Wine Hell

You might think Hell is bad wine. Oh, no. If the wine be bad, spit, pour out the bottle, and crack open another.

Last weekend was my first trip to wine country since I began the wineau wino sommelier training. I was very much looking forward to having a new experience, not only with wine, but in coming to the vineyards and wineries with my beginnings of an education about viticulture and vinification and maybe start to push into place some new understandings of what I've been studying.

E. and I were of one mind that we wanted to soak up as much experience as we could, and so I made appointments at both Lancaster and Jordan for sit-down tastings. The appointment at Lancaster was private, meaning that the group consisted of the young lady from Lancaster and E. and me. We were given a tour of the vineyards and wine cave before we sat in a wine library, this wonderful but surreal minimalist modern room with mile-high walls lined with bottles of Lancaster wines, and tried four wines. At Jordan, we sat with 8 others in a room of baroque nouveau riche vulgarity meant to pass for elegance while an older woman with manners to match the furnishings who knew very little about wine talked at us for what seemed like an eternity (it may have been an hour, but, believe me, it was the hour that stood still, yawning and chewing on its cuticles). And we tried 3 wines and ate a couple of bites of yuppy artisan cheese.

What was disagreeable about both experiences was a lot, so much that I have trouble organizing my thoughts around this, as each thought is greeted with a chorus of Yeah! in my mind, but what I can say is that I would have appreciated authenticity rather than the presentation of wine as status symbol, which reduces it to being an accessory for the I Got More Than You And I Want To Rub It In Your Face crowd--I guess it is no accident that our fellow tasters at Jordan were all card-carrying members. And I would have appreciated humility, instead of the arrogance at both establishments, the promotion of the notion that these vintners have elevated and refined the art of winemaking in some mysterious way. The preening! The inflated self-importance! Give me Gary Vaynerchuk, whose knowledge is solid and vast and whose attitude is humble, over the people at Jordan and Lancaster any day. (Also, Gary makes me laugh, and you know how that do me.) (Not everyone at Jordan was like that--E. and I very much liked the security guard and the young men who greeted us upon our arrival.)

If I could talk to the Big People In Charge at both Jordan and Lancaster--if I thought they might be interested in some constructive feedback--I would offer these observations:

1. People have been making and drinking wine since the Neolithic period. Which means thousands of years of labor and study and science have gone into what you've been doing for 33 years (Jordan) and less than 20 years (Lancaster)You didn't invent wine or wine-making or even the happy thought of eating triple-cream cheese while drinking wine (that last belongs to Jordan alone).
2. The wines at Jordan and Lancaster are wonderful, truly, they are some of my favorite wines. However! They are not none of them no Pétrus, no Romanée Conti. (How could I even hope to taste such wines? But unlike the people at Jordan and Lancaster, I am aware of their existence.)
3. Be aware that there is that of which you have chosen to remain ignorant ("Mr. Google, could you please tell me something about wine and its history?"), and speak only of what you know. Christ Almighty, the nonsense was unbelievable. To hand out that platter of baloney as if it were ground and sliced from actual fact is inexcusable. (Again, this is for the ears of Jordan only. In spite of her habit of speaking of Lancaster wines and the owner of Lancaster with veneration best reserved for someone like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., the young woman at Lancaster did not spew forth a fount of nonsense like that which flowed at the Jordanian fount.)
4. When you invite people to taste wine at your winery, you might consider there is a protocol to wine-tasting, a protocol that includes spitting. How can it be possible that I had to request a receptacle at both places? Let me put it like this: E. and I tasted 67 wines in two days. I spit every single time. I should not have to ask for a cup/bucket/spittoon. Again, this is inexcusable. (The young woman at Lancaster did not treat mine as an odd request, but the woman at Jordan--and all of our fellow tasters--looked at me as if I were Nelly Mae Magoo from White Trash Holler. Also? She gave me a transparent plastic cup to spit into, which out of consideration for my fellow tasters, I could not put on the table and so I had to hold it in one hand or put it on the floor. Again, repeat it with me: inexcusable.) If you don't want people to spit, then you should specify that the Suck-Ass Spectacle (the woman at Jordan also donned an attitude of veneration to the Jordan family) of Vulgarity is a wine-drinking event.
5. The Lancaster wines were, in my opinion, overpriced. Yes, they are great wines. But I have unquestionably drunk plenty of wines equally good for half the cost of what you pay at Lancaster.

From Jordan, we went straight to Truett Hurst, which is like going from Hell (if Hell be a vulgar room overstuffed with pretension and prosperous arrogant white people) to Heaven. The grounds are pretty, the wines are terrific (and reasonably priced), and the people there are knowledgeable and friendly, and there was none of that pretension nor arrogance nor nonsense.

P.S. Yet again, I managed to inspire a sudden and intense aversion in at least one other, simply by my presence. Sometimes, yes, my exuberance can be a big pill for some to swallow. But at Jordan, I was subdued and kept my observations to myself (except once, I could not refrain from whispering to E. that the woman was not only babbling gibberish the likes of which I've not heard since the last time Sarah Palin opened her mouth, hogwash that if you saw the words on a page would make ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE, and everyone was sitting around the table with serious and equally pompous attentive expressions, nodding as if they understood, but she made these pronouncements that were undeniably inaccurate, e.g., that phylloxera was a virus spread by the glassy winged sharp-shooter in the early part of the last century, thus hopelessly entangling and mixing up the two big threats to California vines, i.e., Pierce's disease and the phylloxera root louse, which may seem like no big deal, but it's like telling everyone you are an expert on World War II and then giving Archduke Ferdinand's assassination as the cause for the war, and also saying that it started in 1492), and yet, E. informed me that one woman was mad-dogging me from across the table. At the time, I didn't notice any stink-eye action, let alone that I was the object, but E. reported that the woman's attentions were marked. In our post-mortem, we tried to figure out what I had said or done; however, as I had said and done nothing, we chalked it up to that maybe her golf-shirted, big-gold-watch-wearing, rich white paunchy sexagenarian husband had checked out the landscape when I wasn't looking--I was wearing a dress with a bit of a view of the hills. (Not much. Just enough to keep life interesting. It's not like I went to the wineries looking like Anna Nicole, God bless her--although I wouldn't put it past myself if I had what she did. We all have an obligation to use what we've got.) Or maybe it, like so many things, has nothing to do with me at all and I just happened to bear a slight resemblance to that one neighbor with whom she squabbled over parking 20 years ago and has lain awake nights resenting ever since. Who knows. One of life's little mysteries.