Colman - A Year of Wine: Perfect Pairings, Great Buys, and What to Sip for Each Season

For Michelle and the boys

A Call for Context and a Way to Drink Different

One January evening, my wife, Michelle, and I were watching the sun setting over the Caribbean. We were on vacation and were having dinner at a purportedly good restaurant with swanky black-and-white decor, techno music pulsing quietly, and flowing linens in place of walls. We could hear the waves breaking on the beach, smell the sea salt on the breeze, and I even felt a little tinge of sunburn from where the sun had penetrated my impenetrable sunscreen that afternoon on the beach. I had been looking forward to dinner all afternoon while pondering lofty subjects such as which wine goes with conch, be it grilled or fried.

But reviewing the wine list, something seemed out of place. Cult Cabernet from California followed listings of Merlot and Shiraz. Big reds dominated the list. This isnt always a big disappointment, but in a hot climate? It just didnt add up. The wine list clashed with the context. It would have been fine back home in New York, perhaps, with a fire in the background and hearty fare on the table but here I wanted a lighter wine. The few whites on the wine list were all pretty uninspiring, so we ordered one glass of big red and a Pellegrino. At the end of the meal, the red was still sitting there and the Pellegrino had been refilled several times.

Fast-forward a few years to a vacation Michelle and I spent in southern France in the height of the summer. After hiking in the rolling hills all afternoon, we returned to the house where we were staying and poured a couple of glasses of the local ros. The pink color popped, the condensation quickly appeared on the outside of the glass, and we munched on tapenade and bread. The wine itself may not have scored highly in a blind tasting, but it was refreshing and exactly what the occasion called forthe wine and the moment fit together perfectly.

Context is wildly underrated when it comes to enjoying wine. Where we are, whom were with, what time of year it is, what we are eating, when in the wines lifeand ourswe are drinking it, and even how we are drinking it all influence our perceptions of wine. But for some reason, such a fundamental and obvious point has been overlooked in how we think, discuss, and most importantly, drink wines. Too often, its tempting to go with the known and reach for the same wine even if the context varies. And too often, a wine itself is taken as fixed and unchanging because of a numerical rating that a critic gave it and that it carries with it from meal to meal, year to year. But we must remember that theres a lot of diversity out there in the wine world today, and we need to explore it to find great pairings of wine, mood, and food.

So the thesis of this book is: drink different. If you always ask for the same winebe it a Chardonnay or a Cabernetresolve to change your wine choices (at least occasionally) to reflect something other than your comfort zone, such as the occasion, geographical location, food, or season. I guarantee it will change the way you enjoy and appreciate wine.

At root, plotting a seasonal arc to your wine consumption is simple. In the wintry months embrace warming, big wines. And serious wines too. Im in a more contemplative mood during the winter, perhaps because of fewer distractions from the great outdoors. And the winter menu often calls for big wines since the foods featured tend to be stews, roasts, and risottos, all hearty and warming. If Im in an igloo, I dont want a ros, I want a Cabernet or a Barolo (and, presumably, a blanket).

The summer, by contrast, is all about lightness, being carefree at the beach or the park. Its hot out so these wines are often throw-it-back sort of wines, usually chilled for maximum refreshment. But they are almost always enjoyed when with friends, or when dining outside eating farm-fresh fruits and vegetables. So the setting has an impact on the moment and on your selected bottle. Simply put, if its 90 degrees outside and Im on the deck under an umbrella eating a salad, I dont want a Cabernet. But I do want that ros.

Yes, winter and summer are the two extreme seasons, so the choice of wine might seem a bit obvious. But spring and fall, transitional seasons, have corresponding wines as well. In the spring, I like serious whites that have good aromas and concentration to them. In the late summer and fall, I tend to start to crave reds again and transition back through some lighter-bodied wines. Its all about preparing myself for the months ahead, staying in tune with the current, often rapidly changing weather, and acknowledging the changes that tend to accompany these transitional times of year.

In addition to seasonality, the particular moment youre experiencing while taking a sip can drastically alter the way you regard a bottle for the rest of your life. For example, the Champagne you had after winning a championship or closing a big deal never tasted so good. But really, it could have been some humble bubbly rather than a $75 bottle, because the situation dictated the euphoric mood. However, if youre on a first date and not sure how things are going, opening the dinner with a glass of beautiful Champagne might just push things to the next level.

Why doesnt the wine someone had on vacation in Provence or Tuscany taste as good back at home in Chicago or Seattle? A lot has to do with context: The vacation is over, you have to do your own shopping and cleaning up, and the warm breezes off the lavender fields may have been replaced by biting winds.

Wine importer Kermit Lynch sums it up when talking about a wine from Cassis (not the liqueur): Of course Cassis tastes better at Cassis! Debussy sounds better after a walk through the foggy, puddle-riddled streets of Paris. You are in the midst of the atmosphere that created it. The wine is not different; the music is not different. You are.

And the reverse is true: Great wine has never tasted as bad as the time you drank it as your partner dumped you. At the end of the movie Sideways , do you think Miles enjoyed his 1961 Cheval Blanc that he drank from a Styrofoam cup while sitting under the fluorescent lights of a burger joint? No, he guzzled it, and it could have been Carlo Rossi for all he cared. It was a deliberate insult to the injured wine lover since he thought his romantic dreams were shattered.

All of this contextthe mood and the food, the place and the peoplecreates a culture of consumption, an ambience. Terroir is the term grape growers use for the distinctive combination of where the grapes are grown, including the soil, the sun, and the wind. What often gets overlooked is that how and where wine gets consumed affects how well we enjoy it, perhaps even more than the terroir. Sometimes a Beaujolais is better than a cult Cabernet.

Drinking seasonally and, by extension, mindfully of the time, place, and mood of the moment, brings us closer to the world around us. It makes us take account of our surroundings, instead of ignoring them as we sometimes do with our food and our wine choices. In fact, whats often most appealing about drinking seasonally to me is that the foods on my plate change and the wine in my glass needs to change to keep up. Consider seasonality the wine drinkers addendum to eating locally grown foods, arguably the current biggest trend in fine restaurants and for home cooks.

Drinking locally is not always a viable option or not enough to capture the interest of curious wine lovers. Instead we can celebrate the diversity of the global marketplace. In fact, even if some wine enthusiasts do not have many local wine offerings, the market tends to be fabulously diverse. Such is the case in many parts of America today as wines from Hungary, Slovenia, and South Africa compete for shelf space with the more traditional regions of France, Italy, and California. So lets resolve as wine drinkers to follow one of the most pervasive trends in dining and eating today, and add a dose of vitality and seasonality to our glasses.