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Whether you’re a wine novice or a vino virtuoso, you can always learn something new through the grapevine. With the help of two of Amarillo’s wine aficionados, you will be well on your way to becoming one as well.

Hobby Kuehnast, Certified Wine Educator, wine steward for United Supermarkets Market Street
Hobby Kuehnast has been in the wine industry for more than thirty years. After working in the wholesale and restaurant businesses, Hobby accepted the position of wine steward at Market Street in Amarillo in 1999. Soon thereafter, he joined the Society of Wine Educators and became a Certified Wine Specialist and Certified Wine Educator, the program’s highest honor.

Amarillo Magazine: How long can you keep wine?
Hobby Kuehnast: The number one enemy of wines is air. You have to look at wine as a living thing. It lives and breathes in the bottle. Once you open it up, pour it in your glass, it starts living and the air around it starts making it better for a while. But if you left that glass out by itself for several days, then try and drink it, it’s going to taste pretty bad to you because it’s oxidizing and turned into vinegar. If you left it for two weeks, it would be vinegar.
With your more expensive wines that you buy, say your Chateaus, about every 25 years you should take the corks out and put new corks in. Keeping it sideways makes the cork moist. But sooner or later that wine is going to saturate the cork completely and it’s going to start coming out of the end. If you can see wine coming out of the capsule, you need to either drink it or put a new cork in it. Putting a new cork in it is pretty tough because you have to take it to a winery.

AM: When is the best time to drink your wines?
HK: You usually drink all your whites as young as you can. There’s some really expensive, nice Chardonnays that you want to keep back five, six years and some sweet wines you want to age 20 years plus. But most of your wines you want to drink as young as possible. With your reds, people are drinking them younger and younger all the time now. Most reds should be drunk within two to four years. If you have a cellar at home you might want to keep some of the big Cabernets up to 10 years. But most people drink them earlier than that.

AM: What’s the oldest wine you’ve had?
HB: I would say a vintage Madero. I went to a tasting in New Orleans and we drank something around 1910, 1912. But Maderos don’t age; they’re as good as they get when they’re put in the bottle. You can drink one glass one year, another glass another year, and it’s still going to taste the same to you. It’s not going downhill and that’s why it’s as expensive as it is.

AM: How do you keep red wines in comparison to white wines?
HK: If you want to refrigerate a red, it slows the process down of it living. I keep whites and reds at about 55 degrees. It’s not too hot, not too cold. The hotter the temperature, the faster they age. A lot of people drink their whites too cold and when they drink them, they numb a lot of the flavors of the wine. The colder they get, it numbs the flavor. I like to take it out an hour before I have it. It’s like Coca Cola. It’s really nice when you pour it in your glass right at first. But let it sit there for a couple of hours and drink it. It tastes entirely different, it doesn’t taste good. Wines change as they sit in the glass, as they sit in the bottle, after you open it. And a lot depends on how much air they get.

AM: How can you tell if wine has gone bad without tasting it?
HK: If it starts getting darker colors, it’s bad for red. For whites, if it becomes an amber-gold color. Then the smell will give it away right off the bat. Once you open a white wine, it will probably be good for two or three days.

AM: What is the best way to pair wine with food?
HK: I go by the texture of the foods. If you have light-textured foods, use light wines. If you have heavier-textured foods, use heavier wines. There are always some circumstances to where it’s different because maybe the sauce is the dominant over the main entrée. Then you try and match up the dominant flavor of the sauce with the wine. With desserts, you always try to have the wine sweeter than the dessert so the dessert doesn’t overpower the wine. You wouldn’t put a Cabernet or Merlot with a dessert because that’s going to overpower the dessert texture wise. And that’s what you look at is balance when you’re matching any type of food with wine. If you have a big, red wine with a lobster, which is real rich, then you need a nice, rich, buttery white wine instead of a red wine because the textures are totally opposite of each other. Light reds, such as Pinot Noirs match up with light foods. If you’re having heavy hor d'oeuvres, meats like sausage, brisket, then you get into heavier reds like Zinfandel, Cabernet, Shiraz. It’s not necessarily which Cabernet or which Merlot or which Chardonnay or which Pinot Grigio, it’s more or less the textures of the food matching the textures of the wine.
Another thing you look at when you’re matching foods is the food that has a lot of acid in it. If it doesn’t, you need a wine that has a good acidity to get the flavors in the food up. The acids cut into heavy fats that are on different meats.

AM: Valentine’s Day is coming up soon. What would you suggest pairing with chocolate?
HK: Chocolate is extremely hard to match up with. My number one suggestion is a Port wine from Spain or Portugal, and that’s because all Ports are sweet and most of your chocolates are sweet. You can get all different kinds of chocolate, milk chocolates, dark chocolates, chocolates that are bitter, and the Port will match up with about all of them. You could use a real heavy Cabernet, but I think Ports are the best because you have sweet and sweet against each other. If you’re doing something lighter, say like light, fruity cakes or cheesecakes, then you could go with a sweet sparkling wine. Generally champagne doesn’t match up well with chocolates. Chocolate really overpowers everything. If you have something fruity, probably the moscatos would match up well with the lighter-styled desserts. Late-harvest Rieslings have a lot of good acidity, a lot of stone fruits like apricots, peaches in them, and they’re good because they’re on the sweeter side too.
AM: What wines are good by themselves?
HK: If you’re entertaining and you just want light wines, Pinot Grigio, Chardonnays, Sauvignon Blancs are probably the top three. They are very light and they’re on the drier side. White wines don’t fill you up as much as red wines. Light reds, like Beaujolais, Pinot Noirs, are good with food and good for just sitting around and drinking wine.

AM: What would you say is the most popular wine right now?
HK: Moscato is a real hot category right now. It seems to be the fashion. Also the Pinot Grigios, an alternative to Chardonnay, are hot. Chardonnay is great to get because there are so many different styles. There are light ones, ones with a lot of oak in them, some that are real creamy and buttery. Chardonnay is great for a winemaker because they can do so many things with it. Chardonnay is like an artist’s canvas. Pinot Grigio is pretty much a neutral grape. It’s real light, easy to drink, it’s real pleasant. Sauvignon Blancs are great because of the high acidities in them.

AM: What is the most important part of a wine?
HK: Acidity is probably the number one most important thing in a wine. Try to drink a Coca Cola or a Dr. Pepper without the acidity in it. You know how it tastes when it’s flat. All the carbonation has gone out of it. It tastes flat to you. Wine is the same way. If it has good acidity, it’s nice, light, refreshing in your mouth. If it’s not, it’s dull, it’s flat; the flavors are all gone because there’s not acidity. And when you match it up with food, it’s even more important because you want to have a wine that can counteract. You can change the food, but the wine won’t change. Food can really change the taste of a wine. If you change the food, like add salt to it or drink water with lemon, it will change the taste of your wine. Salt will soften tannins in red wine and lemon adds acids to your mouth.
Chardonnay is not high in acid and that’s why a lot of people like to drink it by itself. Sauvignon Blancs have high acidity so they’re perfect matches for seafood items and with different fruits.
AM: Are more expensive wines necessarily better than less expensive wines?
HK: A lot of people have the perception, the more expensive the wine is, the better it is, and that’s not always the case. I think it really breaks down to the value. You can get some really nice value wines that are $5 a bottle that taste like $10 or a $15 bottle. That’s a good value to you. On the other hand, when you purchase a $50, $100 bottle of wine, you’ll be disappointed if it doesn’t taste like $50 or $100.

AM: What are some good years for wine?
HK: Off the top of my head, 1959, 1961, 1966, 1970. It depends on where the wine came from. France has different good years than what California does. California always has good years. It’s either a good year or above average or a great, great year. California 2005 was a good year. 2000 was an average year in California, but it was a great year in France. It was like the vintage of the century because of the weather.

AM: Where can you get information on good years?
HK: You can go to websites. Winespectator.com is probably the top one. It’s out of California, but they cover the whole world. They give you recommendations and they have a library of history on wines.

Stan Lacy, wine director at Macaroni Joe's

Amarillo native Stan Lacy has been the wine director at Macaroni Joe’s since April. Before making his way back to Amarillo, Stan pursued a career as an opera singer in New York City. While in the Big Apple, Stan served as the director of three-star Italian restaurant Abboccato and the wine director at international wine bar, Madison & Vine.

Amarillo Magazine: How did you get into the wine business?
Stan Lacy: When I got to New York and into fine dining I learned that there was so much to know about wine than what I thought. You think you know about wine because you know that red wine goes with meat and white wine goes with fish and the more expensive the bottle, the better it is, well, there’s an awful lot more.

AM: What’s the reasoning behind “white wine with white meat and red wine with red meat” rule?
SL: When you look to pair a wine with food, you look for one of two things. Either you want to highlight the same the flavors in the dish or you want to contrast them. There are reasons you don’t drink red wine with fish. Most of them have to do with fatty fishes, such as tuna and salmon. The fattier the fish, the more of the omega 3 fats there are, and they do not react with red wine tannin. Artichokes and asparagus react unpleasantly with wine. It can make it taste a little bit sweet. When those things are on a dish, it makes my job more complicated. That being said, you should drink what you like. If you’re eating salmon because your doctor said you have to have salmon, and you love red wine, then by all means, let’s find a red wine that goes with that. You wouldn’t want, under any circumstance, to drink a big, robust Cabernet with that fish. The tannins and fish acids react poorly together. But, if you have to have a red wine with fish, then you can choose a nice Pinot Noir, something from Oregon, a nice French Burgundy to go with the salmon.
There are rules, but they’re there to be broken. The bottom line is, if you’re a big, red Cabernet drinker and that’s the kind of wine you like and you’re going to eat fish sometimes, it’s fine. You probably like that wine enough that it won’t matter to you how it’s reacting with the food.

AM: How can someone go about matching food with wine on their own?
SL: Learn a little bit, just a little bit, about obscure varietals or some obscure wine regions. About 50 percent of the tables [at Macaroni Joe’s] want to drink a Cabernet and they think that Napa Valley is the place to have Cabernet from. And there are extraordinary bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon made in Napa Valley, but that’s not the only game in town. If you like a big, robust red wine, you might find value in Spanish wines. You may have to learn about grapes you don’t know about, Monestrell or Grenache or Tempranillo. The truth is that those Napa Valley Sauvignons are a bit problematic to pair with a meal. Cabernet is great with steak. It’s great with braised meats, hardy short-ribs, anything that’s stewed for a long time. But they’re terrible with that salmon. A wine that’s from another region might be more what you’re looking for, if you’re willing to step out on a limb.

AM: What would you suggest for someone trying wine for the first time?
SL: Simpler is usually better. Not something too complicated. Something with a fair amount of fruit to it. For a white, that means probably steering clear of Chardonnay. Only poor Chardonnay falls into that simple category. For white, I suggest beginning with a Pinot Grigio. Pinot Grigio is light, generally uncomplicated. It’s very crisp. If you find one from regions in Italy, chances are pretty good that that will be a delicious white wine to start. It can be fairly dry, but it’s a nice apply-fruit on the nose; it’s very food friendly. If you want a bottle to enjoy with food, [Pinot Grigio] is a good wine to start with.

AM: Why do beginners gravitate toward sweet wines?
SL: A lot of people, their first bottles are sweet bottles, such as Riesling. Riesling can be sweet or can be dry. German Rieslings have seven categories. If you know how to read the label, it will tell you how sweet the wine will be. In general, the longer the name, the sweeter the wine will be. Riesling can be a very complicated wine to understand and finding the ones you like, with the levels of sweetness you enjoy, is pretty tricky. You had a Riesling one night at a party and loved it. And you go and buy a bottle that looks exactly like it at the store, but it was different in some way, and not the same thing at all. For me, it doesn’t go as well with as many types of food. It goes well with Asian food, with Tuna, Asian-style tuna. The sweetness balances well with the soy, the way very few other Western wines do. There are reasons and times to really drink Rieslings. But it does become a person’s catch-all in this area. People tried it and its sweet, so they go for something sweet.

AM: What would you suggest a beginner start off with?
SL: I advocate going for something that’s fruit-forward, but not sweet, so you understand what more the white and red wine world has to offer. Merlot from Sonoma will usually be very fruit-forward and uncomplicated. Medium-bodied, it doesn’t offer a lot of objections on the palette. Some people like to start with a Pinot Noir because it’s very light, but like Riesling, it has a ton of different styles, a ton of different regions, so it’s tough to always know what you’re going to get out of the bottle. Some Pinot Noirs are light and fruit-forward and that’s the style I would suggest for a beginner. But they can become immensely more complex than that. If it smells of pine straw, it can be overwhelming to someone who’s new to wine. Zinfandel is a good beginner wine. But again there are a lot of different kinds of Zinfandel. It has a lot of plush fruit. Dryness in wine is what I think takes people some getting used to. The darker flavors, the earthy flavors, are what experienced wine guys talk about for ages and ages and they’re the things that can put off somebody who’s just new to wine. Find a friend that you trust that who knows a little bit about wine or ask the sommelier or wine director or find a pro who knows his product and can tell you what you will like.

AM: What would you recommend for Valentine’s Day?
SL: Have champagne for Valentine’s Day. There’s a lot to know about champagne, and there’s a lot to know about sparking wines that aren’t champagnes. Many people have been exposed to champagne or sparking wine of some kind. For that reason, I think many people think they don’t like champagne. Another thing that puts people off is good champagne is quite pricey. The reason is they use a very expensive method to produce it. They don’t really do it too many other places. Ones to look for are by famous champagne houses in France, names you’ve heard of before, who are making a product in the United States. Moet, is one, Louis Roederer, Cristal.

My favorite thing for Valentine’s is to do a nice Rose champagne. Rose champagne shouldn’t be a sweet, sparkling pink thing. They are romantic and fun and wonderful. Don’t drink your champagne with chocolate. Some people really, really like that. For me, chocolate melts in your mouth and you like that smooth, creamy texture. Why would you want that to interfere with a whole bunch of bubbles? Have your champagne with peaches or with strawberries, with caviar even if you want to do something fancy.

AM: What’s the difference between champagne and wine?
SL: Secondary fermentation that takes place inside the bottle and the grapes grown in that region are what make champagne so incredible. The difference between wine and champagne: Take wine and put it in a bottle then put yeast in the bottle with it so it has only a small area to work and turn the bottles all the time to make tons and tons of bubbles, which makes it so festive. When you drink a beer or soda, you get wet plus fizz. In good champagne you get one texture, like a creamy texture.

AM: What wines do you think pair well with particular seasons?
SL: For spring, late spring going into summer, Rose. Great Rose is perfect on a hot summer day with cheese or salami. Heavier wines in the winter. Winter is a good time for big, robust wines. Drink lighter wines for summer, have spicy wines for winter.

Read about vintner Monty Dixon and his winery Bar Z:
Grape Expectations

by Drew Belle Zerby

After graduating from LSU in 2009, Drew Belle worked as a page designer in north Louisiana until moving to Amarillo and joining AGN Media in late 2010. In her spare time, she loves to read, travel and spout out useless movie trivia.

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