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Ah Ha! A Newbie’s Wine List or: How I Managed to Post Twice in One Day

Sep 28, 2009 books, wine

In March of this year, Josh Galliano and I dined at the Niche bar together.  Throughout our meal customers of Niche, who were also customers of Monarch’s, regularly came up to say hello. To my great fortune, a particularly generous customer added to his hello a bottle of 2004 Williams Selyem Westside Road Neighbors Pinot Noir and with that, my Ah Ha wine moment had happened, and a new chapter of my life began. Thanks Jeff L.

Certainly I’d had good wine before, and I definitely preferred it as my libation of choice with a meal.  Outside of restaurants, however, I’d been primarily a beer drinker because I could not only wrap my head around beer, I could afford it.  I had no idea what Williams Selyem was that night and, if the wallop of flavor were any indicator, I was pretty damn sure it was a winery producing a product well outside my price range.  Arriving home and doing a bit of googling, however, I found a bottle at Brown Derby, in Springfield, MO, for $55.  While I realize that’s not cheap by any means, it was significantly less than I’d anticipated, and I immediately purchased it and two other bottles of Williams Selyem Zinfandel to tuck away into my cellar (AKA the cool/dark corner of my basement).

The slippery slope of oenophilia had landed and, where once I was a guy that simply knew he liked wine more than beer but felt he couldn’t afford it, I quickly became a guy that reads a dozen wine blogs a day and voraciously clamors for information.  Which brings us, windingly, to my poorly written point: One of those posts was written by Stephen Schenkenberg on stlmag.com about his favorite wine books and websites.  It’s a good list but, as a newcomer to this world of wine, I thought I’d offer up a newbie’s perspective (which you can read here in it’s shiny-new polite form, or as an stlmag comment in it’s original, several glasses in, grammatically incorrect–but possibly more entertaining–form)

Books
Oldman’s Guide to Outsmarting Wine: 108 Ingenious Shortcuts to Navigate the World of Wine with Confidence and Style – Mark Oldman
The “For Dummies” book without the word “dummy” on the cover.

Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 2009 Edition – Kevin Zraly
Every edition is always a great primer for people that don’t know a thing about wine.  I read it when I was 21 and I read a newer edition again when I was 31.

The Oxford Companion to Wine, 3rd Edition – Jancis Robinson
This is the tomb once you decide you’re into wine.  You’re not going to sit down and read this baby, but you’ll reference it like mad as points of interest crop up in your journey to wine enlightenment.

World Atlas of Wine – Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson
You read the Oxford Companion, and now you need to have some good maps so you have a better idea about just where your favorite 100% Northern Rhone syrah came from.

Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia: Fourth Edition, Revised – Tom Stevenson
Because you need an opinion that isn’t Jancis Robinson’s

Websites

cellartracker.com
Not only will you keep track of your increasing collection on this site, you can see who also rated your favorite wines high and cross reference it with other favorites of theirs you haven’t had.  It’s a great way to guarantee success.

vinography.com
Sure this guy’s often rating highly priced wines, but his biographies of winemakers and descriptions of vineyards keep me coming back for more even if I can’t always afford them–or even track them down.

drvino.com
Tyler Colman’s blog.  This is one of the more laid back wine blogs I’ve run across while still spewing forth a walloping wealth of information.  He’s also the guy who’s always calling it like it is and I get the impression he’s the guy the big wine dogs love to hate.

winespectator.com
Only for the forums which are infinitely more active then cellartracker’s–though they’re largely filled with point whores.

erobertparker.com
Only because Parker and Jay Miller’s tastes seem to be similar to mine.  When they score a wine big, I generally like it.  So the tip here is: find a reviewer whose opinion you actually approve of and read them.  A 100 point wine from a critic whose tastes varies wildly from your own serves you absolutely no purpose.

Note: I now know, by the way, that Williams Selyem should really be written Williams-Selyem as it was a winery founded by Ed Selyem and Burt Williams in the early eighties, and later sold (to John and Kathe Dyson) in the late nineties.  Whatever the case, it’s delicious, and I’m eagerly awaiting my first mailing list shipment proving the point that sometimes a down economy can, actually, get  you something…

Tags: blog, books, cellartracker.com, drvino.com, erobertparker.com, Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson, Jay Miller, Josh Galliano, Kevin Zraly, Mark Oldman, Niche, Robert Parker, Tom Stevenson, Tyler Colman, vinography.com, websites, Williams Selyem, winespectator.com