Um, so
You guys can hear me OK with this microphone?
So I'd like to proceed
by saying I have  no official credential
in wine.
I have no master sommelier, any of that.
But I have been reading about wine for
years,  I've
been traveling to many  of the wine regions in the
world: California and Italy, France
I think I know some, so
this is intended for beginners
and hopefully you'll gain something from my talk
so I do want to say that
I'm not an expert but hopefully you
will benefit
and over the past years I've been having
some practice
educating my wife about wine. I remember
one of our first dates
and I got excited "I'm dating an Italian." She was
born and bred near Rome and
I got a really nice bottle wine, I decanted
it and
and I served it to her and she's all "I
don't really like wine"
[laughter]
but, there's been a lot of progress since then.
So this is going to be a basic wine course.
For example some of you may have gone to
a wine store in seen something like this
this might be a little bit intimidating
to you. I know many people including my
wife have bought wines based on the
painting or the picture on the label so I
want to provide more information to you
so you can make more informed decisions
and hopefully get a wine that you you
enjoy a little bit more. So that's the point
of this talk.
So the first thing I want to
point out
is that wine can be an experience
it's not just a beverage, it's going
to be something that
involves all five senses. And when we think
about it this way
it does shed a little bit a light into
how people talk about wine,
reading wine descriptions, and maneuvering the
wine world
a little bit more. So I'm going to start and go through the five senses.
So first off: taste.
We have five taste senses. I'm only going to talk about the four that most of you will know about.
The first one is sweet,
so basically a wine can be sweet. And if it's not sweet,
it's typically called dry. So whenever someone
describes a dry wine
that means it's not sweet. And by the way, I notice a couple people taking notes.
Number one this talk is being
recorded so there
will be a video posted later on
and there will also be PDFs of these slides
so pretty much everything that I'm saying on the slides will be available afterwards, so no
need to go crazy with the notes.
The second---
so sweet and dry, so dry is not sweet.
The other aspect of
taste is acidic. So many wines are
described as acidic
and this is like lemon juice, vinegar. And
this is something I'm going to be talking about a little bit
later throughout the talk
the other two tastes, sour and bitter,
don't really come up in too much in wine
but there are some examples that it will
but I really want to focus on the first
two: the sweet,
or lack of sweetness of a
wine, and the acidity of a wine. But beyond that,
the one that's more important
and the one that really gives the flavor to
the wine is the smell.
And if you talk about wine especially
more in the
maybe perhaps a little more pretentious
approach to it, they usually call the smell of a wine
the "bouquet"
or the "nose" a wine. So whenever you read
the "nose" of a wine, that means its smell, or the "bouquet" of a wine, that means its smell.
But here where gets really
interesting.
There's actually a whole slew of
different possible smells you can
get from smelling a wine. Let me give a couple of examples.
So fruit, flowers, yeast, earth
leather, wood, chocolate.
All these come about in wine. So for
example,
fruit: this could be apples or this
could be lemons,
oranges, and these are usually associated with white wines.
And the way you can experience this is, the next time you have a wine,
smell it but close your eyes. Close your eyes, smell the wine, and see what
comes to mind. Many times you would swear that you have an apple in front of you,
or a lemon in front of you.
Flowers, rose. These are typically
associated with rosés
and many types of wine like that.
Yeast: you might not think this is a good aspect associated with wine but this is typical of many
sparkling wines and champagnes.
Earth: this also might be a weird one but
this is typical of Pinot Noir
and it's not like you're smelling dirt, but like an earth essence
and it actually goes really well with the
more mushroom-based dishes and
truffle-based dishes. And I'll talk about
pairings later on in this talk as well.
You can experience
leather in old red wines and basically
almost like smelling like nice new
leather and in a glass a wine.
And that's typical of the good wines
that have aged a number of years.
Wood: many times you're going to smell like
cedar an old red wines
or oak in a chardonnay, but again it's
wood and this is what really gets
the different flavors, the different
profiles of wine
and this is what is associated with the
descriptions are sometimes written
on the back of a wine
or on a review of a wine.
Chocolate as well. This will arrive in
or come about in, say red wines and ports as well.
So, smell.
Third is sight, so
using your eyes is going to be very important
for
enjoying wine as well. And this I'm going to talk
about a little more later
but basically I'm going to refer to color
of a wine
red verses white as well the clarity: is
it almost transparent and see-through or is it very
opaque and cloudy? So this is going to be
different aspects of the color of wine.
Touch: so touch is associated with wine as
well.
And this is typically called "mouthfeel"
when you're talking about wine
and a couple of examples that come to
mind is
descriptions that are full verses
light-bodied ones
and this is analogous to drinking cream
verses nonfat milk. When you drink cream
it fills your mouth, feels heavy because of all the fat. Skim milk feels like you're almost drinking water.
It's a straight parallel to that in
terms of wine.
Full body wines feel like a cream. Light-bodied wines
feel like non-fat milk. And finally,
oh I forgot about this.
Touch tannins: this is another descriptive term
that's pretty important for red wines.
This allows wants to age but it's
an aspect that you either like or you hate
So tannins, you can describe it as it dries
out your mouth. It's almost as if you put
cotton in your mouth, and it
feels like the moisture is leaving your mouth. It's also associated or described
in terms of really strong tea.
Once you swallow the tea, your mouth ends up feeling a little dry.
Those are tannins, and usually these are associated with the bigger red wines like Cabernet Sauvignon,
and some merlots. Now let's talk about how
that's associated with food as well.
So that's the touch aspect of wine and
finally, does anyone have any idea how
the the sound comes in?
Sound is associated with wine too.
Yeah, any ideas?
Clinking.
[laughter]
So wine uses all these senses.
Okay?
So another message I want to give you guys,
there is no best wine. Wine is
really subjective,
so basically, I'm giving you tools to figure
out what you like.
Just because I like a wine doesn't mean
you like a wine.
My wife and I have very different flavors when it
comes to wine
so there's not like an objective
evaluation of wine, so keep that in mind
and hopefully you can find out
the wines that you like the best
after this talk. Okay? So,
I'm going to elaborate upon many of these 
throughout this talk.
The other aspect that is really
important when it comes into wine
is something called new world verses old world.
So basically the wine world is split
into new world and old world.
New world is easier.
Basically if you get a bottle wine from a new world producer, a new world country,
it's going to tell you what the varietal,
what the grape is,
that the wine is made from, so
varietal means grape.
So the new world is typically the United
States,
predominately California, Washington, and Oregon. These are the three states that produce
probably the most wine in the US but they are also
produced in New York
and I think up to ten other states, so
it's all over the United States.
But, these are the big
the big players in the US.
Canada and Mexico also produce wine.
Canada surprisingly produces some really
good wine which I'm going to talk about a little bit later.
Other countries that are classified as
new world,
South America, Chile, and Argentina make
really good wine.
Peru makes decent wine.
But Puru, if you look at it, and I know because my mom is from Peru so I've been there many times,
their best grapes are used to make Pisco, so Pisco Sour.
So you're not going to get phenomenal wines from Peru in my opinion.
But you will get phenomenal wines from
Chile and Argentina.
Australia New Zealand also considered
new world
and South Africa's consider new world, so
if you get a wine from any of these countries,
it will say what the grape is that goes
into making the wine,
or the combination of grapes.
So the new world will be a little bit easier to to
deal with.
In contrast, the old world names its wine after the
region in which it's made
So for example, and I'll talk about this in a second, Chianti.
Chianti is an Italian red wine
and Chianti is a region in Italy.
So if you see a bottle that says Chianti, it's made in the Chianti region.
But unless you know otherwise, you don't know what grape is going into that wine.
It will never say on the bottle.
There are some exceptions, but primarily it will not say on the bottle.
So when you're dealing with an old world wine, you have to know
what grapes are going into that region
and then you can make your choice based on that.
So all the old world countries are going to be
France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece,
Germany, primarily Europe.
As I said this is
the harder portion of the wine world to maneuver.
But I'm going to be talking about France and Italy in a little bit of detail.
I don't have time for the rest, but just
to give you an idea of how all this would be maneuvered.
So stereotypically, historically, French
wine has been deemed the best,
and when my wife saw this item, she hit me.
[laughter]
She did.
So, this was actually proved wrong in 1976.
In 1976 there was something called the
judgment of Paris,
and this was a blind tasting of both red
and white wines
from California and from France.
So in particular it was Napa Valley versus
Bordeaux and they picked
the five best producers in Napa and the
five best producers in Bordeaux
and they had a blind taste testing in
Paris.
Blind meaning they didn't know what the labels were.
And what happened was, California won.
The best red wine and the best white wine  came from California.
Different wineries, but California was the winner.
And this put the the wine world on its
head. Everyone was so surprised.
One judge was shamed--she was trying her
best to get her judgments back.
She literally tried to invalidate her own votes.
But the winners, and there are wines that are still produced--you can go buy them.
The best red wine was the Cabernet
from Stag's Leap Wine Cellars.
They're still doing really well, the wine
is excellent if you're willing to pay
say, they're not cheap, maybe 40-50 bucks, it's phenomenal.
On the white side was a
chardonnay from Chateau Montelena
and that's on the northern part
of Napa Valley near Calistoga
but they're there, they're going strong--
excellent wines as well.
But basically, there is no best wine. You know
when you have the wine experts
that always say French are the best, that
was violated.
Alright.
So that's the difference between new and
old world and for the remiander of the talk
I'm going to be talking about new world first, talking about the varietals
so you can maneuver new world more easily
then I'll talk about the old world.
And before I do that
I want to talk about labels a little bit.
So on the left is a label from the new world, on the right is a label from the old world.
So in the new world, this is a label from Napa Valley and Luna is the producer.
On the old world this is from Chianti, so Ruffino is going to be the producer.
So the label will always tell you what the producer is.
The new world will also tell you the grape.
So this Luna is making a wine from the red wine grape Sangiovese.
Chianti Classico is labeled here
because that's where the wine is made
and you just have to know that's also made from Sangiovese.
So these two wines are made from the same grape
yet you'll never see the word Sangiovese on this label.
Another piece of information from a wine label is going to be the vintage, the year the wine was made.
So this one was 1994, this one was 2003.
I'll talk about vintages at the end of the talk.
The other thing that's relevant
kind of hard to see, but basically alcohol
percent by volume and I think this one
was 15.6.
This is a strong red wine.
Here it's about 12 percent so it's a
less alcoholic wine from the same grape.
But this is relevant if you want to get drunk or you don't.
[laughter]
Alcohol strength varies. It'll go from like
nine percent up to 16 percent.
So it can vary a lot, so does pay to look
at that and to make sure you know what you're getting.
So I think that's the most I wanted to say about the labels right now.
That's the most important information.
And again, the difference is, in the New
World you know the grape,
and in the old world, you don't know what the grape is.
So now let's get into color clarity and then
I'll be talking about the varietals.  I'm going to do white and then red.
These are all white wines, so asking for a white wine is a very vague statement.
So we can see that we can have wines that are almost
transparent, almost clear like water
to almost brown. These are all white
wines
from different varietals, from different
grapes.
And I will give you a little information to show you like why the different colors come about
and what the different flavors are.
So in two slides or three slides, I will show you what grape goes into each of these wines.
But the point is, not all white wine is created equal.
So, I want to talk about white wine varietals of which there are hundreds.
I'm going to give you three or four.
So I'm going to give you some of the more popular ones, give short little descriptions
and then hopefully you can go off on your own and learn more about different types of white wines
because I don't want to do information. I'll give little examples and then you can go off on your own.
White wines are typically made from green grapes.
So this is like a grape that's the color green.
And the way the white wine more precisely is made is they'll press the grape
and they'll make the wine from the juice itself.
They basically add yeast which can convert the sugar in the grape juice to alcohol,
sugar disappears and then that becomes a wine.
There's also an exception.
So white wines are usually made from
green grapes but not always.
I'll show you an exception of this, I'll give you two examples of exceptions.
So basically it's possible to make white wine from red grapes, but typically it's from the green grapes.
First example: Riesling
So this might not be the most popular varietal out there,
but the reason I mention it is that it's typically sweet, it's typically easy to drink
and it's a good starter wine.
So if there are any of you in here who have never really had wine before
I strongly suggest to start with the riesling
It's like slightly punched fruit juice.
And it's great with spicy food.
So spicy food I'll mention toward the end is actually pretty hard to pair with wines
but if you add sweetness to it, it becomes much easier to pair with.
So riesling actually goes really well with Indian food, Thai, Mexican food.
Whereas I pretty much would not match any other wine with it.
So sweet wines go with spicy foods.
Sauvignon Blanc is another type of white wine, another varietal.
This is one that is typically acidic
so it has more acidity than other types
of wines
and that's good because it usually goes
well with food
on as long as it's not spicy it
typically goes pretty well.
And the acidity acts like lemon juice that you
put on seafood.
The acidity brings out the flavor
So the acidity from the white wine helps you taste the food a little bit better.
So that's a good default if you're trying to match with food.
And then there's Chardonnay.
And Chardonnay, I'm sure you guys have heard of,
is probably one the most versatile white
wines.
So it's hard to even describe what
it is because it can be many different things.
So for example if you get a Chardonnay
from California
typically they're described as buttery and oaky.
If you smell it, you smell wood because
they're typically stored and aged in oak barrels
so the oak barrel imparts its flavor into the
wine.
In contrast, the Chablis region from France makes Chardonnays
but they don't really store it in oak, they store it in stainless steel
so it doesn't have any of the butteriness, doesn't have any of the oakness
and it tastes completely different.
So there's huge variety.
And there's one last grape I want to mention: Pinot Grigio.
So I want to talk about Pinot Grigio versus Pinot Blanc.
So Pinot Blanc looks like this.
It's a green grape, it makes a white wine.
But Pinot Grigio is also known as Pinot
Gris.
So grigio is Italian for grey, and gris is French for grey.
It's like the grey pinot.
It looks like this, it's kinda like a red grape.
They will make white wine from this red grape.
Basically press out all the grape juice, throw away the skins, and they make a white wine from that.
So even though you might be a familiar
with Pinot Grigio
it's a pretty popular white wine from Italy,
it's actually made from a red grape.
So those are samples of white wine varietals
there's a lot more, but just to get you started
So let's go back here
Let's see how those varietals fit into this scale of colors.
So Pinot Grigio is typically pretty transparent.
Pretty low amount of color.
Sometimes, and I've seen them before, some Pinot Grigios look almost like water
and have mistaken it for water before so be careful with that.
When you go toward the right, the next one is going to be a Sauvignon Blanc.
Still pretty clear but you can tell that is has some yellowness of color to it.
Moving on, Viognier.
I didn't mention this, but this is going to be another grape that's
very common in France and they're
starting to make it in California as well.
A little bit more color, a little bit more full-bodied.
So as you move from left to right,
they become more full bodied,
more toward the cream aspect than to the non-fat milk.
The next one is Chardonnay.
Chardonnay typically has the most color
because most of them are aged in oak, so the wood is going to impart some color into it.
The next one
I'm actually not going to give you a varietal.
But I'm simply going to call it an aged white wine.
So some wines are going to be capable of aging
and the ones that do, when they're white,
typically become browner with age.
So typically white wines gain color as they become older.
That doesn't mean you should go grab a ten dollar bottle of Pinot and then save it for ten years.
[laughter]
Not all wines should be aged and I'll talk about that at the end.
And the last one is a special type of white wine
which I will define and talk about later, but Sherry.
Sherry is going to be a much darker colored white wine
it's almost like brown.
So with white wines,
different colors come from different
varietals, different player profiles and
there's so much there
so the one point of advice I can
give you right now is explore.
Try different kinds, see what you like, and go from there.
I'm still trying new varietals so
I like to find really random ones and
taste it and see what it's like
and sometimes I like it and I go with it, and I'll give examples of that towards the end as well.
Okay
Red wine: I couldn't find a good graphic
but the point is the same.
So especially with this projector
it looks almost the same right?
It looks better on my screen but
if you do this on your own and you pour
them in glasses, you'll see that
the colors are going to very
and in a couple slides I'll tell you a little bit about what colors are associated with which varietals.
But before I do, I want to talk about the red wine varietals
the grapes that go into making red wine.
So this is going to be a red wine grape
and as you can see it's almost like blue
but the way you make a red one is you're
going to crush it just like you did for the white grapes
but you can keep the skin. That's the main difference.
So the skin, the color of the skin,  is going
to give the color to the wine.
If you look inside one of these grapes, it's actually like clear colored meat.
If you take away the skin you'll get a white wine
So it's the skin that gives the color to the red wine, and the different flavors, and the tannins.
A couple of examples: Merlot.
Merlot is probably the one that most of you know.
And this is going to be my recommendation for a starter wine on the red side.
It's typically fruity. If you smell a Merlot it might
smell like berries, sometimes strawberries,
raspberries, more wood type of berries
and typically they have unless you
really invest they don't have too many
tannins so you're not going to get that
that dry feel in your mouth
and it's a good starter wine in my opinion on
the red side.
Another example: Zinfandel. And there's a big difference
between Zinfandel
and white Zinfandel. So it's the same grape.
Zinfandel grapes look like this.
and you can make a red wine from it
that's phenomenal
White Zinfandel is actually a rosé
oh I didn't say that so
Rosé wine comes from limited contact with the skin.
So you leave the skin in for the entire
fermentation process you get a red wine
If you leave it in for a day you get a rosé wine. So if you do that
with the Zinfandel grape if you have limited contact with the skin you get white
Zinfandel which is a rosé
which is pretty simple very easy
drinking but there's not much complexity
to it, there's not much to it
this is the best-selling wine in the US
but it's
very simple, I actually would not
recommend if you actually want to
explore wine
[laughter]
If you leave the skins in you get red Zinfandel which is
excellent, its is really really really
good. It's also the most alcoholic.
They really are, they can get up to 16 or 17 percent.
This is the one you really have to be careful with.
And they're typically described as jammy.
So if you have like apple jam boysenberry
jam
It has that essence when you smell it in
the glass. Very good with barbecue
Another example
Pinot Noir. So this is going to be the
grape that was featured in the Sideways movie
If you haven't seen that, it's the wine that the guy was obsessed with
This is more of an acquired taste
the first time you try Pinot
Noir you might not like it
But practice. The more you practice
I think the more you will learn to appreciate Pinot Noir
until you get to the point where it's actually really good
It does have earthy flavors and this is why it's a little put-offing to many people
when you smell it sometimes it's like
almost like smile a little bit of
ground or the earth, but that means is really
good with mushroom dishes,
truffle dishes, also pretty typical
typically good with salmon
so that violates
the conventional wisdom: white wine with fish, red wine with meat
it doesn't always have to be that way
salmon is a pretty full flavored fish
and with a light Pinot Noir it's
actually really good. By the way
given this, my wife and I just
experimented truffle salt with salmon, very good
So try it
[laughter]
and the the Pinot Gris or Pinot Grigio 
and the Pinot Blanc
that I mention on the previous slide
a couple slides ago
that make white wine
these are actually natural
mutations of the Pinot Noir grape
so this dark blue grape has had natural mutations in the past
to go into that reddish great and also
to the green grape
but they all are from the same family so that's kind of interesting
ok finally Cabernet Sauvignon
this is probably the biggest red wine
this is the wine that I love and the wine that my wife hates
because it has a lot of tannins
a lot of the
the moisture is being sucked out of your mouth
depends on your taste but I love it
with steak, very good with steak
okay so going back to this you can't really see the colors
but basically cabs
and merlots are pretty dark but the
as the cabs age they lose their color
so it's kind of hard to see but
they become less red and more brown in that
sense
and here's an example of Merlot
Zinfandel in my opinion are the darkest
sometimes you can pour a Zinfandel and it looks almost black in the glass
but you taste and and it's it's wonderful it's like a
party in your mouth
I think Zinfandels are one of my favorites. And Pinot Noir
It's hard to tell but Pinot Noirs are usually the lightest the clearest of
the red wines
and as they get older they'll also get browner but also
it's a lighter brown. So the message
here
red wine loses color with age
So those are varietals, examples of varietals, we did some of the white side and some on the
red side
now let me talk about the old world
so the old world you're going to know the location
but you're going to have to learn the
grapes and then you can use your knowledge that
you learn from the varietals
from the early part talk. So I'm going to first talk about France
these are all the wine regions of France
one country the old world and it has
like 15 different wine regions
I'm not going to go through all of them of course but I'm going to give a couple of samples
one of the best in the world and you just have to know
that a Bordeaux red wine is going to be a blend of
Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet
Franc, Petit Verdot, and Malbec
those are the wines that go into
Bordeaux by law.
So in the old world
the blends are going to specified by law.
so if they don't do that they can't call it
a Bordeaux
Here's an example of a label from Bordeaux
and if you look carefully you can't even
see Bordeaux anywhere on there
Pomerol is a sub-region of Bordeaux
so you'll find it in the Bordeaux
section to the store but actually
doesn't even say Bordeaux on it
this is a pretty well-known  Bordeaux
called Petrus
and I point it out because I want to
show you the
Bordeauxs can be expensive. I looked up
the price for the 2010
Petrus... 3700 dollars
pricey
so careful
Bordeaux actually also makes white wines, dry white wines
and they're going to be made
with the Semillon and the Sauvignon Blanc grape
so though that's the ones you
have to know when you're buying a white
Bordeaux is made with those grapes
there's not too many of them but you might encounter them and they're good
but I mention this because it is a
special type of white wine from
Bordeaux
that's a sweet white wine called Sauternes
so what is done to these grapes
is something called botrytis which
is also known as noble rot
they will wait until the grapes rot on
the vines
they break open a lot of the water evaporates
and what's left
is has less water and the same amount of
sugar
and they make the wine from that and
that makes a phenomenal white wine
called Sauternes
But you're drinking something that is previously rotted
okay so let me do burgundy now so
burgundy there's a lot of subregions
here as well
but typically I if you have a red
burgundy
thats Pinot Noir almost always just
going to be Pinot Noir so if you want a red burgundy, Pinot Noir
Thi is an example of a really famous red burgundy called Romanee-Conti
again it doesn't say burgundy anywhere
on the the label
you just have to know that this is a
sub-region of burgundy
Côte de Nuits actually
a 2010 bottle of this is more expensive than that
a lot more thirteen thousand dollars for
2010
so
it can get crazy
[laughter]
there's a lot of people that want it and that drives up
the prices and honestly I don't think
it's going to be
better than a hundred dollar bottle or even a fifty dollar bottle for that matter
there's a lot of white wine in
Burgundy too so think about burgundy as
being half red half white.
The white is predominately Chardonnay.
so if we have white Burgundy it's going to be
a chardonnay. There's a lot of different styles
but you're gonna be getting a chardonnay and
I'll give you one more example
Loire Valley this is the in the middle
France along the
Loire river where all the castles are
a lot of sub-regions there but the one that
comes to mind for me
is a region called Sancerre that
makes wine from Sauvignon Blanc
white wine from Sauvignon Blanc and these
are very very good
so this is the third wine I wanted to mention
so if you did want to explore
another region in France
try a Sancerre
Let's do Italy
good on time. Same thing with Italy there's a
bunch of sub-regions in Italy
so I think there's like maybe another
fifteen here
and again if you want to know about all
of these you are going to have to learn them
I'm just going to give you three examples
so the first is Tuscany
Everyone knows Tuscan wine region but it
actually pays that its predominantly red wine
and its predominately made from the Sangiovese grape
So if you get a Tuscan red wine chances are it's going to be Sangiovese
this is probably going to be somewhere in between
like a Pinot Noir
and a merlot, a little on the lighter side. Typically
described using strawberries, cherries.
Pretty good, and very good with food, a little acidity in there
First example is Chianti
Chianti is a region of
Tuscany that makes
red wine by law made with Sangiovese grape. This is an example of a Chianti
that you may have seen
in stores and restaurants that comes in
a little straw basket
kind of cool as decoration, to taste
not that good, these can be like five dollars
but to cook with and as decoration they're good
but you want a chianti that is
representative of the Sangiovese with the
strawberries and the cherries, you might want to invest in an actual regular bottle that's a little bit better
Chianti is also the wine that Hannibal Lecter had with the fava beans
same one
[laughter]
The two other regions in Tuscany that I want to mention that also make Sangiovese grapes
Brunello di Montalcino
Doesn't say Sangiovese anywhere on the bottle but that's made with Sangiovese
So it's the same types of wine as
as Chianti, perhaps a little bit higher quality. And also
Vino Nobile di Montipulciano, another region of Tuscany that makes wine from
the Sangiovese grape
not to be confused with Montipulciano 
di Abruzzo
which is made with the montipulciano grape
I made a mistake once in Italy because of this so I want to warn you
so you don't confuse the two. So old world becomes a little more complicated
personally I stick to a couple
regions in every country and then
I learn those and I work with those and then I don't get
surprised unpleasantly by picking a
random one
The other region of Italy that I want to mention is Piedmont
This is going to be primarily red wine
This is from the north west of Italy.
This is going to be red wine from a grape called Nebbiolo
You're never going to see Nebbiolo on the bottle
The bottle names are going to be Barolo and Barbaresco
very good wines made from the Nebbiolo grape
very pricey but if you see a
wine from Napa Valley with Nebbiolo
on it, it probably won't be too expensive
and it might be similar to these
so that's a trick you can do to
get
efficient in your wine purchasing
learn the grapes of the expensive wines that you like
find that grape made elsewhere, there's a chance
it'll be be pretty good
and finally I want to mention Puglia
This is like the heel of the boot, the Italian boot
this is where my wife's grandparents are
from and there's one wine I want to mention from there
that you can find in stores: Primitivo
this is exactly Zinfandel, it's just called Primitivo in Italy
So if you really like red zinfandel
and the ones you like are too expensive
try a couple primitivos, you might find a good value there
so I do want to mention really quickly
specialty wines, the first of which
is champagne or sparkling wine
so basically this is
a wine that's fermented
and then they open up the bottle they
add more sugar and the add more yeast
and the byproduct is going to be gas and this is why it becomes carbonated
so there's a secondary fermentation.
And it can be made from white wine grapes
so this statement is about champagne it can
be made from
only white wine grapes and that's
typical called blanc-de-blanc
so white of white in French or it can be made from red
wine grapes
and this is called blanc-de-noir so champagne
sparkling wines are
white but you can make it from a red
grape and typically it's Pinot Noir
so if you ever see a champagne with
blanc-de-noir white from black that is
the
clear champagne made from a Pinot Noir
grape, the red Pinot Noir grape
and this next point is a pet peeve of mine
Champagne comes from the Champagne region of France
Everything else is sparkling wine. This is by law
in France, this is by law in the European
Union
this is by law in I think seventy
countries around the world
except in the United States, but there is a new law in the United States that says
new producers can't call a product
champagne
is only grandfathered producers that can call it champagne
and there's actually one example
that they call it California champagne
costs five bucks not very good
so if you see champagne on a bottle
make sure comes from Champagne
or else it's probably going to be a waste of your money
Another specialty wine: port
So port is, the process of making port
is you're fermenting the wine
but before it's fermented completed
they add brandy
that's going to bring up the alcohol
level, kill the yeast
and there's remaining sugar that's not converted into alcohol
and that is why it's going to result in a sweet, strong wine
and this actually came about
historically
the story goes that
to transport wine from
Portugal to England
they added brandy to preserve the wine
so it lasted the trip
it didn't actually happen that way
they decided to add the port
to sell a new product in they noticed that 'oh by the way. it does happen to last the voyage as well'
but it wasn't because of
preserving the wine to get to England
two types of port, there's Ruby and Tawny
so ruby is the red color, tawny is like a
yellowish brownish color
and there's exceptions but basically
a ruby is going to be a young port
a tawny is going to be an old port
that's been stored in an oak cask
typically it has lost its color
and retains just like the
a little bit of the color of the wood
so as a rule of thumb, 
ruby is a young port and tawny is an old port
Sherry, this is another a specialty wine, it's also
a fortified wine
but they add the fortification after
fermentation is complete
so the sugar is already gone and they just
make the wine stronger
so this is going to result in a strong
dry wine
port is a strong sweet wine, sherry is a strong dry wine
and the last specialty wine is icewine
so this is a special type of wine made in Canada
and Germany where they leave the grapes
on the vines
through winter and they freeze solid so
in Canada
I think they wait until it is
consistently 10 degrees below zero
and then they take off these frozen grapes
crush them
most of the water comes out as ice
and what's left is a very concentrated
a must or a grape juice that they make the wine with
so very sweet but very complex these are
actually really really good
Actually we just bought one yesterday from Costco
Inniskillin made from a winery near Niagara Falls
so if you're
interested I highly recommend that one
Ok so
Terrior and vintages
so we'll go through this quickly. Basically
a wine made from the same grape in
different regions
can be very different it can be a
different
they can be different qualities they can
be expressed differently they can taste
completely different
and the reason is because of the terroir and the vintage
So terroir, it is basically, in essence, a place
and the typical
terms are the geology of the region
and the
geography of the region and the climate of the region so
let me give an example of what I mean by
this. So there's a sub-region of Bordeaux
called Graves which means gravel in French
and if you look at the vineyards, the
vines are growing out of rocks
this means that the vines struggle to grow
and the grapes that they produce a very
very small but concentrated
and that results in a very distinct
wine from that region
so that's an example of geology of a
region
another example if geology is in
Champagne
the soil contains a lot of chalk and that
influences the
vines that are grown there and that influences
the flavor of the wines
another example, so those two
were for geology
the last one is for geography and
climate... Napa
so it's called Napa valley but it
actually has a valley
this is why it's lower case and the Bay
Area is associated with fog
a lot of that fog goes inland throughout
the night
and the valley funnels that fog into
the Napa valley
keeping the region relatively much
cooler than the surrounding regions
that's why they make the wines in Napa
Valley not in the Central Valley which
is roasting hot.
Vintages. So vintage is basically
wines are made every year and the
vintage is the year with the wine is made
and that's influenced by the weather
that they experience in that year
Napa's pretty... not too sensitive to the weather
becuase it's pretty even but in France and Italy
the weather can change drastically
that's going to affect the quality of the wines
so for example 2007 was pretty good for
Napa
rated 97 out of 100 whereas only 90 for
Burgundy
so this is where it gets complicated you
have all these different regions
and all these different years and
they're going to be all different
so instead of memorizing anything, I strongly suggest using a
a Wine Spectator app it's on iPhone and
Android
it's free and basically it's going to give
you all the regions all the sub-regions
so this is a sub-region of Bordeaux
I mean Burgundy and it'll tell you what
the rating is for that vintage
and this is basically a factor of
this is related to prices as well
it's a much easier way to know about
vintages. Whenever I buy wines at the store
I whip out my app
and then I look up 'okay there are a couple of
choices here, let me get this one'
and it's free so I think it's a nice resource
serving temperatures, I'll do this
one really quickly
because there are a couple more things that I want to say afterwards
light white wines,  rosés, champagne, sparkling wines, these are the wines
that you'll want to serve the coldest
this is 40 to 50 degrees
full-body whites like a chardonnay to
light fruity red wines like a Pinot Noir, Sangioveses
little warmer 50 to 60 degrees and then
when you go to the full body red wines
and ports
you want to serve those even warmer so 
 60 to 65 degrees
however if you're storing
wine and it's like 75 degrees
it's probably not going to taste good whether it's red or white
one thing that we've done before, stick it in
the freezer for a couple minutes
cool it down to the right temperature
the wine is going to taste better
if you want speediness, an ice bucket
a bucket of ice filled with water is
going to transfer the temperature the fastest
there's a chemical reason for this
but this is going be the fastest way to
cool
a bottle much faster than a freezer
because in freezer the temperature is
transferring over air
here it's transferring over a liquid this is
going to be faster
okay this one's fun: opening a bottle
so champagne and sparkling wine needs no
tools
so this is what it looks like and you
have a little wire cage you need to
twist the cap
and that loosens the wire cage, you take off
the wire cage, and if you're not careful
this can pop out and hit you in the eye
I've come close once. So basically once you take off the foil
and then the cage, put your
hand on the top
and then twist the cork carefully, it's
going to pop out on its own but you have your hand
to make sure it doesn't
shoot up and like pop your eye out
So you want to be careful with that because if
you don't that can happen
Unless you want that to happen
[laughter]
As a quick aside,
there's actually another way to open a
sparkling wine called sabering
that some fancy restaurants do, they'll
open it with a sword. They pay you a
premium for that and then you lose half
the bottle
but if you have money to burn invite me to
dinner
Other wines
typically from the New World have
screw caps or will you just
screw it and it opens or core plugs
where it's basically a plug you can twist open it and plug
it back in and it's pretty easy to open and close
but most wines have a cork that you need a tool to open
so here's examples
this one right here is my bread and
butter this is waiter corkscrew
you basically screw it in and this acts as a lever and it makes it pretty easy to open a wine bottle
this is another simpler one
requires more effort so I actually have
like a plastic version of this that I travel with
It's plastic so it doesn't set off a metal detector
but I can always open a bottle of wine when I need to
this is pretty self-explanatory, you  screw
and then as you screw the corkscrew into the cork
these move up
and then you move down pretty easy to open
This is a rabbit. It's basically a clamping system, you clamp it around
the top of the bottle and then you push this lever down
the corkscrew goes into the cork, pull the lever up and then it's open
This one is the
I forget what it's called but basically you put it on top of the bottle
you press the button in and out, and it pulls out the cork pretty easily
this one is a piece of metal with two prongs on it
the way you use this is you have to
rock, basically stick that the two prongs
on each side of the cork and you kind of rock it
back and forth
and it goes in and then you twist it
and that'll take out the cork
and it's called an ah-so and the
reason they call it an ah-so
is because once you figure out how to
open it, you're like "ah, so that's how they do it"
[laughter]
So that's actually
pretty fun to use
and these are going to be appropriate when you have an old cork that's falling apart
these two, I have no idea so I don't know
[laughter]
Glasses, so really quickly there's
a lot of business built around wine glasses
the shape of a wine glass linking with a varietal
so for example a Bordeaux or a Cabernet Sauvignon
is going to be a big tall glass
some of the glasses are going to have wider mouths, some are going to have
more narrow mouths, so for example a more
narrow mouth
is to concentrate the smell or the aroma
of a weak smelling wine so you can smell
it a little bit better
and there's a whole science behind this so
personally I think I have two white wines
two white wine glasses, two red wine glasses, champagne glasses
port, scotch
[laughter] a couple more
there's different ways but you don't
need to go all out
just a regular wine glass will more than
suffice and typically once you pour it
you want to swirl
number one it looks cool but number two it aerates the wine
it mixes it with oxygen. So oxygen is a wine's
friend and foe. In the beginning by 
mixing it with oxygen
this can bring out the flavors, make it taste a
little better but too much oxygen
its going to oxidize. The wind is going
to deteriorate after a couple days.
And I have a couple points
on that in a slide or two
Okay I have three more slides
Food and wine, I'm going to mention a couple classic pairings
and they're classic in the sense that the
some other the whole is greater than the
sum of the parts caviar with champagne
caviar with champagne
both are expensive but you can get
any type of fish roe, fish egg, with a 
sparkling wine you're going to get the same effect
steak with Cabernet Sauvignon
mentioned this at the beginning, love it.
Oysters with Chablis
so oysters are very briny, seafoody flavor
chablis is going to be a chardonnay but
not an oaky one, very steely
it's almost like metallic when you drink it but
together
they mellow out each other and
they're very excellent together
another one, foie gras with Sauternes
foie gras is the
the liver of a fattened goose or duck
Sauternes is that sweet wine from Bordeaux
and together the sweetness
tempers the fattiness of the fois, of the liver, and it's actually really good together
lamb with merlot, dark chocolate with port
and perhaps a more surprising one is
stilton, which is a blue cheese, with port
This is a classic pair and if you haven't had this, I urge you to try it
a really pungent blue cheese with port
it works
Note on spicy food hard to pair in general
so I guess at the very beginning select the sweet wine
A warning: wine and cheese. Not all
wine goes with all cheese
So wine and cheese parties you have to be careful
For example I think brie with Cabernet
Sauvignon is really bad.
Again that's my opinion but
you might want to try the different pairings
Actually two nights ago
my wife and I went to a nice restaurant
and they had a cheese course they paired
with a cider
so not a wine, they didn't try to
pair them, so be careful with wine and cheese
okay five minutes, two slides
and here's some, I think some of my
most valuable advice for you for buying wine. There's this company called Cameron Hughes
which I'm gonna gush about I have no
connection with
with them whatsoever do not own stock I
just love them so the started in an
article in 2010 from the Wall Street
Journal
so taking advantage of the wine glut
amid an oversupply Cameron Hughes by top
wineries'
excess and resells it for bargain prices. So
what's going on?
so you can buy one from Cameron Hughes
but you only know roughly where comes
from so
you're going to know its vintage and you're going to know its varietal
but you're not going to know much else, so here's an example
So this is
a Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa
Valley
from 2012, that's all the information you have
the only identifier is the lot number, but what
Cameron Hughes did
is they bought excess wine from a top wine
producer
in Napa Valley, signed a huge
non-disclosure agreement
and sold it at a steep steep discount so
the effect is you're going to pay less for a really high quality bottle of wine
using this I typically pay between
ten and fifteen dollars
per bottle and the wines taste like
thirty dollars and up
like I think they're excellent values
literally ninety percent my wine
from over the last few years has
come from Cameron Hughes
so I urge you try it, you can either buy
it online
sometimes they're available at Costco but
for the best bang for your buck you're not going to beat Costco
I mean Cameron Hughes. Costco too.
Wine at restaurants. Restaurants
regularly charge three times the retail price of a wine
It's kind of like a racket
What I suggest, especially for special
occasion where you want a really nice bottle of wine
is bring your own bottle pay a corkage
fee
corkage fee is the fee that you pay the
restaurant to open the bottle
it's usually ten to twenty dollars
but overall you end up paying less
because of this huge markup
and if you give the waiter a taste
they'll sometimes waive the corkage fee
[laughter]
try it, it's worked multiple times for us
and another thing to get good value
for your buck
is buy less popular wines, stay away from
Bordeauxs stay away from Burgundy
buy a petit verdot, this is a great varietal made in Napa
it's an auxiliary grape from Bordeaux but
in and on itself its pretty good too
Malbec, same principle, they're made in Argentina also Napa Valley
pretty good, buy wines from New Zealand from
Australia
less popular you're going to get a better value 
supply and demand
and one last slide
Storing and preserving wine
typically you want to store wines at
45 to 65 degrees, 55 is ideal
Historically a cellar, like a hole in the ground is goingbe the best
I think most houses here don't have cellars
so closets are fine. If you're living
in Southern California it might get too
hot in your house so I would not advise that but here I
think it's fine
if you have more expensive wine or
you want to be careful
a wine refrigerator is good, we have one
I think we got it at like Best Buy or
something they're not too expensive
you get it from like six bottles up to
we have one like
30 bottles and then you can get huge
ones with thousands of bottles
climate control
most wines don't need aging and so
you don't want to stick a
wine in your wine refrigerator forever
unless you intend to age it for a certain period of time
and if you do want to age a wine 
if you do want to buy a wine to give to your
if you just had a baby and you want to give it a wine when he or she is 21 years old
you want to research it, you don't want to buy a random bottle and save it for 20 years
because they'll be vinegar
[laughter]
once opened, wines oxidize which means they
basically turn to vinegar, it's not instant
In my opinion the next day's going to be
fine
three days later I don't like to
drink it anymore
but when you have leftover wine you can
cook with it
we do that all the time
but there's wine preservation systems you can use too
and these are going to be the two last bullet points and then I'm going to wrap
the first one are backing pumps which are
these little guys right there
you stick it on top of an open bottle
you stick this plunger on top of an open bottle and this pump kind of pumps out the air
it removes the oxygen from the bottle and that's the
it preserves it. They work okay
I think I can get another day or two
out a bottle but beyond that I i noticed
that it's not as good are so if you want a day or two
preservation this will work fine if you want
to preserve a little longer
there's something else that my wife just
gave me for my birthday which
I love, this is called a coravin
[laughter] Yeah I think it's awesome
I really do. So this was developed by
MIT educated doctor he's in
pharmaceuticals and
basically this is a needle so what you
do is
you take a bottle you clamp this thing on 
to it you push down the needle
through the cork and you can
here there's a canister of argon gas and
you can exchange the wine
for the argon gas, one for one, then you
take up the needle
and the cork reseals itself, I tested it. I turned the bottle upside down and nothing happened
So basically you can take a wine out of a bottle
without opening it and they have
apparently it's a 100 percent success
rate
with professional Sommeliers that they
can
they'll give them two glasses of wine, one from a new bottle one from a bottle that
used months ago
and the sommelier cannot tell the difference so if you want to preserve
more longer-term
this is gonna be the tool for you to use
and
I love it, I use it almost every day
Well worth it I think
Okay so let me wrap it up and then if there's any questions
we can answer them then
He's a smart smart man so  I'm going to follow in his footsteps
if anyone has questions about wine feel
free to email me
my email is, the easiest way to remember it is mister wagner at u dub
That stands for Michael Robert but it's easy to remeber
And there's more cool stuff at The Whole U, so look at what stuff there is
and if you're into cooking there's actually Italian recipes from my wife as well as videos
