Swirls well with others

IT’S Bordeaux night for the clutch of girlfriends who call themselves the Drinkettes. In the back room at 17th Street Cafe in Santa Monica a long table is jammed with wine glasses ready for the women, who arrive for dinner at 7 o’clock, each with a bottle of Bordeaux in hand. In moments, the wine tasting is in full swing.

Not that all of these women are wine geeks. Half of the Drinkettes are there to catch up on the gossip while others, who have brought their own deep-bowl wine glasses, are furiously swirling sniffing, sipping and writing copious tasting notes.

“It’s about connecting with each other when our busy lives make it easy to lose touch,” says Janel Dreeka, the group’s founder and leader. “And it’s fun to discover the nuances of wine, to appreciate the seduction and sensuality of wine with friends.”

Just as book groups have helped make enjoyment of good books a shared experience, tasting groups remind us that wine is best sipped with friends. It is especially true in California where so many casual wine drinkers have visited winery tasting rooms and where wine shops host tastings for novice drinkers and formal wine classes abound. Learning about wine with a small group of intimates may be the most enjoyable way to improve your wine IQ.

Setting up a wine tasting group is a lot like organizing a book group. Here’s how to gather friends together to explore wine, allowing your group’s preferences and predilections to guide the structure and the content. The good news is that wine isn’t Proust. Tastings are allowed to swerve into pure hedonism without apology.

Tasting and talking

THE Drinkettes’ monthly tasting group is the result of a promise among half a dozen schoolmates to stay in close touch. The group doubled in size as other friends gravitated to the wine-centric evenings.

When it’s time to discuss the wine, everyone chimes in, offering opinions and voting for her favorite wines. The group does the tasting in a series of flights of three wines each, poured blind, which means the bottles are disguised in numbered paper bags. Appetizers arrive during the first flight, and by the time everyone has had a taste of each of the bottles and discussed her preferences, dessert is on its way.

Getting a wine tasting group going and keep it going when no one knows much about wine is a matter of organization, say the pros. A smart way to start is to decide on the style for your tasting, set a theme for the wines, then agree on a budget.

Is it a couples’ tasting, a mixed group, all men or all women? How intent is everyone on learning the details about each wine? Does the group want to have one leader? Or would folks rather trade off host duties?

There are no rules for how to organize a wine tasting group, just as there are no rules for what makes a perfect wine. It’s all personal preference. Tasting groups are defined by the members.

A Monday evening tasting is less of a party than a Saturday night tasting. Your group may be so focused on the wines that no one is interested in eating anything more than cheese and bread. Or it could be a group of devoted foodies who delight in preparing elaborate dinners that match the wines for the evening. Some groups like to meet in restaurants, leaving the stemware for someone else to clean.

For novice wine lovers, smaller groups of eight to 10 people are easier to organize than large groups. Once a month meetings are easier to sustain than more frequent gatherings. And there is usually one person who cares more than the others about how things are run.

Make it easy on everyone, says Paul Wasserman, a wine expert who has organized dozens of tasting groups. “Let the pushy one run things.” This style works particularly well when the group meets at restaurants and everyone needs to be given an assignment for what wine to bring.

Since the Drinkettes’ first tasting a year and a half ago, Dreeka has chosen the theme each month (Spanish, Italian, German) as well as the restaurant location. Everyone brings a bottle that fits the theme and each orders a la carte from the restaurant menu. Although the wines are discussed and notes are sometimes made, there’s no formal presentation on each wine. The loose structure allows the group to relax and shift gears to personal conversations.

When a group meets at someone’s home, being more tightly structured helps avoid some classic pitfalls, according to Bonnie Graves, a sommelier and wine consultant. With a set budget for the evening, a rotating host can select an intelligent collection of wines for the evening’s tasting. Inexpensive bottles of meaningless wines can be avoided. And the risk of having similar wines or missing benchmark styles is eliminated. Those in the group learn more when they take turns doing the research, she says.

Serious aficionados like to test their ability to recognize various wines by taste and smell. But it’s not much fun for ordinary people, says George Cossette, owner of Silverlake Wine. Blind tasting adds unnecessary tension to an evening that should be nothing but fun. “People feel intimidated, as if they might fail the test, when they taste blind,” says Cossette.

When Rachel Kaganoff Stern started her couples’ wine supper group 10 years ago, they tried tasting blind. But it was a bust. Group members felt they weren’t able to really appreciate the wines. “As we’ve become more educated about wine, sharing the information about the wines is a big part of what we enjoy,” says Stern. “We want to look at the bottle while we drink the wine, talk about the winemaker.”

Stern and her husband Eric started their tasting group when they were in their early 30s. “We just wanted to learn more about wine. It was an excuse for friends to see each other,” she says. The Sterns and the three other couples in their group now each have personal wine collections and routinely travel to wine regions around the world. Their tastings involve elaborate dinner parties with an eye to pairing the right foods with the wines. It’s a lot of work, says Stern, so the host duties rotate among the four couples.

When you are just getting started, don’t sweat the food pairing. Keep the food flavors low-key so they don’t fight with the wines. One trick: Recipes and products from a particular region usually complement the local wines from that appellation. Better food stores can help guide you toward cheeses and meats from particular places.

Set a theme for each tasting. “Random wine tasting is just drinking,” Wasserman says. To learn about wine, there should be a common thread running through your tasting, he says.

The easiest way to organize wine tastings is grape by grape, says Wasserman. Start with Syrah, he suggests. A Syrah tasting could include an Australian Shiraz, a Cote Rotie from France’s Northern Rhone Valley, an Apalta Valley Syrah from Chile and California Syrahs from Paso Robles and Sonoma County.

The grape variety used to make each of these wines is the same, but the regions and the winemakers are different. Notice what’s similar in the wines as well as what sets them apart from each other, says Wasserman, and you will have learned something interesting.

Focus on a favorite

IF the group falls in love with a particular wine in a tasting -- say a big, juicy Cote Rotie -- the next tasting can focus on Syrahs from France’s Northern Rhone Valley. Add some of the region’s classic blends with Grenache and Mourvedre from the Southern Rhone for variety.

Wasserman’s hypothetical tasting of Syrah-based wines is an example of a horizontal approach. It encompasses wines from around the world that are made using a common grape variety. The revelation is how differently that grape is expressed in wines from a variety of places with different soils and climates. It’s a reflection of what the French call terroir.

The second example, focusing on a particular region, is known as a vertical approach. This kind of tasting allows an exploration of winemaking styles and terroir within a region. It’s a deep slice of one spot on the map that incorporates the history, culture and customs of that place.

Wandering -- grape-vining -- through varieties and regions can keep a tasting group on track for years, Wasserman says. France’s major red wine grapes -- in addition to Syrah there is Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Grenache, Cabernet Franc and Gamay -- and France’s primary white wine grapes -- Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Gris, Riesling, Viognier -- are grown around the world. Every region produces slightly, and sometimes dramatically, different wines from the same grape.

The list explodes when grapes indigenous to Spain, Italy and the rest of the Old World are included. And American winemakers are producing wines with many of these grapes. Want to get to know Pinot Noir wines? Try a Cote de Nuits and a Cote de Beaune from Burgundy along with Pinot Noirs from New Zealand, Oregon and California. If you can find one, throw in a Pinot from Tasmania or some other obscure place. Pick the group’s favorite wine and, next time, try several Pinot Noirs from that region alone.

A basic wine atlas and a simplified guide to wines, even the belligerently democratic “Wine for Dummies” series, will provide enough background for an evening’s social tasting. Dreeka, for example, simply goes online to print out information on whatever wines the Drinkettes are tasting that night, and passes copies to participants.

It’s not necessary to load up on website subscriptions or a bookshelf full of printed wine guides, says sommelier Graves, because a lot of wine education tools “feature big-production, big-brand wines, which aren’t all that fun to taste.”

A better idea? “Choose a wine store that you trust, and give them a budget the group,” Graves says. Most retailers can pull together a selection of wines that illustrates your theme.

Graves’ other down-to-earth advice: Print up a list of the evenings’ wines for each person in the tasting group listing vintage, producer, name of wine or vineyard, region and type of wine. Leave lots of space between each listing for note-taking. The next day when group members go wine shopping, their lists and notes will be in hand.

And as for the wine glasses, Graves echoes many sommeliers who believe in one-size-fits-all glasses for tastings. The more important criteria is that the stemware be clean with enough room in the bowl to stick your nose in for a good whiff.

Finally, there’s the question of money. If you’re in a rotating-host group with a budget for each tasting, collect funds to pay for the next tasting and set the upcoming theme at the end of the current gathering, says Graves. “People tend to make sure they attend the wine tasting group if they’ve already shelled out $30 for the night,” she adds.

But how much do you want to spend on the wines? Again, it’s a matter of personal preference. Meaningful tastings can be pulled together with wines that are $20 and less. And yet it’s fascinating to taste through wines with vastly different prices. Often, less expensive wines turn out to be favorites, even when competing with pricier bottlings.

The Drinkettes find price a touchy issue. Other than setting a minimum of $15 a bottle, they avoid any discussion of price. Why? The wine group, they say, is one night in these Westsiders’ lives that isn’t dominated by how much everything costs.

Setting a maximum value for the wines people may bring to a tasting, however, is never done. The possibility that someone might decide to dazzle the group with a rare and costly wine is too delectable to preclude.

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Wine group etiquette

Wine is an individual experience. The following are guidelines respecting individual tastes.

Go slowly. Swirling, sniffing and sipping to observe aromas, color and flavors takes time.

BYOWG. Bring your own wine glasses. That way the host is never stuck with the worst part of the cleanup: washing dozens of wine glasses.

Small pours. You need to make each bottle of wine stretch to serve everyone at the tasting. An ounce and a half is the traditional tasting pour. Leftover wine can be shared after the formal tasting is finished.

Protocol. You can choose either to chat about the wines while you taste or hold your opinions until everyone has had a chance to taste every wine. But the whole group should follow the same protocol.

No right answers. Every palate is unique. One man’s enchanting aroma of eucalyptus is another man’s bitter herbs. There are no right answers at a tasting, but rather individual tastes and observations that deserve respect.

-- Corie Brown