Wednesdays on the BottleBlog will feature an education session on wine, beer or spirits. Today Shannon Spare shares her experiences as a beginner in the World of Wine.
Welcome to part 2 of my Wine 101 Blog: Aroma. As I said in my first installment on color, my name is Shannon and I manage the website content and blog here at Joe Canal's. While I've drunk wine, and liked wine, for many years, I never really had the opportunity to get to know a whole lot about it. Now, I'm getting paid to learn, and I'm happy to share my experiences with you!
The first time I ever really noticed the aroma of a wine was a few years ago, long before my tenure with Joe Canal's began. I was six months pregnant, attending a business dinner at a nice Italian restaurant. To celebrate, my co-workers picked up a couple bottles of wine to share. Of course, due to my condition I couldn't partake of the wine, but the people to either side of me were both enjoying very large, very full, very fragrant glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon. The smell was so fine, and so strong, I found myself salivating. At the time, I just chalked it up to A.) being pregnant and having a hyper-sensitive sense of smell, and B.) not having had wine for over 6 months and just really wanting a glass. I got through the evening without a sip, but that smell stuck with me for months. I couldn't stop thinking about it! Even the first glass of wine I had after my daughter was born didn't live up to the memory of the exquisite aroma from that evening.
Fast forward 11 months, to my first week at here at Joe Canal's. Every Friday and Saturday we have free wine tastings, and on my way out the door, I stopped to taste the weekend wines. Being a newbie, I tried to emulate all of my more educated workmates, swirling the wine, watching for "legs," and sticking my nose deep into the glass. I didn't expect much, since most wines still smell the same to me. When I came to the last wine, however, I was blown away! It was the Rodney Strong Cabernet Sauvignon, and arguably the most expensive wine I'd ever tasted (or smelled). And there it was again - that smell, that awesome delicious smell! It was the first time I realized that I wasn't just having a super duper pregnant craving at the Italian restaurant, it was probably that the wine was super duper aromatic.
When tasting wine, it's especially important to pay attention to how the wine smells. In a lot of ways, the way the wine smells is more important than it tastes. Have you ever noticed that when you have a bad head cold, most foods taste a lot more bland than usual? That's because 80% of what we taste is attributable to our sense of smell.
Before I became a Wine-Enthusiast-in-Training, I would make jokes about "oaky undertones" to my friends and family when drinking wine. The truth of the matter is that, with wine, certain flavors can be brought out by how the wine is made. While it's true that wine is made from grapes, if it's aged in oak you might be able to taste clove or vanilla, or the actual oak itself. (My "oaky undertones" joke has become a lot less funny since I've actually been able to notice them.) "Malolactic fermentation" (a process in which bacteria is added to fermenting wine) might produce a butterscotch or popcorn smell.
I have had the opportunity to attend a couple wine festivals and tastings. I've gone to many wine festivals in the past, but it's a much different experience for me now that I have this new mindset. For the first time, I've actually been able to notice different scents. I still find that a lot of wines taste the same to me after a while (especially reds) but paying attention to the aroma has been really fun for me. At a tasting, I tasted a variety of seven dry red wines, the last two of which were "oaked". When we got to the sixth wine, I was amazed at how strong I could actually smell the oakiness. It totally smelled like wood! It's a slow going process, but I've also been able to pick out pineapple and chocolate in the wines that I have tasted (and smelled).
Reading tasting notes has been an interesting experience for me as well: Did you know that there are wines out there that actually smell like lead pencil shavings, slate or chalk? And, believe it or not, tobacco is an aroma that comes up fairly often.
Did you know that just about every Friday and Saturday, the Joe Canal's stores in Woodbridge and Lawrenceville have free wine tastings? I definitely urge you to stop in and taste for yourself, especially if you're a newbie like me! Just check the events page on jcanals.com to see what we're pouring, and stop in!
Next time I'll talk more in depth about the tastings I've gone to recently. Until then, I'd love to hear your stories and experiences of learning about wine, just leave me a comment!
Kahlua is a liqueur made in Mexico from the finest Arabica coffee beans and sugarcane. The two ingredients are grown side by side in rural Veracruz. The beans are actually the seeds of grape-like "coffee cherries," which are harvested from October to March. The cherries are pulped and processed, and the coffee beans are extracted. The beans are air-dried and aged in burlap sacks for a minimum of six months. 
Kahlua is the main ingredient in many popular cocktails.
B-52 (shot)
The ideal storage temperature of wine is 50 to 55 degrees fahrenheit, but a range of 45 to 70 degrees is considered completely acceptable. What's important is that the storage temperature remain constant or, if it changes, that the change not be drastic. The warmer temperatures of the summer cause wine to age faster, so if you're the type that doesn't care much for AC unless it's unbearable, now might be the time to relocate those special bottles you're saving to your cooler basement for a while. If you're like me and don't have a basement, very wine refrigerators are available for under $100. They hold, generally, around 16 bottles of wine and are compact enough to keep on your kitchen counter. 
Sangria was born in Spain and is traditionally made with red wine, brandy and fruits. While Sangria was only introduced in the United States at the World's Fair in 1964, the drink has been around for centuries. A few weeks ago I posted about how beer was considered "safe" to drink because water was often contaminated - well, the same is true for Sangria. Many families would make their own wine from fruits and berries, and then they'd add other fruits and spices to change the drink up and add new, interesting flavors.
Our office manager, Karen, is indulging in a sushi dinner tonight at a local restaurant. She was asking around for suggestions, and of course the first thing to come to mind is the traditional sushi beverage, sake!
Tequila is made only in Mexico. The country even has an international right to the name and threatens legal actions on other countries that try to manufacture the liquor. It comes from the blue agave cactus, which can only be grown in certain parts of Mexico that have a favorable red-volcanic soil.
There's a common association with tequila and the presence of a worm. The presence of a worm in a type of tequila called mezcal, was actually started as a marketing gimmick in the 1940s. In truth, the presence of a worm in the agave plant indicates an infestation, and if there's a worm in the tequila it's a very poor quality spirit. 
An interesting product was brought to the attention of the Internet gurus that work in the offices of Joe Canal's. It's an Imperial Oatmeal Stout that's brewed with coffee. While this isn't too impressive (there are plenty of delicious coffee stouts), the particular coffee that is used to brew this beer is not just any coffee.
The coffee used to brew Beer Geek Brunch is called Kopi Luwak, and it is one of the world's most expensive coffees. In Indonesian, the word kopi means coffee, and the word luwak is the local name of a weasel-like cat called a civet. The coffee is made from the beans of coffee cherries (did you know that coffee is actually a cherry?) which have been eaten by the civets, and passed through their digestive tracts. While the civets love the fleshy pulp of the coffee berries, the beans inside are undigestable. Enzymes seep deep into the beans, breaking them down and simplifying the acids within. Nature takes its course, and the beans are expelled from the civet, intact. After gathering, the beans are thoroughly (thoroughly!!) washed and then dried in the sun. After the beans are lightly roasted and brewed, the resulting coffee has much less bitterness than other types of coffee, with a beautiful aroma. 
This past Saturday, Tony Sirico from The Sopranos stopped by our Woodbridge store to meet his fans and sign bottles of the Sopranos Chianti Classico. While everyone waited to meet him, the owner of the Sopranos wines told the crowd a little bit about the particular wine, I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to foray into the world of Italian Wines and learn a little more about Chianti!
The black rooster (or gallo nero) is a symbol of the Consorzio Chianti Classico, a foundation of producers in the Classico region. The foundation was founded with the aim of promoting the wines in the region, improving quality and preventing wine fraud.
Rum is a sweet spirit that is made, aptly, from sugarcane and aged in oak barrels, typically. Yeast is added to the sugarcane to begin the fermenting process. Most rum producers use very specific strains of yeast so that the resulting liquor can be easily controlled in terms of consistency of color and flavor.
The past few weeks, Mixology Mondays have explored the favorites of Hemingway and the alcohol references in Dickens' body of work. Today, thanks to this awesome book (Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers) graciously lent to me by my boss, I can share some more favorites of other well-known authors. Apparently, as is the case with most of the arts, alcohol consumption is rampant in the literary community. What better to help with creativity then to loosen up with a cocktail?
Unlike most writers, William Faulkner, from the very beginning of his career, drank while he wrote. He claimed, "I usually write at night. I always keep my whiskey within reach." That he did. In Hollywood, hired by director Howard Hawks to write Road to Glory, Faulkner showed up to a script meeting carrying a brown paper bag.
You may find a system that works better for you, but here's what I find works great for me. My notebook is from the Staples Arc brand. It has these little discs that hold the pages together so that they're easily removed. (A 3-ring notebook would serve the same purpose.) Pretty "Tasting Notes" books are widely available for sale, but most of them are hard-bound. I like being able to remove the pages and shuffle them around. Right now I have three dividers: Reds, Whites and "Other," where I put roses, sparkling wines and dessert wines. Within the dividers I have the wines organized alphabetically by winery. In the future, if I want to compare all the Cabernet Sauvignons I've tasted, I will have the ability to remove the pages and arrange them by varietal. It's nice to have the ability to pop in a page where it fits, and not have to flip through 30 wines to find the one I'm looking for.