My bar did have a special wine-tasting a while back that featured the St. Laurent winery from Washington state.  Even the winemaker himself, Craig Mitrakul, came in person to present the wines.  That, in and of itself, lends him an air of awesomeness in my heart.

Mitrakul poured out five different wines: a riesling, the Lucky White blend, a merlot, the Lucky Red blend, and a syrah.  According to Mitrakul, the mentality behind creating the white and red blends was not about the snooty pontification on chemical makeup, soil, water, acidity or any other “blah” details like those — instead, he simply said, “We just wanted to make something that tasted good.”  Finally, simplicity in a winemaking mentality!  I just about planted a big, sloppy wet one on him out of gratitude.

It turned out that I was probably the only employee who liked the Lucky White.  I liked the smell of it (flowers….?), and I liked that it tasted sort of sweet but not cloyingly so.  Everyone else loved the bouquet but didn’t care for the actual taste.

Oh well.  That just means there’s more for me to drink, because this writer needs to keep the DTs away somehow.

In any case, it’s really an epic search.  You’d think that, the way these girls rabidly read the latest update on “This Season’s $10-Bottle,” that it was a gold-plated key to the hiding place of the Ark of the Covenant and Hugh Hefner’s long-lost virginity.  I’ve sampled bottles in the $10-$20 range, and none of them have really blown my skirt up.

First off, I got a bottle of some Paso Robles … thing … for $10 on sale.  It tasted like, well, a red wine.  I can’t distinguish between reds, unless it’s flavored with something really significant, like pepper, asphalt, or dead baby.  We paired it with some venison, and the boys I was eating it with thought it went well with the meat, but wasn’t anything overly fantastic.  I just thought it needed something stronger and better in it, like vodka.   Or, hell, even a damn dead baby.

… I’m really doing badly at this whole process of learning to like wine.

Next up, I gave Thorn-Clarke’s Terra Bossa Shiraz a try.  The bottle costs around $17, and it’s a wine that comes from the Barossa Valley area of Australia.  Before I gave it a good try, I read up on it first.  Nothing in my readings gave me any suggestions for pairings, except for the marvelously vague “goes well with full-flavored meals.”  Thanks, jackasses.  But reviews did repeatedly mention a dark-chocolate aftertaste, so I took that and ran with it.  The wine did end up going well with a bar of Hershey’s Special Dark.  (At least, that’s what other people told me.  I still had a mouthful of red wine I couldn’t identify.)

Maybe diving head-first into red wines was a bad idea.  No, wait, scratch that — I didn’t dive; I hopped in like a flailing kid on uppers.

The fine mix of artistry, chemistry, agriculture, biology and snobbery that goes into wine is enough to make this writer’s head swim. I like art, but I don’t usually sniff it loudly, swish it about in my mouth, spit it out and proclaim it “too sweet.” I appreciate chemistry, but I could barely understand what catalyzed what when I had to be graded on it back in school. Agriculture? I like eating vegetation and the cows that feed on it. In my little world, biology is what drives me to mate. And snobbery is, honestly, something I tend to associate with people having their noses high up in the air when they’re not snorting a glass of wine, cheeses with eight syllables in their names, and just the entire yuppie-seeming world of wine. Especially red wine. (Evil, pants-staining bastard.) I don’t even like the taste of wine; give me a fun beer or a great liquor, and I’m a happy, happy person.

The ultimate cosmic irony is that I’ve recently started working at a wine bar.

In order to do well at my job and help guests who come into the bar, I have to eventually know what I’m selling. That all sounds fine and dandy until you realize just what kind of vernacular is used to describe a wine’s taste: berry, cassis (what the $%*@ is “cassis,” anyway?), currant, dry, tannins, sweet, cinnamon, chocolate (what the crap is chocolate doing in wine, I ask you?), or leather. Yes, LEATHER was a word I saw used as a descriptor for the aftertaste of a wine we sell.

OK, vintners; now I know you’re just trying to confuse me to the point where my brains start dribbling out of my ears while I sit in the corner drooling a little. But goshdarnit, I am going to learn about wines. Heck, I might even start tasting them and trying to figure out what flavors I can actually pick out (while I’m busy gagging at the general taste of wine).

Oh, it’s on.