THE 20 NEW RULES OF DRINKING ( AND BUYING) WINE (Part 2)

THE 20 NEW RULES OF DRINKING (AND BUYING) WINE (PART 2)

Thanks to a generation of adventurous lushes, the wine world is younger and funner and delicious-er than ever. Here's all you need to know to navigate that world, find the best bottles (and cans!), drink above your pay grade, and say screw you to the old rules.

RULE NO. 6

Natural Wine is Getting Americanized

For a while, natural wine was what we heard every hipster in France was into. Now it's thoroughly integrated into the drinking culture of places like Brooklyn, where LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy has opened a natural-wine bar (The Four Horsemen), and Portland, Maine, where Here We Go Magic drummer Peter Hale now runs a natural-wine shop (Maine & Loire). Though the term “natural” means different things to different people, in general it's made without all the junk—industrial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, enzymes, sugar, and the dreaded additive known as Mega Purple—that turns wine into a homogenized product, the viticultural equivalent of Nickelback. “You can expect a whole lot more from a wine that's made naturally,” Hale says, “because there's more potential for idiosyncratic flavors or textures—a greater sense of wine being unique.” Enjoying it means understanding that a given wine's quirks aren't imperfections. They're conscious aesthetic choices.

RULE NO. 7

Robert Parker Can S.T.F.U. Now

Love ya, Bobby, but your reign as the Only Wine Writer Who Matters is over—and so are the days when a 0-to-100-point scale (which always felt more like a 90-to-93 scale, anyway) dictated what we drank. There are now a thousand sources to help us find, understand, order, and enjoy more wine. Here are three we trust.

THE APP
Snap a photo of any wine label with your phone. Boom: The Vivino app gives you crowd-sourced tasting notes, the average retail price, and suggested food pairings. Somehow it works on restaurant wine lists, too. Twenty million users can't be wrong.

THE BLOG
Alongside pics of her chugging from the bottle, Marissa A. Ross's blog (Wine. All the Time.) bursts with irreverent reviews. One recent white was described as having “all the quintessential Sauv-Blanc shit in there—the citrus, the greenery, the subtle air of cat piss.”

THE E-SHOP
The superb Hudson Valley shop Suburban Wines sells discounted bottles via newsletter. Many of the wines—like a $12 Moroccan red from Ouled Thaleb—are total surprises, and (though your FedEx guy will loathe you) Suburban ships to your front door.

RULE NO. 8

You Can Tell More From the Back of the Label than the Front

THE THREE FOXES
1. This is the producer, a.k.a. the winemaker.

CLAIRETTE BLANCHE
2. This is the grape. Clairette Blanche is white, with origins in France and a musky apple flavor.

ALC 11.5% BY VOL
3. Most mass-market wine hovers around 13 percent alcohol, which means this one goes down easier.

OH NO, SULFITES?!
4. Yeah, they're preservatives. And yeah, some asthmatics can react to them. But most people don't.

IMPORTED BY
5. Love a wine? Note the importer, then search for other bottles it brings in. Two names to look for: Percy Selections (for Spanish and French natural wines) and Kermit Lynch (for French and Italian).

UNFILTERED AND UNFINED
6. Fining is a process for clarifying wine. Declining to filter or fine is considered non-interventionist winemaking and suggests the wine will be on the wild side.

RULE NO. 9

...Unless the Front of Your Label Looks Like This

Thanks to the Blaxploitation-style artwork for his take-no-prisoners red, Machete, Orin Swift winemaker Dave Phinney has developed a reputation not only for the wine he makes but for the way he labels it. More and more producers are like that these days. They'll commission original artwork or put their own eighth-grade yearbook photo on the label. Anything to wipe away the pretension and predictability of yet another vineyard sketch.

RULE NO. 10

Have a Wine Emergency? Just Grab One of These

So you're running late for a dinner party and you know nothing about wine and you can't remember anything else you read in these pages. Don't panic: You can find this instantly recognizable Zinfandel blend in many of the same strip-mall shops that sell Yellow Tail, and its flavor blows the kangaroo away. Your host will thank you.

Bonus rule: Buy anything this man makes. He's vine whisperer Hardy Wallace, one half of irreverent California winemaking duo Dirty and Rowdy, which embodies all the intense flavors and cheeky attitude of the new-wine movement.

Source: GQ

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