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| Let Your Intuition Be Your Guide | ||
Fall 2000 |
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 A wine store is a wine store, right? You've got your cash register, you've got your shelves, you've got your wine. France over here, Italy over there, American chardonnay up front where it's easy to find, Port for some reason baking on the top shelf at the back of the room (why is that always the case?). Simple. Straightforward. Unless, of course, you don't know much about wine.It's one of the things you forget most quickly when you become a wine lover, that feeling, almost a vague dread, you used to encounter before opening the door. This writer, for one, clearly remembers going into a wine store in Washington, DC, and tentatively asking for help from a clerk who had obviously already sized me up as an amateur. Did I know what I liked? I ventured the word cabernet. Fine. What sort of cabernet did I like? I had the sensation of abruptly stepping into deeper water. Something not too tannic, I said firmly. The clerk looked at me and nodded in a bored way, then turned to a bottle. You'll probably like this. I took the bottle and looked at it, then asked if he could tell me something more about it. Well, it's not too tannic, he said. Quote marks of ironic disdain settled softly around the word. I left the store annoyed and disheartened. I was maybe twenty-two, just learning about wine. A year ago I hadn't even known the word tannic had anything to do with wine. Now, apparently, I'd committed some kind of wine ignorance faux pas. Wanting a cabernet sauvignon that was not too tannic marked me as a rube, a chump, a figure of fun. No surprise that I never set foot in that store again. Where was Joshua Wesson when I needed him? When you walk into Best Cellars, the first thing you notice is not that the wine is organized by style - instead you notice how cool the place looks (thanks to top restaurant designer David Rockwell). It radiates "store as concept." Yet the concept is a sound one: simplicity, ease of use, approachability. When you look at the wine selection, then you notice how it's organized: "soft," "smooth," "big," "fizzy," "fresh," and so on. There are eight categories total: three for red, three for white, one sparkling, one sweet. Each category presents a description, "full-bodied red wines" for big," say; a list of adjectives, "concentrated, powerful, satisfying," a symbol, in this case a radiant sun, and a color, here deep red. When you're looking at the bottles shelved under "big," you know what you're getting, and you also know what you're not getting: the sense that this is a club you aren't a member of. And, piece de resistance, nothing is more than ten dollars. Best Cellars isn't all things to all people, no store is. If you want futures of 1999 Cos d'Estournel, you're looking in the wrong part of town. Likewise if you want that 1963 Fonseca to put away for your fortieth birthday. But whatever your buying proclivities, you have to admire the egalitarian simplicity of the idea. Wesson, one of the Best Cellar's founding partners, has led a varied life in the wine world: sommelier, consultant, writer and now retailer. I asked him a few questions about the Best Cellars idea, and about the general concept of looking at wines stylistically. So how did this whole thing come about? Most wine stores tend to be organized by grape type, or country of origin. But neither of those organizational directions allow for a consumer who knows nothing about wine to be comfortable. They both presume a certain knowledge and awareness on the part of the consumer, and when you put the onus of knowing what a cabernet or merlot is on the customer, you immediately narrow your customer base. We wanted to democratize the process. We really set about making it as simple as possible. You've got eight categories set up. In red wine, for example, there are "juicy," "smooth," "big," each modified by several adjectives. Why those adjectives? Why those categories for that matter? First we started looking at all the adjectives commonly used for wine. We blocked out maybe two hundred and fifty of them on cards, and then aligned the cards in broad sweeps based on attributes we thought would tie to different colors of wine. Then we started to turn over cards that needed a glossary for the average person to comprehend, the words that were understandable only by someone with a substantial knowledge of wine. Then if they were so broad that they were essentially meaningless we got rid of them. In the end we had about thirty words that seemed to work. The basic distinction, or division, seems to be weight, though: light-bodied, medium-bodied, full-bodied. Those are your three dividing lines. Actually, we look at weight as one leg of the stool that supports this concept to trying to look at wine stylistically rather than traditionally. Color is not enough, weight is not enough and the words themselves are not enough, but if you put them together you create a compelling context in which they make sense. For instance, if you say "juicy" without it being tied to light red wines, it doesn't make sense. We needed to establish the background, the context, then create the picture with the words, the colors and the icons we used. The single idea is more than the sum of the elements. So when you look at 'soft', you see a light yellow color, an icon of clouds, the words, and then medium-bodied white wine, and that comes back to the notion of making visible what was once obscure. It becomes an intuitive way to understand wine. Do more expensive wines fit into this system? The system transcends price point. You can take any wine and find a place for it in a stylistically based way of looking at wine. You can throw Opus One into the 'big' category we have, and it doesn't denigrate the wine; it shows you its place in the overall world of wine. We're not saying this is the only way to reinvent the way wine is categorized. But it's the way we've found, and it's worked, and I think it will continue to bring people into the world of wine that heretofore wouldn't be comfortable; they enjoyed wine but didn't want to go through the painful process of learning about wine. We don't believe at Best Cellars that you've got to be cruel to be kind - we really believe that shopping for wine should be as pleasurable as drinking it. Hypothetical situation: You're buying wine for a wedding, or really any other large social event. Are there specific guidelines you ought to keep in mind? Well, I think if you're looking for wines that please most of the people most of the time, you're looking for wines that are midpoint. For instance, 'smooth' for red or 'soft' for white, in our system. You're not looking for extreme climates: I'd avoid wine from either zone, because you end up with wines that re either too acidic or too alcoholic. So if you look for the most temperately-grown reds or whites, and wines without too much wood, you can imagine certain wines falling into your lap more often than others. So for red wines? In reds, certain parts of Australia. Shiraz blends for instance. Merlots from Washington State are certainly crowd-pleasing. Also a ton of stuff from the Rhone and Provence and Languedoc fit those criteria as well and end up being both delicious and affordable, and easy to enjoy. And Spanish wines from northern Spain - not Rioja so much as Penedes and Navrra. But I take it these mid-point wines don't have to be mediocre. That's not part of the equation. Not at all. What you're doing is taking out the tails of the taste extremes, which some people go absolutely bull-goose-loony for; but that's not what you're looking for here. When you're buying wine for lots of people, you want what we call in the store the 'not too' wines. They're defined by their balance, their equipoise, their ability to Zelig their shape depending on what foods they're served with. Do you have any particular advice for people just getting into the world of wines? Determining your own palate preferences is the biggest challenge any new wine lover faces, along with articulating those preferences, whether it's at a store or a wedding or a restaurant or anywhere. But figuring out what you like and don't like is actually pretty easy. We do it every day in food, but we stumble when it comes to wine. So look at your food preferences and see if they can be expressed in wine. Even ice cream. Why not? Let Haagen-Dazs be your guide! |
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