SC - The wine experience-long-OOP

[Stephen Bloch]

I wrote:
> << Can you offer any helpful
>  suggestions for those of us who really like to cook, but are utterly
>  ignorant of wine and honestly could not tell the difference between
>  "a four dollar generic Burgundy" and a "far superior Bordeaux or
>  Beaujolais"? >>

to which Lord Ras replied:
> Read, read, read. There are many magazines, articles and books which tell all
> about wine and it's creation, uses, tasting and appreciation. If there is a
> local wine club, join. If you have the finances experiment. Drinking wine is
> the best way to fullty appreciate it's many subtleties and nuances. In fact,
> IMO, it is the only way to develope any amount of discernment. For instance,
> when tasting a chardonnay, is the nose do you taste apricots, melons,
> butteryness? ...

I suppose I should add, for the sake of clarity, that I am not only
"utterly ignorant of wine", but not particularly interested in spending
large fractions of my life on it.  Like the people who do gorgeous,
meticulously accurate clothing but only a minimal attempt at period
cooking (or vice versa), I have higher priorities elsewhere.  In every
area of my life (medievalist or otherwise), knowing more is obviously
better than knowing less, and I expect to know more over time, but I
only have finitely much time on earth, and I choose to spend more of it
on music and recipes than on wines.

I guess I'm looking for how to make non-disastrous choices of wine for
cooking, particularly medieval cooking, without putting a great deal of
effort into the subject.  And I suspect the answer is "find a guy at the
wine store who sounds like he knows what he's talking about."

> ...
> The good news is that the varieties used today are for most part those grown
> in the MA such as pinot noir, sauvignon blanc, merlot, trebbiano, cabernet
> franc, chardonnay, etc. so for the most part the wine drinker in the SCA has a
> vast amount of choices without the added burden of deciding whether it is a
> period wine or not. :-)

This was going to be my next question: how closely do any modern wines
resemble those available in medieval Europe?  I gather that many of the
grape varieties haven't changed much; what about fermenting and aging
technology?

					mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib
                                                 Stephen Bloch
                                               sbloch at adelphi.edu
					 http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/
                                        Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University
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