It’s Only Grape Juice

Richard Paul Hinkle’s new book is a no-nonsense introduction to wine.

Readers of QRW know the writings of Richard Paul Hinkle, whose prose is as stellar as his humor. He has been covering the California wine scene for us for over a decade. There’s hardly a simile he can’t find, not a metaphor he can’t work, and not a humorous moment he can’t make more humorous. Hinkle’s wit is "educated insolence," and he does not suffer fools, cant, or pretension gladly. This is the very experience one has when reading his eighth wine book, Good Wine: The New Basics (Silverback, $20).Hinkle is a teacher, and what all great teachers do is to remove the mystique from their subject, to present their matter simply, directly, tellingly.

Good Wine breaks no new ground, nor was it written to do so. Rather, it reminds us of the basics, of how utterly simple and wonderful fermented grape juice can be. The book is "what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed." And Hinkle wastes no time expressing himself. He doesn’t like wine bosses, those who tell you what you should be drinking. The best palate is still yours, drinking what you like, and yet not being afraid to expand your horizons because "it’s only grape juice," all of which sets the tone.

Simplicity is Hinkle’s theme. For example, he takes a single Zinfandel grape and explains how you can make each of the six basic wine types by using this grape variety. You can make white wine out of it (virtually all wine juice is clear) just by separating the skin from the juice. Want a Rosé wine? Let the juice and skin come in contact with each other. Want a red wine? Let the juice ferment (about seven days), and you’ll get a bold, dry wine. Hinkle explains that fermentation is one of "nature’s miracles." Crush a handful of grapes, and after a week, "the grape-skin-borne yeast ... converts the sugar-rich juice (wine grapes are one-fourth sugar) into ethanol and carbon dioxide ... the carbon dioxide would dissipate into the air, and you have ... wine." Want sparkling wine? Just don’t allow the carbon dioxide to escape into the air; we do this by using pressurized bottles, and voilà!, you have Champagne. For dessert and port wines, we would stop fermentation just prior to dryness, add some brandy, and you now have fortified wines.

No-nonsense again abounds as Hinkle says he loves tradition, but it can’t always be respected, especially concerning corks. "Cork trees are harvested once in nine years." Good corks are getting scarce, and the days of alternatives, like screwcaps, are upon us. While you are banishing corks, think about banishing the "100 point wine system." This is more of the "boss" syndrome that Hinkle rejects. You don’t let people dominate your tastes in art with a number. Why allow it with wine? You know what’s good, what you like. So, with Hinkle humor, we are offered "Hinkle’s Laws": (1) I like it. (2) I don’t like it. (3) I’ll drink it if someone else will pay for it. As for tastes, Hinkle reminds us that women don’t necessarily taste wine better than men; they do have, however, a finer sensory vocabulary -- their cooking experience comes in handy for them when tasting.

As for tasting, Hinkle suggests the "triangle." Take two different Chardonnays and use three wine glasses. Pour some of one wine into two glasses, and in the third glass, pour the second Chardonnay. Mark the bottom of the glass that has only the one wine. Now, have some fun. Shuffle them about and see if you can taste the one that is different. You can and will in time. As for wine glasses, they aid the sight, sound -- the very clink of a toast. Hinkle refers to Georg Riedel, who says that "wine has individuality and it is unwise to think that one glass alone can express that individuality." Hence, Riedel has given us a series of glasses that best express the wine’s essence. From our point of view, however, the glassware game can get silly because Riedel keeps coming out with a plethora of new glass shapes for every conceivable wine; soon you’ll need a cupboard just to house wine glasses. So get yourself Cabernet, Burgundy, Chardonnay, and Champagne glasses. If worse comes to the very worst, drink it out of a mug.

As he has warned readers against numerical wine ratings and wine bosses, he cautions us against wine appellations, which is just "geography," not an "indicator of quality." Appellations are where the grapes are grown -- Napa, Sonoma, Russian River, etc. Great wine comes from great vineyard management, and the winemaker better make his or her footprints there as often as possible. As for the winemaker as Hollywood hero, which California tried to pass off on us in the late ’70s to early ’90s, forget it: Great grapes make great wine; bad grapes make bad wine, it is as simple as that. The winemaker is, as winemaker Brother Timothy once said, a "constructive babysitter." In short, tend to the wine, but don’t get in the way. Recently, a PR woman, who was trying to get QRW to do an article on her client’s wines, said with confidence that she recently went to a tasting and two women were secretively admiring this PR person’s wine and wondering what the wine was. "Do you know," the PR person exclaimed with pride, "that those women were two great winemakers -- Helen Turley and Merry Edwards." The PR person hadn’t received the message: winemakers are no longer seen as heroes. Their job is not to screw up the wine process. Humility is the operative word.

Hinkle again reminds us of the obvious: Great wines do not grow in ugly places. Whether you’re in the steep terraced hills of Portugal, lolling about the Loire, seeing the castles on the Rhine, or with God in Piedmont or Tuscany, wine is produced where beauty is. Along with this, Hinkle offers some warm thoughts on respect for farmers who help create this vineyard beauty, on growers who are a fiercely independent lot who deserve more recognition than is usually given. The "bottom line," as Hinkle succinctly puts it, is to get readers to trust themselves. In the end, we want to find wines that give us pleasure, and wines we can afford to buy on a regular basis. You know what you like, and you deserve more credit than you give yourself. Start celebrating.