Halloween is this Thursday, and I always wonder what to do with wine and this celebration. Really, no one gives a rats ass about wine on Halloween. Of course, I put a couple of wines in the ad that might pique someone’s interest. Bogle Phantom is one of the reds, and Dibon cava the white. The Phantom has a cool name for Halloween and the label is definitely appropriate. Bogle releases this wine once a year, and it used to be a big deal. Not so much anymore. It is a red blend that is in most vintages a couple of notches above their Essential Red. However, there is a ton of competition in the blend category and its lost it’s thunder, at least in my area. Dibon cava has an orange label and is one of my favorite sparklers from Spain. If you’re going to sit by your door in the evening handing out candy to those cute little trick-or-treaters, you might as well have some good bubbles to sip on. The orange label is a bit of a stretch, but I hope someone gets it.
A sales rep said one of the funniest things I’ve heard in a while and it wasn’t Ben. This rep was tasting me on a wine and he said, “Wouldn’t that make a great Tuesday evening wine?” I looked at him laughing and asked what was so special about Tuesday? Why couldn’t it be a great Friday night wine? Of all the days to pick, he randomly chose Tuesday. I asked him if he did anything special on that day (of course I wasn’t going to let this one go). He was nonplussed and really couldn’t answer as to why he chose Tuesday evening as the time to drink the wine. If you step into the drink tank (this is what we call my office), you best be prepared to get some razzing if you say something like, it would make a good Tuesday evening wine. Fortunately for him, my assistant wasn’t there, because when you get Scott and me together we can be relentless with the bantering. I’m still chuckling about the Tuesday thing and the next time he shows up I will make it a point to get down to the bottom of why he chose Tuesday. Hopefully Scott is there to help me out.
There are a lot of terms that are unique to the wine world. One of them is referring to wine as fruit-forward. What this means is that the wine shows a lot of ripe fruit on the palate. We used terms in the past like hedonistic, because that was a term that sold wine. Not so much anymore. Hedonistic became popular when everyone was drinking the goopy Shiraz from Australia and loving it. Today, we have found a way to describe a wine that is somewhat of a fruit bomb to the customer without turning them away. In a lot of my tasting notes, I will use the term fruit-forward instead of hedonistic. Sometimes they will ask me what I mean by fruit-forward. Once asked, I will throw in the word hedonistic if it fits because if they take the time to ask me, I will expound on the descriptor so they know exactly what they are in for. Sometimes they buy it, sometimes they don’t. I think as wine people, we should expand on fruit-forward and extend it to acid-forward or oak-forward if appropriate. I’m going to experiment with that a bit on my wine descriptors and see if it generates some animated conversations. How many descriptors have you seen that describe a Chardonnay as oak-forward? I’ve never seen it, but I see fruit-forward all the time. Why not refer to a high acid white wine as acid-forward? It makes sense to me, we will find out if it makes sense to my customers and readers.
Cheers!
Stan The Wine Man
