Wine Lessons 101: Undergrad
I’ve been thinking recently about my early memories of wine. If I were European, perhaps these would be bucolic scenes from a dreamy seaside villa, with laughing voices and coupes splayed about on a star-filled night…but I’m American, and that’s not how it was. It’s a painful fact that many American wine people (and American lovers of French new wave cinema) simply have to accept about themselves at some point. We didn’t grow up in that culture; the wine culture we share was one we had to manufacture much later in adulthood. My early recollections involving wine are awkward, abrupt, silly. And they really weren’t that long ago.
In an effort to stay honest (and unapologetic) about where we come from, here are three of those: the lessons I learned about wine when I was in college.
1. Free white wine isn’t good. My freshman year roommate was bringing me along to an art exhibition or gallery opening or something uptown. Who knows - the whole appeal for us had nothing to do with the subject matter, but with the promise of free wine. Small white solo cups containing delightful little half pours of alcohol! Which in this case happened to be in wine form. I sipped some of the rancid white wine from the tiny cup, and by the time I was ready for my second “glass” I was thinking to myself, this is going to make me vomit. I abandoned the remaining white wine (an unheard-of move in an era where free alcohol was the highest currency) and found a waiter with red. Much better, I noted to myself. Gotta stick with red next time. Red doesn’t taste like lighter fluid and piss. Red’s where it’s at.
The vile, bile-adjacent taste of that wine stayed with me for some time, as did the taint it left on the whole white wine category. I think of this hard-learned lesson sometimes when a consumer tells me they don’t like white wine and only drink red. Among wine professionals, white seems to be the darling, arguably because of its broad scope – there’s so much you can do with a white. By the same logic, however, you can also make it into the world’s worst wine.
What was that wine? I want to believe that I would experience it exactly like I did twenty years ago, but I can’t be sure. Then again, it was a free white wine; it certainly could have been a proud contender (if not finalist) in the contest for the world’s worst wine.
2. Vinho Verde, forgotten. During the summer between sophomore and junior years, I convinced my parents to let me stay on in NYC for a summer school session. I didn’t want to leave the city for a whole quarter, and was thrilled to have found the perfect apartment for the occasion – a shoddy tenement encrusted in thick white paint on 9th Street, whose bedbugs would luckily be in hibernation until spring of the following year. One day my friend Nick Rizzo came over with a bottle, which he said was Vinho Verde. Did I know Vinho Verde? Oh, I’ve just got to try it; nothing beats it for the price. So I sat down to acquaint myself. We were on my horrible, grimy stoop, taking in the tree-lined block with its sweaty cafes, with two cups (actual wine glasses had at least another year before making their way into my life) of the light, spritzy wine, Nick Rizzo raving about something.
The wine really was delightful, in its breezy way. It was nothing like the caustic white wine I had so unfortunately gotten to know a year and a half earlier; it was airy and crisp, and I loved the citrusy flavor. We would have many bottles of that exact wine that summer, but sadly I don’t remember ever enjoying it – I just remember drinking it. Preoccupied with my own dramas, I don’t think I gave her much attention at all. Whether it was because Vinho Verde didn’t demand much of me or because I simply didn’t have much to give we’ll never know. It feels like a fleeting relationship you think of only a decade later, trying to remember why It fell apart and whose fault it was.
And when summer was over and “stoop season” faded into the autumn of 2005, I forgot all about Vinho Verde and the good she did me on those sweltering afternoons in the urban jungle.
3. Riesling is admittedly a little bit sweet (and that’s why we like it). It was senior year, and after having survived three absurdly splendid/traumatic/eventful years under the age of 21 in NYC, my friends and I felt like seasoned old vets, doing our final tour over well-worn terrain. Keeping with this grown-up theme, we liked to take breaks from the library at the North Square Lounge, a tiny little bar nestled in the North Square Hotel on Washington Square Park North. Frequented by hotel guests and local persons of retirement age (and older), it was truly the least collegiate place you could image; despite its location directly on the NYU campus, the only youthful face you would ever see among its patrons was a rare student sharing an uncomfortable drink with their parents. For us it was perfect: away from the grueling work (what I now call “learning about fun and interesting things”), we would get a plate of crudité and split the same bottle of dry Riesling. I think that was the first wine I really loved. After 3+ years in the city our taste in food was developing, and it was only a matter of time before wine would strike me as something I could enjoy on that level. And this was that wine for me. As I recall it now, it did everything a dry Riesling should do – it was acid-driven, icy melon and white flowers. It was balanced, herbaceous, honeyed. Don’t ask me the name of it – I probably didn’t even know it then and it doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is what how it made me feel then. Wine can be good. Might even be worth spending some money on.
It makes me think that the Riesling Brotherhood of NYC is misguided when they constantly insist on telling anyone who will listen how dry Riesling is. The fact it wasn’t bone dry was why we liked it. We had missed the memo that we were only supposed to like “dry wine.” What a silly idea, anyway! Was it something promoted by wily wine industry competitors, like the beer or pharmaceutical industries? Is this part of a grandiose conspiracy to keep wine consumption down? A developing palate is going to gravitate towards wines that are easier to like – like a wine with a little well-integrated RS. That was this Riesling for me.
It was my first wine-drinking win. It was a good wine, and I liked it. So I kind of get wine, I told myself. Cool.