So, like, what is this stuff, anyway?
I taste a bunch-o-wine (technical term for more than most people). So each week, I share some of my wine reviews (mostly from samples) and tasting notes with you via twitter (limited to 140 characters). They are meant to be quirky, fun, and easily-digestible reviews of currently available wines. Below is a wrap-up of those twitter wine reviews from the past week (click here for the skinny on how to read them), along with links to help you find these wines, so that you can try them for yourself. Cheers!

• 10 Mud House Pinot Noir (Central Otago): Through a red currant, darkly. Also spicily, pith-ily, and somewhat sweet-toast-ily. $19 B >>find this wine<<
• 09 Mud House South Island Pinot Gris (South Island): Toasty, friendly, and carrying melons. Like, back-up-the-truck volume of melons. $16 B- >>find this wine<<
• 09 Mud House Waipara Riesling (Waipara): Mineral water bath, in a slate-and-flint tub, lime zest soap and can of diesel at the ready. $12 B- >>find this wine<<
• NV Grahams Twenty Year Tawny Porto (Porto): Richer than a sultan, toastier and smokier than his hookah, and silkier than his robes. $59 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 10 Firestone Vineyard Syrah (Santa Ynez Valley): An entire meal here, from jammy fruit to smokey meat to a Nilla Wafer for dessert. $25 B >>find this wine<<
• 10 Firestone Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon (Santa Ynez Valley): Has energy, but gets picked on by its cheaper South American cousins. $22 B- >>find this wine<<
• 09 Firestone Vineyard Merlot (Santa Ynez Valley): An amorphous black fruit form that eventually settles into a smokey, solid stance. $20 B >>find this wine<<
• 11 Firestone Vineyard Riesling (Santa Ynez Valley): A bit wobbly on its feet, but it is trying very hard to make friends with you. $14 B- >>find this wine<<
• 09 Cuvelier Los Andes (Mendoza): If dark plums made some sort of blood sausages out of themselves in a hedonistic, cannibalistic feast $25 B >>find this wine<<
• NV Gloria Ferrer Sonoma Brut (Sonoma County): An orchard full of green apples, aggressively blowing bubbles at frequent intervals. $22 B >>find this wine<<
• NV Gloria Ferrer Blanc de Noirs (Carneros): Remember Cherry Jam from Strawberry Shortcake? This is like her baking high-end pastries. $22 B >>find this wine<<
• NV Gloria Ferrer VA de VI Ultra Cuvee (Sonoma County): Lemon peel, peach, and bread walk into a bar… then they get pretty wasted. $22 B >>find this wine<<
• 10 Gloria Ferrer Carneros Chardonnay (Carneros): Trying to make itself look busty, but its slim and slender build is already pretty. $18 B >>find this wine<<
• 10 Gloria Ferrer Carneros Pinot Noir (Carneros): Floral/fruity shirt with tight, taut leather pants. But moves well on the dance floor $27 B >>find this wine<<
• 07 Navarro Correas Structura Ultra (Mendoza): A burly, burlesque entry buffeted by a broad, bracing, bright, and brisk denouement. $40 A- >>find this wine<<
• 10 Kaiken Ultra Cabernet Sauvignon (Mendoza): Dark cassis, toast and the depth you'd expect from vines twice as old as most of you. $22 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 10 Kaiken Ultra Malbec (Mendoza): So chewy, meaty, big and savory, you just might think you'd been served steak in that glass. $20 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 10 Pence Ranch Estate Pinot Noir (Santa Barbara County): Carries a redcurrant-and-leather whip, ready and able for cattle rustlin'. $30 B+ >>find this wine<<

Last month, I was away in Mendoza playing Team America as an International judge in the 2013 Argentina Wine Awards. The AWAs were followed by a seminar that centered on the topic of how to reach “next generation” (Millennial) wine consumers. Today, I’m going to focus on the Trophy results of the AWAs – but believe me, a lot more is coming on the seminar and the topic of Millennial wine drinkers (including thoughts on the wines that my co-judges believed appealed to those next gen drinkers) later.

I’ve two main takeaways from the 2013 AWAs, which are organized by Wines of Argentina (who footed the bill for my participation) and Hunt & Cody (a UK-based team consisting of MW Jane Hunt and Tina Cody):

1) I was self-conscious just to be in the same room as the rest of the judges, all of whom I felt outranked me in terms of tasting prowess, winemaking knowledge and industry accomplishments (I feel privileged to have made fast friends with many of them), and

2) If you try to taste thirteen Gold Medal winning Malbecs in only a few minutes and rank them in order of preference so that a Trophy winner can be determined, you will destroy your palate’s ability to taste anything (including coffee, tea, air, water and, I suspect, crude oil) for several minutes afterward.

The entire process of judging was incredibly fun (despite being shut up in a large conference room in the Diplomatic hotel while the sun was raging all Summer-style outside our windows), and enjoyed seeing the different tolerances we all had as tasters. For example, the UK judges putting up with more Brett (having ben schooled on Old World / Western European wines), the Chinese judge having a higher tolerance for oxidation (because so much international wine reaches her only after it’s been impacted by oxygen), the Argentine winemaking judges almost universally accepting high levels of VA (sought after to smooth out the mouthfeel of those tersely tannic Malbecs).

As for yours truly, receiving boatloads of California samples has taken its toll: I clearly had higher tolerances for oak influences and riper fruits. Sigh…

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Earlier this month, I was a guest lecturer at a wine class for undergrads at Drexel University in downtown Philly. The class is taught by Jason Wilson (author of the very entertaining spirits book Boozehound and who somehow Id never met in Philly; it took a chance encounter at one of the Professional Wine Writers Symposium events in Napa for us to become friends)

Talk about flashbacks (but not those kinds of flashback!) – the impressive great court of Drexel’s Main Building and its serpentine staircases leading to the back classrooms reminded me in no small way of trying to find the Philosophy classroom at my alma matter’s (SJU) Barbelin Hall. I got the sense that a lot of 21-year-old students would’ve been very late trying to get to that Drexel class for the first time (and if you can make it back out after tasting ten-or-so wines without spitting… more power to you).

I was there to talk about the wine regions of Australia (which I’d recently visited), and taste the class through a sampling of wines from those locales, the theme of which, as I tried to summarize early in the likely eventuality that I’d completely lose control of the class later, was “in America we tend to treat French wine regions as if they’re continents apart when in reality you can drive between several of them in a couple of hours; but Australia we treat as one big dessert, when in reality their wine regions really are continents apart!”

Jason has published a fun and insightful take on the class – and on wine talk in general – over at Table Matters (a story in which I play the part of a Brett Nazi, though my reaction to the Bretty wine might have been a bit over-emphasized in that tale… or not, I was onto beer by then, so who knows…).

Scanning the faces of those kids (I can call them “kids” now that I’m 40, right?), sitting in two rows against the long side of the cramped rectangular classroom, I got a microcosm of the East Coast wine drinking future. Some stared pretty intently, offering quiet comments when a topic or wine really struck them. Others were yawning (hey, Wine Appreciation is a better elective than “Math Models In Chemistry,” right?). And others were clearly having revelations about their own tastes and the at lovable madness that is the diversity of wine just within Australia itself.

None of them had any fear whatsoever of trying a new region, grape, or blend. None of them had any concern more pressing than the price point of each bottle ($12 and under seemed to be the realistic cut off for future purchases).

And none of them – not a single one – has ever followed the advice of a wine critic…

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Welcome to the Weekly Wine Quiz, peoples.

Based on feedback from ever-so-vocal-and-intelligent peeps like you, I supply the quiz question each week, but do *not* supply the quiz answer directly in the post. That’s because YOU are supposed to supply the answer in the comments, and then tune back in later today in the comments section for the official answer. Because it’s more fun to keep you in suspense (and I’m a jerk like that). To make the suspense worse, I might be delayed in getting around to posting the answer since I’m on the road (again, again, again) this week – your patience is of course appreciated!

Today continues our recent theme on oak, with a decidedly stinky twist…

Hold Your Nose!

Wine barrels are often blamed as the culprit behind the animal and rubbery aromas associated with contamination of wine by yeast of the genus Brettanomyces. What is generally considered the perception threshold of “Brett” above which most people will be able to pick out those aromas?

• A. 500 mg/l
• B. 700 mg/l
• C. 750 mg/l
• D. 900 mg/l

Cheers – and good luck!