Wine Review: Tearing down wine rules

We live in a world of rules – some societal, some by law – and whether we like them or not, we typically follow them like unthinking zombies.

The world of wine is filled with rules covering what wine goes with what foods, what wine to serve during which season and which direction to pass a bottle of Port wine at a table.

Rules may be necessary if you are entertaining a grand duchess, but we Americans do not like to be bound by ancient rules. So now, let's tear some of them down.

Let us begin with seasonal rules.

Tradition dictates that it is pink wines for spring, white wines for summer, light red wines for fall and heavy red wines for winter. That is all well and good if you have an extensive wine library, own a wine store or have money to burn.

However, if you are the average wine drinker who buys their wine when they go shopping for food or off the internet while having no idea of what future meals will be like, it is a daunting and often expensive task. It is your taste in wines and your money that should be the determining factors of what you buy or order in a restaurant and, if the server in a restaurant looks shocked when you order a red wine with your lobster dinner or a chardonnay with your steak, cut their tip in half.

Next, we come to the stopper and the stigma of the type.

It is erroneously believed that if a wine bottle has a screw top, the wine in the bottle is of a poorer nature and probably not up to your standards. Cork is a natural product made from the bark of trees and suffers from all of the problems and failures of natural products. A cork can carry bacteria and is subject to rot, all of which can ruin a wine. A corked bottle should be stored so that the wine in the bottle keeps the cork moist and thus is fully expanded.

My question is that if cork was an efficient stopper, why do wine collectors have to send their precious wines back to the winery every 30 years to be re-corked and have a bit of the same wine added to replace wine lost by evaporation? While the screw top may not be as attractive as pulling a cork with a corkscrew, it does assure the wine is, and will remain, drinkable for a considerably longer time, a feature that a cork cannot guarantee.

As an explanation of why some wine producers still use cork closures on their wines, the producers believe that wine enthusiasts want to pull a cork because it indicates a better wine.

Then, there's the label.

The label is often the instrument that can determine what wine you will buy or reject. For many years, it was a sedate, pastoral scene with attractive lettering, but in recent years that has changed. From the attractive label and illustrations, which all of the better wineries still use, part of the industry went to somewhat obscene illustrations and close-to-obscene names.

I am happy to say that the public totally rejected those labels and, in some cases, even demanded that the store put those bottles where children could not see them. Obscene labels are rarely seen today as labels have returned to sanity and wines are judged not by what is on the bottle but what is in the bottle.

I finish with the de rigueur way to pass a bottle of Port around a table.

Tradition dictates that it is always to your port, or left, side. However, I have often wondered what misfortune would befall me if I made the mistake of passing the bottle to the right.

Wine columnist Bennet Bodenstein can be reached at frojhe1@att.net.