InkIT Publishing has opened its horizons and broke with Kindle Unlimited to now offer Wine Sense: The Art of Appreciating Wine through the KOBO Online Bookstore. For those who love reading a great ePub, love the interactivity of dynamic table of contents, internal links to direct you where you want, and being able to link to external websites as referenced, then this is the reading experience for you. Beautifully formatted, with responsive design to read perfectly on any device regardless of size, and to navigate according to your desires, Wine Sense enables you to read what you want, when you want and how you want.
Wine Sense makes a handy eBook on your IOS or Android device and eReader to check out tips on the best way to buy wine, store wine, drink wine, appreciate wine and to get the most out of every wine drinking experience. To order your copy of Wine Sense: The Art of Appreciating Wine on KOBO, click any of the previous links in this post. If you are interested in Wine Sense, but want to buy it on iTunes or Kindle, then go to the page in this website entitled Ordering Wine Sense. Happy reading and happy drinking!
During the last month, I have written my assessment, mostly negative, about the newly launched Vino DeCanto wine preserver. But through the benefits of social media (the founder and designer was alerted to my blog posts on the product) and the credit of the company, the founder reached out to me to try to really understand my experiences and how to improve them. In fact, he spent two hours driving each way today to visit me and several more to review the experiences I have had with the product. We used my Vino DeCanto, tested it and compared it to new newer models he brought with him. I learned a lot about the process of making the Vino DeCanto, a number of the engineering and manufacturing challenges they have faced and what they are doing about them. Most importantly, I learned a lot about the character of the company and how far they are willing to attend to, invest in, and address customer concerns to be able to deliver a high-quality product.
As I stated earlier, the product works and does an exceptional job preserving wine, even when I tried it on a fragile wine. My concerns were more around the operational aspects of the Vino DeCanto, such as filling the glass, moving the container, cleaning the container, the drip factor and so on. This product is still being worked on and improvements have been noted and in progress. Five key ones I found out about today include:
using a different process to manufacture the glass container to provide far greater consistency in diameter and perfect circumference (by using an expensive mold instead of the previous glass tube cutting process). Even slight variations created significant impact on the ease of dispensing wine with ease or difficulty dispensing wine and these variations will be greatly reduced, if not removed entirely
offering a stand to solidify and ease filling and dispensing wine
altering the size and weight of the sealing ball to better control pressure while dispensing wine and reducing drip lag time
slightly modified use of O-ring placement for better movement and wine preservation
different texturing of the material in some parts to improve wine preservation with minimal potential for defect
All five of these known improvements will significantly improve the use of the device and continue to improve wine durability. I also learned about five tricks for more easily using and cleaning the device. Vino DeCanto has now created a one-page Tips and Operational Guide where none existed before and also is in the process of making a YouTube video to show others these suggestions for easier use. Looking back, it might be easy to say the company should have waited another six months to work through these improvements, but it has really been through the device’s use in wine bars and through a few select early-on customers such as myself that they have been able to quickly identify and make the improvements necessary. They were almost too close to the problems to identify them as being potential issues for others.
They replaced my earlier device with a newer one and also provided another new one to continue to test and help them work through ongoing areas for improvement. We are going to put both devices through their paces over the next month and continue help provide further suggestions on how to make the Vino DeCanto better. Tonight, I have poured a bottle of 1995 Leasingham Classic Clare Shiraz into the Vino DeCanto and dispensed a glass. The new device I received today worked far better than my previous one in terms of the consistent dispensing of the wine and to just the amount I intended in the glass. Now the wine will sit for a month to really test out how well it is preserved. At least I have been able to verify one of my previous major operational issues was resolved.
The company reached out, in fact, went out of their way to listen to what I had to say, took my and other customer’s suggestions on board and rectified the previous product by replacing it for me. I learned a lot about the character and the passion behind the man who made this device and the company he is building and it is all good. I am going to give this device another chance and continue to work with them to help make sure this is a quality product for those who need wine preservation, but are not interested or willing to go with the argon gas method.
Well done and thank you to Vino DeCanto for listening to your customers and persistently continuing to improve your product.
How do we taste wine? How do we appreciate what wine has to offer? As explained in my upcoming book Wine Sense, we taste wine through our senses. The concept of taste is cross-modal, using our eyes, our nose and our mouth. Tasting wine comes together through all the human senses. But four senses prevail when appreciating wine. Sight, smell, taste (specifically through our taste buds) and mouth feel. But our sight is so predominant, it often overrules what we experience with our nose and our mouth. This sometimes causes stimulus errors which deceive us when drinking wine. Wine Sense teaches us how to smell and taste wine better. It provides an understanding and techniques you can use to trust what is in your nose and what is in your mouth. Many believe they can never achieve this, but I do and that is why I have made the effort with Wine Sense in an attempt to help you to gain trust in your nose and mouth.
Maurice O’Shea was one of Australia’s, if not the world’s, best wine makers. He also had bad eyesight. I am reading Campbell Mattinson’s great book on O’Shea entitled Wine Hunter. It tells of O’Shea having just found out he cannot join the French army in WW1 because his eyesight is so bad. Happy about this turn of events (which allowed him to study viticulture and winemaking), he shouts a nice meal out for his friends in Montpellier. They allow the chef to prepare what he likes. They are happy, eating and drinking, but O’Shea realizes the texture and taste of the meat to be different, even though his friends do not. They later find out they have been eating domestic cat as meat is scarce during the war in France.
As Mattinson relates of young Maurice: “he wondered whether his taste and smell had grown more acute as his eyes had dimmed, as if his other senses had become heightened, as if his sense of smell and his sense of taste had developed into his gift.” Mattinson goes on to describe what O’Shea learned about himself that night: “and he knew something in himself that he had not known before – he could trust his mouth. He could trust his nose. He could feel the taste of things that others could not.”
Until you learn to trust your nose and your mouth, you will be sold wine, you will be told how to taste wine, and you will be told what you like by others. When you learn to trust your nose and your mouth to taste wine, you then learn to truly enjoy and appreciate wine more. And as O’Shea points out, by dimming your sense of sight, you can attune your nose and mouth more acutely. You can learn from others, especially when drinking in the presence of others who know more about wine tasting than you do. Learn from them, but learn to trust your nose and mouth.
The Wine Sense preorder campaign has started in earnest! To secure your copy, just click here! You will be provided an overview of the book, the plan to publish and the details of many great preorder packages and corporate patronage packages available, including:
Personal orders and personal and corporate sponsorships (all prices in US$)
Ebook for $10
Hardcopy copy for $25
Author signed hardcopy for $50
Patron author signed hardcopy sponsorship including Acknowledgment in book, and on websites for one year for $100 – $500
Great corporate team building and client entertainment events and sponsorships
All hardcover copy orders includes free Ebook version if ordered before April 15, 2014!
Wine Sense is approximately 300 pages, has 22 Chapters and is broken into four Parts:
Part One: Wine and the Senses
Part Two: How Wine Interacts with the Senses
Part Three: Enhancing Your Wine Drinking Experiences
Part Four: Where to Next?
Part 1: Wine and the Senses provides an overview and framework for understanding how wine interacts with the senses and why this can be pleasurable. Part 2: How Wine Interacts with the Senses provides a thorough explanation of how wine interacts with each sense to heighten your wine drinking experience. Part 3: Enhancing Your Wine Drinking Experiences offers a a simple approach and pragmatic tips to ensure your wine drinking is as enjoyable as it can be. Then Part 4: Where to Next? points you in the direction of other resources and ideas on how to continue to deepen and mature your pleasure with wine.
Wine Sense will be published published in June/July, 2014.
I have basically finished Wine Sense and in the next few weeks Wine Sense will be in the hands of approximately ten reviewers to critique it and provide ways to make it better. I finished the content of the book two months ago, but (1) wanted to let it rest for a while to be able to read it as a typical reader (to the best of the ability of any author to read the material they wrote!), and (2) there is a lot of work in terms of providing proper citation to other references, adding 40 images and inclusion of Top Tips and Fun Facts insets for most chapters. Then it is onto final layout and publication.
But the content of Wine Sense is close to complete, so I wanted to provide a deeper sense of what the book is about and why Wine Sense may be of interest to you. Over the next few months, I will be presenting excerpts and helpful tips from the book. First I wanted to share the Table of Contents (TOC) with you. Just reading the TOC should provide a good overview and sense of what is in the book.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Part One: Wine and the Senses
Chapter 1: Wine Enjoyment
Chapter 2: Role of Our Senses for Wine Enjoyment
Chapter 3: Philosophy of Primary and Secondary Senses
Chapter 4: Wine as an Aesthetic Experience
Chapter 5: Role of Language in Wine Appreciation
Part Two: How Wine Interacts with the Senses
Chapter 6: Overview of Wine and Sense Interaction
Chapter 7: Wine and Sight
Chapter 8: Wine and Smell
Chapter 9: Wine and Taste
Chapter 10: Wine and Feel
Chapter 11: Wine and Sound
Part Three: Enhancing Your Wine Drinking Experiences
Chapter 12: Improving Smell and Taste Sensations
Chapter 13: Improving Sight Sensations
Chapter 14: Improving Feel Sensations
Chapter 15: Improving Sound Sensations
Chapter 16: Other Ideas for Improving Your Wine Drinking Experience
Chapter 17: Buying and Storing Wine
Chapter 18: Wine Drinking Practice and Experience
Part Four: Where to Next?
Chapter 19: Tools and Systems for Managing Your Wine Inventory
Chapter 20: Further Wine Education
Chapter 21: Other References
Chapter 22: Final Thoughts
Appendices
Appendix A: Castro’s Ten Descriptors of Odors
Appendix B: Robinson’s Wine Color Chart
Appendix C: Wine Database Format and Field Listing
Bibliography
Endnotes
I originally was going to write a blog post last year on why our senses were so important in appreciating wine, how they work, and how to improve using our senses to enjoy wine more. Once the post got to 2,500 words, I decided I was going to make it a multi-part post, but by the time I got to 12,000 words, I knew it had to be a book! The book is currently 112,000 words so it was probably a good idea to go the book route! I am very excited to tell you more over the next few months and to get the book into your hands as soon as possible. More posts to follow.
Please let me know what you think about the content and structure. Any feedback is appreciated.
This should be a spectacular vintage in The Hunter Valley. Weather has been perfect and hopefully will hold for a while longer. The 2013 vintage was hit by torrential late-season rains that made grape picking at the optimal time difficult and yields of great grapes low. Based on the region and grape varietal, grape picking in Australia occurs from January to April each year. Growing seasons are obviously dictated by the annual weather patterns and type of grape involved. We were one of the first to start picking Chardonnay at Kelman Vineyards last week. Tyrrell’s was also picking their Chardonnay grapes for their iconic Vat 47.
My wife, DAZ in the Kitchen, and I have noticed since we started cooking, how much more we have have enjoyed our food, regardless if we make it ourselves or are eating out. We are more attuned to the entire process of food preparation and better understand what seasonings, flavors and processes (steaming versus boiling, or if the meat is seared first or not for example) are involved and how to get the most enjoyment while eating. It is similar with wine.
In my upcoming book, Wine Sense, I discuss a number of ways to learn more about wine and have fun doing so. Grape picking and other volunteer work around the vineyards and winery is a great way of learning while having fun! I have always enjoyed drinking wine, but I now enjoy it more by appreciating how each step from growing and processing the grapes to bottling has influenced the quality of the final product. Grape picking and having the grape juice on your hands and smelling the juice in its rawest form builds anticipation for what the wine will taste like. In one sense, my bodily senses are experiencing the wine well in advance of actually drinking it. Talk about prolonging the experience and getting maximum value from a bottle of wine!
You also learn a great deal in a very short period of time. You learn to identify ‘ready-to-pick’ grapes versus ‘still-growing’ grapes. You learn to identify if a bunch or a few grapes in the bunch have become ruinous and should be discarded. You learned how stems and leaves are introduced when grape picking and some can be all right in terms of flavor and improving tannins, but you also learn not to be too picky or your grape picking productivity slows significantly! There are processes later on to remove the stems anyway. And you learn to start very early, 6 am in our case, before the heat overwhelms you!
Getting involved in any aspect of vineyard management or wine making is a great way to learn and appreciate wine more! Other ideas on getting involved are presented in Wine Sense.
Kelman Vineyards is a beautiful spot in The Hunter Valley which has about 85 home owners. It is a cooperative vineyard with grapes, olives and lemons grown under the management of a body corporate. There are plenty of opportunities for the owners to volunteer their time from serving at the cellar door (requires an RSA), netting the vines, picking grapes, bottling olive oil and so forth and includes picking snails off the vines if you are so inclined! I was one of many volunteer owners who helped out with the season’s first grape picking last week. You realize what a manual process it can be, and you learn very quickly how to cut and collect bunches of grapes without snipping yourself or wasting grapes in the process. Grape picking is also great exercise and community involvement.
The annual grape picking and harvesting for a vintage is an annual festivity in many regions of the world with the whole community involved. Willian Younger in his great book, Gods Men and Wine, starts out by describing the Vintage on the Douro and how year after year, the community comes together for grape picking and harvesting. It is a festival of celebration shared by the entire community. Kelman has recreated a localized version of that for us as owners which I find exhilarating and an educational experience. If you want to learn more on how to appreciate wine, get involved in grape picking and other activities in the vineyard and winery. And may sure to look for my upcoming book, Wine Sense to learn even more!
I am often asked what does SAZ in the Cellar stand for and what was the meaning behind it? I think the ‘in the Cellar’ part is pretty obvious and relates to spending time in a wine cellar. I am a big believer that the best and best-valued wines you will drink are from your own cellar and are aged over time. I buy wine to put in the cellar; rarely do I buy a bottle of wine for immediate consumption. Most wine is drunk far too early and does not have the ability to reach its potential. Therefore, I spend a lot of time in my cellar: putting wine in, selecting wine to go with an upcoming meal and monitoring my wine inventory to make sure I have the right drops aging for the next decade. My wife calls my cellar my ‘man cave!’ Hence I thought it appropriate to think about wine from the perspective of the cellar. My upcoming book Wine Sense present a lot of information regarding how to calculate the size of your cellar, what to put in it and how to store wine in your cellar to make sure you get the most out of it.
SAZ in the Cellar
So why ‘SAZ?’ My wife had inspired me by writing her cooking and food blog DAZ in the Kitchen. Since she was in the Kitchen and I was in the Cellar, I thought I would play off her DAZ theme and become SAZ. I assumed DAZ meant ‘Deanna from A – Z,’ and I liked the idea of SAZ for Steve from A – Z. Therefore I became SAZ in the Cellar and proud of my moniker!
Much later I found out that it was a common Australian country town convention to provide a nickname which used your first initial and added ‘azza’ to it. My wife was looking for a nickname for her blog, but did not like Dazza, so shortened it to DAZ which she thought sounded better. I still like the idea of the AZ representing the body of knowledge from A – Z, but am really glad my wife decided to ignore convention and go with DAZ instead of Dazza. Otherwise, today I might have been Sazza in the Cellar instead of SAZ in the Cellar!
SAZ in the Cellar is now publishing three times weekly:
Sundays (Australia Sydney time) will feature reviews of wine, wineries, wine-related products, events and food / wine pairings
Tuesdays (Australia Sydney time) will be used to re-publish all-time favorite posts (from almost 200 posts over the last two years!) or posts associated with the wine lifestyle
Thursdays (Australia Sydney time) will feature #SAZTIP – a weekly tip to improve your wine drinking
#SAZTIP posts will focus on how to improve wine tasting, storage, purchasing and anything that make wine drinking a better experience! Even if you miss a post, you can just enter the #SAZTIP hashtag to find all posts and what others are saying about the posts. Finally, if you have a wine tip you want SAZ in the Cellar to share, just place the hashtag #SAZTIP in your tweet or post and we will pick it up. If judged to be worthy of sharing with others, we will do so and source it as your idea and contribution!
I am not sure if this will take off or not, but I want to use #SAZTIP to generate a community of wine related tips for everyone to use and learn. There are many wine-related hashtags including #wine, #winelover, etc. so it is a crowded and noisy space. But as SAZ in the Cellar grows and Wine Sense is released early in 2014, hopefully there will exist a body of wine drinking tips you can count on to improve your wine drinking.
#SAZTIP #1 will be released in a few hours and show you how to use a chopstick to pour wine from a bottle when the cork is stuck inside.
Is Penfolds Grange worth the money? I certainly asked that question back in 1997 when I bought my first Grange, the newly released 1992 vintage at $200 per bottle. I was drinking some fine Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon and Hunter Valley Shiraz for less than one-tenth that price. Of a total of 4,000 bottles in my cellar at peak, I never had more than eight bottles of Penfolds Grange. I only have one bottle of 1981 Grange left.
The question ‘is Grange worth it?,’ certainly depends on who you are and why you are drinking it. As I have become more comfortable with drinking quality instead of drinking brand – a concept I explore in Wine Sense – I find a lot of alternatives to Grange which are far better value. Another concept I discuss in Wine Sense is the first two things I really picked up on many years ago when starting to drink better wines: I could identify (1) good balance and (2) good mouthfeel. Mouthfeel is what happens when wine is in your mouth and felt (not tasted via your taste buds) by your palate. It is often most noticeable as tannins affix themselves to the inside of your cheeks. It is also felt through the weight of the wine (due to alcohol level and how the wine has been processed) and if the wine sits comfortably in your mouth or not.
It has been two-and-a-half years since I drank my last Grange until last week. It was the 1971 vintage which is the best Grange I have tasted. It was a special treat as the birth-year wine for my wife’s 40th birthday. This wine is featured in 1001 Wines You Must Try Before You Die by Neil Beckett. The 1971 Grange had great fruit and spice flavors, perfect balance, nuances of oak, fig and dates manifested with each swirl around your mouth, and it had great, great mouthfeel. Given the quality of the wine and event, this Grange was well worth it!
A week ago, we had another Grange, this time the 1993. While it was consumed as part of a standard weekend luncheon among friends, it is a bottle I gave to my friends when they were married several years ago and they insisted on waiting to drink it together with us. We found that opportunity last week, celebrating the birth of their new son and also reuniting with some mutual friends we had not seen for a dozen years.
The 1993 Grange is not considered one of best Grange, yet it is still an outstanding wine as every Grange is regardless of vintage. Penfolds always sources the very best grapes they can find, maintaining as much control over the quality of the grapes as they can in any given year, and year-in, year-out, Grange is made with a style that is identifiable. I was a little worried that the 1993 Grange may be at the end or beyond its best drinking life, but the cork was in perfect condition and the wine excellent. We decanted it for several hours to be served with a Persian beef fillet for the main course. We had a nice Italian Chianti on arrival followed by a 2009 Hugel Alsace Riesling to go with eggplant and tomatoes and then a 2009 McLeish Reserve Chardonnay to go with chicken. Then out came the beef and the Grange!
The wine opened beautifully and came to life during two hours in the decanter. I had been sniffing the Grange to make sure it still had robust flavors and was ready to drink. It had strong plum and blackcurrant flavors and that opulent Grange style. On taking my first mouthful, it was the unique mouthfeel a Penfolds Grange provides that really struck me; full and expansive, yet not over-the-top. The wine and my mouth fused in perfect harmony. The wine did not need to be paired with beef as it was paired with my tongue and cheeks perfectly! My upcoming book Wine Sense discusses how our senses are used to appreciate and enjoy wine. We use all of our senses from our sight to smell and taste, but also feeling and even hearing wine. Our perception of taste is cross-modal and one of the wonderful things about tasting wine is how our senses of smell, taste and feeling come together to provide such a sensually fulfilling experience. With Grange, you can really feel the wine. By reputation and weight, Grange possesses strength and firmness when holding a glass of it. But it is in your mouth that Grange shows it worth. It may seem strange to talk about ‘feeling’ a wine, but you do feel Grange while drinking it. It demands being held longer in your mouth than other wines to enjoy the feeling it provides. It also demands being swallowed in several small swallows with each mouthful to make your mouth and throat muscles work, enhancing the feeling further. If there is a wine that is enjoyed by being felt, it is Grange.
I want to apologize for not writing a wine post for one month. I usually try to get one, if not two out every week. The lack of wine writing has been due (1) intentionally taking six weeks off from looking at Wine Sense, so as to scrutinize it from the reader’s view – not the writer’s view, and (2) I have been focused on building a publishing platform for the book including doing the book cover graphic design, images, formatting and layout. It is all coming together nicely for an early 2014 release.
But I have missed the constant attention to wine bloggin and will be getting back into it next week. We will be three weeks in The Hunter Valley, which has been a source for previous wine writing inspiration! It will be great to have both the time and a glass by my side most days. As Hemingway said, “Write drunk, edit sober.” I never write drunk, but do enjoy a taste or two while putting fingers to the keyboard.
I also wanted to be in The Hunter Valley to validate and finalize some of places I will be recommending for Parts Two and Three in the four-part piece on The Hunter Valley I am writing. I am certain there will be some disagreement over my choices of best places to stay and eat, but I will hopefully introduce you to some exciting new finds. There are so many great reasons to visit the Hunter Valley.
I am very excited about Wine Sense and what it has to offer. Further teasers and information will be released in the next few months which hopefully excites you to read the book. We have established a writing and publishing company, InkIT Publishing to handle our writing and training needs (yes, we are also doing an online training course on wine appreciation!), including the release of Wine Sense. I wanted to prove to myself and others that they can write and publish a book of merit without using a major publishing company. I spent the last three months analyzing and evaluating this decision and have concluded I wanted to go it alone to truly understand the process required and be able to then help others write and publish.
But for now and the next few weeks, it is back to wine blogging! I had a lovely 1993 Penfolds Grange yesterday which will be the focus of my next post!
