More people — readers, students and folk on the street — ask me, “What wine goes with (name of food)?” than any other question. The second most common request is how or where to learn more about wine.
My invariable answer is “Buy Kevin Zraly’s book, ‘Windows on the World Complete Wine Course,'” soon to be printed in its 26th edition. At just under 4 million copies sold, Zraly can boast that it’s the best selling wine book in the world.
Only one thing exists, animate or inanimate, that is a better guide to wine than this book — the man himself. When witnessed live, especially at his New York City wine school (same name as the book), there’s no better wine Virgil.
“In class this semester,” Zraly says,” there’s a 23-year-old sitting next to a 79-year-old. There’s no age appropriateness for learning about wine. Everyone comes.” And thus he has held forth for 40 years, having graduated more than 20,000 students. This year, his influence was recognized yet again with another lifetime achievement award, this one from the James Beard Foundation at its annual award ceremony.
Zraly is my hero, as a writer and teacher about wine myself. He does best what a good teacher of any arcane, complex or faraway subject does. He recasts its essentials in easy-to-grasp analogies or pictures. He distills it; he translates it into your language.
And he does all of it with a laugh. He’s Catholic Catskills, mining his altar-boy past to talk about a subject that is, for some people, a Really Big Deal only in the end to shrug his shoulders to say that “it’s really not a big deal.” His philosophy embodies lessons for all wine lovers, neophytes or seasoned.
Zraly approaches wine in very simple ways, both as a subject to learn about and an object to delight in. “The best way to learn about wine is to open a bottle,” Zraly says. “Bring South Africa into your home; bring Italy into your home. These days, with a glass of wine at hand, you can Google the wine’s site to get a fact sheet on it and learn anything you want about it.”
Zraly brought wine down to earth in his talk “World View of Wines” at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago recently.
“The good news about wine,” Zraly says, “is that this is its golden age. There’s never been so much good wine on earth ever before.
“Bordeaux is making its best wines ever,” he says. “Italy, its best wines ever,” clicking off a list nearly as exhaustive as the 15 countries and 400 winemaking regions he visited last year in service of research for his books.
What’s the coolest thing about wine that I ever learned from Kevin Zraly? It’s about milk.
“How do you get someone started to understanding about wine?” Zraly poses. “You teach them about the six major grapes in the wine world. For whites: riesling, sauvignon blanc, chardonnay; for reds: pinot noir, merlot, cabernet sauvignon.”
“They may not know about these grapes,” he says, “but they know about milk. Wine is about texture more than anything else. Riesling is skim milk; sauvignon blanc is whole milk; chardonnay is heavy cream. Pinot noir is skim milk; merlot, whole milk; cabernet, heavy cream.
“It’s not about wine. It’s not about food. It’s about texture,” he says.
Texture as rich as a lesson from Zraly.
Growing like vines
As Zraly points out with these stats, the world of wine keeps growing.
75percent of all wine consumed in the U.S. is made in the
U.S. Americans drink
American wine.
In 1970, there were 400 wineries in the U.S. Today, there are more than 6,000. In 1970, 40 wineries in Napa Valley. Today, more than 400.
All 50 states host at least two wineries. (Latest on the list? North Dakota.)
During the last 17 years, despite a recession, wine consumption in the U.S. has continued to rise. When things are good, people drink wine. When things are bad, people drink wine.
90percent of all wine made in a given year is consumed within one year. 9 percent is drunk within five years. That leaves a mere 1 percent that’s laid down or cellared.
The U.S. is now the No. 1 consumer of wine in the world, measured by total volume of wine consumed.
In Italy and France, wine consumption has dropped more than 50percent during the past 17 years.
The largest looming market for wine is China. It has 100 cities with more than 1million people in each.
There are about 311 million people in the U.S. Of those, 77 million are baby boomers. And 70 million are millennials (18-29 years old). The latter segment is where the growth in wine appreciation and consumption will be.
Bill St John has been writing and teaching about wine for more than 30 years.
UNCORKED
