Balancing Act

  Wine is a lot like potato salad.  A really good deli will offer many different types of potato salad.  There's old fashioned, sour cream, dill, red potato, oil and vinegar, or the green bean and crispy fingerling potato salad we feature on Small Lots Big Wines.  Potato salads can have hard boiled eggs, cooked carrots, pickes..dill or sweet, bacon, chives, etc.  There are many different styles to satisfy many different palates.  I can't imagine anyone blogging negatively about potato salad, "the use of mayonaise in potato salad is so 1980's...it's a practice I hope to see totally wiped out.  I only use extra virgin olive oil...."  Somehow I don't think that would fly.  There are way too many people who love mom's old fashioned potato salad.  

    I happen to love potato salad...all kinds.  The only potato salad that I turn my nose up at is the kind you can buy in bulk at grocery stores...the types that come in those big tubs.  It's not the style that bothers me.   It's that they are out of balance.  They are way too sweet.    The ingredients aren't top notch.  It's just a boring mass produced potato salad sold to make a quick buck.

   Wine is the same.  Take Chardonnay for example.  Some are aged only stainless steel like Lava Vines.  Some are aged in oak but with no ML like at Stony Hill Vineyard.  Some have partial ML such as Fontanella.  And then you have the full blown ML buttery Chardonnay such as HdV.  They each express the style and tastes of the winemakers.  Each style appeals to different palates. It's not my job, or anyone elses' in my opinon, to say which is the right way and which is wrong.  As long as they are balanced they are right.