The First Glass

A first lesson in wine that opens with a map of the course, then shows how fermentation and winemaking choices produce the seven main families, followed by a step-by-step method for looking at and smelling a glass. It closes by introducing Oregon's Willamette Valley as the course's home ground, its Pinot noir, and the truth about its latitude compared with Burgundy. This episode is narrated by AI-generated synthetic voices. Episode page & show notes Visit website The lesson opens with a map of the course: tasting first, then the vineyard, the winery, special styles, grapes, labels and law, storing, serving and food pairing, the world's regions and buying, with the Willamette Valley as home ground throughout. The course's home winery is Ricochet Wine Co., founded in McMinnville in 2018 by Erich Berg, a former high-school English teacher who makes its wine. It has no vineyards of its own and buys its grapes from growers it names. What wine is, and the seven families Wine is grape juice fermented by yeast, which turns sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. If the yeast eats all the sugar the wine is dry, and if some is left the wine tastes sweet. Grape juice is nearly colorless even from dark grapes, because color and tannin live in the skins. That makes skin contact the dividing line between styles. White wine is pressed off the skins before fermentation. Red ferments with skins and seeds. Rosé gets a short soak of a few hours up to about a day. Orange wine is white grapes made by the red method. Three more families come from other choices: Sparkling wine keeps its gas. Ricochet's Le Ressort finishes its single fermentation in the bottle, and its Off-Line has its gas added at bottling. Sweet wine keeps sugar, either because the yeast is stopped early or because the grapes are dried, frozen or shriveled by noble rot. Fortified wine has spirit added. Added during fermentation it gives a sweet style like Port. Added after fermentation it gives a dry style like Fino Sherry. Looking at the glass What you need is a clear tulip-shaped glass, a white background, plain light, a pour of about fifty milliliters and no perfume. Spitting is normal. This lesson needs no tasting at all. Tilt the glass to about forty-five degrees and judge three things: Clarity. Haze raises a question rather than giving a verdict, since some wines are unfiltered on purpose. Color. Whites run from lemon-green to brown. Reds run from purple through ruby and garnet to tawny, and the rim shows age first. Depth. For reds, the stem test helps: look straight down through the wine at the stem. Color says nothing about quality, price or exact age. Legs mainly reflect alcohol, with sugar making them slower and thicker; they are not a sign of quality. Smelling it Take one sniff before swirling to check the wine is clean. Faults to notice include damp cardboard (corked), bruised apple (oxidized, from too much air), rotten egg (reduction; a faint struck-match or flint note can be deliberate, and reduction is a fault when it dominates) and vinegar or nail polish remover (volatile acidity: acetic acid with ethyl acetate). Then swirl and take short sniffs. Judge intensity as light, medium or pronounced. Sort what you smell into broad groups: fruit, flower, spice and herb, or earth. The chapter closes this part with a five-step routine to run with a white and a red side by side. Home ground in Oregon The course is anchored in the Willamette Valley, which lies between the Coast Range and the Cascades. It has wet winters and dry summers, with Pacific air entering through the Van Duzer Corridor. Thin-skinned Pinot noir leads there, so it often lets you see the stem. The 45th parallel runs through the valley, which stretches from about 43¾ to 45¾ degrees north, so its latitude matches regions such as Bordeaux, not Burgundy. Burgundy lies one to three degrees north of the 45th parallel, and even the valley's north end falls about half a degree short of where Burgundy begins. What it shares with Burgundy is a cool climate, and the two are cool in different ways, as this Willamette Valley vs. Burgundy comparison and the Willamette Valley AVA overview lay out.