Wine celebrities ready for statewide events

Some people remember their first merlot as the dry crisp aftertaste of first date giggles with a college boyfriend. Or the warm sassy comfort of a shiraz, a spilled salve with girlfriends over the latest broken heart, or even the forbidden sweetness of a sneaked sip of their mom’s white zinfandel. Whether it was expensive or cheaply gotten swill, the value and goodness of that wine was likely judged more by the flavor of the memory than the price tag or professional rating.

But as one of the oldest drinks in the world, wine has been placed on a pedestal through complicated point systems doled out over swishes, swirls and spits from pinky-up elites who act as though only those in the know could truly understand and appreciate the sweet nectar. Though the reverence may be deserved, as a drink meant for all to share and enjoy, it turns out it isn’t necessary.

“Either you like the wine or you don’t,” said Serge Dore, owner of Serge Dore Limited, a posh Chappaqua, N.Y.-based wine boutique. “That’s it.”

“Journalists make it so complicated,” he went on in his thick French accent, a holdover from his Quebecois upbringing. “And there are some people who say, ‘Oh, I can smell the wind and flowers on Friday morning in this wine.’ And people wonder, ‘What the hell is he talking about? I don’t smell that.’ I just want to tell them to shut up. Wine is very simple. You don’t like it, you do like it. It is good, or it is bad.”

Later this month, Dore and more than 30 other wine celebrities are bringing wine back to the people. Hosted by the New Hampshire Liquor Commission, the Wine Week festival – lasting from Jan. 23-Feb 1 – is designed to take the scary out of wine for novices with tastings, lectures, dinners and bottle-signing events set up around the state, culminating in a Wine Spectacular.

“That’s really what this week is about: breaking down the pretentiousness and mystique surrounding wine,” said Nicole Brassard, wine marketing specialist with the liquor commission. “It’s for people who are afraid to ask questions about wine because they don’t want to say something stupid, or they’re afraid they’ll say a name wrong, or they don’t know about varietals. . . . (With the event) we want to increase the accessibility of wine. It’s for people who want to learn or try new things or expand their palette in a comfortable environment.”

For some of the winemakers and purveyors who will give lessons to local residents during wine week, they are quick to point out that their love affair with wine didn’t begin with rating systems and rules, either.

“I grew up in a hotel, and spent most of my time in the kitchen with my mother cooking – smelling and tasting and putting things together,” Dore said. “But my big love with wine came from my father. He opened a 1959 Chanbertin, I was 10 or 11 – it was in the mid-’60s. My father didn’t let me taste it, but I smelled it. And that was it. . . . It was amazing. There’s no more to say than that. For a little boy who had never smelled or experienced anything like that, it’s no more complicated than that. Just amazing.”

From there, Dore’s understanding of wine deepened, because he wanted it to. He learned how different wines taste with different foods by trying it, and that way learned about pairing. He learned about the grapes, and how soil and weather affects them, by watching local grape growers.

“We have so much technology now that with calculations and equations, they can figure out exactly when a grape is ripe and ready to be picked,” he said. “But you still have the old men in the fields. And even when the technology says it’s time, they will say, ‘No. Two days.’ And they will be right. Because, they’ve been in the field all their lives. They taste the grapes, they know the land. Technology will never replace that.”

It’s this sense of wine and winemaking as something to be experienced that Dore uses as his guide when he chooses a wine for his business.

“I do not have commodities here,” he said. “Every wine is hand picked and tasted by me. Every wine I choose has heart and passion. I do not have brands here. . . . Most of my wines come from very small vineyards, even from some who have small tiny vineyards just in their backyard, who do it for the fun of it almost.”

For winemaker Tom Eddy, whose small vineyard is on a hillside in Napa Valley, Calif., his passion for wine also began at an early age.

When Eddy was 14 and living in Southern California, he was sidelined with a knee injury, causing him to spend time in his school library. It was there, he said, that he learned of this strange and exotic thing called enology, the chemistry of wine making.

The idea combined his interest in science with what he called his “passionate and romantic bent” for cooking. After taking the initiative to meet with a local professor to discuss his future in wine, Eddy was hooked and turned his home and family into a series of experiments. He tasted his first bottle of wine with his father: a $4.99 bottle of cabernet from their local liquor store.

“We loved it,” he said. “And after we tasted it, I called up the professor and told him about it. I said it tasted like this and it tasted like that. And he sort of played along. . . . After that, my parents loved to entertain, so they would have these dinner parties, and I would hold wine tastings afterward for their friends. I was still in high school, but I just loved it. Then I started fermenting in my closet. I fermented apples, other fruit, my tennis shoes, anything I could ferment, I did.”

Eddy ended up getting a degree in winemaking and went on to work everywhere from wine co-ops to big business winemaking. But in 1989, he decided to start his own vineyard with his wife.

“It’s an extremely challenging business, and it doesn’t pay in reality. . . . There are a lot of months we struggle to make the mortgage, but I wouldn’t do anything else,” he said. “There’s an excitement in wine. It’s so romantic and so passionate.”

He added that many winemakers get the science of the profession, but not the art. He pointed out Robert Parker and his “dreaded” point system for rating wines. So disgusted by this, Eddy launched a “Take back the Cab” campaign in an attempt to rip judgment out of the hands of “so-called” experts to lay it directly on the tongues of the people meant to enjoy wine.

“My thing is, all you really need to do is enjoy (wine), not be intimidated by it,” he said. “There are people who are so highly influenced by The Spectator (wine magazine) and Robert Parker. It’s a bugaboo with me. . . . Most of the wines he rates high are like these tannic nightmares, fruit bombs, ‘polished turds,’ as I like to call them. . . . I want to encourage people to forget the numbers. Buy what you like. Something elegant that will age. Take back the cab, man.”

Both men intend to pass on their expert knowledge to those who come to hear their talks in Nashua during Wine Week, but what they most want to convey is the love and passion of wine.

“Wine is a living thing,” Dore said. “It changes and grows as it matures, like people do. It’s a pure product of nature. And everyone can enjoy wine. Wine is celebration. Whether you are getting married or divorced, you commemorate the occasion with wine. It’s joy. It’s life.”