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Joel Stein: ‘The more the person knows about wine, the more obscure your gift needs to be’
A gift has many purposes, the least important of which is the recipient. A great gift highlights the giver’s virtues: generosity, sophistication, emotional intelligence, environmentalism. A first edition of Ulysses is a great gift. A Murano glass dish is solid. The right bottle of wine is better.
Unfortunately, you do need to think a tiny bit about the people you’re gifting to. Do they know anything about wine? Do they only like certain types of wine? Are they a recovering alcoholic?
Luckily, you can rule out certain bottles right away. Even though people make this mistake all the time, don’t gift a mass-market luxury wine. It’s a commodity, so everyone knows its price.
A bottle of Veuve Clicquot in that yellow box might as well be a $60 Amazon gift card. It says: ‘Thanks to my kid’s teacher, whose name I don’t remember.’ Unlike the Amazon gift card, however, it will never be used; it will be regifted eternally. A friend once received a bottle of Veuve Clicquot with a happy anniversary card attached, and she had never been married.
The more the person knows about wine, the more obscure your gift needs to be. It should make the receiver think, ‘Oh, I didn’t even know this existed’.
I like to go with a Chateau Musar from Lebanon, which allows me to express both sympathy for the country’s wars and knowledge about them. And since it’s one of the world’s oldest winemaking regions, I also get to talk about the history of wine. And that, truly, is the gift I’m giving.
A confusing label is an even better demonstration of your sophistication. German Riesling is obviously perfect for this – perhaps a Mosel-Saar-Ruwer Trockenbeerenauslese Qualitätswein mit Prädikat.
But I’d be excited to watch a friend unwrap a bottle of Txomín Etxaniz Getariako Txakolina from Spain’s Basque Country. Make sure you learn how to pronounce each word on the label so you can say it very slowly and loudly to him or her.
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Ideally, you’d like the giftee to keep this bottle for years, so they occasionally run across it and think, ‘That was a really thoughtful gift from our generous, sophisticated, emotionally intelligent, environmentalist friend.’
So avoid anything people enjoy, such as a Sauvignon Blanc or a Beaujolais, because they’ll drink it right away. Sure, a Burgundy or Bordeaux could age for decades, but why not think really long term? When will they open a Sauternes or a Port? If they know a lot about wine, try a Barolo and maybe a joke in the card about how their great- grandchildren will enjoy that Giacomo Fenocchio.
The real challenge is that most giftees won’t know or care much about wine. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t gift them wine; remember, this isn’t about them.
What you need to do is stop thinking about what kind of wine to get them and instead focus on how much wine to get them. You give someone a three-litre bottle – or better yet, a six-litre bottle – and they’re going to be impressed. I got a textured-glass jeroboam of Bellussi Prosecco at Costco for $40. The person I’m gifting it to is never going to invite 12 people to her house for brunch, so she’s going to be thinking about me until she dies.
For someone you actually care about, you can go to an online auction and bid on a bottle from their birth year. You don’t want to do this if they’re too old, not because they’ll be sensitive to people seeing ‘1971’ on their bottle, but because bottles that old are expensive. But off-vintage Rioja and even old Port can be reasonable.
If, for some reason, none of these ideas seem right, you might have to actually think about the specific person you’re giving it to.
Do you remember them boring you about some trip they took? If so, get them a bottle from that part of the world. It will allow them to relive their experience. Unfortunately, it will also allow them to go on and on about the wine they had there, which ruins the whole reason for giving someone wine, which is to let you show off.
But if you can force yourself to pay attention, one day you’ll be able to bore someone else with the information they give you. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Like that Veuve Clicquot.
In my glass this month
When my mom went with me to visit Babak Shokrian in his funky, Persian-rug-strewn, vinyl-record-spinning shack of a tasting room at his beautiful vineyard in Santa Barbara County, on her first sip of his delicious Grenache rosé, she looked at him and exclaimed: ‘I don’t like this.’
It was like living the movie Sideways. But even she was wowed by everything else he makes. His Shokrian Vineyard, Syrah 2019 (US$48) is meditative but fresh, and just as cool as his artist-painted labels.
