Is wine no longer cool? (And other pertinent questions)

Popular Lodi restaurant and alternative wine (i.e., handcraft or natural) destination, Guantonios Wood Fired. Shelly Guantone.

Once I was standing in a Berkeley wine store with a reputation for "cool" wines, when I saw a woman burst through the door, march straight to the counter and ask, "Can you help me pick out a white wine to drink tonight?"

In his best, calming, Al Franken-like voice, the store manager said, "Okay... may I ask what food you would be having with your wine?" The woman's reply was, "I'm not having any food... all I'm asking for is a very good white wine, preferably very dry, not something fruity or from California, and it has to have alcohol!"

Al Franken.

And I thought to myself: Now here's a wine lover who knows exactly what a wine needs to do for her. How cool is that? She eventually walked out with a good bottle of Sancerre, a lemony crisp, dry and stony white wine from France made from the Sauvignon blanc grape. More coolness.

I don't think many of us start out this way—self-possessed enough to be called "cool." The first wine I ever picked up in a store was something called Madria Madria Sangria Sangria (sic), which came in a jug. I bought it because I saw a commercial for it on television, showing a Mexican woman who said her family had been drinking it for years. I knew it was a total lie, of course, and that the actress playing the South of the Border matron probably wasn't even Mexican. But she was beautiful, and the wine... in retrospect, terrible. But it was low in alcohol, which was a good thing because I was just 18 (legal drinking age at those days), and probably couldn't handle anything at normal alcohol ranges (which was about 12% ABV in those days).

Idyllic mural on Lodi's La Morenita taco truck.

I'm proud to say, though, my wine career began with Madria Madria Sangria Sangria. When I unscrewed that fat bottomed bottle and drank it with my fellow right-out-of-high-school friends, we were like Zorba the Greek, hands over each others's shoulders kicking up our legs, challenging God to a fight. Don Quixotes hacking at the wine-skins that look like imaginary monsters. Or Mick Jagger and the Stones singing... thank you for your wine, California... thank you for your sweet and bitter fruit.

Soon after, I was hired as a server assistant (in those days, called busboys) in a restaurant, where I was exposed to wine in guided staff wine tastings, which I loved. Consequently, I found myself reading the back labels of bottles like the back of cereal boxes. I studied the wording on "finer" wines with actual corks, such as Louis Martini Zinfandel, Beaulieu Cabernet Sauvignon and Robert Mondavi Fumé Blanc. First time I bought one, though, it was hard as hell to get the wine out because I didn't own a corkscrew. If you ever tried getting wine out of a bottle without a corkscrew you probably know that butter knives and screwdrivers don't help. I lost half of the wine after finally breaking off the bottle neck against the corner of concrete stairs.

Wine sated meeting of minds in ancient Greece, often used as a cover of the book "Symposium" by Plato.

Still, wine was appropriate for me because in college I studied philosophy, and I had one old, white haired professor who liked to occasionally entertain his students at his home. We sat around on pillows and he poured us white wine from a big cut crystal decanter. Had no idea what he was serving (probably came from a big gallon jug hidden in the kitchen), but it tasted plenty good, and I noticed that it stimulated conversation. Intellectual discussions, probably somewhere along the lines of Kierkegaard, Camus and Plato. No doubt, the wine didn't actually make us smarter, but it made us feel that way. 

That was cool. Was it any surprise that, by the time I was 21, I was working as a sommelier in a French restaurant?

Vintage cartoon from The New Yorker Magazine.

People often used to ask, and still ask, when I told them that I make a living out of wine: "Where did you get your training?" I never got any "training." I drank a lot of wine. Seriously.

Teaching yourself about wine has always been easy. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a liar or wants your money. It was harder for me 30, 40 years ago because I had to travel to experience wines from different parts of the world. Today, inquiring wine lovers can get their hands on virtually any wine without leaving their home. There were always more than enough books and magazines on the subject, and everything anyone would possibly want to know is now on the internet. It's probably why everyone has an uncle, a friend or colleague who is something an "expert," and a little knowledge, as we all know, can be dangerous.

One fun way to learn about wine: A consumer "blind" tasting of Zinfandels at a past Lodi ZinFest.

Recently many people have been saying that younger people aren't as much into wine as past generations because it's too complicated. Because wine appreciation demands understanding of a "special language." That's such a crock. You think, 50 years ago, baby boomers just coming into drinking age understood a thing about wine? They had access to far less information on wine than today's average wine consumer, yet that didn't keep these same consumers from transforming the American wine industry into the biggest grossing wine country in the world today (re statista.com)!

All the same, no one needs a "mastery" of anything to appreciate it. Think of today's new cars or the latest technological devices: The average person has no real idea how they work, and certainly isn't capable of fixing them when they break down. But does that keep anyone from appreciating technology, or wanting to buy the latest cars? Of course not. You see different wines on a shelf, you buy them and you enjoy them. No secret codes to decipher. It sounds simple because it is simple.

Farm-to-table experience at Lodi's Towne House Restaurant. Jill Means Design.

If not enough of today's younger consumers are buying wine, most likely it's because a lot of them are just... not... interested. Is is not surprising, for instance, that the average median age of first marriages has increaased by over 4 years over the past 25 years (re U.S. Census Bureau)? Today's young adults need more time to make up their minds about everything. Maybe they don't like the kinds of wines predominant in today's market. But if anything, it's not because wine is complicated, or because it's expensive (there are more choices of good, value priced wines than ever before). Since wine appreciation has been around for thousands of years, most likely today's newest consumers will come around to it when they're good and ready, or when more producers finally figure out exactly what they want: How to make wine actually... cool.

Be that as it may, over the years I've found that the most perplexing task is learning how wine fits in with what, at least to me, matters most: The food I'm eating. I'm a wine-goes-with-dinner sort of guy. To me, that is always unexplored territory because information on how wine interacts with different foods is, by and large, not really found in books and magazines. When you do find something online, it might recommend this wine or that with certain foods, but it never really explains why that is. So you always feel like you're a 3-year-old again, following your mother around the house asking why, why, why? Mothers know that cut-and-dried answers to questions are never quite good enough for fledgling minds because It's human nature for all of us to ask about the whys of everything. 

"The Exhausted Mother" by August Heyn (1871).

And that's the problem with most self-appointed "experts." Almost all of them are storehouses of plenty of information on wine—like the grape(s) a wine is made from, their appellation or "place of origin, the temperature of its fermentation, the type of oak it's been aged in, ad nauseam—but most of them could care less about how a wine tastes with food. For learning about how wine goes with food, most of us are on our own. We learn by trial and error. There isn't even a beautiful Mexican woman on television advising us on what they've been drinking for generations.

This is why I'd much rather eat dinner with friends and family who know next to nothing about wine. "Experts" drive me nuts because they don't have the same values as me. I like a wine because it's great with a dish, not because it's "great." A wine that fulfills a why.

"Wine Experts," The Hulton Deutsch Collection.

Recently I was sitting at a bustling local restaurant's kitchen counter, eating a salad consisting of locally farmed vegetables and some sort of quivery white cheese, but I was drinking a hefty red wine that really didn't make the salad taste any better (and the salad wasn't making the wine any better either). And so, my old philosophical brain waves started churning: Shall I order a light, dry white wine, another one of those new-fangled rosés that thinks it's a red wine, a softer, fruiter red wine... do I dare to eat a peach, walk along the beach with my trousers rolled up past my feet? I opted for the second to the last option—a soft, fruity Schioppettino from Italy, which worked despite its funkiness (why do so many European products smell like someone who has crossed the ocean twice without bathing?)—which made something of a happy ending to this particular story, or gastronomic quandary.

Many experts' advice on wine and food are, to say the least, rudimentary: Drink white wine with fish and red wine with meat, and lighter wines before heavier wines. To me, this is like lying in the street after you've been side-swiped by a car and the wheel of your bicycle is unnaturally bent, and someone comes up to you and asks, "Are you hurt?" Life, like wine and food, demands a little more thought than that.

The information that is available, as it turns out, is often literally out to lunch. It's like what I recently learned (true story!) from a coffee merchant: That true coffee connoisseurs don't drink dark roasted coffee because the "carbon" taste obliterates the flavor of the bean. This came as news to me because I happen to prefer the smoky taste of the darkest possible French or Italian roasts, and I drink it every day. Does that mean I'm not really a coffee lover? With so much "expertise" at our fingertips, no wonder I'm a diehard existentialist—I don't even know if my own taste is real! 

In similar fashion, in some of today's camps wines such as Chardonnay and Merlot are considered overrated, tired—uncool—yet Cabernet Sauvignon is still considered California's "finest" wine, which is why it is undoubtedly the state's most popular wine, and most certainly its highest priced. Is it possible that Cabernet Sauvignon is so uncool that it's "cool?" As my son used to say when he first started going to school and began spitting out the answers to many of his pent-up questions, "Think about it, mom!"

Lodi harvest of Albariño, producing the most widely sold varietal white in local wineries.

Ask most wine consumers outside the state where California wine comes from, and I'd wager over 90% of them still say, "Napa Valley." Less than 4% of California's wines come from Napa Valley, as opposed to over 20% from Lodi. I have to say, though, that I am extremely content living in "little ol' Lodi" precisely because this is probably the only place in America where there are more local wineries growing, producing and selling varietals such as Albariño and Tempranillo rather than Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Merlot or Sauvignon Blanc. It's also where, to most wine consuming locals, Zinfandel is an everyday red, which makes sense because it's such a zesty red wine, not too heavy, not too light... just right. Lodi, clearly, is not in the mainstream. To me, that's a good thing.

Does that make Lodi "cool?" Don't ask me, I live here, and cool cats never, ever call themselves "cool."

animalcare.my.

Lodi is weirdly nice that way. Yet if you mention Lodi to most consumers across the country, they probably still ask, "Where is Lodi?" Or, "Isn't Lodi that hot region in the middle of the desert in Central Valley?" Fifty years ago, they would have probably believed Lodi is where Madria Madria Sangria Sangria comes from—a land of cacti, cow skulls and caballeros rather than the lush, green, water-abundant appellation that it is (there are Mother Nature-related reasons why Lodi is easily the most widely planted wine region in the United States).

Still, you have to ask: If Cabernet Sauvignon is so uncool that it's cool, can you say the same thing about Lodi? A place where you find people who actually prefer a drier, more acid driven, minerally scented white wine and a more subtle, less fruit or oak-driven red wine (i.e., Albariño and Tempranillo), none of which ever costs over $100. Plenty of reasons to think Lodi is... kinda cool.

Coolness as originally defined by, say, Miles Davis, Steve McQueen, maybe Gertrude Stein (even longer ago), or (still alive and kicking) Samuel L. Jackson, has everything to do with something of a there-ness. That is, if you know what's there in your heart, your mind and personal taste, and you know very well how to express it by what you do and—in the case of wine, food, fashion, and any of the arts—what you consume. That's what makes you cool.

In more idiomatic lingo, I would say that coolness involves obeying your thirst. If a feathery light, tart edged Albariño or Picpoul Blanc (the latter, another recent "Lodi signature" grape) rocks your world, so be it. Then again, if you know that you like a California Chardonnay for all its big, fat, hefty, lusciously fruity flavor—especially with a meal of drippingly juicy, roasted chicken, or even a breakfast of sweet Dungeness crab and avocado toast—then no driver of fast cars, effete wearer of berets or player of trumpets ever has anything on you. Coolness is not so much flaunting your personality or proclivities as simply being true to yourself.

Lorenza Wine co-owner Michèle Ouellet Benson pouring her Picpoul Blanc, a light and lemony tart varietal that has recently emerged as one of Lodi's most cutting-edge white wines. Lorenza Wine.

On the other hand, if you're drinking bone dry, acid-sharp champagne with super-sweet chocolate—a gustatory equivalent (in my mind) to fingernails on a chalkboard—because some wise, older man or a charming, younger woman told you long ago it's the thing to do, there is also a possibility that you're not only betraying your own sense of taste, you're probably defiling one of the laws of nature. It should be easy to tell when a wine is not to your taste, or a wine and food combination makes no sense—it makes your face turn sour!

Ergo, it will always be uncool to be brainwashed to the point where you are drinking, and eating, things you don't like.

Local artisanal sausage and beef grilled over disassembled oak barrel staves—no brainers with Lodi grown red wines made from grapes like Tempranillo, Zinfandel, Syrah or Petite Sirah!

In retrospect, my taste for Madria Madria Sangria Sangria was decidedly uncool, as much as I dig retro; although the sight of a bony, wrinkly 70-something-year-old American folk bard or British rocker prancing on a stage does not turn me on either. Ah, but that young, earthy, zesty Lodi Zinfandel that I drank down the other night with a cheap cut of steak dipped in a mound of Tabasco-laced A.1. sauce, far from disapproving eyes of chefs or waiters in fancy-schmancy restaurants. That was good. Old school, yes, and maybe a little uncool. But remember, uncool can be cool. Miles Davis or Samuel L. Jackson approved!

Coolness, when you think about it, is a state of mind. That is, an open mind, which means trusting in your own taste, and taking it from there. To state it plainly, it means reveling in as many new wines and different combinations with food as possible, in the same way that you vary your clothes, the books you read, the plants you cultivate, the music you listen to. The naked pleasures wrought by unclouded intelligence, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, are sure to be the best.

And how cool is that?

Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso.