wines served warmer. There’s these… The charts you see especially in the sommelier exams when you get grilled like, “What’s the proper serving temperature?” At this point, I would just fail all that because I’d be like…

[chuckle]

1:13:49 SC: You’ve forgotten.

1:13:50 ML: Well, forgotten/don’t care, because to me, if it’s balanced, if it’s bright, if it’s complete, then I can drink it. I can drink champagne at 55 and get way more of a nose off it and taste it more like a wine than the people that are drinking it when they put it in their fridge, which is, legally, has to hold dairy which is 42. So…

1:14:15 JO: To me, that’s a great example of like mastering the rules so you know how to break them.

1:14:20 ML: Love it. Thank you, thank you, Jennifer. [laughter] I’ll take that with me. I love it. Yeah, I just… I want to enjoy each wine as best I can. And temperature… You can mess with temperature and if there is a… Let’s take a hot, alcohol-wise, red wine. If I put it in a decanter and spin it in an ice bucket for five minutes and then pour it, you will notice less of the ethanol. There’s tricks that temperature can be used to help wines along maybe… Especially in a food-pairing restaurant setting, but…

1:14:54 SC: Wait. What’s going through your mind when you do that food-pairing restaurant setting? So you are working at a restaurant, as you already said a sommelier should do. I think that part of the intimidation factor with a lot of people is feeling like they need to know which wines go with which foods and they don’t.

1:15:10 JO: And they don’t have a vocabulary to articulate what they want.

1:15:13 ML: Yeah, so let’s touch on that real quick, and then we’ll go right into pairing, about the vocabulary. So we were talking earlier how should people get started and I recommended to go to a shop, get some friends, put it up, talk about it, learn, be honest. I would say the goal is to be able to go to a restaurant and say to a waiter, bartender, sommelier, whatever, “Hi, yeah, we would like a clean, crisp, dry mineral-driven white wine and a medium body earth-driven red wine that doesn’t have too harsh of a tannin level. Could you help us with that?” That is a dre… You are killing it. You are killing it.

1:15:53 SC: This is what the sommeliers want to hear.

[chuckle]

1:15:56 JO: Most of us do not speak that language.

1:16:00 ML: Yeah. And it’s not that far away to be able to… That’s like maybe three trips with a couple of friends to a wine shop. You could get at least half of each of those sentences constructed successfully and that helps everybody. And you, it will only help you…

1:16:16 SC: Right.

1:16:16 ML: Right, at the end of day.

1:16:17 JO: Well, you have to figure out what you like. It took me a couple of years to figure out that I could go into a restaurant and say, “I want like a medium to full-bodied red, not too fruity, probably a little on the older side, not too young, and I want kind of these leathery, smoky long finish kind of elements.”

1:16:33 ML: You’re like 95th percentile right there and that is killing it.

1:16:37 JO: And I’m not an expert, but I basically said, “Here’s a vocabulary I need to learn to communicate with my sommelier.”

1:16:43 ML: Exactly. So yeah, not knowing how to say it and… A lot of… Actually, well, this just came to me when you’re asking about the food and wine pairing thing. A great way to learn, if you go to a restaurant and they offer a wine pairing, do the wine pairing.

1:17:00 SC: Yeah.

1:17:00 ML: Don’t make the… Let someone else… I always call it the, “I don’t wanna think about it” option.

1:17:03 JO: And take an Uber, ’cause you’re gonna be really plastered. [chuckle]

1:17:05 ML: Yeah, yeah, especially…

1:17:06 SC: Take a Lyft. Uber is evil, but that’s okay.

1:17:08 ML: Yeah, especially if you’re coming to Melisse.

[laughter]

1:17:11 SC: Or if you’re in the airport, go to the Vino Volo and get a flight of different things…

1:17:15 ML: Done, yeah.

1:17:15 SC: Taste them, right?

1:17:16 ML: Totally. I’d much rather have three two-ounce pours than one six-ounce pour.

1:17:23 JO: So what do you look at when you’re looking at pairings? Because that’s difficult.

1:17:27 ML: Yeah, that’s a whole episode. But basically… So I’d say the number one thing I like to explain to people is that the protein doesn’t necessarily drive. It’s oftentimes the last thing I look at.

1:17:41 JO: So it’s not a white wine with fish and chicken and red wine with meat.

[chuckle]

1:17:45 ML: Yeah…

1:17:45 SC: It’s what we’ve been taught.

1:17:46 ML: Yeah, well, that’s not untrue. There’s just like good exceptions to that. Like the fish one, like salmon is always the blaring example. I always describe salmon, “It’s a rib-eye that swims,” [chuckle] ’cause it’s got fat content, and if it’s cooked properly, it’s medium at most, even medium rare.

1:18:06 SC: Raw, pretty raw.

1:18:07 ML: And… Yeah, there it is. Okay, so then we’re in champagne or dry Riesling at a sushi bar, but… And Pinot Noir, to take a “classic pairing” that I don’t get with only a couple of exceptions, is Pinot Noir and salmon got really popular and it may… Theoretically, I get it, ’cause you have a lighter, usually brighter red wine with the richest of the fishes, shall we say, and… But Pinot, even when it’s from Burgundy and even older, there’s still a fair amount of fruit to it, and fruit and fat butt heads…

1:18:48 SC: I would think you want acid, right?

1:18:49 ML: You want acid but I want tannin. I wanna hug… I wanna… Like the gritty, grainy… If you tasted it on its own, maybe your saliva’s gone, you’re like, “This is dry, man. I don’t know if I dig it.” But then you have the salmon and bam!

[overlapping conversation]

1:19:02 SC: With the rib-eye…

1:19:04 ML: Yeah, the rib-eye or the rib-eye of the sea, it works really well. That’s one example of it. I look at limiting factors. Is it spicy for real, like actual heat? The bandwidth gets pretty narrow as to what you can use and you want sugar to counter-balance that. You also refresh the food that way. For the most part, dealing with pairings on long, at least four courses but sometimes seven or 10, so I’m trying to keep your palate alive the whole time. You’re taught that you go sparkling, into light white, into rich white, into light red, into medium red, into heavy red, into dessert, and then you’re done. And I don’t agree because by the time you’re two-thirds of the way through the trajectory, physically, you’re tapping out.

1:19:51 SC: Exhausted, yeah.

1:19:52 ML: And you’re… I’m affecting how the food tastes. It’s not just, what does the food taste like? What does the wine taste like? You should be able to go to a great restaurant and have a menu like that if you don’t drink alcohol and be happy. Theoretically, you should be able to sit down at a table and just have 10 wines in a row and be happy. And then when the two come together, and when the food is no more than ever 50% of the equation and the wine is no more ever than 50% of the equation, and everything is killing it, that’s the optimal situation. So I’ll start with a light white or a champagne maybe to start off and then go right into an off-dry wine, if the course merits it. I like going right into a red wine at the beginning, and then right back to a white, ’cause then if I’m using acid-driven wines, which I typically am, that cleans the red wine out of your palate. On the 10-course menu, oftentimes at Melisse, I look at it, it’s like two five-courses back-to-back, so I’ll have champagne in the middle. So I’m just trying to…

1:20:53 SC: This is a good sales pitch from Melisse right here.

[laughter]

1:21:00 ML: The philosophy of how to bounce around. It’s not… And people don’t expect it. Again, I don’t wanna think about an option… The stakes are high. It’s important to be able to do the pairing thing well. So that’s like how I try to structure long menus, but there’s a few things like beef, let’s take beef, especially since we have two Syrahs in front of us, this is beef, this is definitive.

1:21:27 JO: This meaning?

1:21:28 ML: The two Syrahs.

1:21:29 JO: Okay.

1:21:31 SC: What is it about the Syrah that makes it good with beef?

1:21:33 ML: Well that… Just smell it, that peppery… Especially the Jamet, there’s like an animalistic roasted thing to Jamet. And what you see all the time is steak and Cab, steak and Cab, and that’s cool, but I kinda preach the Syrah gospel a lot of the time. I think that that is a lot of times the…

1:21:53 SC: Syrah seems to me… Comes to me as more spicy…

1:21:56 ML: Yeah.

1:21:56 SC: Than the Cabernet, overall.

1:21:57 ML: Typically. And it’s easy for it to get out of the wine maker’s hands with ripeness, so…

1:22:03 SC: Becomes unbalanced.

1:22:04 ML: Yeah, yeah. And then that’s where wines stop being food friendly, right? So things that are still bright and not a big, heavy, cakey, oily style of Syrah. But that with beef is great. Chicken’s fun, ’cause chicken is kinda like the coin flip. I literally just serve white and red side by side; white burgundy, red burgundy, have fun. It depends on, is the skin on, is it herbed, or are there truffles involved and… We’re talking about… Obviously, the context of this is I’m fortunate to work in a high-end restaurant. It does not… Pizza and burgers and… Either the great wines of the world or entry level wines, that is a great sport. That’s a really fun thing and…

1:22:45 SC: Is there anything specific I should have in mind if I know I’m getting the nice pepperoni pizza? I’m allowed to have wine, I know that, I’ve done it, but…

1:22:53 ML: Definitely.

1:22:55 SC: What should I look for? It’s obviously sort of fatty, cheesy…

1:23:00 ML: Yeah, well there’s this kind of cheesy saying, no pun intended with that, of, if it grows with it, it goes with it, you hear. So like…

1:23:07 SC: Okay.

1:23:09 ML: That’s why Barolo and the Piemontese truffles became popular, they’re from the same place. So medium body but still bright, fairly earth-driven but still fruit to glue it together, that works well with that kind of pizza. Good white Burgundy and a good burger, I love. I like doing… I use more whites than reds with paring, which I don’t…

1:23:32 SC: I can imagine a white… I’ve not done it, but I can imagine a good white Burgundy with a burger would go well.

1:23:37 ML: Cheeseburger.

1:23:38 SC: Cheeseburger.

1:23:39 ML: Yeah, there’s cheese involved. A lot of people do cheese and red and there’s only a couple of times it works to me. Cheese is a white wine…

1:23:47 JO: Interesting.

1:23:48 ML: Part of the meal to me. And especially some sweet wines, if they are red, like harder styles with really suck-you-in, juicy, bright red wines are fun. That’s also a cool application for the funky orange wine thing, like I mentioned. Yeah, cheese is a whole… When we say cheese, that is like a…

1:24:14 JO: There’s a lot of cheeses.

1:24:15 ML: Yeah…

1:24:15 SC: It’s like wine.

1:24:16 ML: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

1:24:17 JO: There’s some cheeses that go beautifully with reds.

1:24:19 ML: Yeah, totally. Yeah, I guess I’m trying to refresh always. I like when things go up, when the treble is there.

1:24:29 JO: It’s interesting, a couple of years ago, I did a piece for Gizmodo where we did a Girl Scout cookie and wine pairing.

1:24:37 ML: Awesome.

1:24:37 JO: They actually have worked this out.

1:24:39 ML: Oh, I wanna do that.

1:24:39 JO: And it actually was a lot of fun and we…

1:24:41 SC: It was educational.

1:24:42 JO: It was extremely educational. It works less well for Halloween candy, I don’t recommend it, but… ‘Cause too much sugar.

1:24:48 ML: Oh, candy corn dough with Madeira…

1:24:50 JO: With white wine or a… White wines go very well, we found, with a short bread or a fruit. We found that a very plummy Zinfandel went great with a peanut butter cookie ’cause it’s like eating the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

1:25:02 ML: Okay.

1:25:02 JO: But the thing is, the thin mints, so those Girl Scout cookie thin mints didn’t go with anything. They paired it with an Amarone, which was dreadful.

1:25:09 ML: Was it that olive-laden…

1:25:11 JO: That olive-laden, heavy Amarone…

1:25:12 ML: Sluggish… Yeah.

1:25:14 JO: Very sugary, almost… I don’t like Amarones, Sean does.

1:25:18 ML: I’m with you. I apologize to anyone listening.

1:25:21 JO: I think it’s a palate difference. Wine is very subjective, and for me, Amarone is like a punch… It’s that olive punch to the face. And combine that with a thin mint, which I normally love, and it was just like kung-fu fighting in the mouth.

1:25:35 ML: Yeah, I was gonna say that it sounds like wrestling. Yeah, the pairing shouldn’t wrestle.

1:25:39 SC: Part of loving what you love is there’s something you cannot love.

[overlapping conversation]

1:25:41 JO: Is there anything that goes with mint [chuckle] in the wine…

1:25:44 ML: I was gonna say Madeira, although I said it with candy corn, that would probably work. Like chocolate, right?

1:25:49 JO: Yeah.

1:25:50 ML: Yeah, so chocolate and… Specifically Tawny Port or old Madeira.

1:25:54 JO: But the mint seems to be what makes it hard to pair.

1:25:57 ML: Well I would wanna pair… I’d wanna play acid off mint. You could do… That might be a fun… Man, I wanna… Can we do this? I wanna… A dry… Were they all… Was anything sweet that you used or was it all dry wines?

1:26:12 JO: No, we didn’t use any dessert wines. They were mostly dry wines.

1:26:14 ML: Were they all white? Any white wines or no?

1:26:16 JO: There was some white, we didn’t pair that… We didn’t try that with the mint.

1:26:19 ML: So yeah, I…

1:26:19 JO: Perhaps we should have.

1:26:20 ML: I almost think like a really good pretty Sauvignon Blanc could attack that.

1:26:25 SC: Little bit of acidity.

1:26:26 ML: Yeah.

1:26:26 JO: Little bit acidity.

1:26:27 ML: Yeah.

1:26:27 JO: Someone suggested a beer would go well with a mint, but it seems to be a very difficult pairing and that struck me as very curious.

1:26:34 ML: So, yeah, this is hard to get your hands on, but old Cabernet, ’cause there’s always a minty… There could be like a eucalyptus kinda thing going on…

1:26:43 JO: Interesting.

1:26:43 ML: With that. Old Bordeaux. Old Bordeaux with a mint Girl Scout cookie…

1:26:49 SC: I love it. I love it.

1:26:50 ML: Okay, this is what I’m talking about.

[overlapping conversation]

1:26:51 ML: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

1:26:53 JO: That’s perfect Old World/New World.

1:26:54 ML: Yes, yes.

1:26:54 JO: An old Bordeaux with a Girl Scout cookie thin mint.

1:26:56 ML: High brow and low brow and everything. I mean it is just totally all over…

1:27:00 JO: That’s what I’m about.

1:27:00 ML: That is… Yeah, I love that. If it’s red, it got to be old, I would say. You’re gonna want… Fruit… You need the fruit to be shed, which I think was, other than the olive problem…

1:27:14 JO: Was probably the problem there.

1:27:14 ML: The olive problem. Like concentration and kinda cakey, almost like viscosity… Viscous nature that a lot of Amarone has. I mean, that’s why Amarone’s 16.5%. That is…

1:27:26 JO: I don’t like them.

1:27:27 ML: Yeah, it’s hot. Yeah. That’s hot.

1:27:27 SC: I’m not a huge fan of Amarone, to be honest. More than you, but still not… Anyway, there’s two big looming questions here that I gotta get to before we finish up.

1:27:36 ML: Yeah.

1:27:36 SC: One is, there’s a bit of mystery not only with wine, but this process of being a sommelier, of being a wine expert. You can forget about the certification and so forth. A lot of people like to make themselves feel better by telling themselves that all of wine tasting is a bit of a hoax, right? What in your mind goes into… How accurate can you be identifying a wine in a blind tasting? How much of it is expertise? How much of it’s luck? How much of it’s reality? How much of it’s perception?

1:28:09 ML: Okay. Well, so blind tasting in the context of wine tasting in an exam setting, let’s say, it’s deductive. What is it not, what is it not, what is it not, what is it not, until… If I’ve done that four times, my world is small enough to where I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. So let’s take the reds in front of us. So, again, thin skin, thick skin. Thin skin, it can only be one of so many things. So I can just… Before I’ve smelled it, I’m walking up to the table and sitting down, I know that it’s not a fair amount of things. Also…

1:28:52 SC: So you’re basically saying you’re looking at it and go, “Oh that’s, thin or thick.”

1:28:55 ML: Yeah, so thin or… Yeah, thin tend to be lighter, thick tend to be heavier. Like I said, there’s that Grenache that can straddle both, Zinfandel can be kinda screwy too, but… And then age factors into this, but… So I haven’t tested at the high levels, I don’t really care to. I just sort of love…

1:29:12 SC: You have your job. You have your dream job and now you’re doing it.

1:29:14 ML: Yeah, I have my gig and I like French wine and I like California wine and I just straight up don’t wanna end up hating wine. And I don’t wanna have to memorize all these things that I… I’m really passionate about what I do and I defend that. So what I was gonna say is that when you’re dealing with old wine, things get kind of screwy with the color, ’cause red wine gets lighter and white wine gets darker. But basically, I’m sitting down and, okay, thin skin, bright, ruby, almost magenta kinda color, okay, it’s almost certainly not a Syrah. It’s… Basically, anything thick skin, I can throw out. Smell it. Is it fruit-driven? Is it earth-driven? And these are broad strokes, but just to illustrate the process. If it’s earth-driven, it probably is from the Old World, from Europe. If it’s fruit-driven, it could be, but it’s probably not. So right there in two steps, I’ve yanked out a lot of things it can be. If they’re white wines, I immediately taste and see if there’s residual sugar, ’cause if there is, then my world just got really small.

1:30:19 SC: That helps, yeah.

1:30:20 ML: Or smell, and hope it’s that Marlborough Sauv Blanc, but… And to go back to what I was talking about with the acid level, the tannin level, the balance between the fruit and the earth flavors. I mean, you can triangulate a lot of things through that and they’re not trying to screw with you, they’re not trying to… They’re not gonna serve you Santa Barbara County Tempranillo. They’re serving you classic examples…

1:30:45 SC: Yeah.

1:30:45 JO: Mm-hmm.

1:30:46 ML: Of wines.

1:30:46 SC: They wanna test your actual knowledge, not just like trip you up.

1:30:48 ML: Yeah, yeah. It is hard because you asked about… You mentioned vintage, that’s… “Oh, is it ’78? Is it ’61?” That is part rote memorization of classic vintages and just how vintages function in different regions, and that’s definitely… There’s a learning curve to that. And it’s really hard to taste those wines. You have to either have a trust fund or you have to be a sommelier, basically.

[chuckle]

1:31:15 SC: Or become an expert on super expensive…

1:31:17 ML: Or work… Well, but not even just expensive but getting your hands on old wines that have been stored well, that are gonna show like they should show, which they tend to go up in price. But I’m not even talking about the astronomical stuff. It’s just… It’s a hard thing to come across, and hard thing to have an extensive mental Rolodex to be able to dial through and go, “Okay, I think it’s 30, 40 years old. I think it’s Bordeaux. Okay, so what’s… ’70, I got ’75, it’s classic. It’s showing more tertiary flavors than something like a ripe ’82 would. I don’t think it’s ’82. It could be ’86, weird, funky.” You’re going like that. You’re jumping through the hurdles. But if you… With the deductive process, you can get pretty close. And you have to show your work. You can’t just show up and, “Bam!”

[overlapping conversation]

1:32:07 ML: “I had it, I drank… I’m killing it, I had this last night. It’s 1990 Domaine Jamet Côte-Rôtie.” Boom. Why? Long division. And it is useful. It’s humbling, oh my God…

[chuckle]

1:32:23 SC: But it’s real…

[overlapping conversation]

1:32:25 ML: It’s real, yeah, I know, it is…

1:32:26 SC: That’s more than enough evidence.

1:32:27 ML: Yeah of course, I mean…

1:32:28 SC: There are people who are good at it and people who are not good at it.

1:32:30 JO: Well…

1:32:30 ML: Yeah. And so what I… So I love… So this makes me think of… I get this a lot at the restaurant like, “Oh, you must have a great palate to do what you do.” It’s like, well, I think my mind… I split hairs well, and it’s the palate… If you do it enough, there’s a scene in the SOMM documentary where they thought the best way to describe it, no one’s a natural-born Samurai sword maker. You had a teacher that had a teacher that had a teacher. And if you taste 20, 25 wines a night, five days a week for even a month, much less a couple of years and you’re paying attention at all, your palate will exponentially “improve”. You just have more things to play off.

1:33:15 JO: Right. Sean mentioned this sort of backlash against one that it’s all BS, that there really is no difference. And there’s a famous example where people like to cite that sommeliers were blindfolded and couldn’t tell the difference between red wine and white wine. And that always bothered me because, to me, the sensory experience of wine is not just the taste, or rather taste is smell, it’s vision, it’s everything that goes along with it.

1:33:41 ML: Yeah.

1:33:41 JO: It’s a much more complicated thing. And the minute you blindfold somebody, you’re tying both their hands behind their back.

1:33:47 ML: Yeah, I mean I just think, “Okay what are you trying do? A. [chuckle] What happened to you that