Wine and Your Memory

 You saw the title and you were hoping, weren't you? Admit it. You thought I was going to report on a new discovery that drinking copious amounts of wine around the clock every day was going to improve your memory.

I'm not. I've been working on this experiment for a while now and drinking wine has not improved my memory. Perhaps it has occasionally distorted my memory, but it hasn't improved it ... at least not yet. For me, however, the good news is that memory is still pretty darn good, so I'm here to report that wine seems to have not diminished my memory.

So why I am I writing this?

I want you to use your memory in order to enjoy your wine more. It works for me and it can work for you. And, contrary to popular belief, if you do use your memory whether or not you choose to combine it with one of those wine apps that I disdain, you'll get more pleasure out of wine.

What do I mean? 

I want you to remember what wines you liked and why. Not just that it was a Merlot and not just that it was from a winery in Ouachita Valley, Arkansas (yes, they do have wineries there), and not just what you were doing when you drank it, but everything about it.

• Primary grape
• Other grapes
• Vineyard(s)
• Vintage
• Producer
• Region
• What food you were eating, if any
• Who you were with
• Was the bottle decanted? 
• Coravined? 
• Was it freshly opened?
• Was it at a bar and you fantasized about the person who poured the wine for you?

The reason that all these things matter is that real enjoyment of wine is about the total experience. I know that I like Vintage Port better in dim light and a warm room. But that's not true of all dessert wines. I prefer Sauternes in the summer on a breezy evening listening to music from the middish 60s through the early 70s. Each is its own experience.

Let's corkscrew down a little bit (my mind said drill down, but that is such a horrible consulting term and besides, we don't use drills to open wine bottles). 

At least where I live, one of the really popular red blends these days is Orin Swift's The Prisoner. It's a nice enough wine at its price point. You can probably buy it for around $45 or so at retail and obviously way more than that in a restaurant. What vintage though? Nobody ever looks and frankly, some of the vintages have been far better than others.

So why do people like Orin Swift The Prisoner so much? It's the experience and the mystique, I'm convinced that the large majority of people who say it's one of their very favorites have been captured by the marketing and branding and not by the wine. In fact, if they tasted it in a blind tasting alongiside other similarly priced red blends, I don't think it would be a standout.

Part of the problem with this wine, and remember, I said it's a nice wine, is that it is a mish-mash. It's not just a blend, but it's a blend of a whole bunch of stuff that many wine experts would say don't really go together. 

It has a Zinfandel base, Syrah, Petite Syrah (long-time readers will know that Syrah and Petite Syrah are not exactly close cousins and if you called Petite Syrah by its older name (Durif), you'd never associate the two), Cabernet Sauvignon, and sometimes Malbec, sometimes Charbono, perhaps occasionally Merlot. So while its production is patterned after an Italian field blend, its pedigree is Californian through and through.

Dave Phinney gets his grapes from all over California, but largely from Napa, Sonoma, and Santa Barbara. Those are some seriously good places to get red grapes from. That said, there is not necessarily consistency from year to year and that's ok.

What attracted people to Orin Swift wines originally? I think it was the name. Orin Swift sounds so sophisticated. And with well-designed bottles and decent prices on many of their wines, people were attracted.

I'm sure you want to know who Orin Swift is or was. Well, if I recall and I'm not going to cheat and use Google or some other infallible <cough cough> search tool, Dave Phinney's mother's maiden name was Swift and his father was Orin Phinney. Voila, a brand.

Returning to the original topic, however, if you are a fan of The Prisoner, what do you like about it? It's a pretty big wine with high alcohol content (these things tend to appeal to American wine drinkers). It actually overwhelms a lot of food, but perhaps that is part of why people remember the wine. And the warm weather vintages might do that even more so.

But let's suppose you really like this wine (I thought the 2022 was really worth drinking), from a purely wine standpoint, what do you like? It's an important question because unless you drink this same wine every day, you probably want to understand which other wines might appeal for similar reasons. And if you've had this wine a lot, did you like one vintage over another? What was better about that vintage.

Going back to the original questions to insert answers ...

• Primary grape -- Zinfandel
• Other grapes -- Usually a lot of Syrah and Petite Syrah
• Vineyard(s) -- you'll never know
• Vintage -- look at the bottle
• Producer -- Orin Swift with winemaker and proprietor Dave Phinney
• Region -- California from a mix of regions
• What food you were eating, if any -- how would I know what you ate?
• Who you were with -- the love of your life, I hope
• Was the bottle decanted? -- unlikely
• Coravined? -- doubtful
• Was it freshly opened? -- better have been
• Was it at a bar and you fantasized about the person who poured the wine for you? -- I won't tell

Your answers to all those questions should guide your future selections. But you don't just want to base your selections on The Prisoner. You should know AND REMEMBER every other glass of wine you have ever had and why you liked it or disliked and build your own non-artificial intelligence to help you select wines in the future that will suit you at that moment.

Honestly, that's what I do. It's rare that I fail to remember most of those details about any wine I've had. You can do it. I'm sure you can. Maybe drinking enough wine will improve your memory.