A truly extraordinary Sauvignon Blanc from an intimate Carneros vineyard. A delicious blend of juicy acidity and minerality with a creamy mouth-feel. Opens with bouquet of baked pineapple and tropical aromas with distinct notes of flinty minerality. Balanced on the palate offering flavors of ripe pineapple, citrus and minerality with subtle hints of apricot and honeysuckle. Meyer Lemon is the star of the long finish. Buy This Wine

Barrel fermented with 85% malolactic fermentation, this Chardonnay is a winner at $20. The nose is reminiscent of mom’s apple pie with warm notes of yeast and nutmeg. As it opens more tropical and citrus aromas come forward. Balanced acidity and creaminess with flavors of red apple, pear, caramel, vanilla and baking spice with subtle notes of ripe pineapple on the finish. Buy This Wine

A refreshing wine on a warm summer evening, interesting enough to stand alone and inviting enough to pair with fresh summer fare. Expressive aromas of baked pineapple and white peach with floral notes to round out the experience. Mouth-watering acidity for excellent food-pairing with creamy yet crisp flavors of ripe pineapple, tropicals, Meyer lemon and minerality with hints of lime in the finish. Buy This Wine

There are some wines where the description should begin and end with yummy or delicious without all the deconstructed tasting notes… this is one of those wines. A flamboyant fruit-forward Pinot Noir with an enticing nose of blackberry and baked cherries with notes of blueberry. Robust flavors of dark cherry pie, blackberry and ripe raspberry followed by vanilla and baking spice on the long finish. An excellent balance of jamminess and acidity. Buy This Wine

Wine Guerrilla just does Zinfandel right. A rather complex offering with a perfect balance between Zinfandel flavor and texture. The 3.5 acre vineyard was planted using cuttings from a 120-year-old Zinfandel vineyard nearby. A robust nose of black cherry, ripe plum and leather with hints of cocoa. Full-flavored without going too jammy. Great food-paring acidity with notes of black cherry, black plum and cocoa with a touch of spice and espresso in the long finish. Buy This Wine

Think sunny warm summer afternoon with friends. This SB opens with a creamy nose of pineapple and minerality with notes of Meyer lemon. Creamy on the palate with crisp acidity. Lovely flavors of ripe pineapple, Meyer lemon and granny smith apple on the very long finish. Enjoy on its own or with lighter fare. Buy This Wine

“I am going to make it (wine seminars) worth their while. I have a short attention span. I don’t want to be bored. I am going to do whatever I can to make them walk away and say, that over-delivered.” Mark Oldman

During the Austin Food and Wine Festival we had the chance to meet wine style guru Mark Oldman, two time winner of Georges Duboeuf Best Wine Book of the Year Award for: Oldman’s Guide to Outsmarting Wine: 108 Ingenious Shortcuts to Navigate the World of Wine with Confidence and Style and Oldman’s Brave New World of Wine: Pleasure, Value, and Adventure Beyond Wine’s Usual Suspects.

Oldman has a distinct style described by Bon Appètit magazine as “winespeak without the geek” and by Publishers Weekly as “the ideal mix of wine connoisseur, showman, and everyday dude.”

I didn’t know what to expect from Oldman, of Drink Bravely fame. He was very fun, engaging and frankly a blast to chat with. While in Austin he professed his love for the Lone Star State repeatedly, interesting for a Jersey guy. He even pulled out his Longhorn money clip in testament.

One of the funniest moments however, was during his last seminar when he pulled out a 3X5 foot blowup of his outstanding arrest warrant from the 2012 AFW festival and his newly minted “Free Oldman” t-shirt. It seems Mark was caught by the tireless (obviously with too much time on their hands) Austin police for ….drumroll… Jaywalking, which in Austin is, believe it or not, a criminal offense. The crowd rolled out of their chairs laughing.

Mark says he tries to over-deliver in all aspects of life and in fact he did, both in person and his three amazing seminars. If you ever get a chance to participate in a Mark Oldman wine seminar, do not pass on the opportunity.

B&B – Define your phrase Drinking Bravely

That’s sort of my catch phrase for going outside your comfort zone. I’m guilty of sticking in my comfort zone; not only in wine but in all aspects of life and you really need to push yourself. It’s understandable, especially in restaurants where wine is really marked up, that people don’t want to take risks. So it’s great when you can find a wine teacher or blogger that turns you on to functional alternatives.

Some wines are overvalued and others are undervalued. I don’t like to spend a lot on wines so I tend to sniff out wines you need to drink bravely for…like the ones with hard to pronounce names and wines from unusual regions, like Portuguese reds. You have to know what stones to look under and trust your sommelier, if they seem trustworthy. Engage them in a conversation. Give three criteria, like I want a red, not too tannic and light bodied and have them suggest a few things. Then pick the one that’s most appealing to you. That can start a love affair with a particular region that you otherwise might not have discovered…so that’s Drinking Bravely.

B&B – Where did your fascination with wine begin?

Oldman – In college I started a wine club, the Stanford Wine Circle. Back then I thought we’d have to pay the winemakers to come in but to my surprise nearly every winemaker we invited was chomping at the bit to market to the younger generation. I knew very little about wine then but we had Robert Mondavi, himself, Bruce Cakebread and Jim Clendenen from Au Bon Climat. So there were these 21 year olds getting to drink $80 mountain-grown Cabernet basically for free. It was like going 0-70 in one fell swoop. We really learned a lot that way.

B&B – Tell us about your path from running the Stanford Circle to Mark Oldman, famous wine guru?

Oldman – I don’t know about guru, you’re very kind. After college I went back to New York, I’m a Jersey guy. I like to think that both Jersey people and Texans tend to have big personalities but Texans are cool…and Jersey people aren’t always so cool…we’re from the wrong side of the tracks (letting out a hearty laugh).

So armed with my new knowledge I began approaching restaurants about teaching wine classes in their empty banquet rooms. The all said, “kid we could make a lot more money selling wine to people…good idea but No!” Then in ’91 I found what was the first major wine bar in Soho before Soho became as popular as it is now, Soho Kitchen and Bar. It’s closed now, but the owner was totally cool and the idea had traction from the first day.

B&B – Was your New York wine audience a tough crowd?

Oldman - Second only to teaching a crowd of Texans, a crowd of New Yorkers want good value for their money. So when you’re teaching wine, you really have to know your stuff. You have to be crisp. There are people who will probe you, so you really have to study five times over.

B&B – What is the key to being a successful wine educator?

Oldman - It’s about being that bridge between that 99% of the population who feel they know nothing about wine. It’s a complicated subject, not a difficult subject.  But it is complicated. So you have to think a lot about how to make it easily digestible for people. 

Mark Oldman teaches the art of the Champagne Saber

B&B – What can wine lovers expect from a Mark Oldman wine seminar?

Oldman - I am going to make it worth their while. I have a short attention span. I don’t want to be bored. I am going to do whatever I can to make them walk away and say, that over-delivered. I got more than I expected. Because in life, I don’t care what it is, I want things that over-deliver.

B&B – In addition to teaching wine, what else were you involved in?

Oldman - With a friend from college we started a dot-com in ’98 called www.vault.com . It still exists. It provides information for job seekers interested in Fortune 500 companies. Think of it as a Zagat style guide for job seekers will real company culture details. At that time I taught wine as a hobby but when we sold Vault.com in ’08 I returned to my true love, the wine world and teaching people about wine.

B&B – When my daughter heard I was doing this interview, she texted me to say you “are so cool” and wanted to know about your work with Pottery Barn.

Oldman – Well, as you know they don’t sell wine but they do sell what they call table-top, glassware, decanters and other accessories that wine lovers would be interested in. So I do a lot with them, I speak at their stores, I do videos (see video example) for them and I speak at their national convention.

What’s funny about it is they call me a “style expert.” It makes me snicker to myself…If they only really knew… I guess in the tiny world of wine I have some style. But it’s been a great relationship because we have a similar audience. A lot of people, before they become full bore wine snobs, are looking for cost effective wine accessories and Pottery Barn really has their finger on the pulse there. They don’t ask me to endorse anything I don’t believe in so it’s an open – positive relationship.

B&B – What do you think is the difference between a wine enthusiast and a wine snob?    

Oldman - A wine snob, I think, has often gotten into wine to lord it over others, as a status symbol, where a wine enthusiast has gotten into it as a source of pleasure, a source of hedonism, a source of social interaction. For me, wine has always been the great social lubricant. It brings people together.

There are a lot of weird people out there but somehow the wine people are a little less weird, more fun and a little more sociable. I think the snobs get into wine like art snobs or car snobs; they do it more for the perceived effect or the perceived prestige rather than the true passionate love of wine. Also wine snobs tend to over-talk about wine.

I’m very careful among my friends; a lot are not in the wine world.  After we order wine, they all look at me and are expecting me to say something erudite or poetic. But I’ve learned the more you know the more you should clam up and let other people talk. Listen to what the casual drinker has to say about wine. You know we know all the fancy words; it’s chewy, its diffident, malolactic fermentation, tomato leaves and stuff like that, but I find it much more useful to hear things like, that’s kind of bitter.

If I can generalize, women tend to have really good senses of perception…sometimes too good. But when it comes to wine, they can really decode a wine even if they’ve never read a wine book.

In America, people lack a lot of confidence with wine. It’s been put up on the Grey Poupon pedestal and what is stress reliving is to know that people who actually know a little bit about wine are real happy with a $10 bottle and not getting into too much ritual or protocol. It’s fun to puncture some of that pomposity.

B&B – You were on the PBS show The Winemaker Season 1. Right now there is very little wine television, unlike food. What do you think are the biggest challenges for wine TV?

Oldman -I feel like the right match hasn’t been made yet. You need someone who really knows how to talk to the masses. By the masses, I mean, the otherwise sophisticated people who still feel like they know nothing about wine, which is about 99% of everybody. The problem is a lot of the wine experts get so filled with knowledge that they don’t really empathize with what most people want to know. Unlike food that lends itself to a culinary porn aspect…you can watch the cheese dripping down the side of the plate and the meat is wet and moist, wine offers little to be evocative when it’s not in front of you.

But I think the internet will change that with interactive online courses with immediate feedback from people who want to learn about wine. But your right, with all the food shows on now, wine is like the person whose been etched out of the family photograph.

B&B – What’s on the horizon for Mark Oldman?

Oldman – There’s another book but I can’t talk much about that. Most immediately is the Aspen Food and Wine Classic which is my 8th year. Like Austin, I absolutely love it and I love the people. They all really love wine and are a fun audience. It’s like a wonderland there. It always feels air-conditioned outside. (Our interview was done outside in 90+ degree heat)

Author’s note: I attended three of Mark’s seminars and to say they over-delivered is an understatement. Mark is fun, irreverent and high energy. His wine seminars tackle interesting and unexpected topics like, Drink Like a Pro, Cinema Vino – Wines from the Movies and Hard to Say – Easy to Drink.

Consistently an excellent wine, the 2011 vintage is something special. A subtle bouquet of of red apple with notes of ripe pineapple, stone fruit and baking spice. An elegant balance of a creamy mouth-feel and zippy acidity offering flavors of red apple, pear, ripe pineapple and distinct minerality with just enough oak to round off the edges but not overpower.  Buy This Wine

Made from predominately Sauvignon Blanc,  Sauvignon Musque clone. All lees aged with 62% in French oak. Don’t be tempted to over-chill; this beauty shows best as the temp. rises to pleasantly cool. A temptingly crisp nose of pineapple, citrus, white peach and intriguing aromatics. A round mouth-feel with juicy acidity offering flavors of ripe pineapple, citrus, minerality and hints of green apple. Lovely subtle notes of key lime and honeysuckle on the finish. Buy This Wine

Ray Isle

“I still get excited when I find a $17 wine that blows me away.That is a continuous hunt for me at the magazine.” Ray Isle

During the 2013 Austin Food and Wine Festival, I had the chance to sit down and chat with Food & Wine Magazine Executive Wine Editor, Ray Isle. A self-described “Texan living in New York,” Ray was one of the festival’s preeminent wine presenters, offering three seminars. His gentile Texan style eschewed any sense of wine snobbery as he shared his knowledge and passion for wine.

B&B – Ray, Many wine lovers can point to one moment when their love affair with the grape began. Did you have a wine epiphany?

RI - For me, I was having dinner a long time ago with a former girlfriend and her father. He ordered…I’m positive it was an ‘84 Diamond Creek Volcanic Hill. I started drinking this wine and about three sips into it, I thought WOW, I’d never tasted anything like this before…it’s really good and it began to preoccupy me throughout the dinner. I probably paid more attention to the wine than my date. So that’s when it started.

Then I was randomly fortunate to get a writing fellowship in the bay area. I started hanging out at wineries and volunteering on the bottling line because they paid you in free wine so I could get wine that a graduate student normally couldn’t afford. I later switched my teaching schedule around for a couple of years so I could work harvest…Finally I said I’m done with academia…I’m going to be in the wine business…one way or another. I switched and never looked back.

B&B – What are the biggest challenges about being the Executive Wine Editor at Food & Wine Magazine?

RI - Food & Wine is very much a food magazine and a wine magazine, so I want more wine content and the food department wants more food content. There is always a very friendly back and forth about that. Writing well about anything is difficult, so my own standards make it tough. Additionally, since I am writing for Food and Wine, I can’t just write about what I like. We have an enormous audience and they have to be taken into account. We have to write about wines they can find. I can’t just write about small production wines because I’ll get a mailbox full of emails saying, I can’t find this wine anywhere. So I balance the needs of our readers with my own wine passions.

B&B – How do you keep your wine writing fresh?

RI - What I do is wine journalism. I don’t score wines. I do recommend wines but I also write about the people, places, latest trends and the historical background of things. It’s tricky because many of the most significant wines and wine places have also been written about ad infinitum. So finding something new to say about Chianti is always a challenge. But the nice thing about wine is that there is always something new to say and new trends to report…like15 years ago I would not have been writing about Malbec from Argentina.

Vine Talk Cast

B&B – We enjoyed you on the PBS television show Vine Talk with Stanley Tucci. What do you see as the future for wine television?

RI - Wine has a basic problem with TV in that TV is a visual medium and wine tasting, appreciation and wine itself is not a particularly visual subject unlike cooking which involves knives and fire, people running around, slabs of liver and what not. It’s basically liquid in a glass and you swirl it, sniff it and taste it and TV demands a visual interest. Location based shows like In Wine Country have tremendous costs. Non-location shows, in a studio, have to work around the problem of swirling, sniffing and spitting. Vine Talk, which was a blast to do, was a work-around. We showed celebrities at a quasi-dinner party and got them to talk about wine so there was both an educational and entertainment aspect. However, it has been tough to get the funding for the second season and PBS has its own odd requirements since there is no advertising.

I’ve been waiting for someone; I’d love it if it was me, to come up with a wine show that garners a huge audience because with TV and movies you realize just how big the reach is. As a wine journalist and wine lover, I want more people to fall in love with wine. Look at a movie like Sideways, a popular but still indie-film without a giant release; it had a measurable and substantial influence on the sales of Pinot Noir and Merlot. So if there was a hit wine TV show it would be a fascinating thing.

B&B – How would you compare the Austin Food and Wine Festival to Aspen Food and Wine Classic?

RI - They are very different in scale…Aspen and Austin are very different towns and I love them both for their own reasons. Aspen has been going on for 35 years so organizationally; it is a machine…that’s not a bad thing. Austin is still figuring out the best angle to showcase a food and wine event for Austin. First, I was psyched to hear we were doing something in Texas which means I can come home and drive to Houston to visit my mother and I just love Austin. I like the fact we incorporated the music element which captures the sense of the city, too. I’m very interested in Texas wines, so I think it’s great we have the Food and Wine Festival smack in the middle of one of the Texas wine regions. Austin just has a great vibe as a place and the festival seems to have taken off pretty well.

B&B – What new wine coverage will we see in Food & Wine this year?

RI - I’m trying to get more and more wine coverage in the magazine all the time and I’m succeeding or not…as the case may be. I’m always interested in up and coming regions including  wines in obscure places like Pinot Noir in Patagonia. We are also looking at wine regions in America that are not in California, Oregon or Washington.

It’s a really good time to be a wine consumer. There’s a lot of really good affordable wine under $25. The quality level of 10 to 20 buck wine available in the U.S. can be incredibly high. That’s a good chunk of what I write about, affordable wines of the world. Not coming from a wine drinking family, I still get excited when I find a $17 wine that blows me away. That is a continuous hunt for me at the magazine and definitely readers can expect more of that.