Gardens are sprouting. Clocks have jumped forward. Martha's website has declared it's time for spring cleaning. More tellingly, I just got the urge to open a soave.
I know that it's finally spring when lean, crisp, northern Italian whites start to beckon the palate.
Canadian winter offers a natural edge to full-bodied chardonnays, shirazes, merlots and cabernet sauvignons. They're what Canadian drinkers tend to prefer most of the time. Call them comfort wines if you like.
But wines, like foods, have peak seasons, not in terms of vine-ripened freshness but certainly in terms of visceral appeal and culinary compatibility.
Soave, made from the under-celebrated garganega grape, is to me the oenological equivalent of the season's first spin on a bicycle or in a convertible with the top down, the first walk of the year without a scarf, coat and gloves. (Good producers include Pra, Pieropan and Inama.)
"Springtime is an awakening of our natural world, so it's fun to have an awakening of your wine palate, too," said Tyler Colman, author of A Year of Wine: Perfect Pairings, Great Buys, and What to Sip for Each Season.
The book, published late last year, does away with the standard geographical template of so many wine publications, offering month-by-month suggestions paired not only to the weather but also to seasonal celebrations: kosher wines for Passover, for instance.
"That was one thing that really struck me about wine," he told me over the phone from his home in suburban New York. "Nobody had ever plotted a seasonal arc for wine consumption before."
March, the ultimate transitional month, brings that arc into sharp focus.
In spring, Dr. Colman, a political scientist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the political economy of wine in France and the United States, is a fan of aromatic whites. That's the nickname for varieties with typically pronounced aromas, usually of flowers and ripe fruits. They include riesling, pinot gris, pinot blanc, gewürztraminer, friulano, kerner, gruner-veltliner and muscat (not to be confused with the decidedly non-aromatic muscadet).
"Aromatic whites capture a little bit of that flower aspect, the floral notes, and some nice fruit that lures us back into thinking about warmer weather," Dr. Colman said.
A fan of chenin blanc, Dr. Colman likes the floral quality of the grape, "a veritable field of flowers to greet you on a spring day." At least that's often the case with the best chenin blancs, which come from France's Loire Valley and are named after communes such as Savennieres and Vouvray. If you can find and afford a Nicolas Joly Savennieres ($40 all the way up to $120 for his stellar Clos de la Coulée de Serrant) or a Huet Vouvray ($25 or so), your spring will be off to an auspicious start.
My own preference at this time of year is for whites that, like well-made soave, I'd classify in the geological rather than the floral spectrum. I love lean wines with a tingly, mineral-like seam running through them, such as the aforementioned riesling, friulano, muscadet and, for me the king of spring, Chablis. What's that about March, lions and lambs? My March comes in with cabernet and goes out with Chablis.
A northern satellite region of Burgundy, Chablis specializes in a uniquely lean, crisp style of chardonnay. Producers generally eschew the heavy vanilla characters of oak-barrel aging in favour of a tingly, bone-dry quality that evokes the surrounding chalky soil.
Chablis isn't cheap, either, starting at roughly $18. But it's generally under-priced by Burgundy standards. That's partly because producers don't have to pass along the cost of $1,000-a-barrel oak aging. Good, widely available brands include Drouhin, William Fevre and Louis Moreau. But it's hard to go far wrong with any Chablis - unless it's a fake one from some place other than France, namely California.
Like many professional wine enthusiasts, Dr. Colman has an incorrigibly adventurous palate when it comes to wine styles. The thought of sticking with the same old label all year long holds little appeal.
Yet even self-professed experts with big cellars can be guilty of stylistic inertia. They often like to stick to what they know so that they can show off their knowledge to guests, and what they tend to know is big reds such as Bordeaux and California cabernet sauvignon.
