Knowing Enough to Drive Off A Cliff

When I was a fledgling wine steward trying to earn my wings, my wine director, aka my boss; aka "such-a-character-he-merits-his-own-book," told us in a wine consultant meeting about this occasional specimen of humanity that comes into ones wine department and plays "Stump the Wine Guy." Being as green as I was all those years past, I felt my defenses go up as I knew my relatively new confidence was held ever fragile by my passion to learn. At this point, I knew I would not be ready if I found myself thrust into a situation where I had to defend my wine knowledge and recommendations.

That gave me the drive to seek out more knowledge and information about wine because as fearful as it made me, I was also excited at the prospect of meeting this challenge. I imagined the sense of pride if I would have felt if I could defend my positions like a debate team creaming their opponents; with methodical, precision strikes and yes, glee. Sadly or I should say, fortunately, I have never had to go to those extremes. The customers I have served since have been a wonderful lot and were eager to learn what I had gleaned from wine makers ,books and the internet.

I have since developed a more mature approach to my methods often giving the customers the benefit that I may also learn something through my discourse with them about wine. It has proven very useful as until now I find that I still can learn one or two new things every other day from my customers.

It was shortly after noon on Wednesday 2/24/2009. GM, I'm sure it wasn't his real name or it was haphazardly abbreviated) walked into my store almost with his chest stuck out (although I think his pot belly was doing a better job) and his hands in his pockets. He was man of average height with a heavy build in his late 40s dressed in an old work shirt and even older blue jeans. He had a bright red baseball cap on, the ones you get when you attend a company function. I saw him from the other side of the store but I did not think much of him as I was heading up to the office to finish some paper work.

In the midst of my tasks, I was paged to come help a customer on the floor from one of the staff. GM was holding a bottle of Beringer White Zinfandel 1.5L. At first, I greeted him cordially and asked how I could be of assistance. The first thing I realized about GM was that he comes uncomfortably close to you when he shook your hand, barely gets your name when you give it and he tells the story of his name like he had rehearsed it a thousand times and still get the punchline to the joke wrong. ("Like General Motors" was the punchline) Okay. sometimes we get drunks here and this guy definitely fit the bill. But instead of removing him from my store, which was well within my rights, I allowed this conversation to continue.

What I thought was a normal request for my assistance turned out to be long drawn out Q&A session about tannins, how blush wine is made, dryness levels, health from wines and other minutia that will test the most patient Buddhist monks. The sad thing about it was that it wasn't even a real intellectual discussion more like a "look-what-I-know about..." while claiming to have had what he thought was rare and expensive wine. (Chateau Greysac is not rare and expensive wine, though it is a good one. I think it was one of the few wines he could remember). He even told me that I was not the wine guy and that I want to be the wine guy. At which I promptly corrected him and proved it by answering two more wine questions he threw at me. The last straw was when he told me the Mouton Cadet had nothing to do with Barone Phillippe de Rothschilde. I went into overdrive and explained the connection and differences between the Pauillac property, Mouton Rothschilde and the Bordeaux AOC Mouton Cadet. I bitched slapped this guy's ignorance to the ground and body slammed his ass out of the ring, metaphorically anyway. Mind you, all this done with a smile on my face masking seething rage at this guy's audacity to come into my workplace, take up almost 30 minutes of my time exclusively (there were other customers waiting), insulting my professional credibility and not having the decency to admit to his own flawed logic.

He did eventually make a decison and bought a Lindeman South Australia Cabernet Sauvignon 1.5L and seemed happy about it. I, on the other hand felt that this was not the "victory" I had wanted to realize when I was staring out in my career in this industry. It was an unfair match-up and GM was outclassed.

It did, however, impressed upon me (after I had calmed down later) the need to educate everyone about this subject. Not just the completely new but this lot which I like to call the KEDOC customer or the "Know Enough to Drive Off a Cliff, the one who is not completely ignorant of wine but has enough information to be dangerous as he can lead others to the join him over that cliff.

New Orleans CMS Class Aftermath

This was a reply I got from the CMS Master Sommelier, Tim Gaiser. Apparently, they read the blog and wanted to clarify some information with me. Bear in mind, I had wound up at the last row of the class because the Marriot sent me on a wild goose chase about the class' location. So the Wine Zen couldn't really hear all of the information as clearly as he would like plus the breakneck speed of the class didn't help. So I apologize for getting some of the names wrong on the initial blog (heck! how could I have forgotten to include Guy, the MS from Texas.) So my thanks goes out to Tim for his help in keeping the Wine Zen accurate.

Now all I have to do is convince some of these cognac producers to take a refresher class.



On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 8:25 AM,

Jonathan, hope all is well. Your latest blog post came up via Google alerts yesterday. Thanks for all the good comments about the class. Much appreciated. I did want to get back to you with some corrections in terms of the content. The instructors included myself, Randa Warren, Brian Koziol, and Guy Stout. To your point, there are over 750 slides presented during the two days and that’s a lot of information—hence the outline hand out that’s taken directly from the PPT. We don’t give students a print out of the PPT for obvious reasons—with the notes form of PPT there would still be well over 250 pages—a lot of wasted paper, certainly environmentally unsound, and a logistically challenging. Also to your point, the CMAA people were given a heads up on what to study several weeks before the class and also a general idea of how the two days would proceed. They also paid more for the class simply because their tuition included meals for both days and a reception after the end of the class--all set up through the CMAA. Keep in mind they were taking the class for credit towards a specific CMAA accreditation. As for other comments, the Cognac subzones are indeed correct and taken from AOC law. The Domaine Baumard you mentioned is from Savennieres and not Sancerre—a totally different animal. Otherwise, thanks again for your time in taking the class and also for posting comments. Please let me know if you have any questions.

My Reply:

Thank you for the corrections. I am honored you took the time to view my blog and offered objective view points to help us all in our journey to enjoy wine.

In New Orleans with the Court of Masters Sommeliers

After 3 days and 2 nights, the Wine Zen is ready to get home. The classes for the Court of Masters Sommeliers Introductory Course were long and there was barely enough time to cover everything we needed to know about wine, let alone spirits, beers and sake. A portion of the class, I was looking forward to learning, cigars, was cancelled flat out.

4 Master Sommeliers Tim Gaiser, Randa Warren, Guy Stout, Brian Koziol, ran the class as well as they could. Tim, Randa and Guy were the veteran MS-es and were able to pull information from their vast stores of travel experience. Brian did not have their vast personal experiences but he made up for it in technical expertise and sheer passion. Everything was there, the professionals and information but the weak link was time. Quite literally it was like taking sips of water from a fire hose.

I pity the folks who came here and thought they were going to be spoon-fed information while having their hands held for this mind job of a class. The frustration started to mount as almost all of the 45+ participants told me that they barely had time to take any notes as frames of PowerPoint slides just zipped by on an average of 20 seconds. I think some were ready to write letters to the CMS through their organizations. In a partial defense to the CMS, people were warned though to do their pre-class readings at least a month ahead of the class date. Of course it would be better if the schedules for 2009 classes came out earlier than the end of December 2008. Still we were warned nevertheless.

With wine retail it isn't as if December was a free time for me, I had managed to skim through most of my reading material and most of the information was already active and used everyday. Still I knew where my weaknesses lay, Burgundy, Italy and Spain. Thankfully, when it came to exam time, these regions were covered pretty generally. I disagreed with some of the information in the course. For example, the classifications for Cognac the CMS listed were very different from the ones actual cognac producers told me. So it boils down to believing the people how learn and teach about cognac or believing the people who actually make and sell the stuff for decades.

The blind tasting portions of the class although not part of the test were a good peek into what was expected of you if you wanted to be a certified sommelier. I must admit, I was not at the top of my game. I had been tasting wine all this time from the stand point of enjoyment and price to quality ratios, not playing guess the wine. So I had to dust off the sections I had long ignored , the visual aspect. To me if a wine tasted good you won't be able to see it go down in your mouth anyway. Furthermore, wine makers everywhere are using a variety of new techniques to make a wine look how they want it to look. One particular white wine I thought was incredibly complex was a Savennieres. It actually threw off blue cheese notes. All the MS-es loved it and it was a fabulous wine but I knew that the majority of the folks would not like this wine. When a vote was taken in the room, 80% did not like the wine. It was the Domaine des Baumard Savennieres 2004. Just goes to show you that it still takes courage to make wine that are really terroir driven. Especially when nobody understands that terroir.

Still the frustration built up so much from striking out so much that there was a time where I questioned my faith in my abilities and my career choice. Then came the last set of wines of 2 whites and 2 reds. I got them all right down to the varietals, region and even vintage, something I have always had a problem doing blind. (Whew! Now I don't have to take a welding course and do construction.)

So yours truly is now one step closer to being a certified sommelier. I think the classes were informative and fun but I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that for almost $500 per person and having to fly to New Orleans and book a room at the hotel, the least the CMS could do was give us a copy of the PowerPoint slides in print. We didn't get to keep that. Still it could be worse, I could have been part of another group there that had a joint function with CMS and had pay close to $900 per person. Yikes!