It is entirely possible to be an expert wine taster and have rather boring taste in wine. I suspect this is more common than wine educators would like to admit.
Consider someone who can identify grape varieties, distinguish among regions, recognize winemaking techniques, and detect subtle faults that ordinary drinkers would miss. These are impressive skills, acquired through years of study and disciplined practice. But does any of this tell us whether the person has good taste?
I don’t think so. At least, not without some further qualifications.
We tend to conflate two abilities that deserve to be distinguished. One is the ability to accurately identify the sensory properties of a wine and draw inferences about its origins. The other is the ability to recognize aesthetic value, to perceive what makes a wine interesting or expressivel. The skills required for each overlap up to a point but they are not identical.
The ability to accurately identify the sensory properties of a wine is acquired and tested via deductive blind tasting. The successful blind taster is engaged in a kind of detective work. Without knowing the origin of the wine, she identifies acidity, tannin structure, fruit character, and other clues that narrow the range of possibilities until a plausible identity emerges. It is a remarkable skill requiring a prodigious memory among other abilities, when done well. Success depends on recognizing patterns and fitting them into established categories.
Aesthetic judgment sometimes requires us to resist that impulse to categorize.
Imagine tasting a 12-year-old Syrah from Cote Rotie with a touch of volatile acidity, aggressive tannins, and an acidity that bites just as the tannins swell. An analytically skilled taster might identify all these features correctly and conclude that the wine is unbalanced. Perhaps it is. But some wines like that are interesting. A second taster might find the wine’s rough edges contribute to an expressive character that might disappear if those elements were softened. Something analogous to a mood, attitude, or distinctive way of behaving. It might be a significant departure from what conventional Syrah from Cote Rotie tastes like.
Who has better taste? That depends on whether the second taster can make a convincing case for the aesthetic virtues of this unruly wine.
The point is that aesthetic value resides partly in the relationships among a wine’s properties, in the way they interact and develop as we taste. A wine might have perfectly integrated components yet be thoroughly predictable. Another might be full of tensions that never quite resolve, yet those tensions give it an expressive intensity that keeps us engaged.
Good taste requires sensitivity to such differences and the imagination to recognize possibilities that established categories overlook.
Wine education doesn’t always encourage this. We train tasters to identify typical characteristics and we reward them for getting the answers right. This makes sense when teaching the fundamentals. But when these habits carry over into criticism, they can encourage an aesthetic conservatism in which familiar markers of quality become substitutes for judgment. Someone can be very good at recognizing what a prestigious wine is supposed to taste like without having much curiosity about the different trajectories quality wine might take.
A person with sophisticated aesthetic judgment might perform poorly in a blind tasting examination. They may struggle to identify a region or distinguish between similar varieties, yet possess an acute sensitivity to the expressive possibilities of flavor, texture, and the temporal unfolding of a wine. I would take their judgments seriously, provided they can show me what they are responding to.
Of course, good taste is not simply a matter of having unusual preferences. A contrarian who praises every flawed wine because it violates convention is as predictable as the critic who worships technical perfection. Good taste requires experience, good judgment, and the willingness to revise one’s judgments when a wine presents something unexpected.
There is a reason we don’t judge music critics by their ability to identify chord progressions or art critics by their knowledge of pigments. We expect critics to tell us what makes a work worth our attention.
Why should wine be different?
If I want someone to identify a wine, I’ll consult an expert blind taster. If I want to discover what a wine has to offer, I want someone with good taste. Ideally, the same person can do both. But they are distinct skill sets.
