Last week I wrote about a wonderful experience my wife and I had
while on a media junket at Bernardus Lodge. It seems like the event
that keeps on giving. Late last week, we got a call from the
Hollister Post Office informing us that there was an overnight mail
package addressed to our post office box awaiting us. After getting
over the shock of a postal employee actually calling to tell us
that, we spent the evening wondering just what could be in that
package.
Last week I wrote about a wonderful experience my wife and I had while on a media junket at Bernardus Lodge. It seems like the event that keeps on giving. Late last week, we got a call from the Hollister Post Office informing us that there was an overnight mail package addressed to our post office box awaiting us. After getting over the shock of a postal employee actually calling to tell us that, we spent the evening wondering just what could be in that package.
Could it be a late birthday present for me? An early one for Melanie? Another weird package from my mother-in-law Norma? (One time, she sent us a one-pound bag of California pistachios – Norma lives in Michigan – and about a quarter of the pound was missing. She enclosed a note that said she didn’t think we’d mind if she and her husband Bob ate some.)
Bright and early the next day we made our way to the post office, all aglow like two kids in our jammies with the little feet on them, coming down the stairs on Christmas morning. What was in the package? A brand new, leather-bound (from Gumps!) copy of Frank Johnson’s Professional Wine Reference. It was yet another thank you from the folks who hosted the junket.
We’ve had a copy of that little book around the house for years. In fact, it’s rather dog-eared from use – I used it a lot for research until Al Gore was kind enough to provide us with the Internet. Now, I mostly look up stuff on a collection of reliable Web sites I’ve gathered. But our old one is not nearly as fancy as this one. The leather cover has a buttery, Coach-like feel to it, and you can see yourself in the gold-edged pages when the book is closed – it reminds me of my Grandma Alice Chatfield’s well-thumped Bible (yes, I did mean “thumped” not “thumbed,” although I guess that’s true too. Alice was a card-carrying charter member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The worst thing she could say about a person was that they “got to drinkin’.” She would be appalled that her chubby little pink-cheeked grandson Mike makes part of his living tasting and writing about the Devil’s beverages.)
Anyway, thumbing (not thumping this time) through the Reference reminded me of what I’d been missing by relying on the Internet. Everyone who has an interest in the arcane world of wine terminology should have a copy of this book right next to their foil cutter. There are definitions for winemaking techniques such as “Dégorgement,” which is the process used in the Champagne region of France for removing sediment in the bottle. After “riddling,” the act of turning the Champagne bottles lying neck-down in their racks to bring the sediment to the cork, the neck of the bottle is immersed in a freezing brine solution, allowing the frozen sediment to pop out under pressure when the bottle is briefly opened.
There are some big differences between our old book and the new one we got last week. Aside from the cardboard cover and non-gilded pages, the old book, published in 1983, contains some dated information. A case in point is the entry “Soviet Union.” Since Mr. Gorbachev listened to The Gipper and “tore down that wall,” the new edition omits it. But the story is interesting, nonetheless. It seems that the communist Soviet government, in an effort to introduce its comrades to the pleasures of wine (and away from the vodka and other hard liquor of which they are so fond), authorized the planting of millions of acres of wine grapes in the 1950s. Instantly, the USSR became the world’s third-largest wine producing nation after Italy and France. Indeed, as late as 1980 the country ranked fourth, producing three times as much as the United States.
As can be imagined, grape vines do not take particularly well to the icy Russian winters. In fact, the vines have to be covered with earth to keep them from dying in the severe frosts. But the post-Communism Russian people are still at it, slowly improving the quality of the wines they produce. I’ve heard that they make a pretty decent sparkling wine called “Shampanskoe,” though it hasn’t yet made its way to the wine section of the Hollister Safeway.
Russia aside, all the major wine regions of the world are profiled in the Reference. Any oenophile worth his or her corkscrew needs to have one of these little burgundy babies around the house.
Events
If you have or know of a wine-related event coming up, please send the particulars to me. Send an e-mail to wi******@*****ll.net, and I will include it in a future column.
