What To Do About a Wine Like Pinot Noir?
I have a special glass. It’s not an ordinary type of glass. It is my special tasting glass. It is made by Mark Phillips and it is not cheap (about $20). The bowl is paper thin and the stem is half the thickness of a knitting needle. It is nice to look at and lighter than a feather, but the reason I have a special glass is that it works. It does a great job of capturing a wine’s manifold aromas, it delivers the wine to my palate appropriately and, best of all, it doesn’t leak. For my most recent blind tasting of Oregon pinot noir, however, I chose not to use my special glass. I used a large-bowled glass with a rather small opening, a glass specifically made for pinot noir wines. Why? That’s not an easy question. The short answer, which will likely mystify the casual wine drinker, is pinot noir is like that. For the longest time, I failed to appreciate what pinot noir was all about. Even when I was a sommelier at Buckhead’s Cherokee Town Club, I understood the facts of this thin-skinned,
