The Wine Buying Game of Chance - Pay Your Money and Take Your Chances

     Selecting a bottle of wine is similar to buying a stock listed on the stock exchange, or picking the number where the circulating little ball will land on the wheel in roulette or betting on the last draw in a game of stud poker—it is always a gamble. There are no magical formulas or sure-fire rules in any of these “games” of chance to guarantee the right choice. The best we can do in any of these situations is make an educated guess or trust our instincts and hope for the best or to paraphrase an old poker adage, you pay your money and take your chances.

     This was the precarious situation I found myself in the other night when I went to buy a bottle of wine to top off a fun-filled day of exploration at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In my mind there was no margin for error.  Such a pleasant day deserved a bottle of wine that I knew would not disappoint. Much to my chagrin all of my usual favorites were sold out and now I faced the tenuous task of buying a bottle of wine we never had before.  At first I was attracted to a bottle of Spanish Rioja labeled Estate Grown. Past experiences though have taught me that I usually have more success with wines that have been aged more than those that are estate grown. This does not only apply to wines from Rioja but with most wines in general.  With today’s modern wine making techniques, barrel aging seems to be more important than terroir in determining quality; a concept that has taken me time to embrace.

     My next possible choice was a wine from Cahors; one of my favorite, lesser known wine producing regions in France.  Although I usually enjoy wine from Cahors the label warned me that this wine might not be what I would expect from this wine producing region.  Prominently displayed on the front label were the words Malbec and Merlot below the producer’s name.  With the exception of the wine from Alsace, French wine labels normally state only the producer and wine producing region of origin (terroir), not the grapes that the wine is made from.  Wine label’s emphasizing the grapes the wine is made from is a practice of new world producers, such as the United States. To prominently display the names of the grapes on the label, as this wine did, indicates that this wine was made for the export market, not for domestic consumption.  As such, this wine will not have the “style” that I expect from a French wine made for the French consumer. Using this rationale as my guide I rejected this bottle of wine too.

 Undaunted in my quest for just the right wine and now with the taste of a Spanish wine firmly affixed in my mind, I returned to the Spanish wine section.  I ruled out a bottle of wine from Catalunya made from Tempranillo and Garnacha as possibly not right because of the inclusion of Garnacha, a grape I usually associate with lighter bodied Spanish rosé wines. As luck would have it, on the shelf below the wine from Catalunya stood a bottle of wine from Rioja with the sought after word Crianza on the label; which according to Spanish law means that this wine must be aged for a minimum of two years, one of which is in oak.

     My patience and rational was immediately rewarded when I opened this 2009, bottle of wine from Rioja, produced by Montecillo. On the nose the aromatic effects of wood aging were pleasantly noticeable combined with tantalizing whiffs of black cherries. Our palates were equally entertained by a sumptuous, full bodied wine with notes of black cherry that “opened up” to luscious black cherries coated in dark chocolate. All this for $11.99! 

     It would nice to say that all of my mental machinations, rationalizations and the likes always lead to such a pleasurable conclusion, sadly this is not true. There are times, in spite of all my best efforts and careful considerations that I have been terribly disappointed by wines whose labels have all the rights words but the wine itself does not have the expected taste sensations deduced from the label.  In this one brief shining moment though, I paid my money and I was duly rewarded with a very enjoyable bottle of wine.