The Sexiness of Panthers

(Archive - written Monday 30^th August 2010

Veronica Corningstone: My God, what is that smell? Oh.
Brian Fantana: That's the smell of desire, my lady.
Veronica Corningstone: God no, it smells like, like a used diaper... filled with... Indian food. Oh, excuse me.
Brian Fantana: You know, desire smells like that to some people.
News Station Employee: [Disgusted] What is that? Smells like a turd covered in burnt hair.

Some of you may recognise this as the cologne ‘Sex Panther’ immortalised in the film Anchorman, the Legend of Ron Burgundy.  (Some of you are more civilised than that).  However the descriptions could also apply to the contents of the thirteenth wine glass in a very special tasting at Veris Winery, Paso Robles.

This very special tasting actually doesn’t involve any of the wines that are produced and sold at Veris Winery so don’t go away with the impression that they produce wines that taste like used nappies filled with Indian food.  Not only is that completely not the case but were Matt, the owner of Veris, to hear that I’d been spreading such rumours, he’d be after me with a blunt stick; and Australian Chris would be there to help him. 

In my experience, Australians and subtlety belong together like Romeo and Stacey, but Australian Chris has a very subtle palate indeed.  It is the secrets of this subtle palate that he is attempting to share with us.  I am part of a group from Kelsey Winery, joining a Technical Tasting, an event hosted by Veris Winery presided over by Chris, its winemaker, for the local winemaking industry.  The guest list of about forty of us boasts winery owners, workers, pourers and journalists from all over San Luis Obispo County.  I am part of a group from Kelsey Winery that descends on picturesque Veris just as the sun is beginning to set: Mara and Chantal, pourers from the tasting rooms; Mexican Chris, informal wine-making apprentice and self proclaimed inspiration of the ‘Deported’ dessert Zinfandel; Keith, the winery owner; and me.  There is little to qualify me as a member of the wine industry but Keith has pushed the title of my book to make me sound like a well-known wine writer and I feel like a fraud and hope no one from Veris has read the account of my joyful floundering in the cabernet grapes at Silver Horse.

Once we have all congregated and been given our ‘hi, my name is..’ stickers, we are ushered down to a white wooded wine shed, where a long table is laid out between two rows of shiny steel fermentation bins.  We are all excited about getting stuck in to some decent wine but laid out in front of each place are seven glasses with what looks like water in every one.  Five minutes later, I am wishing that they were water.  Chris begins the technical tasting by telling us about the different taste nodes on the tongue and around the mouth.  There are five types of taste: acidity; sweetness; bitterness; saltiness and the recently introduced Japanese term ‘umami’.  It’s the sort of word I can imagine Vic Reeves using to announce a special round on Shooting Stars but apparently it means ‘savouriness’.  A different part of the mouth detects each of these elements at a varying pace.  Chris uses the water glasses to illustrate this for us.  We have to taste each in turn and describe the reaction on our mouths for each on our tasting sheets, after which he tells us what they really were.  The first was water; the second, which hits the side of the mouth and the gums after a short lag and makes me guess is weak lemon juice, is actually water mixed with tartaric acid; the fifth, which quickly hits the back of the gums with an almost liquorice-like bitterness is quinine sulphate.  I feel hugely impressive to be drinking something so scientific sounding until Chris explains that quinine sulphate means flat diet tonic water.

Seven glasses of weird water later and we are now enough in tune with our palates to taste some special wines.  Oh, they are ‘special’ all right - special in the way that you say that Rain Man is special.  With ‘savants’ like Rain Man, one or two settings on the graphic equaliser of their mental make-up is hugely enhanced (turned up to 11) while others are dialled down.  That’s why you get those little guys in the paper every couple of years whose communication is so poor that they can’t tell you their names but can draw three metre wide canvases of complex cityscape perfectly from memory and that’s why Dustin Hoffman’s character can count four thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven toothpicks spilled on the floor instantaneously and remember every borrowed US cell phone number I’ve ever had but still thinks K Mart is cool.  It was the same for these wines.

Tinkering about with wines that will never be sold to the public, Chris has emphasised a taste feature (sometimes two or even three) of these wines; some unfinished at various stages of the process and some deliberately ruined.  We taste six white wines, grimacing at the weird ones and drinking huge amounts of water to take the taste away afterwards and make our notes before he explains them to us.  We taste an acidic bitter wine followed by a sickly sweet one that he tells us has 15g per litre of sugar in it before he challenges us to identify a third wine, cloying and sour in taste.  None of us can tell until he explains that it’s a mix of the previous two.

Then it’s time for the really disgusting ones.  The first of the two is a greenish gold in colour, similar to the sort of wine I drank at University.  I write ‘putrid’, ‘bitter’, ‘strangling’ and turn to the next, slightly browner in colour.  When I have finished gasping, retching and choking and clutching my neck, I crawl back up to my seat and my tasting sheet.  That’s when I write ‘sex panther’ and any one of the descriptions of Brian Fantana’s legendary love musk (that, 60% of the time, works all the time) could be true of the taste of this wine.  Chris explains that the previous two wines have been oxidised.  ‘They have undergone oxidation’, he says, ‘not oxidisation,’ looking around him like a village vicar who knows there are heretics in his flock.  The first one he oxidised himself that afternoon while the sex panther’s foulness is due to age.  I ask my neighbour if oxidation is the same as a wine being corked and he embarks on a lengthy explanation of the difference that makes as much sense to me as the offside rule.

We try two reds that taste very different – one is slightly bitter while the other hits the tip of the tongue with its sweetness and the gums with its acidity.  ‘Why,’ demands Australian Chris, glaring balefully round us all, ‘do these two wines taste so different?  What’s the difference between them?  I’ll give a pallet of wine to anyone who can tell me.’  Matt the winery owner and the probable sponsor of this enormously lavish prize, squirms uncomfortably in his seat opposite me and his beautiful wife Amy puts a reassuring hand on his knee.  But Chris is confident.  Not one of the industry cognoscenti sat around that table can come up with a guess that’s anywhere near and he tells us that the only reason for this obvious difference is a variation in the type of yeast used for the fermentation of the two otherwise identical wines.

We learn some other interesting things.  We learn that the clear crystals on the bottom of a white wine cork are called ‘tartrates’, salts of one of a dozen different types of acid used in winemaking.  We learn that tannins cause a chemical reaction which precipitates the protein in saliva which stops lubrication and makes our mouths dry; that putting a bottle of red in a fridge for two hours will make it taste much more bitter (and colder obviously); that you can get away with raising the sugar in a wine if you also raise its pH level as the resulting acidity will offset the sweetness and you can enjoy the chemical changes of the sugar addition without being forced to race for your toothbrush; that the reason Californian wine does so much better in California than it does anywhere else is the same thing to do with the climate as the reason you can’t smell grass being cut in Paso Robles until you get up really close to it, but what that thing was completely escapes me...  We learn many more things than this but unfortunately in the process we drink eighteen different wines and a small glass of vodka (to learn about dehydration) and so we forget far too much of it.

What I do come away with is the sense that wines are tremendously complex individual things.  They are sums of dozens and dozens of different factors of nature that do better in different environments or reach their best potential when you nurture different parts of them.  Wines are like people; like friends or lovers, with different personalities and effects on you.  Some will cheer you up when you’re down and others will just make you want to drink more; some you’ll want to stay with for years while others will get considerably ropier with age; some will cost you a fortune and some of them will be worth it; some, when you pair them up with others, will produce offspring that are nothing like either of them; and some, like wine thirteen tonight, will leave you feeling disgusted and faintly violated.

Disclaimer - None of the wines described above are issued by Veris Cellars.  No panthers, sexy or otherwise, are harmed in the making of any wines at Veris Cellars.