Date: January 13, 2010 @ 2:19 PM
Tasting Teeth
It’s January and we are busy evaluating our next moves with the 2009 red wines. It’s time. They are in barrel. They have dropped a lot of their sediment. They have finished malolactic fermentations. They have lost the “fermentation” character. (Oh…and they are very good.)
Tasting wines this young can sound great…even romantic in a wine-geeky sort of way, but, like teenagers, they can be aggressive and rebellious. (They are supposed to be like that…the wines, not the teens...but the goals differ, you never want teens to get into the bottle.)
First; young red wines aren’t red. They are a deep, dark, scary purple! I believe that some wine writer back in the days of hand-set type thought it was easier to set and print “red” instead of “purple.”
I am a little obsessed with the color because I just got back from the dentist. My attempt at a casual Cary Grant smile nearly caused Sherry, the dental hygienist, to faint, and she assumed I was a product of the British dental health care system. (Tasting young wines tends to stain teeth an unusual hue of blue-black that effectively reminds all of Hollywood special effects for zombies, vampires, and ghouls.)
She and her emergency response team got to work fighting “the stain.”
The Inquisition: Have you noticed that there is something about going to the dentist that immediately makes one feel guilty? I think it is because they put you under that big light (now you know that Hollywood gets those lights from dentist offices)…and they stand over you…and they ask you questions...after they put on masks to hide their faces! “Do you floss regularly? Do you use an electric tooth brush? What’s your carbon footprint?”
“I meant to floss…REALLY…but we used it as thread for my kid’s cell project.” OK, I panicked and I didn’t think that they would believe that the dog ate my dental floss (although our cat once ate a string…erggg.)
I think Sherry offered me music, but that doesn’t drown out the scraping noises and may lead her to believe that the twitching in my right leg is related to Super Tramp instead of some frayed nerve ending. Then the chair started to move. Really! It has some sort of built-in massage thingy gently rubbing my back that could almost make me forget that there are ten or twelve latex covered hands working inside my mouth in a space that was reserved for small bites of lasagna. It was enough to keep most of the panic and thoughts of “Little Shop of Horrors” at bay.
Back to the stain. Young wines stain so badly that it requires technology. Sherry used “the laser” (I think you have to crook your little finger when you say “the laser.” She used the “de-scaler,” which sounds like a nifty gadget for the fisherman in your life, not like something that should be manipulated across your teeth. There were special magnifiers, (with Stan the dentist behind them), which make someone’s eyes look slightly larger than a bowling ball, and then there are all those pointy metal tools…each has a purpose. They are after the stain. They only stop pursuing the stain long enough to use a suction tube. (Has anyone studied its ability to remove all the air from your mouth?) The last of the stain gets scrubbed away by the polish, which comes in flavors that are designed to be incompatible with Napa Valley and wine. We believe that the least heinous flavor is mint…Frau Blucher formulated the other choices.
The advice? Have teeth extra clean before tasting. Rinse with water. Later, make and brush with a paste of water and baking soda. Consider actually tasting and drinking wines that aren’t so young. (That may have been trying to get me to spend more on wine.)
I have smiled at twenty people so far today. Not one has noticed and most have averted their eyes.
