August 2009 - Wine Freedom - Vinfrihet - Blogs

Archive for August, 2009

Wine and Music Matching?

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

Our talented sommlier/wine buyer Jimmy Forsman used to write a column for a well known Swedish wine magazine that connected wine with music. Combining two of his great interests apparently had a divisive effect on the magazine’s readers, some who loved the idea and some who thought it frivolous. The latter obviously wine snobs in need silence to identify the last of the 300 different flavours lurking in their glass! The column was canned but it seems that Jimmy was ahead of his time and on the right track (excuse the pun).

Molto Mario Batali’s business partner Joe Bastianich (the dynamic duo of NYC and US restaurants and foodie TV) recently came out of the closet with his real passion – music, particularly Led Zeppelin and more importantly pairing the right wine with the right song. “Our passion for wine is only rivaled by our passion for Zeppelin,” Bastianich is quoted. http://newyork.metromix.com/restaurants/photogallery/the-great-led-zeppelin/1035196/content Joe now hosts a weekly food, wine and music evening at one of his NYC restaurants where each wine is served accompanied by a carefully selected track. I have not yet heard what a wine and music matching professional is called (perhaps a Wine Jockey WJ or Harmollier?) but Joe and his followers are singing the praises of this harmonic evening.

Curious to find if Joe is a lone NY wine / Zeppelin nutter or not I googled Wine Music Pairing and discovered a whole alternative universe of wine lovers sitting too close to their Wilson Audio speakers sipping in time to the beat. This blog is just one of a few on the subject http://www.wineandmusic.com/moment_top10_01.cfm.

This new art of wine pairing has its appeal to me as wine as well as music are two things I have strong memories of. Best selling author Dr. Oliver Sacks in his book Musicophilia examines the special place music has in the human brain. Music memory, he writes, is stored in a different part of the brain that is not as affected by dementia, alzheimers and normal memory loss. Musical memories are often the last to slip out of our fragile minds due to age, disease or cerebral injury.

Who hasn’t been moved by a song, opera or concerto that itself stirs the emotions or is connected to a special moment such as a fantastic summer vacation, birth of a child or first dance with the person you later love and marry?

Those of us who enjoy good wine are also moved by the complex bouquet of a Pinot Noir, the first slap and slurp of a crisp Riesling or the long after taste of an aged Barolo that you can time on your watch hoping it never ends. Perhaps setting these moments to music would enhance the experience, allow us to remember it longer or as Joe thinks, make the wine taste even better.

Maybe when I am 95 years old I can sit around with my buddy Graeme in the old people’s home and play tracks from our Ipod listed under the Playlist “great wines of our times” and we can reminesce about the vintage 2030 Sauterne, the 2010 Mt. Difficulty Pinot Noir and 2023 Super Tuscan, long drunk and obviously contributed greatly to our longevity!

I am curious, I am gonna take Joe’s advice without the Led Zeppelin and see if there is a new subject Graeme and I can add to our list of things to discuss at the MZ Home for the Aged. How I get started I have no idea……take the Ipod into the cellar with a wine glass, spittoon and cork screw?

I know, I will ask Jimmy!

Advice would be greatly appreciated and send in your favourite wine and music pairings if you have already discovered this new audio-oenological experience. I would love to hear from you!

Cheers (chink)

Mark

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Tags: http://www.bastianich.com/, Jimmy Forsman, joe bastianich, Led Zeppelin, mario batali, matching wine and music, Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks, wine and music pairings
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Circus trick not to be tried at home

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

The internationally recognised Swedish circus group, Cirkus Cirkör dazzled and entertained our family today with their total attack on our senses. http://www.cirkor.se/trailer/ .

Spinning inside a large hoola hoop seemed like a new green form of urban transport or cheap diversionary entertainment for the kids but one act that got me thinking most was by a hairy fairy clown.

While the other performers held the champagne bottles in place, she lightly strode from top to top of 10 bottles. Gee, I thought, champagne bottles really are made strong to cope with the high internal pressure of the sparkling wine, it could not possibly work on a normal wine bottle. Then I thought, oy, I hope no one is inspired to try this at home as it could lead to broken bottles and bones. But then I relaxed as this trick will not be tried in too many Swedish homes because a) most would not have 10 empty champagne bottles but b) walking on the top of 10 bag in box cartons is a less dangerous trick (unless of course they are full and that would be rather funny and not a bad use for the wine within!).

A great performance, well worth seeing wherever you are in the world – they are apparently coming to a champagne bar near you!

cheers

Mark

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Tags: Cirkus Cirkör
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What a Difference it makes

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

It starts with the wine – somehow the tastebuds just can’t tolerate cheap or badly made wine so correspondingly the budget for wine slowly rises. Then rises again….

You don’t serve your guests lovingly home made food on paper plates so the type of glass you enjoy the suddenly quite expensive wines in starts to matter. Ikea wine glasses are just one step up from passing the bottle around and taking a swig, so something more is needed! Nice looking and functional glasses suddenly become important.

For a few years now I have annoyed my wife with how much space the wine glasses collection takes in the kitchen cupboard and the extra 10 minutes polishing the wine glasses added to the 45 minutes needed to choose the wine for the special dinner just added to the pre-party tension. But hey, I never liked the final scene of Sideways anyway.

I thought I had the wine glasses sussed. Then last night our new friends from Orrefors came over to prove that it is just not enough for the wine glasses to look nice but certain wines taste better in different sized and shaped glasses. Sceptical? Read on!

Anders, their traveling wine glasses taster, sat all of us down for a tasting with a difference (for once we were doing the tasting not leading it) and within 30 minutes we were all swishing and swapping wines from glass to glass to smell and taste the difference. Indeed the younger fruitier wines were must more pungent and alive in the two glasses called Crisp and Primeur (white and red wines respectively) and the more mature wines were also more enjoyable in the Fruit and Mature wine glasses (white and red respectively). According to Anders, who seems to enjoy all forms of alcohol, younger wines need a greater distance from the wine to your nose while older wines require your shnoz to be almost bathing in the liquid. There are other factors that have to do with alcohol and secondary flavours that I won’t bore you with (even if I could understand it myself) but basically these 4 glasses fit almost all table wines (except for the Sweet wine glasses that looked, well, sweet, chubby little thing that it was!).

The range of glasses is called…no prizes for guessing….Difference.

We were so impressed we are only going to use Orrefors wine glasses now in our work tastings and I am going to change out all my glasses at home to experience the Difference every day!

Thanks Magnus and Anders!

Cheers!

Mark

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Is Rosé red or white wine?

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

The most enjoyable part of our business is giving thousands of our members amazing wine experiences, or at least trying to. Sometimes no matter how hard you try you don’t succeed in every case. To many of us the summer wine list always includes a great Sauvignon Blanc, a sparkling, a rosé and of course a few good reds to help the grilled meats go down. Therefore we added many of these wines to our mixed summer boxes as well as taking what turned out to be the wrong decision to add Rosé wines to mixed red only boxes.

Firstly, we tasted a large amount of Rosé until we found ones good enough. Not sweet pink water or bitter oxidised grape juice. A good Rosé is a well made table wine with a balance of fruit, sweetness, acidity and has an appealing colour. But it is the colour that has sent some of our customers into a spin. Is it a white wine or a red wine and should it be included in a mixed case of red wines? What defines a red wine. Here is a little litmus test: Rosé wines are made from red grapes – tick. But then champagne can be made from Pinot Noir and be white – cross. Rosé gets its colour from a quick contact with the grape’s red skins – tick. If the grapes were white and the grape must had contact with the skins it would not be pink, it would be green – tick. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and sounds like a duck it probably is a duck.

Rosé is a red wine just like a light Pinot Noir is a red wine and beaujolais is also a red wine.

Of course our customers who did not like having Rosé in their mixed case got the wine replaced with a really really red wine, while some even took our advice and opened the wine, tasted it and liked it. I can not attest to the fact if they now classify Rosé as a red wine or not but at least they know it tastes good!

Also, a sad farewell to one of our competitors, Good Wine, which recently stopped selling to consumers. They launched with great publicity last October with full page advertisements in major daily and monthly publications and then we heard nothing of them until the news of their closure. Competition is a good thing, so is consumer choice!

Cheers

Mark

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Tags: goodwine.se, Rosé
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