A question that often pops up at Nancy's is:
"How do you people find this stuff?"

Generally, the inquiry comes from a customer who bought a wine that blew them away. Well, this is our world, welcome to it, and this month, Jason answers that question for you ...

It's tasting season again.
Then again, in some ways for the tasting team here at Nancy's, it's always tasting season. But this time out, we're talking about the fall tasting season in particular. To those for whom tasting season means about as much as hunting season, let me explain this to you.

Regarding the 'process', visitations from importers' and distributors' representatives occur all year round. We have tried to train these individuals to do our bidding. Basically, we'd like them to bring us wines perfectly tailored to suit both our store and the people who trust us to find and deliver to them wines of unusual quality and value. This, unfortunately, does not happen as often as we'd prefer. Oh, we find the goods, but we stain our teeth black and dye our tongues blue in the process. I guess, in some twisted way, we're happy to do it.

The actual 'tasting season' thing, for the most part anyway, happens only twice yearly; in the spring and then again in the fall. We fill our shelves by trying little sips, (which we then spit out into fabulously designed buckets), of as many different wines as we can. The fall tasting season is right around the corner. Wine companies, both large and small, are beginning to display their latest offerings in such varied venues as the Marriott Marquis and the prestigious Puck building downtown to spaces as small as cubicle 'offices' that the smallest of the small work from. We trek the five boroughs (and sometimes beyond) in our quest. We are the buying team; we go to where the wine is. We attend them all.

We look for very specific endowments in each wine we taste ... white, red and dessert. White wines must be fresh goods, as fresh as they can get. Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand is a perfect example. A wine that may have inspired us to envision a deity and draw a picture of him (or her) from the 2002 vintage is now literally stale news. The freshness and vibrancy of the 2003 vintage is what we're excited about now. Most white wines do not benefit from age, even the ones which begin their lives with high acidity and bracing clarity of flavor; the exceptions to that rule being Riesling and Chenin Blanc, and even for them not all examples of these wines age as gracefully as generally purported. If Sauvignon from New Zealand or Chenin from the Loire valley in France begin to show signs of fatigue after a year or so in the bottle, think of how white wine from Italy must fare over the same time frame without having been blessed with a generous amount of acidity out of the gate.

The same guidelines apply to red wines, as well as dessert wines, although sometimes, depending upon the grape varietal, the producer, and of course the vintage, more leeway is granted regarding the age of a particular bottling. Very few can withstand the test of time, the 'future,' but for the most part, the fussiness and fanfare is still applied. Why? Profit, snobbery, we don't know -- that's the part of the business our tasting team generally skips over...

If I do say so myself, the Nancy's Tasting Team functions like a well oiled machine. In point of fact and to put it plainly, we taste real good.

For example, the larger tastings may show anywhere from 400 to 500 wines per event, in one afternoon! We taste them all; usually we have at least 3 of our team at each event, black teethed, blue tongued and totally dizzy just from the vapor of so much sipping and spitting, and still may only come home with a few we're genuinely excited about. To draw an image from the movie Wall Street, we're the Gordon Gecko's of the industry. "We hear 100 deals a day, we pick one."

And precisely because of that philosophy, whichever wine you decide to bring home with you, you'll know that it's the deal we picked out of the 100 we saw.

Aren't you glad we're on your side?

Jason Spingarn
October 2004