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YachtCollege Day 2: Refined Wine-Tasting
70 Plays4 years ago
Paul Zitarelli of Full Pull Wines welcomes Kelyn Rowe and Spencer Richey to his wine-tasting course at YachtCollege.
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Transcript
Introduction to Yacht College Wine Course
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to Yacht College's FPW 202 Refined Wine Tasting Course. I am Jeremiah O'Shan, the self-appointed dean of Yacht College. I'll be taking a very secondary role today, but before we get started, I want to remind everyone of two things.
00:00:31
Speaker
If you like what you see today, you've got almost two weeks worth of courses that you can join by visiting yachtcon.eventbrite.com. I should also add that we are doing this as a fundraiser for the Seattle Children's Autism Center. You can make a tax deductible donation to them by visiting give.seattlechildrens.org slash yachtcon.
Meet the Experts: Paul Zittarelli and Spencer Richie
00:00:51
Speaker
So with all that said, I will be making room for today's professor Paul Zittarelli of Full Pole Wines. Thank you, Jeremiah.
00:00:59
Speaker
So you may remember Fullpool as the longest tenured sponsor of No Sadietes, but what you may not know is that Paul is a genuine wine expert. In addition to being a Harvard-trained applied mathematician, he's a WSET diploma holder and the author of 36 Bottles of Wine. Paul, thank you for doing this. I am extremely excited to see how this goes.
00:01:23
Speaker
Thanks Jeremiah. Yeah, no, I'm excited to be here. I appreciate the opportunity and it's a good cause. And yeah, definitely, you know, as you know, whenever I list my bio, I put no Saudi test sponsorship as the number one thing before all that other stuff. Yeah, that's the most important thing on there, I think. But let's get, let's also introduce our celebrity students. Really excited. These are two of the newest sounders. The first one is Spencer Richie.
00:01:52
Speaker
What's up, guys? How we doing? Welcome. Welcome. So Spencer is a Seattle native who attended Roosevelt High School. He played club soccer at Crossfire and then spent five years with the Washington Huskies before being drafted by the Vancouver Whitecaps, before finally making it back to Seattle this offseason. So how excited are you to be back in Seattle, Spencer?
00:02:18
Speaker
For sure, man, it sounds cheesy, but it really is a dream come true. I remember being, you know, 12, 13, 14 growing up, attending every Seattle sport you could name, and, you know, even watching the inaugural match, you know, I was down in Florida that time, actually, down in residency and thinking, damn, it'd be pretty cool to end up playing for the Sounders one day, so.
00:02:45
Speaker
It's still a little bit surreal. I'm sure it'll fully hit me when we have our first game at Lewin Field with some fans in there and all that good stuff. So it's been a fun first two weeks and I'm looking forward to the rest of the year. So real quick, what can you tell us about your wine knowledge?
00:03:00
Speaker
I don't I think I might be the less experienced of the two students in the class and I calendar is a little bit more of a wine concert than me but I would say I'm probably around average. I know you know what reds are like. I'm not really a white wine guy but you know it could use some improvement.
00:03:23
Speaker
Well, good. Hopefully we can fill
Wine Tasting Techniques with Paul Zittarelli
00:03:25
Speaker
that gap. So as you alluded to, our second guest, our second celebrity student is Kellen Rowe. Bring Kellen Rowe on out.
00:03:36
Speaker
He's been drinking for the last half hour already. Look at this guy. I know. He's ready to go. So in case you don't know, Kellen is also a local product. He attended Federal Way High School and then he played with Spencer actually at Crossfire. He then went to UCLA and was the number three overall pick in the 2012 MLS Super Draft.
00:03:54
Speaker
It may have taken him a bit longer than he hoped to find his way back home to Seattle, but he did sign with the Sounders this offseason as well. He's a bit of a wine aficionado. Recently, you got his WSET level two, which I think that that's very fancy, right? It's not as fancy as Paul over there with the diploma, but I'm working my I'm about half about halfway there, so I'm working my way there.
00:04:19
Speaker
Well, good. Well, with all that said, I think I'm just going to get out of the way and let Paul kind of take over here and have some fun with this. All right. That sounds great. So just to sort of set the scene for tonight, I think we're expecting the class to run about an hour. But I'm happy to hang around as long as we need to for Q&A at the end. Also, feel free to send your questions in through the various methods for that, chat boxes.
00:04:49
Speaker
And I think Jeremiah will be happy to interrupt us at any point and ask questions, which is great.
00:04:57
Speaker
I also want to say I am probably not going to get right into tasting these wines, but that should not stop our students from getting right into it. It is St. Patrick's Day, and while we're not drinking green beer tonight, I think we probably all deserve plenty of wine after the year that we've been through. So feel free to start checking out both wines.
00:05:20
Speaker
And I did want to ask our celebrity guests one question before we dig into our first topic, which is, I'm curious to hear. The first wine that I ever tasted was an ice cold, Barringer, white Zinfandel from my parents' basement freezer. Sticky sweet and delicious. And that started this whole journey. So I'm curious to hear if you guys remember, what was the first wine that you tasted? And then what was the first wine that you actually paid attention to?
00:05:52
Speaker
I think my first one, I don't know how proud you're going to meet Paul, but I think I was getting Carlo Rossi. I think it was, is that a thing where you get it like in the big jug and you could do the thing with the, put it over your bicep.
00:06:09
Speaker
I was of age, of course, but I think that was, that or Franzia, that was a kind of a go-to in the college scene. I feel like neither were good at all, but I feel like later when I started to kind of enjoy wine, I started buying yellowtail. It was kind of like $10 a bottle that I could justify as a kid with no money, but trying to,
00:06:34
Speaker
trying to please my now wife that I was into red wine and mature and all that. So that was sort of the first beginning of my journey of red wine. Right on. I don't remember my first glass of wine. I remember getting tastes and such from my family growing up. And they love their Napa wine. So it's got to be something from Sonoma or Napa.
00:07:02
Speaker
But I remember the wine that got me that my aha bottle, that kind of old bottle, was 2014 Von Strosser Aguirre Vineyard. I remember having it at the vineyard in the barrel room with my family. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. I really want to get into this stuff. Got it. And down the rabbit hole you went. Oh, big time. Yeah. Yeah.
00:07:28
Speaker
All right. Well, let's get into the first topic. So the first topic for tonight, I like to call, why the hell do you do it like that? And what we're going to dive into is why you see wine professionals or people who pay attention to it a lot sort of taste and evaluate wines a little differently than
00:07:51
Speaker
than a lot of other folks do. And so the first thing that I want to say is it's perfectly fine to not do it this way and to just drink the wine and enjoy it for what it is, which sometimes is just an alcohol delivery device.
00:08:08
Speaker
But if you want to start to evaluate wine instead of just enjoying it, then the most important thing that you need to remember is you have to slow down. Slowing down and actually paying attention is the number one thing. But within that, there are kind of a number of easy steps that sort of force you to slow down. So the first thing that I want to talk about is swirling.
00:08:37
Speaker
You'll often see folks like us pick up a glass and a lot of times, first thing you'll do is smell, take a good sniff before you swirl.
00:08:53
Speaker
And then give it a swirl, and usually you'll see, with that second sniff, you'll see significantly more pronounced aromas. Part of what's interesting about wine, especially interesting as a product, is that it really is kind of a living creature.
00:09:11
Speaker
And it's a chameleon that changes mostly in its relation to oxygen exposure. So a lot of what we're going to talk about today is introducing oxygen into the wine to sort of let it show its best. So the reason that we're swirling is basically to introduce more oxygen to aerate the wine and to concentrate the aromas, depending on your glass shape, into a narrow aperture that allow you to
00:09:41
Speaker
perceive a broader amount of aromas. So do you guys notice a difference between a sniff without swirling and a sniff with swirling? Completely. Big difference. Yeah.
00:10:00
Speaker
Another interesting fact, I don't know if this is true, I'll have to ask you guys. So I've heard that about 90% of people naturally swirl their glass counterclockwise and only about 10% do it clockwise. So what's your natural direction? Kellen, what do you do? I'm counter on my right hand. I always go in. Clockwise on my left hand, counterclockwise on my right hand. And I have tried to do the opposite and it is,
00:10:28
Speaker
Just feels weird, right? The flood. Yeah, it doesn't really. Maybe if you were in the southern hemisphere, maybe you could swirl. The toilet bowls go the other way. Yeah. That's crazy. It's so hard to do it the opposite way. I'm a counterclockwise guy as well, but the other way feels like I can only go left to right. Yeah, I can do it on the ground or on the table. I can do it on the table the opposite way. That's easier. You just guide it. Up in the air, that's danger waiting to happen.
00:10:58
Speaker
That's true. Jeremiah, you just swirled like someone who maybe has never swirled across the one before. I was trying to go backwards. That was not backwards. That was not backwards.
00:11:11
Speaker
There's no mirror on this. Great. All right. So that's why we swirl. Now, why do we smell wine? It may seem obvious, but smell and taste are inextricably linked to each other. I mean, it's the reason you think about it when you
00:11:32
Speaker
you know, when you catch a cold, which I realize is a little bit of a heavier thing right now, but when you catch just a regular boring, you know, old school coronavirus and get a stuffy nose, you know, you'll often notice that that food doesn't taste the same. It's not only that you can't smell it, you basically can't taste it. And so
00:11:53
Speaker
One of the reasons that we smell wine and really get your nose in there and get a good sniff is that you're priming your palate. You're sort of priming your taste buds to know what to look for. And especially when you're really evaluating wine, one of the places where it's really helpful is
00:12:14
Speaker
You know, you can kind of, you can smell flavors to some degree. Like you can kind of start to smell the type of fruit, whether it's a red fruit or a blue fruit or a black fruit, but you can't smell texture. You can only really taste that. So if you sort of preserve the tasting portion for focusing more on texture and really use the smelling portion of the evaluation to get a sense for what the flavors are going to be,
00:12:42
Speaker
you know, that'll take you a long way. Now, if, and I should say, if I were, if I were actually evaluating this, another important way to slow down is you could start to write a tasting note. Now that's a little beyond if you're not, you know, if you're not actually working in wine, but if you want to start to sort of force yourself to pay attention, you know, writing notes is not a bad idea. Kellan, have you gotten to your point? Yeah, it's funny you say that I actually had COVID over Christmas.
00:13:11
Speaker
And so I lost my smell and my taste. And when I got my taste back first and I had tried, my smell was coming back. It wasn't all the way there. And I had tried some wine and I still couldn't get any kind of flavor to it. All I got was the alcohol. I could test the acidity and the tannin, but I couldn't actually taste any of the wine, which was very interesting to me because I knew it was a lot of the, you know, a lot of it was smelling, but I didn't know how much it actually was. It actually took a while to get my smell back. And so I was just,
00:13:41
Speaker
going crazy, not being able to have a glass of wine and enjoy it. Right. Oh man. Yeah. There you go. And have you ever, uh, have you gotten to a point where, I mean, I assume for, for your studies, you've, you've started writing tasting notes. Do you do it on a regular basis? Yeah, I do. Okay. I've got a nice little booklet. Spencer, how many tasting notes have you written in your life? Very few. All right. Maybe, maybe tonight's the night. Very few. My doctors are hanging out with Kelly more. So.
00:14:12
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Perfect. He wants to get over the yellow tail, and so he's coming to my house. Yeah, exactly. OK, so after you've swirled it, you've sniffed the wine. Now we get to finally do what sort of looks like the fun part, which is to taste the wine. But I think you'll often notice that wine pros do not really taste like normal human beings.
00:14:39
Speaker
pretty wide variety of bizarre gurgling and gargling and aerating. So I think I'm kind of like mid-spectrum of how strange my personal aeration is, but we'll see if you guys want to try it and not swallow right away and actually bring some air bubbles over the wine while you're tasting. I'll show you yours if you show me mine.
00:15:16
Speaker
Delicious. I should say, I pulled the glass on the left, which is our first wine of the night, which is the Saint Combe Prose Hermitage, which is a Syrah from the Northern Rhone Valley in France. So why do we do that? Because it's undeniably weird, and we'll always get you looks.
00:15:41
Speaker
If you start pulling that move out in a tasting room and start spinning into spit buckets, you'll absolutely get some stares. We do it for a few reasons. One is back to oxygen and aeration. You're basically introducing oxygen to the wine and broadening the number of
00:16:02
Speaker
of flavor elements that your taste buds can perceive. You're also spreading the wine out to as broad a swath of your palate as you possibly can. You've got taste bud and flavor receptors all over the place. So if you're just sipping and swallowing, you're really not going to get the same experiences as letting it wash all over there.
00:16:29
Speaker
And then the other thing is, and we'll get into what this all means later, it does allow you to perceive the texture and the body of the wine a little more. And again, the broader portion of your palate that's actually experiencing the wine, the more data you have to understand what's going on there.
00:16:53
Speaker
Okay. Oh, and then of course, I'm sure you guys saw that I did not swallow the wine, although that's probably going to change pretty soon here. But when we're tasting for evaluating, we generally spit into a spit bucket.
00:17:12
Speaker
which is really only gross if you decide to drink it like Paul Giamatti and sideways. Otherwise, it's perfectly sanitary. The reason we spit
00:17:27
Speaker
I mean, I think it's probably pretty simple. I don't know that you need my class to understand what happens if you don't spit wine and you continue to taste and sample wine throughout the day. Your powers of evaluation start to decrease a little. I guess I'll turn it over to our celebrities and ask, have you guys ever been on like actual wine tasting days where you've gone around to a number of different wineries and tasted a bunch of wine?
00:17:53
Speaker
I have a few times out in Woodinville. My parents are living out in Northeast Seattle. But my dad goes out and pours out there on the weekends sometimes. So every once in a while, we'll go and meet him out there. But I presume Kellen has quite a few experiences hopping around in here. So I'll let him take this one. I have. And before I learned how to spit out wine and the reason for it, I have lost my taste many of times.
00:18:24
Speaker
You can't evaluate any kind of wine. Even my first lesson as a student, I had 10 bottles that we were studying and I didn't realize. So after I started spitting the first few glasses and then I realized, oh, I can't really taste as much yet. I wasn't used to it. And so I started swallowing and I was not fit. Not fit for the last class.
00:18:53
Speaker
Yeah, they learn my lesson quickly. The good news is usually if you're not spitting, it's remarkable how the last winery stop of the day inevitably has just the very best wines. You always buy. You always buy from the last winery. And you go home and you're always disappointed. When you open those 12 bottles later. Yeah, why did I do that? It's true.
00:19:22
Speaker
Jeremiah, when was the last time you spit wine? I'll be honest. I have been out wine tasting a few times, and I think I could probably count the number of spits on a hand.
00:19:37
Speaker
which might not even need a finger. I don't do a lot of spitting on, like I don't have a, I don't, I drink it and I go, I like this. And I buy, like I'm a very poorly, like I'm not a discerning wine drinker. I- Well, before this class. Before this class is why I'm here. Yeah. Like I need to learn how to like,
00:20:04
Speaker
Yeah, it tastes good. That's like my note most of the time. That is a good starting place. A lot of times when wine drinkers are getting started, what we'll talk about is learning to trust your palate. And the first thing before you get into all the evaluation is trusting yourself to know what you like and what you don't like.
00:20:29
Speaker
The trick of this kind of stuff is that the next step that you can take is to understand why you like what you like and then to start to be able to take some of the mystery out of it and be able to more consistently, you know, at wine shops or restaurants order things that you're actually going to enjoy. So that's the idea.
00:20:49
Speaker
All right, well, we are going to move on to the second topic of the night, which is comparing wine styles. So we're going to look at both wines. I already showed our first bottle, which is Syrah from the Northern Rhone. Our second bottle is also a Syrah, two Vintners here in Washington state. And this is their 2018 Syrah.
00:21:17
Speaker
One of the reasons that I wanted to choose these two wines is that wine is extraordinarily complicated. And so one thing that really helps when you're comparing side by side is to hold a lot of the variables constant and just change a few things and start to be able to pick out differences. So what's hopefully interesting about tonight's comparison is that we're looking at the same grape variety, which is Syrah.
00:21:47
Speaker
the same vintage, so both of these wines were harvested as grapes in the autumn of 2018. And this was more luck than skill, but they were actually both aged and reasonably more matted, which is
00:22:07
Speaker
all French oak, a little bit of new oak in both cases, and mostly in larger punch and size barrels, which, as opposed to smaller bariques, which have a lot of surface area.
00:22:23
Speaker
a lot of similarities, but one main difference, which is that they're grown in completely different places. The Northern Rhone Valley in France, like many European wine regions, is quite a bit cooler climate than a lot of non-European regions and Washington included. As I think most of you who are taking the class know,
00:22:52
Speaker
The vast majority of Washington's wine growing region is in the eastern half of the state, where it is quite sunny and warm. So the thing to keep in mind to start out with is that wine is an agricultural product. I mean, it's made from fruit. And grapes, like any other fruit, get
00:23:16
Speaker
get ripe depending on the condition. So if you have a cooler climate region, those grapes are not going to get quite as ripe. And what I mean by that is that the sugar levels in the grapes are not going to be as high at the time of harvest. And oftentimes, the acidity levels will be higher than in a warmer region. In a warmer region, the acidity levels start to drop out as you get close to harvest.
00:23:44
Speaker
In France, they're going to be harvesting grapes with lower sugar and higher acidity. In Washington, it's going to be higher sugar and a little bit lower acidity. And when those grapes get turned into wine, fermented and turned into wine, you can actually see those differences pretty clearly.
00:24:08
Speaker
all that sugar has to do one of two things. It either gets fermented by yeast into alcohol or it stays as residual sugar. And in the case of these two wines and most red wines,
00:24:23
Speaker
it is fermented to dryness. So what happens is all that sugar turns into alcohol. So what you would expect as we start to check these out is that the wine from the Northern Rhone is going to have
00:24:40
Speaker
lower alcohol and higher acidity, and we'll get into that. Generally, as I was saying before, it's a good idea to, if you have these wines side by side, which I would encourage, to sniff both or to smell both before you taste either one.
00:25:01
Speaker
and start to think about, you know, what is the fruit quality? Which wine has sort of lighter or redder fruits? Which wine has darker or blacker fruits? And maybe I'll turn it to Kellan for a sec to get his thoughts on the aromas of these two wines. Do you have anything left? Yeah, there's definitely some left. All right, that's good. Luckily, I have a whole bottle to fill it up funny.
00:25:32
Speaker
I'd say for me it's the easiest way to put is I think about colors I think about you know what I what I smell in the sense of a picture With the crows amitage from France you kind of get this bright very colorful picture Something that has just it's clean Everything you're tasting and then when you go to the the two winters out of Washington it's almost like it's hiding behind something it's almost like it's
00:25:59
Speaker
It's an early morning fog in Washington. You're waiting for it to go away and just kind of bring that darkness into it. So a little bit of grayness. This has the darker fruits. It has a little bit more. I think it has a little bit of sage or thyme in there as well. Well, the other one is more bright. Yeah, great. Did you spend all day writing that, or did you just come up with that on the spot there?
00:26:30
Speaker
That is on top of the dome, dude. Wow, dude. You're only in phase two? That sounds like phase four to me. I think he's at least ready to pass W-Set 3. Spencer, do you smell differences between these wines? Would you say that these smell more similar or different from one another?
00:26:51
Speaker
I would say that they smell different from one another, but I don't know if I have the terminology to be able to articulate exactly how I feel that they smell differently. There are certainly some differences.
00:27:10
Speaker
Those of us in the wine trade tend to like, uh, or, you know, an enthusiast tend to like, get really deep in the weeds about like, is this a, you know, is that a, a blackberry or a raspberry or a mulberry or cherry?
00:27:22
Speaker
which could get a little crazy. I would just start with even just classes of fruit colors. Does one of these smell more like red fruits or black fruits? Do you have a sense of a feeling that one or the other has sort of a different color to the fruit quality?
00:27:54
Speaker
Not at all. All right. Fair enough. So I would say, uh, you know, for me and for my nose, the, yeah, the French, the French wine is a little bit lighter colored fruits, so more bright red cherries and, and red fruits. The two vendors is ordering into darker, blacker fruits, black cherries and, uh, blackberries and that sort of thing. I'm getting like a blueberry muffin on that two vendors.
00:28:23
Speaker
Well, you know, a lot of folks talk about Washington Syrah as kind of blueberry pie juice. So that's definitely a note that comes out.
00:28:36
Speaker
I actually had a question that's along these lines, but maybe this isn't the best place for it, but I'm going to ask it anyway. You mentioned Woodinville, but there's always wineries in Woodinville, but most of them aren't based there. They're not growing their grapes there. Why is Woodinville such a big wine hub?
00:29:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of the conundrums of Washington, and I'll give the short answer and the long answer. The short answer for why Woodinville is such a big wine hub is Chateau Saint-Michel.
00:29:19
Speaker
it is just the dominant player in the Washington wine scene and has been for a really long time. So they set up shop there and became kind of a center of gravity for wine tourism. And a lot of fairly smart people realized that if they set up tasting rooms around St. Michelle, they would get the folks that don't want to make just one stop in their wine touring day.
00:29:40
Speaker
But it, you know, it presents it, it does present a bit of a challenge for Washington insofar as the vast majority of the grapes are grown east of the Cascades, whereas we have a pretty large number of wineries that have set up west of the Cascades. And that's, you know, in a lot of ways because wineries want to set up in places that are close to population centers, because it's really nice to be able to sell wine directly to people who come into your tasting room.
00:30:09
Speaker
And because a lot of winemakers would rather live in the Puget Sound than live in Zilla or even Walla Walla. Sorry if we have any Zilla residents on the call.
00:30:30
Speaker
But what does make it a little bit tricky, or it's a critique of the Washington wine industry sometimes, is that you do lose something by being as far away from the vineyards as you are now. The most dedicated Washington winemakers are out in Eastern Washington constantly around harvest time and just tasting nonstop and put thousands of miles on their carbs. But the ones who maybe aren't quite as dedicated or depending on the
00:30:59
Speaker
farmers and the growers to kind of make the make the picking the timing decisions for them and it's just not the same as you know as having the winery in the production facility right next to where the grapes are grown.
00:31:16
Speaker
All right, well, I have another, this one came from one of someone in the audience, Lickett actually, he says, this is for Spencer and or Kellen. Not sure when Spencer found out that Kellen was like a big wine guy, but are there any new teammates they've met that they found out have a shocking hobby or talent? I don't think so. I don't think it has been enough time yet, especially with
00:31:45
Speaker
With COVID, I feel like you spend less time at the facility. They don't want us eating breakfast together and eating lunch together. And we're not going away to Arizona for preseason or things like that. So nothing that spicy yet. A lot of golfers, a lot of stock market discussions. A lot of coffee discussions. Nothing that crazy. Nothing that I've heard at least. Yeah.
00:32:13
Speaker
I'll throw a twist in there just because I've spoken to him a bunch. A bird watcher. We got a bird watcher. Who's the bird watcher? Just gonna let that say. Bird watcher. It's not me. It's not Spence. It's not myself. It's a good old Shane O'Neill. Wow. He likes the bird. He likes his wilderness. Okay. Guy from Colorado loves the big outdoors.
00:32:41
Speaker
He likes his peace and serenity, and that's his bird watching. Hey, shout out to Shane on the other side. Oh, yeah, that's right. Crack a ghost form later. Is anyone else, are there any other wine? Who are the other wine guys on the team? There has to be a couple others, right? I don't think so. No? How about Adrian? Have you talked about wine with Adrian yet? No.
00:33:11
Speaker
He hasn't told you he doesn't. He hasn't had yogurt for wine yet, Cal. I know. How do you make disappointing? That was part of my signing bonus. My signing bonus was a bottle of wine. He owns a winery, I think. How am I just hearing about this? How am I just hearing about this? Yeah. I think he owns like an Argentinian winery or something. Wow. Hit them up.
00:33:39
Speaker
Yeah, I'll just give him a call. Yeah. Exactly. I get it. Who's this? Yeah. Does it know my number? Go ahead, Paul. I'll work in some other questions later. I don't want to get you too off your game. Oh, no. That's no problem. You got another one keyed up, or should I move along? No, go. I'll hold on to this other one.
00:34:06
Speaker
Okay, so one of the reasons that
00:34:15
Speaker
that I wanted to spend so much time sort of obsessing over the the nose of the wine or the aromas is that again we have a tendency to a lot of times over focus on flavor and under focus on texture when it comes to wine and you can really learn a lot about wine and where it's from and and also what types of wines you like
00:34:39
Speaker
when you start to pay attention to texture. I've found that it's really a better indicator than flavor over time of what type of wine someone likes. If you get a sense of whether they like lighter or fuller body wines, more or less tannic wines, higher or lower acid wines, you can really start to dial in on what someone's palate is. So I wanted to talk about
00:35:04
Speaker
texture in wine and how you evaluate it. So I think of texture as having two components. And the first component is body. And the second component is structure. And we'll get into structure. But let's start with body. The best way to think about body and wine is, in my opinion, is to think more about milk.
00:35:31
Speaker
which is a little strange, but bear with me. So when you think about the difference between how skim milk feels in your mouth versus 2% versus whole versus, I mean, I don't know, am I the only one that's ever had a small glass of half and half? But like whipping crease.
00:35:53
Speaker
So the texture of skim milk is akin to the texture of a light bodied wine. So wines like certain pinot noirs, gamet noirs, and a lot of white wines tend to be lighter bodied. A medium bodied wine is going to feel a little more like
00:36:11
Speaker
you know, like maybe a 2% bordering on a whole milk, you know, that kind of body in your mouth. And then a full-bodied wine.
00:36:25
Speaker
is really gonna be like borderline chugging the half and half from the container. You can start to get it, if you start to get into like dessert wines or fortified wines, then we can talk about guzzling heavy cream. But for the most part, we're gonna talk about light, medium and full-bodied wines. So let's maybe taste these two again, side by side and talk about body.
00:37:01
Speaker
All right. So, Kellen, if you were writing a wset note on the body, where would you put each of these? Oh, just as I just... Uh-oh.
00:37:30
Speaker
I think we've lost, did we lose Kellan's audio? I think we lost Kellan. Uh-oh. Maybe his AirPods died. Oh yeah. All right, so while we wait for that, Spencer, did you have a sense of which of these wines was the, that you would consider the fuller, the fuller bodied of the two? I would say
00:37:55
Speaker
For me, maybe the two Vinters is a little bit more full. I felt like the French one was maybe a little bit lighter, but probably both somewhat here in that medium body category. Yeah, that's perfect.
00:38:16
Speaker
might be a little better than you're giving yourself credit for. So I mean, that's pretty much spot on. I would agree that the two vendors is a little fuller bodied. But to some degree, these aren't drastically different. This is not kind of the leanest, meanest French wine that we've ever poured.
00:38:38
Speaker
You would maybe describe the French wine as medium bodied or maybe medium minus. And the two vintners is more like medium, medium plus, getting towards full. Yeah. Do we have Ellen back?
00:38:59
Speaker
Oh, good luck. All right. We're just I don't know if you can hear us, but I think we're gonna you're gonna have to switch your mic source. But all right. I I'm gonna ask I'm gonna ask a question. It was time. So this is so this is from Derek young. He says is the sugar acid issue by some wineries talk about their vineyard being on the shady side of the hills?
00:39:27
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of times when wineries are talking about the location of their vineyards, it is going to relate to how ripe or not the wines are going to get. The other reason that they would talk about hillsides especially is hillsides are generally pretty well prized for vineyards.
00:39:56
Speaker
That's for two main reasons. One is water drainage. You want water to drain and not to pool around the roots of your grape vines. And also for air drainage, hillsides tend to not run into trouble with frost. Frost can be a real pain when you're growing grapes in marginal climates. You can get spring frost that can knock you out before the vine even gets started, and then autumn frost that
00:40:25
Speaker
that can hurt the vine before it's kind of shut down for the winter. Hillside vineyards tend to have more airflow and are less frost susceptible than a flat land or a bowl. But yeah, usually when wineries are talking about their vineyard sites, some portion of it is around the climate. They'll probably reference soil type sometimes too. And it all sort of adds up to this
00:40:53
Speaker
this this French notion of terroir, which is a word that we haven't really translated into English because there's nothing that we have that exactly gets at it, but it's sort of sense of place would be the closest. You know, not just as a complete aside, I just have to share this. I had never heard that word before yesterday.
00:41:12
Speaker
I was talking to the one of the people that works at stoop brewing who made the yacht con beer, which I swear I'm not saying that just to plug that but he was talking about terroir. I had no idea what he was talking about. Now I know what he was talking about. Yeah.
00:41:25
Speaker
So I'm very excited about that. Well, yeah, the idea of terroir is a pretty critical concept for those of us who really get into and love wine. And the reason is because it sort of differentiates it from a lot of other agricultural products. And it's why wine looks so different in a grocery store than a lot of other products. It's why the wine section is so dispersed. And even though you have
00:41:52
Speaker
you know, you have some big players, you always, it's still very much a cottage industry in a way that a lot of, you know, you don't see like, you don't see 500 different cans of types of cans of beans at the QFC, but like they're the wine section is just, you know, this incredible,
00:42:10
Speaker
And part of that is because it's a type of agricultural product that expresses itself differently depending on where it's grown. And that's a really unique thing about vinifera, about that type of wine grape. And it's what gets those of us who get excited about wine, really excited about wine.
00:42:34
Speaker
All right. So we talked about body. And now I want to talk about structure. So structure, there's two main components to structure in one.
00:42:50
Speaker
One of them is acid or acidity, and the other is tannin. And they're both kind of balancing factors for fruit. And they both sort of balance out the fruit to make a more palatable and delicious wine.
00:43:11
Speaker
So acidity, which turns up in white wines and red wines, I think we all have a pretty good sense of how to perceive acidity. When you think about a high-acid beverage would be a glass of orange juice or a glass of grapefruit juice. And you sort of feel it a lot of times on the sides of your tongue, higher acid.
00:43:37
Speaker
I think of acidity in wine the same way that I think of salt with cooking. You don't want so much that your food tastes salty or that your wine tastes acidic. But when it's done right, just like salt sort of makes food taste more like itself, a proper amount of acidity in wine really just makes the flavors pop. It makes them taste more like themselves. Oh, welcome back, Ellen.
00:44:04
Speaker
Thank you. Hopefully you guys can hear me again. Yeah, we can. All right. That was good, good means to good, uh, stress testing there of our system. Yeah, that's great. So it's fine. Yeah. Well, I'm sorry.
00:44:21
Speaker
You missed your chance to talk about wine body, but in return, you get to talk about an even geekier topic, which is wine acidity. So having had a few sips of these, give me your take on which wine is higher acid. Higher acid, for me, is definitely the crozine montage.
00:44:39
Speaker
I mean, if you were to hold, once you swallow or spit, you hold your mouth closed for a few seconds and you open down, you would be drooling. And that is a good test that it's very acidic. Your mouth just continues to water through those cheeks.
00:44:56
Speaker
That's right. Thank you. That's actually a great reminder. That is definitely another way to perceive acidity is that acidity activates salivary glands. And if you find yourself after you're swallowing, like ready to like gleek halfway across the room or drool on the floor, chances are you have just had a sip of a high acid wine. And it's not that the two vendors
00:45:26
Speaker
does not have acidity. It has some balancing acidity, but I think you'll find that it's notably lower than the crows, which is what you'd expect. I mean, again, it's a very different growing region, much, much warmer. Something that my, just, I think she was angry at me, my wine teacher. She used to, before a tasting, she would make me bite into a lemon, and that's how you test your acidity most acidically, if you find. Wow. I'd have to count how long it was,
00:45:55
Speaker
And then with each one, you kind of go off the highest acidity possible. Yeah. This is like, yeah, like masochistic wine class. The need to get the business card for this teacher. I now know for sure. Yeah. We are. We're not going to make anyone.
00:46:16
Speaker
if you want a lemon tonight. But I will say a good way, if you want a similar fruit test for tannin,
00:46:27
Speaker
You know one time long ago in a weird evening on the on the Jersey Shore I grew up outside of Philly I had reason to bite into and chew a banana peel for a while. It's an extremely high tannin food product So let's get into let's get into tannin so tannins tannins show up in
00:46:49
Speaker
in a lot of different foods and beverages. They definitely show up in tea. They show up in banana skin. And they show up in wines. They show up in wines in a couple of different ways. There are tannins in grape skins. There are tannins in grape seeds. And there is tannin that can be extracted from oak barrels.
00:47:15
Speaker
Now, as much as I've studied wine and tasted wine, I have still never gotten to the point where I can really distinguish between fruit and wood tannin. I do think I've gotten to a point where I can distinguish between skin and seed tannin only insofar as the seed tannins tend to be extremely astringent. And that's the thing about tannins, that's how you
00:47:40
Speaker
measure tannins as you're tasting wine is the sense of astringency in your mouth or to put it another way like how sort of gum, puckery and drying is the sensation.
00:47:57
Speaker
And I mean, you might be asking yourself at this point, why is that a pleasant, like, why would, why would you want tannins in your wine? That doesn't sound delicious. And if you're thinking about wine as a cocktail, there's some, there's some truth to that. You know, if you're just, if you're just having kind of sip after sip of wine, high tannin wines are really not that pleasant, you know.
00:48:18
Speaker
That's why you won't find many people drinking high tannin wines like Barolo made from the Nebbiolo grape just on its own. But tannin is an extremely important
00:48:31
Speaker
piece of food pairing. And the reason why it's important is that tannins basically, that gum sucking sensation is real. And what they do is they essentially scrape fats and lipids off of your palate. So if you're tucking into like a nice medium rare ribeye,
00:48:54
Speaker
And you have a big tannic Cabernet Sauvignon next to it and you're actually interspersing bites of food with sips of wine You know each sip of that cab is gonna is gonna Basically cleanse your palate. It's gonna scrape some of the some of the fats Off your mouth and it's gonna make each successive bite of steak taste for lack of a better word stakier so that's So that's kind of
00:49:20
Speaker
That's tannins. I'm going to pour myself a little more here, and then we'll taste these two wines again and try to think about tannin. Now, I will say Syrah is not a notoriously tannic grape, but they are present. And I think we can probably figure out some differences between these two. So this feels like a good place to ask because I think
00:49:49
Speaker
This is appropriate. So I'm assuming rosés don't have a lot of tannins, right? That is a great question. Thank you. And I meant to mention that. Yeah, let's talk about rosés. All right. We'll talk about rosés and we'll talk about tannins. So when I introduced acidity, I said both white wines and red wines and rosés contain acidity. When it comes to tannin,
00:50:20
Speaker
quite rare to experience white wines or rosés with any significant amount of tannin. And the reason is it really comes down to the way that each of those different wines is made. So, you know, with red wines, you're generally
00:50:40
Speaker
the grapes are gonna sit and ferment and the fermenting juice is going to have extended amounts of contact with the grape skins. And an important thing to know is that even red wine grapes have basically white wine juice. If you press those right away, you will get a white wine. So all the color in red wines comes from the grape skins and it comes from the time
00:51:08
Speaker
where the juice is soaking on the skins and then eventually you press the juice off the skins and you have your red wine. But during that time when the juice is soaking up color it's also soaking up tannin. When you make white wines and most rosés the amount of skin contact is negligible because you don't want any color
00:51:32
Speaker
You know, and with Rose, you just want a little bit of color, which is usually translates to, you know, you're counting the skin contact in hours, not in days. And so there's not really enough time for tannins to.
00:51:42
Speaker
accumulate. Now, I will say, you know, for the for the geeks among us, yes, there are extended skin contact whites, they're pretty trendy these days. And those will those will have some notable, some notable tannin, but it's very much still, still the exception. Paul, who's the orange one?
00:52:05
Speaker
Yep. There are a lot of times they're referred to as orange wines. That's right. Because and that's because they do take on a bit of an orange tinge, partly from the partly from the color of the skins and partly from some oxidation that happens just in the same way as if you leave a cut apple on your counter, it'll start to turn like a brownish orange color. The same thing happens when wine gets exposed to oxygen.
00:52:31
Speaker
Yeah. Jeremiah, did you have a specific question about Rosé beyond that? No, I just wanted to be able to say Rosé and I wanted to bring it up because people love their Rosés, right? Like they...
00:52:46
Speaker
Rosé is an insanely high category. As someone who sells wine, we just can't even, we just can't buy enough. What's the deal? What's the deal with Rosé? Why are people loving that so much? I mean, to begin with, they love it because it's delicious. I think the
00:53:09
Speaker
So a couple different things have happened. I don't know. It's a little bit of a chicken and an egg thing. Like, rosés have, especially domestically produced rosés, have gotten a lot better, and Washington specifically, in the last, I mean, since, you know, I started Full Pulling 09, and it was a, it was a pretty grim rosé scene. So there's, and I'll get at it by,
00:53:29
Speaker
quickly talking about the two different ways that you can make rosé. So you can make rosé where you know that you want to make a rosé and so you harvest the grapes early where like the acidity is high and the alcohol is low and you can get this delicious refreshing rosé.
00:53:44
Speaker
Then there's another way to make rosé where you harvest your red wine grapes, which have probably like 14.5% potential alcohol. And you do something called seignet, which was French for bleed off. So you bleed off a portion of the juice after just a few hours of skin contact.
00:54:02
Speaker
And so what that does is it does two things. It concentrates your red wine, so you get an even bigger, richer red wine. And then you also get free rosé. Now, the problem with it is that if you ferment it all the way to dryness, you're going to have this big, boozy rosé at 15% alcohol that's disgusting. So you have to do one of two things. You either have to
00:54:25
Speaker
you either have to not ferment all that sugar to alcohol. And so then you end up maybe with a 13% alcohol rosé that is noticeably sweet, which is also oftentimes kind of gross, or you just add gallons and gallons of water, which dilutes your amount of alcohol, but also totally dilutes the flavor. So that was kind of the scene of Washington rosé 10 or 15 years ago. Most of them were made like that and they were pretty bad.
00:54:50
Speaker
now most of them are made in the direct press method and so the rosés have gotten a lot better and the appetite for them has grown. I mean I think like most wine trends it seems like those things start in restaurants and it started with
00:55:06
Speaker
sommeliers and wine buyers and restaurants being more confident that they could sell uh you know rosé not just in the summertime but all year long it's a it's a fantastic food pairing wine you know it's because it is a tweener between white and red and so it can it can pair with all sorts of different things and i also think like
00:55:25
Speaker
I don't know. And this is true of sparkling wines, too, at least for the past year and the upcoming year. Like it's just a little festive and like we need a little festivity in our lives right now. And it's just nice to like have this beautiful pink wine. You know, it's like at least we have this.
00:55:40
Speaker
Yes. So, okay. So this is actually came from Emily in our internal chat. She wants to know, was that Barringer White Zinn a rosé before Rosé was Rosé? I think she just wanted me to say Rosé three times. Yeah, that Barringer White Zinn, thank you, is absolutely, that is a Seignet Method Rosé that is made from Zinfandel, which is a red grape. And that is one where they
00:56:09
Speaker
rather than let all that grape sugar ferment to dryness kept quite a bit of residual sugar. And actually quite a bit of alcohol, too. So you really get a little of everything, a nice sweet, boozy, and just, I mean, my parents' basement fridge was like borderline a freezer, so it was just ice cold and middle of summer, and I just thought it was the most delicious thing I had ever had in my life.
00:56:35
Speaker
Well, before I forget to ask this one, I just want to get it out there. It's not associated at all with what we're talking about, but Wade Weber, Wade Weber wants me to ask a question. I'm going to ask a question. Yeah. He wants to know what the sounder's wine is that you got behind you is. Oh my God, right.
00:56:53
Speaker
I don't know if she spotted that, but. Yeah, that's impressive. I've never opened these. One of my buddies was gifted these, I think it's one of my distributor friends and they were trying to get these into distribution and he wasn't going to work with them, but he thought I would enjoy having them. I assume they're licensed. I hope so. I don't want to get a lawsuit out of this class.
00:57:20
Speaker
I'm a humble teacher. I can't afford trademark lawyers. So hopefully Wade will cover my attorney's fees if it comes to that. Yeah. Well, Wade's wife will. She is her fault, I guess. That's who asked. But anyway, sorry for the digression. I want to get you to up your game.
00:57:43
Speaker
No problem. Yeah, so I would say just getting really quickly back to Tannen. Neither one of these is a super Tannic wine. I would say that the French wine is slightly more Tannic than the Washington Syrah. Kellen, Spencer, do you guys want to weigh in on that? Do you have any feelings? Go ahead, Spencer.
00:58:11
Speaker
I nailed my body answer, so I'm gonna just leave it one for one moment and you can say we're done.
00:58:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I would agree with you. I would say the differences of tannins for me, I've learned to like structure the tannins a little bit and how they kind of feel in your mouth. The French is more of a dusty, like there's, you got some sand or dust in your mouth a little bit while the Washington one is more of like, you know, when you're at the dentist and they blow the air, it's all air. That's what I felt like in Washington. Those are my tannin notes.
00:58:48
Speaker
Perfect. All right. And now I think Spencer's pizza just arrived. So let's go. The door, he wants to come hang out. So we're going to let him in. So I am curious to hear, Spencer, which of these wines did
Sounders' Players Wine Preferences
00:59:10
Speaker
you like better? Oh, that is a cute dog. Which of these wines did you like better? He's been outside the door for like a half hour, so we're going to let him in.
00:59:16
Speaker
Big wine fan, I could tell. Look at that. Which wine did you prefer? I know we're not drinking these with food, so this is kind of a cocktail wine, but which of these two wines did you like better?
00:59:31
Speaker
Um, I typically prefer lighter bodied wines. I feel like oftentimes when I'm drinking wine, it's also associated with eating good food. So I tend to prefer Pinot noirs and lighter bodied wines. Um, so for me, I will go with the, uh, French wine. Okay.
00:59:53
Speaker
Helen, how about you? How did you feel about tonight's beverages? I'm also on the French side. I'm also a little biased. I love my French wines. I also like that just that clean, bright kind of wine. Yeah. All right. A couple pica files. I'll go a different direction. For me, since I don't have a nice plate of charcuterie in front of me,
01:00:16
Speaker
Uh, and I'm drinking this as a cocktail. I will say that, uh, that Mr. Morgan Lee's, uh, two vendors, Sarah was completely delicious tonight. Very enjoyable. Uh, Jeremiah, were you tasting both wines? You know, I'll be honest with you. I only opened one bottle because I knew that, uh, I'm the only one in my house right now who's drinking it. And I didn't want to.
01:00:37
Speaker
I didn't want to like waste a bottle of wine. So I only opened the French wine. I liked it a lot. I don't have, so I didn't have any notes on the Washington one. I did like this one. I thought it changed throughout and I would imagine, and maybe you can get into this. I felt like it changed throughout the, I opened it pretty close to the start of the recording. And so it didn't have a lot of time to aerate or to, is that the right term?
01:01:02
Speaker
Yeah, look at that nailed it. And so I actually feel like it did change throughout the, throughout the recording of this. Yeah, I bet it did. And it ended up to you. I mean,
01:01:16
Speaker
Yeah, wine really evolves with oxygen. And so a lot of the various gadgets that you see, everything from pouring spouts that aerate to like redal, trying to convince you to buy $600, really like swan-shaped decanters. That's all variations on a theme of getting oxygen into the wine. It's the same reason why
01:01:44
Speaker
for the most part a lot of, especially with red wines or wines that are supposed to age, that's why they're finished with cork. It's because cork is oxygen permeable and it does slowly let oxygen into the wine in that very small surface area of the cork. And that's how wines will evolve in your cellar too. So, one way to look at it, it's not an exact analog, but if you leave a wine open for
01:02:10
Speaker
a couple days or decanted over time. It's a little bit of a predictor of what it would do if you translated that to years in your seller. So this is a good time for questions. Yeah, I think we're kind of done with the main topics and I'm happy to take questions.
01:02:30
Speaker
All right, well, this one is from T. Ghost. I don't know what it is. That's what he goes by. So how much does the same wine change from vintage to vintage? Is it a matter of quality or do you expect a different taste profile? Or does it depend on variables like vineyard sourcing?
01:02:47
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, vintage. So vintage is important. It's more important in regions that have dodgier climates. It's less important in... What's a dodgy climate? Tell me what's a dodgy climate.
01:03:04
Speaker
Yeah, so like I would say to keep it close to home, like the Willamette Valley, dodgy climate. Columbia Valley and Washington, like not so dodgy. Like the Columbia Valley is basically a big, a big irrigated desert. So you get vintage variation, but not much. I mean, summers in Eastern Washington are pretty consistently sunny and warm.
01:03:26
Speaker
and completely dry. So you just don't have to worry much. As long as you have irrigation, you're fine. Growing Pinot Noir down in the Willamette Valley is a lot more challenging because they barely get enough heat units to
01:03:45
Speaker
to ripen Pinot Noir. And Pinot Noir, among red grapes, needs about as few heat units as anything else. So you can barely get Pinot Noir ripe. And then invariably, it starts to rain right around the time when you want to harvest grapes. So you've got all these complex decisions around, like, do we, oh, god, it's about to rain for eight days. Do we pick the grapes now, even though they're not fully ripe? Or do we take our chances and let it hang?
01:04:14
Speaker
When grapes and vineyards get wet, you run into mold and mildew and all sorts of problems. And this is right at the end. You've had like a five month growing season and you're like four days away from harvest and this stuff crops up. So all that to say, I pay a lot more attention to vintage when I'm buying
01:04:36
Speaker
Oregon Pinot Noir than when I'm buying stuff from Eastern Washington. It's not to say that it doesn't matter at all. There are definitely stronger and weaker vintages from Washington, but you just see it in a much more pronounced way when the climate is trickier. So as usual, Oregon is garbage. Is that what you're talking about? That's right. Yes, thank you. I generally build bonfires for
01:05:03
Speaker
for Oregon Pinot Noir. So this is actually another viewer, Matt, wants to know, are those Gabriel Glass standard art universal glasses Killen is using? These are Gabriel's, yeah. Someone has a good eye, I guess. A very good eye. Wow. These are a gift from my wine teacher after finishing my Bevy Set too. What are you drinking out of, Spencer?
01:05:31
Speaker
These are Bill Ritchie special. He gave me these just an hour ago when I graduated from doing the dishes. Nice. Nice. What's the dog's name? This is Chungus here. I got a squirrel in my hand here. Hey, come here, dude.
01:05:52
Speaker
Yeah, we're, uh, we're staying at the parents right now, but we just got a purchase agreement signed on a house. So thank God we're closing in two weeks. Where are you? Where, where, where in Seattle? Is it in Seattle? Yes. Uh, just south of Green Lake. So kind of like Wallingford tangle town area. Oh my God. You're going to be my neighbor. What's the address? But the, the dog is, uh, this is Chungus here. Yeah. He doesn't like my camera.
01:06:21
Speaker
More power to you for being willing to go through this, this housing market is brutal out there. Luckily we got tipped off on a off market house and that's how we ended up getting it. But we put an offer on one five, six weeks ago that had 30 offers on it. Crazy. Yeah, that is crazy.
01:06:44
Speaker
Yeah, 30 at 15 pre inspections. It went like 200 K over as something absurd. What was joking that even if you win one of those, you're actually the ultimate loser. So we didn't get that one. Yeah. Are you are you killing? Are you living at home? Are you living at the parents place? I got out of there as quick as possible. I got out of there. No, I'm in Kirkland. Yeah, I went I went to the east side.
01:07:14
Speaker
Brad would be so happy with you. He is. I'm sure. Oh, he is. Yeah. Smart man. He's in the middle of the bloodbath that's the housing market right now as well, so. And he's even worse on the east side, I think. We're getting way off the road over there. Yeah, because then you're talking millions, and it's just like, oh, I can't do that.
01:07:39
Speaker
If you can bring it back to Woodinville, Jeremiah, you know, that's kind of you side. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Woodinville. No, but seriously, I am, I was curious, when did, so Callen obviously at some point there was a awakening or there was a light bulb. And I know you've talked about a specific like glass that you had that made you really want to get into wine, but when did you like decide that you wanted to like do this seriously? Like not just,
01:08:07
Speaker
you know, not just a normal seriousness, but like you were going to go and get licensed and whatnot. Yeah. How did you, how did you even hear about, uh, setting set, for example? Yeah. Uh, I did a strip, uh, up the coast, California, I just drove the coast, all the way back to Seattle. So in San Diego, and I wine tasted for about a month, all the way around. It was an amazing time. We get a lot of time off and I was running on the beach. Yeah. Uh,
01:08:35
Speaker
And I ended up spending about 10 days in Napa as well, kind of going around wineries, trying ones, both cheap, middle, and more expensive, seeing which ones, if I did have the palette or not. And I went to Italix, which is a winery out there in Coonsville. And the head song that was leading the tasting ended up being My Wine Teacher. So Hillary Cole was her name, and we went through quarantine.
01:09:03
Speaker
She emailed me and said, hey, look, I'm in quarantine as well. Do you want us to learn about wine? So we started tasting every week, twice a week. And then she was the one that recommended W Set to me. She told me not to do the one. Just go straight into the two. I did the one.
01:09:23
Speaker
quickly, and then went straight to the two, and had a great time doing it. So she was actually,
Kellen Rowe's Wine Journey and Wildfire Impact
01:09:29
Speaker
we still taste, I was in college, and we all tasted together, her and my family, so we still very much talk every day. Wow, so I guess, is it gonna be a problem now? Is your professional soccer career gonna get in the way of achieving the WC level three? I actually have, I have,
01:09:52
Speaker
I'm choosing to hold off on level three just because it is a lot more drinking. Because then you're drinking and tasting a lot of wines. You're then blinding yourself a lot. And so I need to actually be a good soccer player and be somewhat fit. So I need to stop on the drink. Overrated. Yeah, I know. Don't worry. At training, he still takes the Gatorade bottle, drinks the Gator, and then he just spits it out into the bucket all the time. That's perfect. You should keep going with that, you know?
01:10:24
Speaker
It's like, what is Kelly throwing up every 20 minutes? It's so weird over there. It's like, no, he's just doing wine stuff. When you find yourself aerating, Gatorade in your mouth, you know, you've kind of gone far, far down the road. Very chalky orange. Yeah.
01:10:48
Speaker
So this one's from Michaela. She wants to know, speaking of vintages, how much will the wildfires in 2020 affect the 2020 vintages from across the West Coast? Yeah, remains to be seen. The really pernicious thing about smoke taint, which is the
01:11:10
Speaker
which is the problem with when you get wildfires near your vineyards, is that it doesn't always present itself right away. Even in laboratory analysis, sometimes the grapes will look fine, but you'll start to see smoketain in the fermenting.
01:11:27
Speaker
in the fermenting bins and sometimes the fermentations will go fine and you'll be aging in a barrel and all of a sudden you'll experience smoke taint and sometimes, this is the most horrifying thing, it doesn't reveal itself until the wine's already in bottle and has been sold.
01:11:43
Speaker
So it's a dangerous situation for a lot of wineries. I know, anecdotally, I've heard a lot of wineries chose to either bulk out or declassify, which means they either just sold their juice on the bulk market to another winery and tried to make back some cash that way, or declassified means move wine that would have been intended for a higher price bottling into a lower price bottling to just avoid any brand damage from
01:12:11
Speaker
getting to a point where they might have a $30 or $40 or $50 wine out of the market that smells like an old ashtray. That seems suboptimal as the as the kids say these days. So this one is from Lorraine and I don't I assume this is like a thing maybe you I don't get the I'm just gonna ask it. What are your thoughts on the 28 vintages in Washington?
01:12:39
Speaker
I'm sorry. The 2018 vintages from Washington. 2018 in Washington. Yeah, I don't know. Is there something about 2018 that is notable? No, I think it's a vintage that's off to a good start, but it's a little early to tell.
01:12:58
Speaker
a lot of the best wines that come out of Washington are on a bit of a slower release schedule. So we've still mostly seen some of the lower priced 18s, but no, seems like a very, very promising solid vintage. So do you, this is a question for Spencer and Kellen. Do you have
01:13:20
Speaker
a specific wine that you either associate with a particularly good memory or that you just remember being like the best bottle, best wine you've ever had? I'll go first. Um, I had some, uh, one of my good buddies that I grew up with, his family owns a jam sellers. And so, um, sort of throughout my,
01:13:48
Speaker
recently my professional career and my love life with my wife got married a year and some change ago. They have sent us bottles of wine sort of as a celebration. And so, and I've also been gifted some wine from close friends, also from jam sellers. So that's a winery that I love. There are great people over there that run it.
01:14:14
Speaker
And longevity is probably the best bottle of wine that I've had from them. So yeah, good winery, good wine, good people. I mean, I think for me, I think wine is all about what you share it for and who you share it with. So I've had some amazing bottles. I think the only one that I've had on my own that I enjoyed the most was the 2016 continuum.
01:14:44
Speaker
which is out of Napa, but the other ones I've shared either on Zoom via class, my teacher Hilary, or with family and friends. And you remember, you know, we talked about the last winery, you always buy bottles. You usually also always buy bottles, the ones that are most fun. And when you bring it home and you try it on your own without the fun, it's not as good. It is part of the atmosphere as well. So I don't,
01:15:13
Speaker
I remember who I've drank them with and what I was doing more than I do while themselves. Do you have one, Paul, or is it too many at this point? Sorry, say that again. Do I have, oh. Do you have like a wine? Is there like a wine that you just like go, like let's put it this way. An important anniversary, what are you gonna open up for that?
01:15:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's almost always going to be champagne. I mean, it's part of the founding story of a full poll was that my wife, Kelly, at the time kind of agreed that I could go and try to start this stupid business. And she would kind of keep her steady job and her good health insurance that covered both of us. And in exchange, the only requirement was that we always had at least a full case of sparkling wine on hand.
01:16:10
Speaker
at all times. So sparkling wine and especially champagne have become kind of our go-tos. I have a feeling we're going to be we're going to be selling a lot of champagne this year. I think people are going to be really ready to celebrate. All right. Well, tempting to end on that, but I'm going to keep going because there's another good one in here. Walla Walla versus Chelan. That's from Justin. I just feel like I had to throw that in there. Oh, that's the question? Yeah. Walla Walla versus Chelan.
01:16:40
Speaker
Okay, well, honestly, I'd be here. All right, so. Honest, this is the circle of trust. Yeah, yeah, that's good. Brian already said that precedent. It's circle of trust in here.
01:16:55
Speaker
Yeah, there's nobody watching, right? Eight o'clock, everybody's out? Yeah, everyone's gone. So I have a big problem with Chelan. And my big problem with Chelan is that they're too spoiled. They just don't have to, the wineries there don't have to work hard enough to sell wine because they have this built-in tourist audience that comes in there and the tasting rooms are open
01:17:21
Speaker
like some of them are open like four months a year sell out everything they make you know with people like walking off with like a case of white wine on their shoulder like back to their lake house um and so it it kind of drives me crazy because it's a it's actually a super interesting area for washington wine it's another one of those rare cooler climate uh regions and i don't want to paint with two two broader brush there there are some wonderful shaland wineries and uh
01:17:48
Speaker
some that we've offered over the years, nefarious sellers being one that I would want to point to there. But for the most part, I just think that they've had it too easy and it's kind of not, they haven't been really forced to innovate and make really like consistent, excellent lines because they just, you know, it's like,
01:18:08
Speaker
you know it's like at uh i can't remember the new name it's century length or lumen field like i mean how good do how good do the food vendors really need to be because like they've got you they've got you trapped and that's how it is in shaland they've got you trapped like you're gonna buy you're gonna buy the damn wine because you're there and you want to drink ice cold white wine on the lake so yeah i would use fall wall kellin i could tell you had some itch you needed to get in on that what's well i i've actually
01:18:37
Speaker
looking the same reason that it's a little bit cooler in Chelan. I would love to see what they can produce. I haven't had enough, or I don't know if I've had any Chelan wines, and I haven't had enough Walla Walla to actually make a description, an actual, a guess, but I think, I imagine Walla Walla is going to win that battle.
01:18:58
Speaker
Well, I do feel like that is probably a good place to call it. You gotta end on a hit like that. So thank you. Thank you so much, Kellen and Spencer for doing this. I hope it was fun for you. It was definitely fun for me to watch this. Paul, I really do appreciate you doing this. I hope if you liked what Paul said, if you found it interesting, check out fullpoolwines.com. I mean, this is like,
01:19:26
Speaker
Talk about supporting a sounder, like they've been supporting Nosadietes since 2012, I think, it's crazy. He's only bounced a few checks to us. And ECS in 2009. There you go.
01:19:40
Speaker
But I really, a reminder, if you like this whole shtick that we got going on, we got, we have a cocktail class coming up on Friday. We've got a D and D Dungeons and Dragons campaign coming up on Sunday, an art class next Wednesday. We have a pizza making class on the following Friday.
01:20:00
Speaker
We're going to do an interview with Garth Lagerwey on Sunday. We're going to have a pub quiz. We've got a lot left in Yacht College and we're raising money.
01:20:13
Speaker
Set an original goal of $10,000 to meet what we did last year for the Seattle Children's Autism Center. I have a feeling that we can blow past that if people are into this thing. So anyway, that's my pitch. Thanks again to Spencer Ritchie, Kellen Rowe, Paul Zittarelli, I am Jeremiah O'Shan, signing off as your Dean of Yacht College. Remember,
01:20:41
Speaker
Hopefully we'll all yacht, we'll be yachting together soon. Goodnight guys. Goodnight. See you guys.