Expose yourself

Tales from the biggest wine tasting in the country

Uncorked by David Marglin

Click here for a rundown of wine tastings, dinners, and events.

Okay, it's official. Boston is a wine town. There may not be a lot of wine produced in these parts, but the next-to-last weekend in January testified to the fact that people here sure are passionate about drinking the stuff. Sixteen thousand people bought tickets to the Boston Wine Expo on Saturday -- that's a sellout crowd at the World Trade Center. And the previous night's Anthony Spinazzola wine-and-food gala, at $125 a head, was packed.

At this point, the Wine Expo isn't just the largest wine event in New England, it's the biggest public wine show in the country. If you haven't been, imagine a huge convention center packed with tables and people, like Downtown Crossing during the Christmas shopping season at rush hour, all of them pouring and tasting wine.

For winemakers, a booth at the Expo is a sound business proposition: it helps them either hook up with a distributor (a necessity under Massachusetts liquor law) or promote wine they're already selling in the state. It's also a very human proposition: it gives them a chance to meet customers face to face. As Chris Tietje, the winemaker for Four Vines and Scaramouche (he comes from Boston, and got his start working at Bauer Wines), told me: "A lot of people there don't know me from Jonah, but when you see the look on their faces as they taste the wines, and you hear them say, 'Whoa! That syrah is so darn delicious!' it makes you remember why you make wine in the first place."

For most wine drinkers, the Expo is mainly an opportunity to celebrate wine, to learn more about it -- and to drink a lot of it. The price of admission seems steep, at $43, but it gives access to an enormous variety of wines ranging from $5 to $50 a bottle retail. Assuming you spit most of the wines you taste, you can try quite a few in an afternoon. It's hard not to have a really good time, getting a little buzz, seeing everyone else having fun and indulging their passion on a weekend afternoon in winter.

Most people at the Expo, I'd guess, are there more to consume than to learn. But even if they just showed up to drink, chances are good that they learned something. At the very least, they probably tried a lot of different varietals -- and for people who rarely venture beyond the varietals they know (merlot, chardonnay, white zinfandel, whatever), it's worth the price of admission just to get bumped out of that rut.

For real aficionados, the Expo represents something else: a chance to keep tabs on the industry, to meet a lot of its big names, and to learn what's new in the wine world. A lot of the real action for wine nuts is in the seminars and tastings held during the event, which cost extra but deliver quite a bit more than you get in the push-and-shove of the convention-center floor.

Probably the most exciting tasting I went to this year was a vertical tasting of 10 Jordan cabernets ranging from 1976 to 1995. Jordan, in California's Alexander Valley, is a fairly pricey wine and a very consistent one, essentially an American first-growth chateau. Its older vintages are hard to come by, and the tasting was a chance not just to try some hard-to-find older vintages, but to taste them with the winemaker himself, Rob Davis, who's been at Jordan since 1978. To see his passion and experience and delight made me realize why it's worthwhile to spend so much time consumed by -- if not consuming -- wine.

I was also delighted by a blind tasting of syrahs from around the world. Blind tastings are fun: you have a list of the wines, but you don't know the order you're drinking them in. You really have to focus on the taste, and what you know about a region, in order to figure out which wine is in which glass. (I got the first three right, and then nothing.) Too often, you just drink your wine without thinking about it; it's good sometimes to take your appreciation to the next level, beyond "This tastes good" and into "How does this taste?" and "How, if at all, does the taste reflect the region, the growing conditions, the soil, or the style of the winemaker?"

For me, the top story of this year's Expo was syrah (or shiraz, as it's often called in the Southern hemisphere). This is the varietal of the moment, as merlot was a few years back. An increasing number of producers from around the world are making syrahs, big and bold and brash ones -- very bright, American-style wines. Everywhere I went at the Expo, people were discovering syrah and loving it. I liked Tietje's stunning 1997 Four Vines from Paso Robles (****), which will soon be released in Massachusetts (about $20 at Bauer Wines, on Newbury Street) -- loads of ripe fruit, currants, hints of spice, perfect balance of oak. Also impressive was the J. Lohr 1996 Syrah from Paso Robles (***), which was approachable but still chewy, with lots of cinnamon and blackberry.

One of the nice things about an event like the Wine Expo, which draws consumers from all over New England and wine people from all over the world, is that there are so many stories out there. Right now, some other wine critic may be writing that the wine du jour is really riesling, or port, or something else. The key to understanding people's enthusiasm about wine is that there is so much to say, and so many varieties to choose from. The Expo offers a taste for everyone's taste, and whether you're looking to or not, you can't help but learn something. See you there next year.

David Marglin can be reached at wine[a]phx.com.

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