• Michael Gebert
  • Kevin Zraly with a panel of winemakers from Codorniu Raventos

Winemakers come to town to put on a show all the time—to talk up their wares and get restaurateurs and wine writers to taste them. They’re always interesting—even if the wine isn’t that interesting, the mere fact that anyone gets to live that life in their family’s 18th-century chateau is enough to get you working on being reincarnated into a winemaking family next time—and they do their best to dance around the ineluctable fact that turning the abstract sensory experience of wine into words never really feels like it works. You know what a really good wine instructor, like the famous Kevin Zraly of the Windows on the World wine school, knows how to do? Drop a word like “strawberries” and, the next sip you take, you say, “Yeah, strawberries.”

Each of us had nine wine glasses, four whites and five reds, arranged on a paper mat under which the wine’s name and vintage was printed; plus a water glass and a plastic spit cup. We started with three cavas, Spanish sparkling wine made in the “methode Champenoise” (which Codorniu claims to have been the first in Spain to use). The first, Gran Codorniu Xarello Gran Reserva 2007, was 100 percent Xarello, a relatively little-known Catalonian varietal. It was like taking a sip of a sour beer first thing at a bar, startling to begin with in its strength and acidic bite. I wondered at the logic of starting us with something so strong—surely it would blow more delicate flavors away.

A Rioja, Vina Pomal, 2010 Alto de la Caseta, tasted like blackberries to me; my neighbor said “It tastes like licking the inside of the barrel,” which I understood was meant to be a compliment. A Ribero del Duero, Legaris 2009 Tinta Fina “Muestra L,” was inky and peppery; you could believe it was, as the winemaker told us, the last harvest of the year to struggle out of the highest, direst slice of land in the Spanish wine world. 2011 Masdeu de Scala Dei, 100 percent Garnacha from a 12th-century monastic winery, was thinner, more raspberry than blackberry, but still with an acid kick. (Or maybe I thought raspberries once Zraly said raspberries.)