Big In The Mouth

What's In A Name?

The first question I'm usually asked about Segue is not how it tastes, but how it's spelled. It's not spelled the way it looks, or the way it's pronounced— which is Seg-way. A Segway, spelled like this, is the motorized thing that resembles a hand lawn  mower with oversized wheels. It intuits where you want to go and gets you there based on some sort of advanced artificial intelligence that takes its cues from the soles of your feet.

On the ground or on the label of a bottle of  Pinot Noir,  segue is all about change, some sort of transition or journey, often musical. I used the word because it fit what I was up to, but on the other hand I didn’t hear any trumpet fanfares announcing my segue from wine writer who makes wine at home to commercial  Pinot Noir winemaker who writes at home.

What I  heard were a few loud grunts from some of the many folks I know who make wine for a living as they recalled their own hazardous adventures with the Pinot Noir grape, that demonic diva who  lures you into her boudoir to slit your throat as she nibbles on your earlobe.

Alder Yarrow has pretty much the same reaction to my undertaking  in his feature on Segue this week on his Vinography blog.  He likes the wine and he writes about it with his usual blend of wit and insight. He also knows me. “That he decided to get his start with one of the most notoriously finicky grapes on the planet probably tells you more about Stephen Yafa than anything else,” Yarrow remarks along the way.

This guy’s never met me, it doesn’t matter, he’s nailed me cold. If something’s easy to do, why bother?  When my wife, Bonnie, read Yarrow’s observation, she laughed out loud. She’s been saying the same thing for twenty-seven years about my reckless nature, and  for just about that long I haven’t listened. Somehow she’s mustered the grace and forbearance to make our journey together a voyage of constant discovery, and there’s nothing I've come across in any bottle, including mine, that comes close for pure, vintage soul satisfaction.

2006 Barrel Tasting: Part One

Winemaking  is located at the juncture of poetry and chemistry. It’s not a place you’d want to hang out if you  were in any kind of hurry, I was thinking last Saturday as I tasted through  2006 Russian River Pinot Noir barrels with my partner in crime, Greg LaFollette.

One of the great enjoyments or exasperations of  winemaking, in fact, is the time it takes to do all the things that resist  end-arounds and short-cuts. Boutique winemaking  is like writing letters in longhand with a quill, while the rest of the known world  is instant text messaging, emailing, and, yeah, blogging.  Ancient practices have been updated without any corresponding increase in speediness; human sweat  continues to trump technology.

Once they probably used hollow reeds to suck wines-in-progress out of the amphora for a sample swig. Now we  barrel-taste by sucking juice through a narrow plastic siphon tube from 60-gallon oak barrels. That’s about all the difference, 3000 years later. We still purse our lips, breathe in, try not to get it up our nose and hope for the best. As soon as the juice rushes through  we squeeze the tube and aim it toward the glass we hold in our other hand. Usually we get a little less precise as the hours wear on, which is why you see all those claret stains on wine barrels, which are not leaking from within.

But that’s the easy part. The thing that Greg and I were doing, that most boutique winemakers become skilled at, is a form of rock-climbing that doesn’t involve rocks. These filled barrels tower up as high as fifteen to  twenty feet  on steel racks, and although you can use a ladder, there’s a good chance you’ll also quickly learn to rise  to the top level by adroitly climbing up between vertical column of barrels, more or less wedging yourself skyward  as you hoist  your weary torso up with a grunt from one barrel to the next, left then right then left as if ascending  a narrow gap by staggering your steps between ridiculously large boulders.

In one hand you hold your torch—small flashlight, standard equipment—and in the other, your siphon hose and tasting glass. It’s not quite an Olympic event, but there’s enough going on—and an unforgiving concrete floor below—to make you pay close attention.  Over several hours we tasted through ten barrels from six different vineyards.

By “tasted “, I mean that we siphoned off a small amount into our glasses after illuminating the dark bung hole  with our torch and sucking up the fluid. By “tasted” I mean that each time we swirled the new wine, sipped it, gurgled it, and spit it out—sometimes in an arc, twenty feet above ground. By “tasted” I mean that we tried not to swallow, because wine is the enemy of winemakers. When drunk even in small amounts, it tends to dull the taste buds—that’s the alcohol at work—so you learn quickly to spit,   into floor drains, and accurately whenever possible, or anywhere you can when not possible, the way tobacco chewers treated the world around them as one vast spittoon  in The Old West.

As for the 2006 wines-in-barrel we tasted, and the different flavor that each of the different barrels is imparting to them, slowly but surely—more on that in the next installment. They were tricky to harvest for a variety of reasons, but all that may soon be forgotten.