Here and there, you may have heard or read of myths, oversimplifications, about wines and how they should be served. Here are five myths I have found to need dispelling.

Myth #1 - Simple meals should be accompanied by simple wines. With this myth, the perception is that if you have a simple everyday meal, you should have a simple "everyday" wine. Quite the contrary, having a complex wine enhances the experience by enabling one to focus on the wine rather than the food. One night, Lynn and I had a 2010 Tero Estates "DC3" Merlot/Cabernet Franc blend with a rotiserie chicken from Harvest Foods and found the wine to be more complex and compelling that it had been the previous time we had the wine. So much so that I raised the score from 18.5+ points to 19+ (review to be published in the February issue).

Myth #2 - Wines need lots of oak and tannin to age well. While red wines need a certain amount of "structure" to age well, this works only up to a point. I have seen wines where the tannins have outlasted the fruit, resulting in austere, unattractive wines. Wines need fruit as well as structure to age well. I am not a fan of twenty year old wines which have had the fruit dried up.

Myth #3 Reds are for winter, whites are for summer. This is treating wine as a seasonal beverage akin to beer (e.g. stout in winter, IPA in summer). Wines are wines and should suit the meal or occasion regardless of the season.

Myth #4 - When it comes to whites, ABC rules. Anything But Chardonnay is followed largely by consumers who think they are being sophisticated by shunning Chardonnay in favor of more "exotic" whites such as Marsanne, Roussanne and Grenache Blanc. These alternatives have their merits, but there are plenty of fine Chardonnays such as those from Buty (Conner Lee Vineyard), Maison Bleue and Sleight of Hand (French Creek), and Tranche (Celilo Vineyard) and more.

Myth #5 - Great wines don't have to be expensive. This is only partly true, enough to generate a reverse snobbery on the part of consumers who exult in the discovery of "twenty dollar wines that taste like fifty dollar ones." From time to time, great wines do come up that are not expensive, and I have reviewed such wines. But they are exceptions, oftentimes less favored varieties such as Chardonnay (see above) and Riesling. By and large, the best wines do cost a good deal more than others. In the Review of Washington Wines, the wines scoring 19/20 or more points tend to run around $50 a bottle, and 19.5 point wines, higher. High quality does cost more, with the cost of grapes from top growers, such as Champoux, Ciel du Cheval and Boushey. and winemaking equipment and oak barrels and so on. By and large, one gets what one pays for.