Tete de Cuvee Rose Tasting
As a wine writer, I get invited to a lot of tastings. As a person with a full-time job, I don’t go to all of them. I disregard some, hope to make some — and then can’t — and occasionally find myself at one. Then there are the tastings that get me to take time off so I can attend.
When I got a note from Schramsberg, America’s prestigious sparkling wine maker, inviting me to a tasting between Schramsberg’s wines and comparable wines from around the world, I jumped at the chance. And that was when I expected it to be a small but standard press tasting: Too many people in too small a space, industry friends chattering away while blocking the spit bucket, and a line-up of interesting wines.
When I showed up on Monday morning, after an hour and a half of hungover driving, I was one of nine people in the room, most of whom were in the winemaking business. A line of 12 glasses — it was a blind tasting — had been arrayed in front of each seat. We even had individual spit buckets.
As Hugh Davies, the company’s president, explained, we were there to taste wines from a similar class and see how they fared against each other. He and his staff do this periodically. I had signed up for the Tête de Cuvée Rosé tasting, which meant we were tasting some very nice brands indeed: Bollinger, Cristal, Taittinger, Dom Perignon, and of course the J. Schram sparkling rosés. Most were vintage bottles.
Pencils scratched out notes and glasses went up and down — and sometimes up and down again — as we quietly evaluated these prestigious pink wines. Then we gave our rankings and discussed them.
I consider myself knowledgeable about wine. I have that obsessive geek thing, and I put a lot of research into my articles, which I generally consider to be worthwhile contributions to the wine press. (Indeed, one of those pieces, about efforts to combat urban sprawl in wine regions, had made enough of an impression to get me to this tasting.) But seated among winemaking veterans, I felt like a wine novice. Adjectives poured out, fine points of balance and herbaceousness and bitterness were bandied about, and winemaking techniques were guessed at.
It was fantastic. I love this industry because I’m always learning. I jumped in as best as I could (I will say that I introduced some of them to the term petrichor) and listened to Hugh talk about the sparkling wine industry, his winery’s changes over the years, and more.
As an aside, I always urge students in my wine class to be honest about their opinions, because I can’t tell them what to think. People disagree, and it’s okay. Indeed, wines that I loved came in last place for other tasters. Wines with low marks from me came in first for others, and not always the same ones. And all those tasters disagreed with each other as well. Everyone has a unique palate and sensibility.
Except that there was one clear winner, a complex, well-balanced wine with a rich, fragrant nose and a great taste. As I said to the group, I could have waffled on 2 and 3, and 4,5, and 6 overlapped, and so forth, but number 1 was an easy choice. Most of us put it in the first or second spot. When they pulled off its bag, it was the 2000 J. Schram Rosé.
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