Little Penguin – Shiraz

Date: 30NOV07

Name: the Little Penguin – South Eastern Australia – Shiraz

Vintage: 2006

Copy: the Little Penguin, the smallest of penguins, can be found along many parts of South Eastern Australia’s coast. South Eastern Australia is also home to some of the finest vineyards in Australia and is the home of the Little Penguin wines.

the Little Penguin Shiraz is spicy with bold flavours. Pair it with cioppino or red meat dishes.

Little Penguins are very sociable and often gather to forage for delicacies. We invite you to do the same with the great wines from the Little Penguin.

Price: $7

Appearance: Though dark, this wine is slightly redder than the Citra, my inaugural vino. When viewing it – again under artificial light – ever so slight pink, rosy hues fleetingly percolated up. Since I have a red/green color deficiency, an affliction shared by between 5-8% of males (and which I just now learned is called protoanomalous for those weak in red, and deuteranomalous for the green condition), my reporting of the color portion of the Critique must be deprecated slightly. If you’ve seen me dress, you might opt for more deprecation.

Nose: This Little Penguin has a very alcoholic smell. Almost overpowering. As we’ll see below, that doesn’t carry over to the taste, but the smell alone nearly had me tipsy. Since the alcohol smell is so strong I could hardly detect any other aromas, spice being the only one that may or may not be there. I strained so hard to come up with another aroma that might be wafting from my glass that I might have simply conjured up a hint of spice. Alas, another sniff and I can confirm what I would think of as a hint of spice. I might need to learn the scientific term for smell deficient.

Taste: Not nearly as watery as the Citra was. It has a more meaty taste to it. The immediate impression is that this wine is less cheap-tasting than the Citra, though only about a buck more. As mentioned above, there’s not a strong alcoholic taste to this wine, a fact made strange by the abundance of alcohol in the nose. Here, though, is where my utter lack of wine experience, or reading in the wine literature, really starts to show. I am finding it very hard to come up with any other descriptive phrase that would be anything more than pure fabrication. I lack the proper vocabulary. I’ll only add that it’s smoother than was the Citra, and more enjoyable overall. To that end I can say that only on my second bottle I have found a wine that costs only $7, and which I wouldn’t mind drinking more than just this once. I realize I said the same thing about the Citra, but that was just a lie. Straight arrow truth from this cat from here on.

Tellings: I stole some books today. I’m proud of it. Let me explain.

I’m a bibliophile. For ourselves and for our daughter we’re cheerfully and diligently creating a quite large and varied library. Here in San Antonio an organization called Friends of the Library puts on book sales at the various branches, at about a one-to-two-a month pace. These books go from $.25 for children’s books up to $1 for hard back novels. Sometimes they’ll also have a section of books that go for no higher than $3, though this is only about 10% of the entire selection. The main point is that I can get big, beautiful hardbound books – the very same books I’d pay maybe $25 or more for at Barnes and Noble — or practically nothing. To me, that’s thievery. Today, in fact, the Friends treated us to a “Buy Two, Get One Free” sale. I’m surprised I wasn’t arrested on the spot.

My wife and I are becoming regulars in this circle. If a sale starts at 9a, a line will form outside the library at 8:15. We played this game for a while but the imminent jostling and jockeying for position once the starting gates were lowered got to be a bit Neolithic, so we’ve learned to wait until about thirty minutes until after the sale starts before arriving. When we do, we see the same faces over and over. There are those that are there professionally; they carry hand-held UPC readers and race through the shelves wirelessly scanning every book they can grab, hoping for some arbitrage opportunity. These types are usually looked upon disapprovingly by those there for the more salutary goal of finding a good novel to read. These types in turn are mostly older folks ostensibly with plenty of time on their hands to read books. Aside from the mad rush at the start, they are quite pleasant to talk with, but thumbing through the stacks remains the more important task.

Then there’s my wife, my daughter and I. We’re not unique in our age or appearance at these sales, but rare. My wife zips to the children’s section and can come away with forty beautiful children’s picture books for around ten dollars. Thief! I scan the non-fiction section for any math or science books, then head to the fiction section and become the slutty book glutton I’ve always wanted to be. Today’s haul brought home hardcover books by the following authors: James Michener, Ken Follett, Tom Wolfe, John Le Carre, Sue Grafton, Garrison Keillor, Erma Bombeck, Larry Niven, John Irving, Gore Vidal, Herman Wouk, Leon Uris, and Philip Roth to name a few. Twenty-nine books in all. I’ll let you do the math when they’re selling for $1 a book, and you get one free for every two you buy. Stinking thief! Add in the 15-20 books that my wife found for our daughter – she was stuck in school today as this was a Friday sale – and the haul we came away with made us both blush.

I’m a very avid reader. Each day I try to read 100 pages from a book. That’s in addition to the Wall Street Journal (impossible to read all the way through, but I’ll get something from each issue), magazines, work-related reading, and the copious amount of reading I do with my daughter. Even though, I typically end up averaging more than 100 pages a day, over the course of any week-long period. This way, I can get through a 700-page book almost always within a week. For instance, over what I would guess would be the last two or so weeks I’ve read Michener’s memoir The World is My Home, Ken Jennings’ Brainiac, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Dan Simmons’ Terror, Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel and am in the process of reading Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full. It was only yesterday that I had that delicious feeling of having just finished a book and getting to go to our library, stand in front of a wall of books, and select what I wanted to read next. I say delicious, and I mean it. My (our) library comprises both books I’ve read and books I haven’t and leisurely leafing through fiction, non-fiction, mysteries, sci-fi – most genres are represented – and picking whichever one suits my fancy is usually a highly satisfying exercise. Tom Wolfe’s A Man In Full is proving to be quite a pick, indeed.

For those here for the wine-related stuff, I will report that the Little Penguin had a faux-cork cork. I remember reading at one point that this was the new trend as the trees from which cork is derived are going the way of the dodo. Can’t say I have any complaints. First, I have basically zero experience with good old cork, except to note that it can crumble and float around in your wine bottle, surely not the preferred method of the sophisticate. Second, the presumably rubber cork worked just fine, went back in easily, and didn’t even crumble.

Also I will report that I broke slightly from my plan and leafed through a wine book while at Barnes and Noble today. Windows on the World, 2008 edition, I think it was. True to my plan, though, is that I didn’t peek for ways to make my Critique less amateurish, but just to blow some time until my family showed up for story time. I figure that I will start my formal training in the enjoyment of wine after I have paid my dues by attempting to write about wine without a single clue through the first five bottles. So critique number six may be a shade more informative. One can only hope.

Citra

Date: 22NOV07

Name: Citra – Montepulciano D’Abruzzo. Imported from Italy. Denominazione Di Origine Controllata.

Vintage: 2005

Copy: A smooth, rich and well-balanced signature red from Italy’s picturesque coastal Abruzzi region. Concentrated berry flavors compliment the lush ruby color and appealing nose, characteristic of the Montepulciano (MON-tuh-pul-chee-a-no) grape. Enjoy at a cool room temperature with grilled meats, pasta, spicier fare and pizza.

Price: $5.99

Appearance: This wine looks very dark. Hardly earth-shattering, but I seem to remember that some red wines have a reddish hue to them, whereas this is only tinged with red along the edges, and it’s a dark red even then. Perhaps of note is that I’m looking at the wine under artificial light. Maybe wine should be looked at in natural light? Would there be a difference? The sun is bigger than the light bulb I’ve recruited, so maybe the extra light would, well, lighten the color? Since I’m writing this when it’s completely dark outside, I’ll have to stick to the single-bulb verdict of: dark, with only a hint of dark red around the fringes.

Smell: The odor of red wine is always slightly arresting to me. It’s as if my mouth is anticipating the astringent taste to come and is sending hints to my nose. Arresting, however, is about as descriptive as I can conjure up at the moment. Alkaline comes to mind, though I’m probably on the wrong side of the PH scale. Oddly enough there’s a faint image of a bee floating around a hedgerow that drifts up through my consciousness the more I smell, so maybe there might be a hint of flowers? I wouldn’t take that one to the bank.

Taste: Watery. That’s the overwhelming and, to me, most understandable, adjective that I can come up with. I’m thinking that’s maybe what I can expect when I buy the cheapest wine I can find. I’m also thinking that when people use the word “swill,” they’re describing wine like this. It also tastes harsh. There’s not much of what I would consider smoothness in this specimen. Then again, I’ve never tasted a wine I would characterize as smooth, so I won’t hold that against this contender. It burns my throat a little, like a carbonated cola might. What else? The taste, which I don’t find all that palatable, does not go away after the wine has left my mouth. Since I’m not swishing and spitting, which I believe is at least part of the correct tasting procedure, the wine goes directly to my stomach after it leaves my mouth. I’m thankful there are no taste buds in the stomach. The aftertaste is very slightly reminiscent of that taste you get when that delicious Thanksgiving feast decides to make an encore back into the mouth.

After saying all that, this is a wine I could drink a glass of every now and then. My fervent hope is that with time I learn that this wine is priced at $6 a bottle for a very good reason, and that there is a lot more to look forward to.

Tellings: I’m writing this part of the Critique after a Thanksgiving feast at my mother’s house. My father, brother, wife and daughter were there. Surprisingly we had turkey, a bold change from the more typical macaroni and cheese with fixings. It’s not that we’re poor, or even simple. It’s just that we’re not into celebrating the way that everyone else might. So after turkey, vegetables in a melted cheese sauce, mashed potatoes, carrots with butter and honey and perfectly flaky biscuits, after driving home and trying very hard not to wake a sleeping three-year old and successfully getting her to bed, and after reading a few more pages of Dan Simmons’ latest book Terror, I write these words, just as I am finishing the last drops of this Citra. I’m sure the food eaten earlier, my current mood, the howling wind outside…I’m sure these things and countless others affect how the wine looks, smells and tastes to me, but I won’t control for those ephemera. I’m just not that particular about this whole endeavor. Maybe the true connoisseur will understand the effect turkey has on wines. Maybe the true connoisseur won’t ever read this Critique.

This first review also will be the only review with the heading of “smell.” The packaging copy, which I’ve dutifully posted above, makes note of the wine’s nose. My suspicious confirmed, I’ll follow that convention. Not wishing to hide my original ignorance, I’ll leave for posterity my brief romance with “smell.”

Lastly, I made a decision to write these Critiques without the benefit of having actively read any wine reviews. I want the impressions to be mine, and mine alone. Because of this decision, I won’t follow my base instincts and immediately Google and Wiki the Montepulciano grape, the coastal Abruzzi region of Italy, or any other information crying out for more research. There’s a wealth of knowledge out there, and I’ll get to a lot of it in due time. For now, the reader and I will have to tolerate my sciolism.

The whys and wherefores

I must admit right at the start that I’m no wine critic. I’ll venture even further and reveal that I don’t even like the taste of wine. So this Critique will surely be for the ages. I wouldn’t mind, however, coming around on the taste part, and because of it might even pen some lines that look as if a connoisseur had written them. I assure you it will have been by chance, or less admirably, by tried-and-true plagiarism. The latter will be made more difficult by the mere fact that, though I fancy myself quite widely read, I’ve never read a wine critique with an eye toward remembering any part of it. Through the tasting of and writing about wines I will surely venture to some third-party reviews, but I’ll start with the vocabulary, knowledge and refinements I currently possess. My condolences, in this case, to my readers.

And who would my readers be? Me, at this point. My wife every now and then, and my daughter when she’s able to read. I figure with her I’ll get about a year of her being able to read, before she finds out that she’d rather read just about anything else. Those will be cherished moments. I’ll note that I have belatedly decided to post this on the Internet, as well, which, after the first few issues, should nearly double my readership.

Why start a wine critique, though, when I don’t even like the taste of wine? Health reasons. I’m told that resveratol is healthy, and that it’s found in copious proportions in red wine because the wine has stayed in contact with the skin of the grape for some time. Since I’m only going to drink roughly one or two glasses a day, and I’ll surely average less than that, the benefits of the resveratol will outweigh any possible health risks. Add to that the fact that I don’t drink any other alcohol, and you’ll see I’m just in it for the good stuff.

Let me talk about the format of the Critique. Since I have no sense of how a wine critique should go, I’ll be taking stabs at what I feel ought to be included. In general, I know that professional wine critics smell wine. I know they comment on how the wine looks, possibly assessing the wine’s clarity. I think they spit the wine out after they’ve tasted it, and then report on how the wine “finishes.” Writing this Critique while not being a wine drinker clearly finds me adrift in a world where not only do I not have an anchor, but I wouldn’t even know one if I saw it. Yet I’ll slog on.

Date: I include the date that I write the entry, which should correspond to roughly when I’m on the last glass of the wine. It would also allow those analytical souls among us to note the various entry dates and scoff at how long it takes me to get through a simple bottle of wine. Or be alarmed at how rapidly.

Name: Even here I’m a novice. Of all the words on a wine bottle, just what refers to the wine’s name? When does it refer to the winery? To the process? The genre? The grape, region, award? I won’t sweat details too much in this Critique, but I do want to stay safely above “idiot.” The reader will have to make that assessment.

Vintage: I’m embarrassed to say that as I started copying the name down from my first bottle, for my first Critique, I noticed a date. Glumly I remembered that small detail that those wine folks like to discuss, and decided there really should be an entry for the vintage. Glum, indeed.

Copy: Someone spent some time conjuring up flowery, suggestive words that may or may not have anything to do with the wine in question, arranged them in the most eye-pleasing manner their faculties allowed, and then plastered them on the sides of an otherwise fine-looking piece of glass art. I might as well read them. I might as well let you read them. In the process I’ll no doubt come across words that are new to me, regions that I never knew existed, and awards from contests too numerous to take seriously. You’ll see them as I do.

Price: Look, I’m cheap. I can tell you right now that I’m starting right at the bottom and working my way up. If I can’t tell the difference between cheap purple-stained water and its more expensive cousin, award-winning wine, then I’m staying at the bottom. Quite cheerfully, I might add.

Appearance: Really, I have no idea. If it looks purple, I’ll say it looks purple. Cloudy, I’ll report the same. With experience and some reading my descriptions will become less dilettantish.

Smell: Ditto. I’m sure that even the word “smell” is not used in wine circles. Maybe it’s “nose,” or something to do with olfaction. It seems I’ve much to learn.

Taste: You’ll get a description, but I wouldn’t rush out and buy based on what you read. I’ve nothing of note to compare the wine I’m straining to find a word for against. Sure, I’ve seen “peaty” and “fruity” and “round” used and abused in shocking ways. I doubt I could call anything “peaty,” though, and be close to what “peaty” is supposed to mean. Here again I’ll slog on and hope the gentle reader remains so.

Tellings: This is just a repository for any anecdotal information that might be pertinent to the wine in question. Or that might not be. Read at your own peril.

Those that do not know me well often think I come off as pretentious, know-it-all, sarcastic and generally hard to be around. It’s because I am all those things. Most of the time, however, I’m poking fun at myself. The very title, “Being a Critique of the Wine,” should be the reader’s first clue. Anyone that writes that title in earnest needs to be committed. Anyone that uses the word “critique” instead of the more appropriate “review” needs to be assigned an editor. But this is all in fun, and “critique” sounds so stuffy that I had to run with it. So please have fun, don’t let anything ruffle your feathers, and when in doubt, have mercy.