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Tuesday, November 14, 2006
An Ohioan ventures into the heart of Texas — and why they’re still laughing at my expense
It was the first time my toes tickled the topsoil of Texas, and it was an experience I won’t soon forget — for (ahem) a variety of reasons.
Over the weekend, I served as a judge at Rodeo Uncorked, the wine competition that is part of the gigantic Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. The annual charitable event stretches over three weeks in late February and March and last year drew an astonishing 1.7 million people.
Now lest you snicker at the idea of a wine competition being part of a livestock show and rodeo, let us just put to rest those Yankee stereotypes y’all might have.
Folks in Houston are serious about their wine. Just ask Charles M. “Bear” Dalton, the chairman of the rodeo’s wine competition. Bear serves as wine manager for a retailer in Houston called Spec’s. (This picture of Bear might give you an idea of where he got the name). Bear has slogged through the vineyards of Burgundy, Bordeaux, Argentina and Chile, and all other corners of the world, to bring back the best for his Texas wine customers. And they buy it. They buy it in vast quantities. In short, it’s not all about Lone Star beer in Texas.
And the rodeo’s wine competition that Dalton oversees is starting to make a name for itself. One of its stated objectives is to “become the largest and most successful wine competition and auction in the world.” This year, it received 1,580 entries, up about 25 percent from last year. And the wine-related tastings and auctions put on by the livestock show and rodeo raised a nifty $1.6 million for scholarships and other educational programs last year. (The hearts of the organizers of Dayton’s Fleurs de Fete just skipped a beat.)
The panel of judges for this year’s wine competition included sophisticated palates of the caliber of Patrick Fegan, head of the Chicago Wine School; Mike Dunne, wine writer for the Sacramento Bee; Mike Lonsford, wine writer for the Houston Chronicle; and Wendy Narby, a British-born wine and food consultant who has spent the last two-decades plus in France leading wine tours for various entities and teaching English to Bordeaux winemakers (more about Wendy — and the prestigious Sauterne property her husband’s family recently sold — to come in a post later this week).
Now, why in the world the organizers would want to sully the reputation of the event by inviting me to serve as a judge is a mystery for the ages. But invited I was, and go I did.
There were 13 panels, each with five judges, swirling, sniffing, sipping and spitting various categories of the 1,580 wines. My panel drew two categories: cabernet sauvignons priced under $15 (74 wines), and pinot noirs priced at $20 and up (44 entries). My fellow panelists included a knowledgeable consumer and three folks who worked or had worked in the distributor/wholesaler end of the wine business, all of them Houston-area residents.
We were chugging along — well, spitting along — our teeth slowly turning black from the red-wine pigmentation when the real fun began.
Each panel can request a “re-pour” of a wine that we find unusual or flawed in some way in which we suspect there may be “bottle variation.” The volunteers uncork another bottle of the same wine (each producer who enters must send 6 bottles) and send out a second set of samples, so the wines can be evaluated fairly.
We encountered a pinot we all thought was corked — heck, I knew it was corked. Corked wines are tainted with the faint aromas of wet cardboard, damp basement, old socks, wet dog — whatever your description of the smell associated with trichloroanisole, or TCA, that this page has written about before.
The volunteer dutifully removed our glasses, and when she returned with samples from a fresh bottle, we could tell she was hiding something, trying mightily to keep a straight face like a poker player at the championship table of a game of Texas Hold-‘Em. It took a while to figure out why she was stifling laughter. The wine we sent back as corked came from a screwcap bottle. The folks in the back room were, we envisioned, rolling on the floor with laughter. And of course, since I was the only out-of-towner on the panel, I figured this screwcap-enclosed wine quickly would evolve into the one that the loony-tune from Ohio sent back as “corked.” (Glenn Cordua, director of the Wine & Spirits Management Institute at the University of Houston and one of the wine competition’s chief organizers, thought the wine was flawed but not corked, though I still disagree.)
And might I have taken a load of livestock manure about this from all of the other out-of-town judges with whom I dined that evening? Oh yes indeedy, I most certainly did.
Now right about here I suppose I could protest vigorously that the TCA that causes the musty aromas in wine does not have to come from the cork itself, that it can be present in barrels and in the cellars of wineries and can taint a wine that hasn’t seen a cork — all true.
And maybe I will someday. When they stop laughing.
But I don’t think that day is coming anytime soon.
Cheers!
Mark Fisher
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