The election is over, and Barack Obama is our President-Elect. After 20 months, 20 candidates, many hundreds of millions spent, millions of hours of attention devoted to heated discussions, nasty political advertisements, withering analyses, bashing from the left, calumny from the right, whispered white lies and tissue-thin truths lying about like so many spent chads, I think it’s fair to say we could all use a drink.
It seems like years, eight at least, but I’m grateful that finally I have something to raise my glass to.
On election night I found myself in Davis, California, in the home of some friends of friends, who were weeping with joy — weeping, evoking John F. Kennedy, evoking Abraham Lincoln, quoting Martin Luther King, and I wondered to some friends when was the last time these eminences were brought into a conversation, as points of comparison? When had we last been inspired enough to remember that greatness is actually a part of our heritage, and that being in touch with that heritage made us better citizens, better men and women — it was, you might say, the engine of hope. Barack Obama was merely the messenger, but it was just wonderful to be reacquainted. I craved Champagne.
But be careful what you wish for. Just after McCain conceded, the party’s host, wearing Guatemalan draw-cord peasant pants in seven lurid shades of red, took me aside to ask my opinion about a bottle of Champagne he had on hand for the occasion. He asked me did I know it, was any good? I told him I didn’t know the producer, who oddly had a German name. ‘But,’ I added, ‘this bottle is warm, so…’ I thought that my mentioning this obvious point would be sufficient for him to lay it down for another day.
That was naïve. Either that, or in his paroxysms of joy, he decided not to care, and promptly opened the bottle to pour, for each member of his family and friends, a warm, foamy slug of wine with which to toast the moment.
The horror! Submitting friends to cheap or poorly presented wine not only breaks rules of decorum, but it sours the whole experience. Is it so hard to imagine that gagging on too-warm Champagne is enough not only to swear off the stuff forever, but also to reevaluate one’s values, because of the sheer unpleasantness of the experience? Can you understand the risk? Instead of feeling uplifted, ecstatic, moved, hopeful, what if the opposite occurs: as you flail blindly for something to recalibrate your taste buds and wash out the bitter, tacky, foamy mess in your mouth, it may occur to you, ‘better not to hope–better to adjust my expectations and settle for whatever the status quo has promised.’ You see what kind of disasters this can lead to?
Don’t make this mistake. The future of the country is in your hands. Let’s move on.
The changing of the guard in Washington seems a good occasion to challenge old assumptions about a lot of things, including wine. Recently I lined up a group of Australian Shiraz bottlings, from seven different regions of the country — Margaret River, Barossa, Coonawara, the Clare Valley, the Yarra Valley, Bendigo and Orange — and it was a lesson learned.
I began this exercise with some resignation. I must confess that Aussie shiraz is often a victim of my preconceptions long before it reaches my glass, and I think that a lot of other wine lovers share this bias. Aren’t they all what you expect, big blue lummox-ey wines, simple and jammy, approaching gag-levels of candied sweetness, the epitome of a Parker confection?
What I got instead was a revelation. These wines expressed an astonishing range of flavors and nuances. Some were duly powerful, of course, but many offered intriguing subtleties of flavor that I simply forget to attribute to Shiraz. The better wines from Barossa and Coonawara were smoky and brooding like Côte Rôtie; the wines from Yarra and Orange were brightly fruited and fine, with supple mouthfeels and precise textures, and alcohols in the 13% range, while the Margaret River Shirazes offered up levels of acidity that’s rare even in California Syrahs. The older vine wines possessed a vinous intensity that wouldn’t be out of place in the northern Rhône Valley. So where have these wines been, I wondered, and how had I managed to overlook them?
It seemed as if Australian Shirazes that were truly deserving of the stereotype, jampot wines like Mollydooker and Two Hands and the like, had completely tainted my sense of perspective. These gluey concoctions taste much the way Rush Limbaugh sounds — thick, bombastic, stupidly aggressive. A typical big Shiraz relies on heat and noise to make one very clunky statement for a crowd that isn’t interested in doing any thinking for themselves, but prefers to be riled up, bowled over, told what to think.
But there are alternatives. A jampot Shiraz can be as loud as it wants to be, but you don’t have to listen. Who knows, maybe the country is moving away from such bloviated windbags. One can only hope.
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For tasting notes on these Shiraz bottlings, head to the Wine Reviews page