Women Wine Critics Board

Red, White and Drunk All Over

This week we are joined by award-winning wine writer Natalie MacLean, who has just published her first book, Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass. Natalie joins us below for a Q&A session about her book, and if you have any questions for Natalie, please post them here!

From the book cover:

Natalie tastes sensuous pinot noir in the ancient cellars of Burgundy while discovering the mysterious tenets of biodynamic viticulture from such colorful characters as the tiny, ferocious Lalou Bize-Leroy, part-owner of France's acclaimed Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. She pulls on sturdy boots to help with the grape harvest at California’s Bonny Doon Vineyards—and gets to the root of the anti-establishment philosophy of winemaker Randall Grahm, notorious for his experimental wine techniques, love for unfashionable grapes, and fondness for naming his wines "Cardinal Zin," "Heart Has its Rieslings," and "Big House Red" (whose grapes are grown just down the road from one of California’s state prisons).

Natalie takes a job as undercover sommelier at a five-star French restaurant, spends a day helping customers in a high-end New York wine shop, wades into a famous feud between Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson, two of the world’s best-known critics and, back home, invites friends over for a casual wine tasting. Along the way she teaches us—painlessly and often hilariously—how to face a telephone directory-sized wine list without fear, what questions to ask to get exactly the wine you are looking, what those scores out of 100 really mean, and how properly to expectorate (it’s best to start out in the shower!)

At the 2003 World Food Media Awards in Australia, Natalie was named the World's Best Drink Writer. The competition received more than 1,000 entries. Natalie has also won four James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards for her writing, including the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, in memory of one of America's greatest food writers. Natalie has also won an unprecedented five Bert Greene Awards for excellence in food journalism, presented by the International Association of Culinary Professionals, four awards from the American Association of Food Journalists, four from the North American Travel Writers Association and three honorable mentions at the National Magazine Awards. Natalie’s e-newsletter is read by 50,000 wine lovers in 36 countries and was twice named one of the three best food and wine newsletters at the James Beard awards.

Elegance and the Spittoon

Contributed by Daniel Rogov, wine writer

Ever since Susan Anthony took to the streets, Americans have been talking about equality between the sexes. Despite enormous progress in both awareness and action there is only one place in which women and men have found true equality and that is in the humiliating use of the spittoon.

The question of spitting at wine tastings is one that haunts both men and women, professionals and amateurs alike. Let's start off with one given - spitting can never be elegant. But at wine tastings, especially if you are going to be tasting more wine than you would normally drink, it is one of the few ways of maintaining one's sanity, sobriety, and dignity. For professionals who sometimes taste 40, 50 or even 100 wines at a sitting, it is also a way of assuring that their livers, kidneys and brains will continue to function in some sense of normalcy until they reach a ripe old age.

Georges Duboeuf can spit into a spittoon two meters away from where he is sitting without getting a drop of wine on his shirt, the floor or his neighbor. There are not many, however, who have mastered that odd task. Nevertheless, there are several ways in which you can maintain if not elegance, at least a sense of dignity while spitting: