Thoughtful Wines for Active Minds: Wine Pairing for a Noble Cause

Class transcript:

All right, welcome one and all for this very special edition of Tail Up Goat Wine School. Welcome in particular to those of you joining us for the first time. We are absolutely thrilled to be hosting our 31st lesson. And hosting our 31st lesson in collaboration with an amazing national nonprofit, Active Minds. We are joined by Margot and Bethany, and as well the founder and executive director of Active Minds, Allison Malman, who hopefully will be finding her way here through the magic of her phone forthrightly. All the way from Colorado. Oh, Allison, there you are. You look lovely on the phone there. Thank you so much for joining us today. And we are taking this opportunity to explore a topic that I know a lot of you have wanted to address over the course of our 30-plus weeks.

And that is the magic of wine in context, the magic of wine as it exists with food. And we thought that, you know, in light of the fact that we have this amazing community partner in Active Minds, it would be a really fun opportunity to kind of, you know, start at the beginning and consider how, you know, Zoe and I in particular think about wine and how we like to enjoy it with food. And we've been selling through our restaurant, or we have sold through our restaurant, a wine flight, as well as snacks, a snack pack to go along with this lesson. First and foremost, I want to stress that there's no right or wrong way to enjoy wine and/or food. Sense of taste, highly subjective.

And if you like, you know, your red wine with sushi, if you like your white wine with steak, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. You know, we are all hardwired differently, and it could be that is the best biological answer for you. And I think, you know, above and beyond, you know, reaching for this quote unquote perfect pairing, which is where a lot of people start for the sake of wine pairing. I think, you know, there's this Catholic sense that there is this hard and fast kind of wisdom around what we should be or should not be drinking with food and wine. But I want to move beyond that, and I want to live in the mystery of it all and live in the journey of it all.

And, you know, consider not only what works, but what doesn't work and consider even at a deeper level. Why it works, and today to do so for an amazing cause with Active Minds. Allison, thank you for joining us from Colorado. Allison, can you say hello to everyone? Introduce yourself to the people. I happily will be. I'm Allison Malman. Hello, everybody. I am the founder and executive director of Active Minds. I apologize. I'm having some tech issues today, so you're getting me on my phone. But, Bill, I'm just so grateful for you for letting us have this opportunity to do this with you today. In partnership with a board member of Active Minds, Amishan, her husband, Arjun, and we're just so pleased to be here. So thanks for having us. Awesome.

We are equally thrilled to have you. And you look great on your phone once for a thousand years, uncompromised on all credit in the world to the telecom industry for your presence here. And should be said, Active Minds, the nation's, for those of you that aren't familiar with their work, is the nation's leading nonprofit organization, dedicated to promoting mental health and destigmatization of access to mental health, particularly among young adults. And they are an organization that has over 800 individual branches on public school and college campuses throughout the country. And the organization is devoted to creating a sense of community and uniting around access to mental health. You know, much like, you know, this community is dedicated to enjoying wine and coming together while socially distanced every Sunday.

So, I think there's definitely synergy there. But we are thrilled to have you all with us, Allison. Without further ado, we're going to kick things off here. It should be said, I want to say, for the sake of our lessons, that you should have multiple glasses; it doesn't matter what order you try things in. You know, it's all good. I'm going to be a little more rigorous and scientific for the sake of this particular session. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that order does matter a bit. So for those of you, you know, who purchased our flight, we are going to work our way kind of methodically through these wines. And we're going to do that because, you know, we want to consider the wines on their face and then, you know, kind of prima facie.

And then we want to consider the wines in context. We want to consider the wines in context with food. And, you know, to do so meaningfully, it helps to do so in a more organized fashion. So we're going to work our way from, you know, one dimension of kind of wine structure to another. And the dimensions, the four dimensions that we'll consider are acidity, acidity, sweetness, tannin, and alcohol. And we'll describe each of those as we go. But for those of you who have the flight, our exemplars are Chablis. We're going to start out there. Riesling for sweetness. Georgian orange wine for a tannic grip. And Prerat, a dense, inky Spanish red for the sake of alcohol. And we're going to move in that order and we're going to taste in that order with our food.

So it is more significant for the sake of this lesson that you are following along and on the same page. For those of you who have joined us before, you know that we, you know, we have a lot of work to do. We like to kick things off with a bit of verse. And that seems all the more significant for the sake of this lesson devoted to mental health, you know, outreach and advocacy. And this bit of verse comes from one of my favorite poets. This is an old favorite poem from Rainer Maria Rilke, who in his own life, you know, kind of struggled variously as many of us do with his mental health. But wrote some of the most profoundly beautiful lyric German poetry in the world.

This is an English translation of one of his poems. So without further ado, here it is for you. Quiet friend who has come so far. Feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses. The meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth, I flow. To the Russian waters speak, I am. Love that poem. That's one that we featured at TELCO before.

But, you know, obviously there's a wine connection, which we, which you all know. Always love, but the bit of verse itself is absolutely beautiful. So without further ado, let's talk over food and wine pairing. And obviously, to understand, you know, food as it plays with wine, you need to understand the wine itself. And we're going to start there and we're going to consider briefly the physiology of taste. Don't tune out yet. The physiology of taste is wildly fascinating for those of us wine nerds. And, you know, I think taste in particular smell, which is the guiding sense when it comes to our appreciation of wine. So we bring three senses to bear in, you know, trying to understand what's in the glass. And they are sight, smell, and taste, but they're not all created equal.

We're going to address each, but they're not all created equal. Smell by far the most important. It's been said that smell accounts for about 90% of our experience of an individual wine. It's also been said, and I love this, that about 1% of our human genome devoted to the sense of smell. Which is about the same as the development of our immune system. So, you know, equally weighted there. And I think in modern life, you know, to the extent that people are overwhelmed by their sense of smell, it's mostly in the context of, dear God, what is that smell? It's more, you know, wandering along a dumpster. Alongside a dumpster. Or a dumpster fire. Or, you know, someone cuts one next to you. Or whatever it is. But, you know, it's unpleasant.

As opposed to something that you're actively seeking to train. And fully unravel. But it's all there. We are genetically hardwired to be much more highly attuned to it than I think people commonly access. And people often ask me, you know, oh, you must have this amazing, you know, preternatural gift for, you know, smell and taste, et cetera. And, you know, I certainly do not have a preternatural gift for hearing or music. You know, I don't think, I think I have a decent sense of smell. But I don't think it's like, you know, dog, you know, canine worthy or anything special. I think it's just something that I have learned to train. And I think everybody has that.

And, you know, I make the analogy for the sake of musicians in the audience to, you know, learning the difference between a sharp and a flat note. It's out there. And if someone points it out to you, you can distinguish it over time. But if no one bothers to, you know, make that distinction for you or, you know, you don't listen closely enough to a particular tune, then it's lost on you. And a sense of smell works the same way. But it is out there. The truth is out there to discern, you know, if we are willing to look for it. It should be said that people diverge widely for the sake of their sense of smell. Not everyone experiences it equally.

There's actually this huge variance for the sake of how many taste buds that we possess from one person to the next. There's this, you know, great range. I think a lot of you may or may not be familiar with the concept of a supertaster. But supertasters, and women are vastly more likely to be supertasters than men, have up to 425 taste buds per square centimeter. And there's a fun, popular science experiment that you can run for yourself. To figure out how many taste buds that you have. And whether you're a regular taster or a supertaster. Non-tasters, at the other end of the spectrum, have about, you know, 90 plus taste buds per square centimeter. And then most people, you know, it is a bell curve, fall somewhere in between, around 180.

And it should be said that for the sake of tasting food and wine, it's kind of best to be somewhere in between. A lot of supertasters don't like alcohol. Because they feel the taste. They feel the intense burn of the alcohol itself. Or for the sake of tannins, they feel the intense bitterness of it. For the sake of acidity. They fear the harsh searing astringency of it all. So, you know, being in the middle of that bell curve, somewhat counterintuitively, actually works in most folks' favor for the sake of tasting wine. Our sense of smell and taste evolves over time as well. So when we are born, it is much more highly attuned. By the time, you know, we are in our 60s and 70s. It is vastly diminished.

That is highly individualized. But, you know, by the time we are into our 80s, most of us will lose at least 50% of our sense of taste and smell, sadly. But, you know, that said, you know, for some people, that 50% goes a much longer way than others. And, you know, even if diminished, you can train it much further than a younger buck would be able to. I'm going to read kind of a briefing. A brief description here. This is from Kevin Zarely and Wendy Dubit talking about, you know, just the physiology of taste. And then we'll move into this particular wine because, you know, we covered enough popular science for the day. But this has to do with the immediacy, the, you know, kind of primal sense that we bring to taste and smell.

And, you know, how we are genetically hardwired to perceive something as elemental as the taste of Chablis. And then we're going to talk about the ability to perceive it in the glass. Memory stored in the limbic system, that is the kind of pre-brain that is devoted to our emotional responses. Uniquely links emotional state with physical sensation, creating our most important and primitive form of learning, working memory. We remember smell differently than we recall sight, sound, taste, and touch because we respond to smell the same way we respond to emotion. An increased heart rate. Increased memory. Enhanced sensitivity. And faster breathing. It is this emotional connection that gives smell the power to stimulate memory so strongly and why a single smell can instantly transport us back to a particular time and place.

No two people are alike in either how they smell or the smells they perceive. It is deeply personal based on our own memories and unique sets of experience. And I think that's incredibly poetic. I shared for the sake of this lesson a really awesome kind of pictorial, kind of display. From Ratatouille. It's this like visualization of food pairing. And, you know, one of my favorite moments from that movie is when the evil restaurant critic, Anton Ego, tastes Remy's ratatouille for the first time. And he is instantly transformed into his childhood self, tasting his mom's ratatouille. And, you know, I think wine works the same way. I don't know. I want to say I think music can transform the same way. But, you know, there's something visceral and elemental about it in a way that is totally worth celebrating.

All of which is to say that, you know, there's no right or wrong way to do this. You know, if for the taste of a particular wine, you know, you get gummy bears or you get, you know, underripe pineapple or you get something, you know, widely divergent from the rest of us, you are not wrong. You are just, you know, a glorious individual. You know, emotionally tasting. As are the rest of us. So, without further ado, let's taste this particular wine. And there should be said there are many different ways to experience a wine. The court of master sommeliers has its grid, as does the WSET program. We are going to speak in terms of those three senses that I spoke to earlier. Sight, smell, and taste.

And we're going to work our way through the Chablis, which is an exemplar of one dimension of taste, which is acidity. For the sake of wine. Zoe, I'm going to kind of kick it off to you because you are a much more rigorous taster than I am. What can the sight, the look of this wine tell us about this particular Chablis? Well, you can see how old it is, certainly by the rim variation, if there were any. You can also look to see about alcohol content or if there was any residual sugar by how the tears are going to naturally fall down the glass. And that will also, you know, equal the weight of the wine.

In itself, you can see how it reflects light off, which I don't really think means as much as we might gild the lily and say it does, personal opinion. But certainly seeing any other types of oak influence, if it's a little bit more golden or amber, versus how bright and light it is. Yeah, so we're just kind of initially evaluating this wine. And it should be that, you know, it should be said that a lot of folks, you know, skip ahead. To, you know, guzzling the wine right away. And I think, you know, if you're, you know, there are different things, you know, tasting analytically and, you know, tasting for pure enjoyment. And, you know, if you skipped ahead already, more power to you. There's nothing wrong with that.

But we can learn something in, you know, kind of pacing ourselves for the sake of evaluating a wine. We want to understand the Chablis as an exemplar of acidity. And there are four different dimensions we use to kind of determine the structure of a wine. The look of the wine can tell us, as Zoe said, about its age. Wines, both white and reds, tend to brown. As they get older, it can tell us with the alcohol. Wine will tend to drop tears if it's more alcoholic or if it has leftover sugar. And there are all sorts of other things that can be at play. And then smell is the most important. And it should be said that, you know, we should spend the most time smelling a wine as opposed to tasting it.

You know, that sensual dimension of the wine playing on the palate is really important. Especially vis-à-vis food. But the smell is most instructive. And even when we're tasting, we are smelling for the sake of this, like, wonderful retronasal thing that happens for the sake of these odors working their way through our sinus cavities. And then, you know, for the sake of something like Chablis, it's blessedly pure. So Chablis, as we smell it, I think significant to understand where this particular wine is from. So Chablis, it should be said, hails from France. And it hails from kind of a northern corner of France. So it is kind of well north of Burgundy. You can see Burgundy in this lighter red here. And then Chablis much further to the north.

It is really a separate enclave. In as much as, you know, Beaujolais is separate from Burgundy proper, Chablis is separate. And Chablis is the region, the great Pièrre Chardonnay. But it is very different than the Chardonnay that many of you have become aware of. It is a wine that I'm accustomed to in the New World, in California, that's heavily oaked. Chablis is a wine of refinement. And in this case, from Jean-Claude Descennes, is a wine that sees zero whatsoever. It is a wine that is grown on these very hugely famous Chimergean and Devonian chalk soils. That is a geological era in the late Jurassic period, so 140 to 150 years ago, when this whole region of France, the Paris Basin, was at the bottom of a shallow sea and over eons.

But these deposits of, you know, oysters and other shellfish created this highly chalky rock that gives rise to wines that are bright and acid-driven and incredibly lean and acidic for the sake of Chablis. And it's, you know, evocative. It is a wine grown on ancient oyster beds that goes with oysters that smells a bit like oyster shells. And for me, you know, some of the notes I get on the nose with this, you know, certainly, some of the notes I get on the nose with this, you know, certainly, some of the notes I get on the nose with this, you know, certainly, citrus, you know, certainly some of that like lemon curd, certainly some of that, you know, water over rocks, they're all in the midst there.

And then, you know, on the palate, you know, you're initially confronted with that perception of acidity. Acidity is something that registers right away. I like to talk for the sake of evaluating wine in terms of a three-act play. So, you have the first act, the first third, which is attack. And when you're tasting an acidic wine, wine, the first act is always acid. It's a flag that goes up. It's something that registers immediately. And for the sake of Chablis, it registers immediately. And then that resolution, that mid-palate is hugely important. It's when you're, you know, more kind of analytically evaluating a wine and trying to understand it at a deeper level. And then that finish is ultimately what you are left with. And we're moving from one to the next as we evaluate this wine.

And then as we understand it with food, we're going to want to try this wine alongside different dimensions of taste. For the sake of your snack pack, you have crackers, you have fiery, chili, focaccia, you have a couple of different cheeses, St. Malachi, a hard salty cheese, and hummingbird. And then you have a fatty liver mousse. You're going to want to work your way through each of those exemplars. And we have, as we work our way through them, salty. And I think that's the best example. And then you have sour, best exemplified by the hard cheese. You have sour, best exemplified by those tomato pickles. You have sweet, best exemplified by that glorious caramel, kind of like a cookie situation. Umami is a dimension of flavor, and that's certainly well exemplified in the liver mousse.

And then, you know, spicy physiologically is kind of like a, on taste buds, on tilt, everything firing at once. And you're going to want to try this with this particular wine as well. And then bitterness is another dimension of taste, you know, is kind of harder to pinpoint, but we'll talk that over for the sake of tannin. Zoe, for the sake of this particular Chablis, what did you find that it worked best with for the sake of the snacks that, you know, you and I sampled it with earlier? You know, what were you pleasantly surprised by for the sake of what went well and what didn't for this first wine? I loved it with the St. Malachi cheese. I thought that that caramel richness and how nutty it was was delicious.

And then because the Chablis is a lot leaner, it doesn't have that, like, lactic twang or any of the, like, yogurt notes that I sometimes get in Chablis, the cheese really helped finish the rest of that circle off. I also really enjoyed it with the jam, which I wasn't expecting to see. I know that Chef Casey put quite a bit of effort into it. But I think it's going to be a great with orange and lemon, both zest and juice in it as well. And I think that, like, citrus element really helped it shine. And what did you find it didn't work as well with as a wine that was, you know, drier and acid-driven, Zoe? Well, we disagree on this, but I did not enjoy it with the green tomato pickle.

I thought that it was, like, too much with the acid and the acid competing. And sometimes acid and acid really do go well together, like Chablis and a citrus fruit or something like that. But I think it was maybe the vinegar was just a little bit too much. And it should be said, for the sake of acidity, that, you know, the way we perceive different flavors is very different, and our threshold for different flavors is very different. So it should be said that, you know, we have a very high threshold for sweetness in food. So until something tastes sweet to us, you know, it's a pretty high bar to cross. The bar, it should be said, for sour. The bar is a little lower for salty, a little lower still.

And then for bitter, it's the lowest. So we are much more highly attuned to bitter flavors than any other dimension of taste. And if you think about that evolutionarily, it makes sense, because for us as, you know, primates, hunter-gatherers, bitter equals poison. So you're going to want to be able to suss out those bitter flavors if you want to survive. It's a little less important to suss out those sweet flavors because they're good for us at the end of the day. And, you know, if we want to eat all the calories we can, you know, you know, a little kind of sensory delay is probably a good thing when it comes to that. Now, with respect to acidity, there are actually a lot of different types of acidity when it comes to wine and different types of acid that we can discern between for the sake of a wine.

For the sake of most wines, the most important is called tartaric acid. Grapes are actually really unique among fruits in being very high in tartaric acid. And tartaric acid can sometimes register as bitter to us, but it's very chemically stable. Why? As much as alcohol, as much as sugar in wines, that's why wine is the durable product that it is because of the high levels of tartaric acid. And then, you know, some wines more than others are higher in that particular constituent that makes them age-worthy. So the Riesling that we're going to taste forthrightly is incredibly high in tartaric acid, which makes Riesling this incredibly age-worthy wine in the way that you wouldn't typically expect of a white. And then you have malic acid, which is the apple, kind of green apple acid.

Then you have citric acid. Which, you know, is self-explanatory. And then lactic acid, which is the acid in yogurt. And you get conversion of malic acid into lactic acid in a lot of wines during a secondary process called malolactic conversion, which we won't talk about at length, but happens in some wines more than others. Significantly, it didn't happen for the sake of Archibald Lee. It should be said that I, you know, thought the pickle thing worked. There is an old adage for the sake of wine pairing that you buy with an apple and sell with cheese. It's an old English merchant's expression. And that means that it's harder to find a wine to go with something very acidic than it is to find a wine to go with something, you know, rich and fatty.

And that is hugely true. So it is harder to find a wine to go with the pickles or the acidic item on your plate than it is the liver mousses of the world. And I want you to kind of experience that for yourselves. But I thought the Chablis was a perfectly all right pairing with pickles. I like the Riesling a little better with it. Another high acid wine with a little bit of sweetness. But, you know, again, this is a place where, you know, there are individual individualized preferences, and that's totally OK. So having worked our way through this first particular offering, we're going to kick it back to founder and Edie Allison to say a little more about her work with Active Minds and share her story.

Allison, how did Active Minds get its start? I went to school myself in the early aughts, not to totally date. I went to school myself and there was nothing like Active Minds. I wish there there had been. But how did the organization, you know, get, you know, begin its journey? Well, I appreciate the question. And first, again, just want to thank you so much for partnering with Active Minds to put forward this incredible special edition of the Tugwine School. And again, a big thank you to our board member, Amishan, our husband, Arjun Shah, both of whom are regulars in this class. And we're just really excited to be able to share. And congratulations on their their new arrival as well. So, indeed, indeed, there's no better way to celebrate the both of them and their new arrival.

So, you know, just everybody has a better sense of Active Minds. As Bill shared earlier, Active Minds is the nation's leading nonprofit addressing mental health, especially for young adults ages 14 to 24. If you looked us up before the event or know our story, you'll know that Active Minds was born from my grief following the death of my brother. Brian, who died by suicide in the year 2000; in the weeks following his death. My friends rallied around and worked with me to plan ways to help others that were struggling like Brian had been. And the passion I felt and those around me made it seem clear that this generation really could start to change the culture around mental health. And that is what Active Minds does.

And that's what we do in the 800 plus schools and communities and workplaces that we're in. And we do still to this day now, almost 20 years after I lost my brother. And, you know, changing the culture to us means getting to the day where no one feels that they must struggle alone. That everyone understands that help is available, that they know where and how to get help. And we all feel as comfortable talking about our mental health as we do our physical health. My brother had struggled for four years with his mental health before he felt comfortable telling anyone, my mom, myself, his friends. And by the time he did seek help for him, it was too late.

And so our goal as an organization is to create; An environment where we are talking about mental health without shame and sharing our stories openly. Since 2003, when I started the nonprofit, we've grown to a nationwide network of advocates. Changing the culture everywhere young adults are in those schools, college campuses, workplaces, communities, all led by this next generation who is talking about mental health in a little bit of a different way than so many of us were raised in. Every part of our lives affects our mental health. And every part of our lives affects our mental health. And every part of our life, we can feel empowered and validated through a positive mental health culture. This is especially important for young adults for whom suicide is the second leading cause of death.

And this year, amidst the pandemic, we are all struggling. And young people are especially vulnerable. And so that's why your support tonight, everybody who's joining us tonight, is really already making a difference. It's going to help us bring remote and digital tools to more than 15,000 volunteers who last year reached over 1.8 million. People directly through Active Minds programs and each of you can be a part of changing that culture with us if you don't already feel comfortable reaching out to someone you suspect may be having a tough time or you sometimes wonder if you're saying the right resources or trying to figure out how to talk to people just visit our website ActiveMinds.org take a look at our resources, it's really simple, you don't have to be an expert to help you just need to be there and Active Minds has the tools to give you the confidence to be a measurable part of that culture change in the way that we all interact around mental health.

So that's kind of us in a nutshell, again, just so so grateful for this opportunity. I think I'm going to pop in again a little bit later. But for now, I'll toss it back to you, Bill. So we can try our next pairing. Great. And, you know, it should be said personally that I have struggled with, you know, depression and anxiety throughout my life. You know, I'm still on antidepressants to this day. And, you know, it's not something that I'm, you know, I feel awkward about sharing at all. And I don't think it should be. I think it’s something that people struggle with in silence all too often, and especially young people. I think it's easy, especially when you're first going off to college.

And, you know, if your sense of self isn’t fully developed to feel alone in your struggles with mental health. And I think it’s usually important to know that other people your age are struggling with the same things. I can remember, you know, visiting a psychologist in college and, you know, coming out of his office and, you know, the sense of dread that you're going to run into, you know, one of your, your classmates and, you know, that is fundamentally preposterous, you know, people are struggling with this across the board. And it's not something that, you know, should evoke a sense of shame, you know, far from it. It's a sense that, you know, should evoke a sense of shared humanity and, you know, I admire your work, you know, certainly, Alison, to, you know, create a safe space for dialogues around mental health on the college campus.

You know, and just a young person. Among younger people. Without further ado, let's drink some Riesling. So Riesling is one of life's great joys. It is one of the most food-friendly wines in the world. And I want to share a map. While I do so, those of you who are regular participants know that I love maps. Zoe, do you have any comments? I encourage all of you to throw out personal best pairings, superlatives, and then you know, worst pairings as well. I think the, the bad ones are very often more instructive than, than the great ones. For the sake of your food at home, please throw this out. And all the more so, if you're eating wildly irreverent things.

So if you have, you know, borscht or, you know, other crazy foods that you are enjoying above and beyond the snack pack, please let us know what goes well and what doesn't with the wines you are drinking at home. Zoe, any, any comments? Any news from the commentariat? Sure. I have a great question. Is acidity the reason that it is hard to pair wines with asparagus and artichoke? Or why do those vegetables in particular just get it? Weird. So this is, that's like the Pee-wee Playhouse, like couch is going crazy. So asparagus in particular is a notorious sommelier bugaboo. There are, there are many sommelier bugaboos and it's never, you know, what you think it would be.

It's, it's actually like, like more kind of vegetable driven dishes tend to be harder to pair with than, you know, things that you might think would otherwise be difficult. But asparagus in particular, in addition to making your pee smell funny, has a chemical constituent that makes wine seem sweeter than it otherwise is. So it actually like changes your perception of taste in a really dynamic and interesting way. One of my favorite pairings with asparagus is, is a wine called a Swarovski. Swarovski from a grape called Garganaga. Swarovski works really beautifully with, with asparagus. And I don't know what the chemical underpinnings for that are, but I find with asparagus, you want something that has a certain like greenness to it.

So like Gruner Veltliner is another wine that works really well with vegetables because it has like a green, almost vegetable quality to it. And, and, you know, sometimes with pairings, you, you, you kind of contrast. So very often, and I hope you found, for those of you who are speaking from home, you know, that some of these, you know, high acid wines, they work nicely. Especially with fattier foods, sometimes better than others. You know, the Chablis with the liver mousse for me fell a little flat. It got a little lost, but, you know, with, with the salty cheese, I thought it was great. And, you know, that's because, you know, it is a bit of a sabre that cuts through some of that, that saltiness.

And sometimes you want to kind of like, sometimes you want that sabre, but sometimes you want an analog. And I find with things like asparagus and artichokes, typically you want, you know, something that is kind of briny and savory as well. So there was, and I will disagree that. I have a question. This is a great question, here. How does your taste evolve after multiple glasses of wine, Bill? It, you know, like many things in having multiple glasses of wine, I'm sure it's diminished. I always find that, um, there's this fascinating, uh, you know I don't think it's a steady, uh, you know straight line though. I find it's a bit like, um, uh, it's like a linguistic curve.

So, I know a lot of people, you know, who speak other languages, you know, they're familiar with the notion that, you know, maybe you speak a little better or at least, you know, um, you know um you know the uh the words come to you, um, a little more freely after like a glass, but you know, after several glasses it all gets really messy. I find I find that, you know, there's some of that true so I find that, you know, um, the you know associations come to me, you know, a little faster if I've had like, you know, glass, glass and a half, but um, uh, it steadily diminishes thereafter, so Um, you know it's always it's always a fine line in terms of that you know, a little bit of helpful buzz versus, you know, um too much um inebriation that, you know, kind of ruins the roost

uh, you I will say those like um, your taste buds do get fatigued though so uh, it is a bit like looking at the sun um, if you try too much stuff then you you know just you lose any sense of taste which is like why the whole Robert Parker is sitting down with 100 wines and giving scores after tasting 80 is like morally debased because the only thing you can taste after 80 wines is like, you know, bullshitty raisin wines um, you know that, that's why he likes them to. Some extent, some of the favorite pairings so far should be with the hummingbird, um, along with the Riesling, with the hummingbird, everyone's mostly on the recently right now, um, but going with, the focaccia with the Calabrian chili oil as well and then some folks who are out of town not necessarily going through the tasting that we had but a great Pinot grigio with jalapenos and someone else has a recently without having your honey which I absolutely love that, um, combination too where it's a little sweet and it's a little spicy, yeah, so let's let's talk about recently, that's a great segue, though, um, so uh, I wanted to bring Up um, you know I think we've up a map featuring isotherms, very exciting. So this is average annual temperature and obviously this is changing a lot as the world warms, all of these isotherms are moving north and south.

But you get a sense, this is the band in which the grape vine, Vitis vinifera, so the grape that goes into all fine wine comes from a species of vine called Vitis vinifera, which originated in Georgia, spoiler alert for the next wine, the country mind you, not the the state, in trans-Caucasian region right here. And it thrives between what is a 30-degree and 50-degree latitude or between, typically they'll say like 10 or 20 degrees Celsius, but actually this is probably a more accurate trope, 12 and 22. But this is the band we're working with for the sake of fine wine and the first couple wines we're tasting are closer to the northern edge. So you know, when you taste the grape vine, it's a little bit different, it's a little bit different from the taste of wine.

I think, you know, sometimes you get a kiss of the north wind, sometimes you get, you know, a more sun-kissed, you know, kind of southern Mediterranean quality, and I think the two wines we're starting with have that, you know, kiss of the north wind about them. This particular wine is from Germany, Deutschland, land of my forebears, some of my forebears, not all of my forebears, in spite of appearances. But it is from the Rheinhessen, which is one of the most important regions for Riesling and the world. Rheinhessen is this light blue region right here. This is the Rhein, which is the German Ganges, it flows from south to north. This particular wine from the Röder Kung, which means the red bank along the western edge of the Rhein here, comes from essentially Grand Cru vineyards.

But this is a Cabernet Riesling. Cabernet is a designation for the ripeness level of the grapes at harvest. Typically, it corresponds to a delicately sweet wine. This one is a little drier than it has been in other vineyards. This one is a little drier than it has been in other vineyards. It just changes quite a bit. Cabernet, as a designation, doesn't assure a certain level of sweetness. So I feel like I've put the cart before the horse, but for the uninitiated, this whole notion of talking about a liquid wine as dry is kind of fundamentally preposterous and counterintuitive. But we're just talking about this notion that there's no perceptible sweetness in a wine. To say dry means that there is no perceptible sweetness, which is to say there's no residual sugar.

Which is to say that we cannot, as humans, perceive sugar below the threshold of about three to five grams per liter residual sugar left over in a wine. All wine has a little bit of sugar left in the mix. Yeast does this amazing job of converting sugar into alcohol and CO2, but it never completes the job as such. And then the Germans kind of embraced that a little more fully for the sake of the Riesling, and they leave a little bit of extra sweetness in the mix. And that's the idea here. This is a high acid and higher sugar wine. And it actually corresponds more closely to a German designation called Weinherb, which is a little drier than your average German Cabernet, even though it's labeled as Cabernet. It's a great wine.

I think it would be fun to try something that's a little sweeter. So if you're at home and you want to doctor this wine a little bit and add a little bit of like simple syrup or honey or just even a little table sugar to it, and swirl it around, you know, get a sense for how the line changes as you do that. The bouquet will change. The perception of fruit will change. It's a little; the perception of fruit will be a little riper, the way it interacts with food will change. Zoe, what were your favorite pairings with the Riesling? I loved it with the hummingbird cheese, that's the softer cheese, and then I absolutely loved it with the chicken liver mousse with a little bit of that jam on top.

Yeah, I think, you know, Riesling is amazing insofar as it works with these massive flavors. So, you know, you think about something like a liver mousse, it's a huge flavor liver mousse, but it should be said that it goes really beautifully with what otherwise is a pretty delicate wine and that's the glory of Riesling. I think, you know, Riesling proves that, you know, strength is not synonymous, you know, with, you know, big, bold, blustery bullshit. You know, hopefully, you know, our president has woken us up to that, you know, like, you know, you don't have to be a total asshole or take over the room to be strong. You can be, you know, thoughtful and elegant and, you know, lithe and, you know, balletic and graceful and be equally as strong as the big bruising entity in the room.

And I think that's an important lesson in wine as it is in life. Zoe, is there anything that the Riesling didn't work for you with? So, I mean, I think that Riesling just goes with everything. Absolutely. But going from the chat, there was quite a few people who did not like the Riesling with a hummingbird cheese or the ham or the pizza. Yeah, I could see that. I think that this Riesling in particular has more of that green apple flavor, you know, it doesn't have the weight that you want for a softer cheese. I think it's really good with the same Malachi. I think it's great with the chicken liver mousse, but with the soft rind cheese, I think you want something broader and more expansive. And I don't think this particular Riesling does that.

I think, you know, if we had something that was a little sweeter, like a Scheurebsel or like an older Auslese, you know, that would be, you know, Lindenhagen. But, you know, this particular Riesling doesn't do that quite as well. Absolutely. I really like the Annabelle and Michael said that it's a skeleton key of wines, which I think is the perfect way. I'm just going to quote that for, I think, forever now. What about you? What did you think that the Riesling didn't pair with? You know, I am Zoe, you know that I'm an avowed Riesling lover, so it pains me to admit that it doesn't pair with anything. You know, this, I think, you know, there's Riesling as a whole, which, you know, there is a Riesling to go with any shape or size of dish.

But in terms of this particular Riesling, I would agree with the folks who commented about the hummingbird. I didn't think it worked quite as well with that. I was actually surprised it went as well as it did with the um, the cookie situation. I thought that was a good idea. I think it's a good idea. I think it's a good idea. I thought it was actually really lovely. And it speaks to how good Annie is at what she did. You know, it's like a caramel-infused thing, but it doesn't taste cloying. And I thought the Riesling was really delightful with it. I thought it was killer with the pickles. I thought it was great with the liver mousse. Yeah, I mean, Riesling is, you know, a glory and enjoy that way.

And we're going to take that opportunity, Zoe, to move to another skeleton key of a wine. This is orange wine. So, for the uninitiated, what is this orange madness? It should be said that orange is a separate genre and it's very simple. It is a very old thing that involves a certain amount of hipster rebranding. I don't have the tattoos for it. I have the terrible beard for it now. But it should be said that orange wine is just as simple as making wine from white grapes. But whereas under normal circumstances, with a white grape, you wouldn't do an orange wine like that. Because, as we know, white wine is a wine such as the Chablis or the Riesling that we initially tried; you would press the juice directly off the skins for the sake of this wine which has this you know magical amber color.

You leave the grape skins in the mix so that is to say, you leave the wine on the skins and it should be said that wine derives its color, whether white or red, except for individual circumstances from the skins; so all the pigments that determine the color of a wine come from the skins of the grapes. Therefore, it is necessary to leave a wine on the skins during the winemaking process in order for it to soak up a bit of color. Now, in the case of a red wine it is picking up red pigments from a group of chemical constituents called anthocyanins in the case of white wines or orange wines there are no red pigments to soak up so the wine is not red as such but you know not white either so you know Williamsburg hipsters said let's call it orange in Georgia that would be profane actually like the best Georgian translation would be amber and I think amber is much more poetic than orange orange yeah orange is not that doesn't do it for me amber you know feels you know timeless you know amber it's like topaz it's just like it's a better color word but at any word at any rate like orange Has become the brand, so we're stuck with it. Yada yada, this one's from Georgia, the country damn it, not the state! Georgia is a birthplace of wine as we know it. This one comes from Kiketi, that is the region, kind of like an Euphrates Tiger situation with dueling river valleys on the eastern edge of the country.

We've been talking wines from cooler climates in Chablis and the Rheinhessen in Germany. This is a bridge, so Georgia is trapped between the continent Europe and Asia, and has cooler climates in the west, and then drier, more arid kind of climates as you go further east. And this hails from the drier corner, and a grape in Kisi that. has this more profoundly kind of you know dried apricot sun-kissed kind of quality to it now tannins come from a number of different sources in wine they are long chain um uh you know kind of uh chemical uh constituents um and uh they come they can come from the stems seeds skins of grapes but also from oak um if a wine uh is aged uh in oak and uh these complex polyphenols they get longer and longer as a wine ages they get longer and longer as grapes ripen uh somewhat counter-intuitively as they get longer we actually lose our ability to perceive them so when the tannins get too long they kind of fall out of a wine uh for the sake Of the wine itself, literally, um, and you see tannins fall out in the form of wine crystals or tartaric acid, um, at the bottom of the wine, um, and you, you see wines fall out as wine ages for the sake of your palate, um, as fiercely tannic lines age they get softer, um, uh, for the sake of our perception, uh, and that is, uh, because the tannins lengthen and link one to the next, and we lose our ability to perceive them, and then, um, for the sake of the position of the wine, the conoscé ce sonJax is basically a hieratic Rev standing triangle locked down with sufferings, um, and as you can imagine, the placed in the middle of the wine named just an existing green.

There's a nice taste of water in the middle, red, you know, especially coming from white wines. I think you get a fuller sense of what tannins are in coming to a tannic white than you would if you switched to a tannic red. Uh, what did you like as a pairing with this particular offering? So, I really liked it with the chicken liver mousse, um, and I actually really enjoyed it with the pickles, which I thought was quite surprising. Um, I thought that there would be just too much going on but it was a fun little party, um, and then I really, really, really enjoyed it with the caramel sammy as well, um, that was like a peanut butter and jelly kind. Of a situation, which I'm always down for a little sweet, a little nutty, a little salty.

Uh, what did... what did you not like it with? Um, I think the hummingbird. I think that creaminess although the tannins I thought would conceptually like cut through that softness of the cheese. Um, it was just a little bit too soft and I think that they were too much of competing flavors where the Saint Malachi the harder cheese that caramel richness so then plus all that like saffron and pineapple like black tea... no, not one of the just like works so well together. Yeah, it should be said that this is a place where Zoe and I disagree again, uh, so uh, the the uh georgian orange wine and this is from a great called kisi um and and for me kisi uh so georgia has well over 450 uh possibly over 500 depending on who you listen to native grapes um which is to say they're they're in you know kind of you know kind of like a new brand so um and then um and then I just I just kind of wanted to kind indigenous to that particular region of the world, which, again, speaks to the fact that the very great vine that almost all fine wines come from is thought to have originated there. Kesey being one of them has this kind of persimmon-like astringency to it. And I thought if you try the pickle alone with the, so something that's fiercely acidic with the Mortanic wine, I thought that was gross.

That was one of my least favorite pairings. And there is scientific resonance there because acidity tends to heighten our perception of bitterness. So you have these very variables of taste isolated, but they interact one with another. They interact within the wine, and then they interact between food and wine. So if you change one, it's not a simple case of just dialing down something. If you dial down something, you change the whole in a dynamic way that makes it utterly different. So it is a complex ecology of taste. As opposed to something as simple as isolating a singular variable. I will say that I was surprised by how much I like this with the sweet cookie. And for me, this is a wine that, again, is a skeleton key.

In Georgia, the style of dining is not unlike if you take the snack pack and then just make it a whole meal. That's kind of like the way Georgians dine. And it becomes this war of attrition where they keep throwing. So imagine if they just threw new wine, and they just throw new snack packs at you, you know, until you had to wave a white flag. And that is the Georgian super. And the beauty of wines like this is that they're very dynamic in terms of the way they work with different food, in terms of the way they evolve over the course of the meal, and over the course of a glass. And, you know, that's what I love about them. That's what other, you know, nerdy psalms love about them.

And I hope that's what you at home are enjoying about them. Without further ado, we have one more wine to taste. But we're going to give it over again. To Allison, to talk a little more about her work at Active Minds. So Allison, take it. Thank you so much, Bill. Well, before class ends, I want to celebrate the incredible support of everyone attending already today. Before the event even started tonight, we had raised over $6,000 to support mental health tools and resources to help young adults understand their mental health, and to comfortably speak about with peers about their struggles. And it's incredible. If you haven't already contributed, or if you're willing to give just a little bit more, to help our movement continue to grow, there is a QR code on the screen being shared.

There we go. Perfect. Hover your phone camera over the code. That's my cue, Allison. There you go. You got it. Hover your phone camera over the code. That will cause a banner to pop up at the top of your phone. If you click on that banner, it'll open up a web browser to make a donation right now. We came into today's event having raised $6,202, to be exact. We're hoping that you'll help us reach $7,000 before the day is out. If you're having any problems making the donation, please feel free to put a note in the chat box, and one of the members of the Active Minds team will reach out to help. And again, a very big thank you to each of you that has contributed in honor of tonight's event, and to those of you donating right now.

I also want to take a moment and thank our sponsors, who have helped Active Minds raise more than $175,000 during our fall fundraiser called All In for Active Minds, of which this event is a part. Thank you so much. Thank you. How bribr shots, Reg chalk, here you go. financial support this afternoon. Back to you, Bill. Great. I'm going to leave the QR code up as we initially talked over our fourth one for the sake of flight.

So we talked acid, we talked sugar, we talked tannin, and now we're going to talk about alcohol, which, you know, many of you are feeling at home, but it is a significant dimension of taste. And it's fascinating, you know, alcohol gives weight, gives perceptual weight to wine, but it also transforms wine. So if you add alcohol to an existing wine, it can throw things out of whack. And wine, good wine, like good food, good life, it's all about balance. And if you were to say, and I've done this, or did this exercise with our staff very often, you know, just add, you know, a little bit of, you know, pure alcohol. To a wine, not only does it, you know, transform, you know, the perception of alcohol in the wine in the palate, but it tends to actually mute or dim, you know, certain aromatics.

And, you know, so it changes the totality and it skews this wine ecology in a demonstrable way. So we're moving on to red. I thought, you know, it'd be fun to play with red fruit on top of alcohol for the sake of this. JOSEPH STASINI from Spain. If you are in the cellar or if you are going to the shop, this wine is really full of might of Spain. Thank you so much. Parecerly Me for a long time, kind of like center of the caramel surrounded by Montsant here and it is defined you know by the southerly locale but also by this really cool localized type of soil. It's actually one of my favorite wine soils to pronounce because you get to lean into a double L.

It's called jicorella, and these are pre-grout vines being harvested on jicorella soils. A jicorella is a type of black slate; slate does a lot of things for the sake of vineyards, but you get amazing drainage on these very poor soils, but also you get you know this amazing concentration of heat, so they're sun-soaked, much as asphalt is, and they communicate that to the vines for the sake of ripening. And I think you get a sense of that for the sake of this wine. So I wanted to find something that's a little different. Do you have any other comments before we move on? Something that you know had a really pronounced, you know, kind of fullness of alcohol but you know without an overt dimension of tannins because very often those things go hand in hand, you know, when you get high-alcohol wines, they're also very tannic.

This does see a bit of oak. It sees you know mostly large neutral oak from Álvaro Palacios, who's kind of one of the foremost modern Spanish winemakers of his era from a very proud family of Viñerons and Rioja. But he spread his wings and put Fiorio back on the map, put Fiord back on the map. He is you know deserves as much credit as anyone else for making Spain the wine destination that it is today. But his wines are forward modern you know and you know they're very approachable and I think you get a sense of the alcohol in this wine even on the nose and for the sake of our exercise I want you to think of how that weight think about how that weight plays with you know the individual dishes and and whether that you know added alcohol you know plays well or you know it doesn't play well with friends for the sake of food. So what were your takeaways for the sake of the career route with the individual offerings and, again we've been you know talking over these wines very quickly for the sake of technical specs but we had the Chablis, Chablis the region, Chardonnay the grape, the Riesling which is the grape is from a German region of Rheinhessen, Kesa the grape, Georgia the country, the region Kaketi and then in this case a wine that you know goes by the Old World Convention identified by the particular region which is Priorat which I showed you on the map but the grapes are a bit of a hodgepodge.

So you have Garnacha, Garnacha which is just fun to say and it helps to do the shimmy. That's 35 percent. Cagnana otherwise known as Carignan otherwise known as Mozzuello. Then more ubiquitous Syrah, Capsa, Merlot but less fun to shimmy to. But Zoe for the sake of this wine with food what worked what didn't work for you about this one? I hated the Priorat with the pickles. Yeah yeah so again you know pickles are divisive. Pickles again it goes to the back of that English merchant expression you know buy with, buy with an apple, pair with cheese. I vehemently disagree with Zoe's orange wine take on the pickles, but we're going to move past that, but we both hated this with the pickles, so we can agree on that.

I wrote 'ooh David endpoint.' I really enjoyed it with the chicken liver mousse. I thought that that was really nice with all of that ripe fruit and the high alcohol. That is a place where it's funny, I think people when they pair, they want to jump to this place of tasting notes. So they want to say that because you know something tastes like blueberries, it's going to go with blueberries. And you know, I think it's much more important to start with the building blocks. Start with the mouthfeel. Start with you know these basic elements that we have addressed for the sake of talking through the wines. Acid, sugar, tannin and alcohol. Start with that skeletal structure and find food that matches that mouthfeel. Don't worry about you know the tasting notes as such.

Start with you know texture and build out from there. But you know that's not to say that you know fruit quality fruit is not important. And I think you know that liver mousse pairing with jam in particular is a place where quality of fruit you know really shines through for the sake of this wine. And, you know, that like you know, jammy you know berry fruit constituent makes this really same. Exactly. I thought it mocked a lot of the flavors in the honey grape jam. Particularly with that like star anise going through as well. I liked it with the hummingbird. I just wish that there had either been a little bit more tannin in the prior to be able to like cut through that fattiness.

But I thought that it shined better with the nuttiness in the Saint Malachi for sure. Yeah, I really liked it. I like it with the kind of hard salty cheese. And I do find that red wines broadly, especially bigger red wines, tend to work with harder cheeses as opposed to softer ones. You know that that's not universal. And again for for those of you playing along at home I really you know want to if you're one takeaway you know if you have one takeaway I want it to be that you know you should live in the mystery and have fun with all this . You know I want to get past this notion that there is a sacrosanct version of one wine to go with one dish. It doesn't work that way you know.

You know the fun of it all is in trying things together. The first rule of it all is a drink what you like eat what you like. That is the overarching rule. Life is too fucking short not to do so. You know, so if you want to drink, you know, pre-wrought with your you know green tomato pickles and you like that go for it. You know you shouldn't care what Zoe and I have to say about it. You know so that that's rule number one. But I think rule number two though is: is you know for the sake of these dishes, that texture, mouth feel matters. I think that that is something that people vastly underestimate and and people who taste wine for a living they tend not to kind of put the cart before the horse.

They tend not to raise the tasting notes. They tend to think more in terms of where wine lands. Vis-a-vis alcohol and and and and for alcohol we tend to think in terms of you know how far does it slide you know down your throat. You know is it you know like a bourbon or brandy you know working its way all the way you know down your gullet. Is it you know kind of dissipating you know at the front of your palate you know for for something lower alcohol. You know for the sake of something acidic you know is it you know you're giving you that like twinge in the back of your ear like a good lemon curd. You know for the sake of you know something you know tannic.

Is it you know drying out your mouth like a like a black tea for the sake of something you know sweet. Is it you know obviously cloying. You know those are the dimensions of taste we tend to live with and work in preparing. It's less about you know um flowery just flowery descriptions than it is those fundamental building blocks. Um and then I think the last piece that's instructive for the sake of of this exercise with this wine, and you know the liver mousse, and the sauce is that you know you pair for the most prominent flavor. Um, I'm doing the Kennedy uh pair for them uh but you do like in a dish, and when I when I'm working at the restaurant, you know so you've got a protein, you got steak, but you know you've got steak with sauce.

You pair for the sauce. You don't necessarily pair for the protein. You pair for the most prominent, uh, flavor, uh, in addition that's not always the, um, most prominent ingredient. And and I think you know, um, when you're at home, you know kind of playing around with things, you know, I think it's important to do so. And then lastly, um, I would say, you know, don't assume it is a one-way street where you know the food is done and you got to find the wine to work along with it. You can kind of, you know, mess with the acidity on a dish. So you know if you have an acid-driven wine and it seems a little too acidic for the food, um, you can add a little salt, uh, to your cuisine to dampen the perception of acidity in your food.

Uh conversely um you know if you feel like the food needs you know something to give it a little more lift you know just add a little lemon juice. Add a little sherry vinegar um and you can transform a pair. Um uh you know you can work backwards uh the same way you work uh in a restaurant. With with wine uh retroactively or you know work for it or I don't know which direction we're in. But anyway you can transform a dish as much as you can transform the wine um and that can be equally fun uh to play around with. Um so any closing thoughts about the pre-rock uh in particular uh vis-a-vis uh this particular uh exercise? I thought it was really instructive with the the focaccia with all the Calabrian chili oil.

It obviously heightens up that spice. Um, when I was flinging a lot of Indian food and recently um, that was really something that I always kept in mind as if there was any really high alcohol wines that for spicier dishes it just you know it puts your mouth on fire. You can't taste anything else. Um, so that's always really instructive. If the Riesling were a little bit sweeter, I think it would have been able to like calm that down and then also have the acid that like washes out the palate and all of the oil that's in the focaccia. Um, but this being you know slightly more dry than I think we were expecting is still instructive nonetheless.

Yeah, totally, and spicy in particular is a really fun dimension of flavor to play around with, and it should be said that you know, in terms of like the biological mechanism of spicy, it's not a particular taste receptor. So, you know, uh, the I didn't share uh, the tongue map. Um, I should have um, and and I will now, but you know there's this antiquated notion of the tongue map, uh, which is total bullshit. Um, it should be said, um each of our, you know, whether you're a super taster or a non-taster, uh, taste buds has all the receptors essentially so, uh, bitter, uh, salty, uh, sour, sweet, they're all in the mix on an individual receptor, um, you know, there's, there's no tongue map, it's, it's pseudoscience, um, and I think it's important to understand that, um, umami is a taste but it's, it's more of a sensation, um, than it is a, a taste as we understand the other dimensions.

And then, spicy is like a again I Pewee's Playhouse, but it is a uh all the couches going off at once kind of short-circuiting of the system um, so it just activates everything all at once. That's what spicy does um, and there are various ways to mitigate spice. The most effective, honestly, is milk um lactic acid if you're really suffering, you know, at a Thai restaurant uh, drink a glass of milk it's the best, one of the best ways to do it. But uh sugar uh does that really beautifully, which is why sweeter Riesling, sweeter wines in general are bundabar with sweet food and I hope you got a sense of that with the at home uh.

But there are a lot of things that work against spicy so high acid and tannin in particular exacerbate the perception of uh spiciness in foods in um, you know, a uh, you know, harmful uh way uh, for the the sake of enjoyment of food uh, and wine uh, so uh, without further ado, I'm gonna have a deep thought for you, but um, uh, and we'll have questions uh from the commentary for both uh myself uh and zoe about the wines of such an allison about her work but um allison i want to give you a chance to um uh throw out any any final thoughts um i'm i'm really mad that you don't have a glass of wine on your person uh she's participating for denver so in your defense it's only four o'clock there um now it's not it's not you know quite happy hour but um uh what would you like to lead us out with house personally i'm pretty disappointed i also have little children running around so the combination of the the midday sunday and little children i need multiple uh but i have learned so much um and again i just want to thank Everybody so much, I want to thank you, Bill, and um, the whole class for inviting Active Minds into this. This is, you know, the work that we do at Active Minds is meant to touch everybody because we all know um that everyone is touched by mental health, and we're doing all that we can to create an environment where people can share their stories and experiences, and share their stories, um, and I'm, we're honored to have um, like you did uh earlier on, and it there is no stigma, there is no shame, uh, we could talk about the the help that we seek and the help that we need, and then we have in our families, uh, and we're only doing that through The support and help of all of you so um just a big thank you if anybody is interested in learning more and hasn't gotten what you've needed out of today um you can visit our website which is activeminds.org and you can also email us at events@activeminds.org. Thank you, Bill, for putting the QR code back. And this is an opportunity to be able to give via this event. And again, a big thank you to Ami and Arjun for helping us get this set up.

One quick fundraising update: We have raised over $9,000 through this event. Our goal was seven, and we believe we passed that. It's amazing; it's absolutely amazing. So a huge, huge thank you. Maybe we can hit 10 and we're just so grateful and hope to be able to work with all of you again and really appreciate you welcoming us into this opportunity this afternoon. Yeah, thank you so much. So just for the sake of final thoughts here as I leave the QR code up. One of my favorite things about wine, then wine and food in general is that, it brings; it is a bridge of sorts. So you have this kind of primal, sense that is smell and taste that is all about the limbic system and is irrational, fundamentally irrational, emotional.

And then, you take it when it comes to something like bringing food and wine together, and you intellectualize it, and wine in itself is something that lends itself to erudition, and you wanna kind of pick it apart and break it down. But I love that. That combination of something that is of the flesh and blood, and then something that reaches for something more timeless. And I think there's poetry there, and certainly, I spoke to this earlier, but it reminds us all of how we relate to ourselves, to our own senses, but also one to the other. And then I have a final quote before we toast. This is from Pablo Neruda. This is from his Nobel lecture. It is one of my favorite quotes of its kind of all time.

But at any rate, Nerudo closed out his lecture as such in Spanish, but obviously translated into English. There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal, to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song. But in this dance or in this song, there are fulfilled the most ancient rights of our conscience, in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny. So cheers to you all. Alone, together, as always, thank you for joining us this afternoon. All right, Zoe, what do you got for us? How do you pair wine with desserts? Ooh, a fun question.

So this is a place where there is actually a hard and fast rule that I hard and fast abide by. So I, A, first and foremost, I love, love, love dessert wine. I lament the fact that, A, no one orders dessert wine. So, you know, if you wanna ingratiate yourself to your, you know, nerdy sommelier friend, order dessert wine. You know, if you like your company, you know, extend the meal and say, oh, it's a treat. But the dessert wine is a meal, it's so good. Like dessert wine is very much the original wine. Sweet wines in antiquity were the most lauded wines. They age incredibly beautifully. They're so good. Don't let anyone think that, or tell you that, you know, sweet wine is morally debased. I think people feel guilty for liking sweet things.

Like, lean into it like just go um, but when it comes to pairing with desserts there is a hard and fast rule um that you know biologically works and is important um, with a few exceptions that are that are mostly spirit forward for chemical reasons that we're not going to touch on for this class but if you're working with unadulterated wine the wine itself kind of has to be as sweet as or sweeter than the dessert that's just how it works otherwise the wine just gets lost um, the dessert runs roughshod over it and makes the wine seem insipid um, even if it's amazing um, please you know like like some fruity reds so I was I was pleasantly surprised how well becoming worked with the the sandy but like it's not a great pairing they're they're that's like it's like an unobjectionable pairing it's not a great pairing; great pairings are that convergence where you know uh there is this greater whole so uh, you know the the Hippocratic oath of psalm life is first do no harm so you know at the base level you don't want to you know mess with the food so you know the food should always come first you know and you as a psalm don't want to you know ruin people's enjoyment of that um you know but above and beyond that what you're seeking is you know a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts um you know i think with the priorat like you know one plus one equals two yeah yeah yeah that's fine they're both there you know they're not you know really you know uh messing uh one up um they're fine but to get to that greater place um i think with dessert in particular you need a certain amount of sweetness in a wine and and and it gives you an excuse to explore these amazing styles um you know sauterne tokai um madeira um you know port um you know there's just like so many uh you know amazing sweet wines that no one ever orders um you know so they're they're just just take that leap and the other thing too is that you know because they're sweet they're they're more durable so you know you get a bottle of um you know like berenice or or truck and berenice which is fun to say um um or ice vine or whatever um you can leave it in the fridge and it'll be fine you know like like revisit like that that exists so um you know uh you broaden the universe like i think you know people get really hung up on like one style of wine that they drink like you know explore the space savor the flavors you know um and that includes sweet or dry um you know and and then the other thing is too like you know trot these wines out these sweet wines out with apparently um you know uh savory friendly things so you know there's a reason why the french you know get all worked up about foie gras and sauterne it fucking works it works you know you have to be you know like a rich you know kind of i imagine like rich monks you know drinking sauterne and foie gras but you know we should all be that lucky like it it's good and like these sweeter um you know kind of uh deserty wines uh particularly with Like, like unctuously fatty things work beautifully, so like, uh, uh blow everybody's mind, like uh sauterne and like bossam, like you know, uh, you know Thai, really spicy Thai food, like it's, it's stupid good, like they're, they're so good. Sweet wine deserves a place in this world and um, is getting canceled for reasons that you know aren't its fault, you know, just like yeah, go there. Sorry, I do want to say that for weeks people have been wanting a dessert wine class; it's hard to execute, but I just want to let everyone: we're gonna get there, we're gonna make it work.

Yeah, yeah, so it's, it should be said that you know, uh, for the sake of our viewers like i've committed to in my head i've committed to a full year whatever we're doing now so we've got ample opportunity don't worry we'll get there eventually it'll be like the most epic wine flight in the world because no one wants a full bottle of dessert wine everybody wants like four ounces at a time so we'll go through all the glass bottles but i think i think it'll be fun and and actually uh um i will say that like you know for the sake of the restaurant one of my um you know great choices that we have a pastry chef working first now i was incredibly gifted in annie coleman and um it would be a fun uh opportunity To work with her too, so we we will make that happen.

Uh, it'll happen um, you know, sometime in December, but um, you know, it sounds like a sounds like a fun mandate maybe that could be a fun post-election if we finally no, no, no, we do something different post-election. I don't want to spoil uh, uh, but I have I have a plan post-election uh, it's like an A or B thing so it's gonna be amazing great um, you know. The way that we did have a question about all of Annie's gelatos and what type of wines would work best with like the roasted fennel and then the Concord grape and then everyone's favorite the cinnamon toast crunch which is so bomb yeah. Again, I want something sweet. I actually want, um, with a lot of those like, I really love ice cider, uh, is super cool, um, and with like, a frozen thing.

I want something that feels cleansing and sweet, um, and uh, apples being really high in malic acid, um, uh, you know the your perception of sweetness is mitigated by acid so they kind of work against each other so if you have something that's like really high in you know malic acid then you need more sugar for it to seem perceptually sweet, um, and and ice cider, uh, plays with that, uh, dimensionally in a really fun way, um, uh, so like Eden ice cider in Vermont is one of our favorites, um, uh, the Cape. Aqua invented ice cider, and there's some really low-key lovely like seedy gloss there, but I think that'd be really fun with cinnamon touch in particular.

But like, I do, I do want to know a sweeter wine, I want something with more of like a uh, like a kind of baked white fruit quality. I don't know if I want like you know port, I want more like that Sauternes and that Tokaji um, you know kind of style of wine or you know if you do something red fruit or Moscato would be lovely. Um, like a like a good good Moscato, and actually Nikki Minaj makes her own Moscato, I like it, I don't know if it's good enough, but like it's out there um, but like, you know, Moscato. Some kind of like that playful, like white fruit thing, I think could be could be fun.

I don't want port as much, I think that like that like darker fruit thing wouldn't wouldn't work as well unless you had something chocolatey, uh, which darker fruit wants um, but you know uh with like the cinnamon touch in particular, like you know sautere and Tokai, um Veronica ice wine, ice cider, those are things. But don't, but like again, and also like, um, don't be afraid of sweet across all categories so like a, like a really glorious, uh, white vermouth, Dolan Blanc, uh, one of life's great joys, Cap Corse, from Corsica, um, any number of Italian White Vermouths, like those, are really fun after dinner. Beans too, that's phenomenal. Um, could you talk a little bit about how Shishwa and pepper... um, it's difficult to pair with, it's spicy, but it's spicy in a different kind of way.

Did you elaborate on that? It's like the whole ghost pepper thing, yeah, it's really weird, like that's it's kind of like the short-circuiting your um sense of taste, I would agree with that, ghost pepper, um, short-circuiting your sense of taste kind of... uh thing that um asparagus does, and I, I find like, I find those things hugely fascinating, like, uh, you know, I think in as much as you're a wine person, you're like a you're a taste person so like it shouldn't matter it actually really pisses me off when psalms poo poo people that don't drink like you know there are a lot of really interesting non-alcoholic beverages that induce some of the same things like you should just be you should be about a universe of taste  alcohol is one dimension worth coming together over you know but it's not the only dimension um uh but you know vis-a-vis szechuan cuisine is it's really weird because there's like a numbing sensation that comes along with it which you know obviously like throws your palate for the for the loop it actually reminds me of having talked with um so, when you like if you're good enough at what I do, you don't do this anymore, you like consult, so you like work for airlines and shit like that, so I've talked to people that are like better at what I do or have more credentials and stuff and consult. And I've talked to one person that likes consulted for an airline; they're talking about the challenge of um wine at uh 30,000 feet.

And one of the biggest challenges is you're in a diminished oxygen environment, and that messes with your perception of taste, so you need wines that are extra, like um that are more expressive, so you can't like Chablis. wouldn't work you know like these wines that are are subtle and like you know that are you know erudite and you know kind of like you know more polite they don't work so you need like these more bombastic wines and i find that with flavors as well so you know um like sushi is a great example sushi is actually really hard to pair with um not least of all especially with shishini because not very acid driven so you that's why that's why sake works really well so um like rice wine is actually way lower like the ph is way higher than most wines as such and it works well with shishini which needs something softer so like riesling and Shishini don't work because the Riesling is like way too aggro dry Riesling in particular, like you need something that comes off a little, you know, uh softer. With Shishini, but like with Szechuan, you want a really loud voice, so whatever wine you do, I think you want a really loud voice, but you don't want something tannic. So that's where I go to these like weird, really floral, like fun, bombastic red wines. So, like, um, dry Bocchetto Granolino, like these, like northern Italian, like fun things, like like these, like big, juicy reds, um, work, um, wines with RS, um, residual sugar.

Uh, work like spatially so recently, you want loud voices but you want loud voices um that you know are round uh as such um with with Szechuan uh cuisine but it's a it's a fun challenge and I I love um you know I I once upon a time um paired wine at an amazing Thai restaurant in Little Cerro and fucking loved it because there's no tradition there, so there's this old sommelier expression if it grows together it goes together, and in a lot of places, there is a hard and fast tradition of what you pair one of the famous examples being Cassoulet and Madeiran, so um like there's this old-school notion of pairing where a wine completes a dish. So, Cassoulet.

Obviously, you have to know all the meats and sausages in the world, beans, and the dish is like unctuous and fatty, and the wine, which is from Great Pulpit to not Madeiran, is the designation of origin. It exists to apply tannins and acid to that fatty dish, and it's like the one completes the other. Um, it's funny because in the context of most modern restaurant dishes and, and like John, um, you know my, um, husband chef, um, in particular, most of his dishes are self-contained, you know. So, if John served Cassoulet, he'd put a shit ton of pickles on it, so you know the dish itself would be you know texturally and dynamically And balanced, so you know it's a different challenge for the sake of the wine um, but you know historically, you had one that finished the other, and and so, you know, with Southeast Asian food, it's fun to play around with that because there are no traditions, and you can do whatever the hell you want.

And I love the fact that there, you have, you know, what could be more different in the world than like a Prussian and a Thai person? Like, there's like hugely different you know cultures and histories, and whatever... but like, for whatever reason, you know, the Prussian wine goes really beautifully with the Thai cuisine, and that's. Awesome, what else you got? Oh, what happens when you burn your tongue? Uh, you just like sear your taste buds and you're lost, yeah that's that's not gone for forever. And how long does it take to regenerate? Uh, from personal experience a few days; um, it's not as damaging as actually the most damaging one of us like I would say, like one of my worst uh, like it's a few days and you typically don't burn all of them and they regenerate really fast because it's like soft kind of mucous membrane tissue.

One of my worst flavor experiences of all time was being um, a test taster for a sea urchin; whether it was too old or not, it was a test taster for A sea urchin, whether it was too old or too young, um, and, and for those of you that haven't had this singular pleasure, an urchin rots from the center in um, so there's just like no way to know, and that stayed with me much longer than any um, you know, tongue burn uh, that I've gotten, but you know it just diminishes everything. But it should be said again that, like, um, your sense of smell is a driver, the tongue is a blunt instrument, and it's more about texture than it is about taste at the end of the day, um, so losing your sense of smell is much more damaging than your sense of taste as sadly a lot of people have found for the sake of the coronavirus.

And, honestly, I like why I'm you know, honestly, like somewhat horrified of catching it because like one of the major side effects is losing your sense of smell and having that diminished. And you know, professionally, that's not where I'm at; small anecdote: I have a friend in New York who got COVID at the beginning of this and it's like months and months later, and she's still like seven months later. The virus is seriously fucking with my livelihood, I'm like like on a personal level and on a professional like on a business, you know economic, wide-level absolutely. Well, I think this pretty much wraps up most of our Questions and we just have a lot of requests to do a snack pack every week and to do merch for the holidays and, um, to just really lean into you know snacks.

Thank you all for those requests, um, you know this has been an amazing journey with you all and I am hugely grateful that we have as many folks that are, um, you know still devoted to these lessons, um, 31 weeks on as they were, um, at the beginning, and Allison, I want to give you the last word, and Allison, um, it should be said that if you're not on our lesson uh in future weeks with like a huge glass of wine in hand, I'm going to be personally offended, I'm, I'm coming, um, I'm double Fist happily, but so um, just imaginary Allison, I want you so imaginary, double fist, and lead us out with a toast. Um, I'll take my uh, with my imaginary glass in hand, a toast to all of you. With great thanks for your support of the really hard work that nonprofits are doing right now, and the mental health of everyone as we get through this pandemic, and we get through this election; and a huge thank you to all of you for your support of Active Vines today.