What kind of wines would she recommend? What would be her wine and food pairing MO? I ask these - admittedly - seemingly silly questions in response to a delightfully hilarious article I just read at CreativeLoafing.com comparing sommeliers to superheroes. Seriously. Problem was, the piece assumed the super somm was a man. The author, one Taylor Eason (very funny dude, although perhaps a bit sexist), contemplated the anonymity keeping Spiderman and Superman from realizing their true fame, even ruminating at one point "If the public knew them, wouldn't they be showered in enviable perks and get all sorts of chick play?" Hmm. Just what, I wonder, would female superhero somms replace "chick play" with when it comes to rewards for their super wine deeds?

This assumes, of course, that the female somms aren't lesbians. I know this is San Francisco, but for the sake of the argument let's simplify things and assume the female somms in question are straight.

Ok, so now that we've got the sexuality question out of the way, let's look more closely at Mr. Eason's superhero-somm parallel. Mr. Eason earnestly explains that somms, certainly inspired by superheroes, perform super tasks in the dining room such as "leap[ing] difficult asparagus dishes in a single bound, transform[ing] an otherwise blah meal into something worth paying for and, most importantly, sav[ing] you from bad decisions." Hallelujah.

But Wonder Woman ain't no Spidey. Not only does she pack different chromosomes, she's got a whole 'nuther way of going about her superhero business. The Female Superhero Somm, turns out, is a whole other animal.

Chicks are Super Tasters Too
For starters, she's more likely to know her stuff. A study conducted by the Clinical Smell and Taste Research Center of the University of Pennsylvania proved as much when women outperformed men on taste tests in every age group examined. Still not convinced? Linda Bartoshuk, professor at the Yale University School of Medicine, claims that all tasters can be divided into three tiers of tasting ability: nontasters, regular tasters and supertasters.

Supertasters are defined as the lucky folks who possess up to 100 times as many taste buds as their less well budded peers (I won't even depress you by going into the non-taster definition). Guess who comprises the lion's share of the supertaster contention? You got it: chicks.

And besides all this, female superheroes are better at exercising their emotional prowess to get things done - and yes, that includes tasks in the dining room. Got an awkward customer situation where the chick knows more about wine and wants to place the booze order? The Female Superhero Somm perceives this sort of tension and knowingly places the list in the middle of the table.

Would you like some vino with your...cat fight?
Or, have a weird business meal sitch where one player wants to spend big and another wants to scrimp? The savvy Female Superhero Somm hones in on the friction and mitigates potential disputes by suggesting wines at both ends of the price spectrum at different parts of the meal - allowing both players to achieve their goals and the meal to play out successfully.

You're probably beginning to see that it's not easy being a sommelier - heck, it ain't easy being a superhero! But chicks just seem primed for the task. I might even go out on a limb and suggest they're a better fit for it than dudes.

But because this is a happy blog I'll stop short. Because although it's statistically unlikely that male somms (and even male superheroes, for that matter) are supertasters, if they're in the job it's almost 100% likely they're in it for the right reason: love of the job.

Let's give it up for all super somms!
Being a somm in a restaurant is hard work, much of it involving schlepping cases of wine from stock rooms to cellars and managing irritating inventory minutia. And after all that, they've got to show up looking spic 'n span on the floor to sell wine and guide guests through the - in all likelihood - imposing tome that is their wine list. They work long and weird hours (dating life? forget it) to boot, often doing their thing til midnight or later on the best nights of the week, when all the "normal" people are out partying.

So now that I've made absolutely no point in this piece, before I cut out I'd like to readdress the original question posed: Just what do you think female somms ought to score as reward for their super deeds? Oh, I know: respect. Let's all give it up for the chick somms - they're here in growing numbers, and they're damn good at what they do. Take a listen! Werd.

Creative Loafing Article

Image: totally self-gratuitous plug of me in Southern Rhone, on top of a castle, feeling very super

Posted by Courtney at 09:16 AM • Comments (2)

"I think I smell a soupcon of cat's pee in this wine."
"Come again?"
"You know, pipi du chat."

Um, ok. Whatever you call it - cat's pee or the more sophisticated-sounding French version, pipi du chat - there's no getting around the fact that this is one ugly way to describe a wine. I've heard it used to describe the good stuff time and again and have hated it every time. I mean, can you think of a more unsettling way to describe something you're about to drink? But, I must say that when I attended a recent media lunch for Pouilly Fume's Claude MICHOT, pictured here with me, I really felt like the pipi du chat descriptor suited his wine. And that's not to say it wasn't good wine - on the contrary, it was outstanding!

Pouilly Fume, an appellation in the Loire Valley region of France, is famous for its copious production (around 6 million bottles annually!) of white wine made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape. Situated to the east of more famous appellation Sancerre, Pouilly has suffered from overproduction in the past but also turns out some very good wine. Such is the case for Michot's wine, a darling Sauvignon Blanc redolent with the pungent aromatics typical of Loire Sauvignon.

The heady aromatics in Michot's wine come from a combination of the grape variety's innate pungency and the limestone-rich soil of the appellation. Michot's wine, simply called "Pouilly Fume" after the appellation where it's grown, boasts layered aromatics including freshly cut grass, acacia blossoms, grapefruit and, well, cat's pee (the grape variety talking here) as well as wet stones, mineral and smoke (that's the terroir, or appellation, talking). "Fume" is French for "smoked," incidentally, a nomiker that's no coincidence!

But back to the cat's pee. It's a descriptor often used to describe Sauvignon Blanc. But it's rarely observed in the riper Sauvignons you get in California; instead, it usually comes into play in cooler-climate Sauvignons such as those hailing from New Zealand and France. Mineral-driven soils in particular seem to bring out the pee quality, and minerality is something the Loire's got in spades.

Is it unpleasant? No! It's not exactly a literal cat's pee smell, which can be so gut wrenchingly upleasant you think you might lose your lunch every time you catch a whiff. Instead, it's quite muted, more of an essence of cat's pee, really. Some noted wine critics, in fact, claim that a crisp Sauvignon Blanc without a certain soupcon of cat's pee is a disappointment!

And so, after tasting Michot's delicious Pouilly that harmonized the cat's pee thing with other delicious aromas and flavors and stellar balance, I've finally reconciled myself to the cat's pee thing. Michot's wine, you might say, made a convert of me.

Henceforth, bring on cat's pee! My glass is empty and beckoning.

Tasting Notes - 2005 Claude Michot "Les Berthiers" Pouilly Fume:
This beautiful Sauvignon Blanc from Les Berthiers, one of the two best growing regions in the Pouilly Fume appellation, strikes an ideal balance between the vibrant acidity that makes Sauvignon so food friendly and a ripeness that lends it balance and lots of appeal. The nose is heady with acacia blossoms, wet stones, honeysuckle, grapefruit, smoke and meadow grass, while the palate delights with more grapefruit, tomato essence and bell pepper.

About Claude MICHOT
Affable winemaker Claude Michot hails from the commune of Saint Andelain in Pouilly sur Loire, where he's been making wine for more than 30 years on his family's estate. He's known as a purist when it comes to Sauvignon Blanc, and his wines are in the style of the best Pouilly Fumes: clean, flinty and ripe. Stainless steel fermentation.

Posted by Courtney at 12:53 PM • Comments (6)

I must admit I've been totally divided on whether or not to write about this. But, when I consider what I've slogged through in the last year in terms of starting up my own business, taking a little flack for an honest mistake doesn't seem all that intimidating. Then again, I'm sure there are plenty of folks out there who'll read this and decide that I'm a total sham. For those of you who choose the latter path, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. I can only, instead, present things exactly as they happened and hope that you'll decide, in the end, that I'm a good sommelier who just happens to fuck up big time from time to time.

This all went down a couple of Saturdays ago at my first Saturday School class, "Blind Tasting Bootcamp." Bootcamp was the first in a series of small, focused classes I've started teaching at SF wine bar Vino Venue on Saturday afternoons. I've had a lot of folks ask me at my bigger, monthly wine parties (see hiptastes.com) where they can learn about wine in a more focused setting, and, as you can imagine, after enough inquiries like this I decided there's enough demand to start offering such small, focused classes on my own.

Blind tasting is tough!
At Bootcamp I walked a great group of 8 "students" through the fundamentals of blind tasting technique, focusing on the three main axes of tasting - a wine's appearance, aroma and taste. Things were going swimmingly, in fact, for the first couple of wines. I'd selected five key varietal wines (three whites, two reds) with which to teach blind tasting technique; I decided it would be better to teach folks about identifying major varietal characteristics with some solid examples in front of them before ultimately moving on to blind taste a sixth wine. We wound up tasting this last wine in teams, with folks competing against each other to see who won (both teams did swimmingly, correctly guessing the variety).

But first, back to the lesson. When it came to the third wine in the day's lineup, I floundered hugely. "Hugely," in fact, doesn't even do justice to the magnitude of my screw up. The wine was a Chardonnay, and, having previously tasted two relatively unoaked whites (a stainless steel fermented Sauv Blanc and a neutral wood-raised Gewurztraminer) I immediately launched into my "now it's time to taste an oaky Chardonnay for comparison" talk. I went on and ON - seriously for quite some time - about how the pendulum is swinging back for oaked Chards and how people are accepting them again, and how the wine in their glass was really quite oaky.

Yes, I even put my nose into the glass and believed, really truly thought, that I smelled lots of pungent oak on the wine. Minutes later I was utterly dumbfounded when a student (my own sister, as a matter of fact) read the label on the bottle and said, "but wait! it says 'No Oak'!" And, sure enough, right there on the label the wine said "No Oak." Turns out it was one of the new in-vogue unoaked Chards, and I, as the "expert" in the room, looked like a complete and utter sham for having misidentified it as an oaked wine. At that moment if there had been a way to switch places with a floor tile I would've done it in a heartbeat. Instead I just stared at my sister, not quite believing that everyone in the room had stopped breathing.

Can I please disappear?
Minutes passed with no one saying anything. It was what you might call a moment of professional crisis. Here I was, the expert, waxing on and on about how to identify oak in a white wine when there was, in fact, absolutely no oak on the wine we were tasting. I put my nose back in the glass and took a quick sniff and, yes, I had to admit, it was really rather un-oaky. The room was silent. My face was bright red. I was in a state of complete and utter panic.

And then, somehow, I recovered. It was quite perfect that it had been my sister who "outed" me, who called out the "no oak" thing. She was the first one to see the bottle, and she didn't even hesitate to point it out. She was, in fact, totally shocked too and admitted later that she said it without even realizing that doing so was tantamount to showing me to be a total sham. Had it been one of my other students it would have been horrible, by comparison. That it was my own sister made it a little better (just a bit!).

Why did it happen? In preparing for my first class - my first real, focused educational series on tasting - I was caught up in a million tiny details (attendance, the venue, stemware, print materials), and, ironically, the wine was really the last thing I was thinking about. Sure, I'd tasted all the wines prior to the class, but I've got to admit in retrospect that I had been in a bit of a hurry. The Chard WAS, looking back, very rich on the nose in spite of its un-oakiness. And I'd been searching for an oaky Chardonnay and I think I simply projected this quality onto the wine (it was a warm climate California Chard). I was in a hurry, and I made a mistake. A HUGE mistake.

Humility all the way
Back to the class. How, exactly, did I recover? With a LOT of humility and by confronting the issue head-on. Once I'd apologized profusely to everyone for my glaring error, I talked about how my mistake actually underscored the reason we blind taste. People project all kinds of things onto wines, and it's for this very reason that we taste blindly. You drinking an oaky Chardonnay? Great! Can't you just smell all that caramelized oak? Oh wait, that's a Viognier. Bang - you've tripped yourself up. You have to taste blindly in order to TRULY identify a wine's characteristics. Otherwise it's so tough that can find yourself smelling and tasting things you WANT to be in there (e.g. grapefruit for Sauv Blanc, cigar box for Cab) when, really, sometimes they just aren't there.

I'm beyond relieved and thrilled that things wound up really positively in the class. After a rocky few minutes I managed to convince the students that I was, in fact, fairly competent and the class proceeded smoothly. In fact, it actually turned out to be a pretty big success. The students really learned blind tasting technique, evidenced in their correctly identifying the final wine in the blind tasting competition (it was a Northern Rhone Syrah - both teams guessed Australian Shiraz, but - hey - nailing the variety's not bad for a first time go at it!). And I felt like the experience might have even upped my credibility with them, in a weird way.

Looking back, it's completely possible I might've just not recovered from my error. But, by plodding on and doing a good job with the rest of the class - showing them that I wasn't really a sham - I think I gained their respect. At least, that's what I'd like to believe! Four of them showed up at my next HIP TASTES tasting in the city, so I think that's a pretty good indication they don't think I'm chopped liver!

Lesson learned
And at the end of the day I learned a great lesson. It is, quite simply, that we all fuck up sometimes. Heck, sometimes we REALLY fuck up. Like, hugely. But, turns out that everybody screws up sometimes, and it's really more about the way that you handle yourself when it happens than anything really specific about the screw up. I also found out that screwing up BIG TIME has the advantage of netting you lots of empathy. I even had one of my most uptight friends relate to me later after he caught wind of the incident, "heck, I screw up all the time!" - something I NEVER thought I'd hear come out of his mouth.

From one perfectionist to another, it was pretty sweet to hear. Now, back to blind tasting. Clearly, I've still got a lot of learning to do. Any good sommelier will tell you the same.

PS here I am with my sis at my Green organic wine tasting last week - still friends. But if she ever calls me out again like that...

Posted by Courtney at 11:40 PM • Comments (6)