Tag Archives: wine tasting

Wine Language and Diversity

09 Wednesday Sep 2020

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wine and languageEsther Mobley’s thoughtful article in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled “Wine’s diversity issue starts with the way we talk about wine” raises important questions about ethnocentrism and sexism embedded in wine language, although I’m not sure she offers a clear solution to the problem. It is behind a paywall so I will summarize:

But now, it’s becoming clearer than ever that the conventional language used to describe wine isn’t merely intimidating and opaque. It’s also inextricable from racism and sexism, excluding dimensions of flavor that are unfamiliar to the white, Western cultures that dominate the world of fine wine and reinforcing retrograde notions of gender.

She points out that many of the taste references used in wine reviews are flavors and aromas specific to France. Words such as brioche, cassis, garrique, coulis, and pate de fruit mean nothing to someone unfamiliar with French or haute cuisine. Such language is a barrier to anyone trying to learn about wine or get ahead in the wine world if they lack the cultural background from which these terms are drawn.

She is certainly right about this. There is a diversity problem and an accessibility problem. The narrow focus on white Western cultural references makes wine inaccessible to people unfamiliar with those references.

However, her solution is a bit puzzling. She writes:

It’s not that western European flavors should be vilified, or use of French restricted; it’s that the dictionary should be expanded. And as new pathways are created to usher in a more diverse new generation of wine professionals, the resources to do that expansion will grow.

Expanding the vocabulary to use a more diverse set of references is laudable but I don’t see how that solves the accessibility problem; it makes it worse.  Trying to incorporate taste references from, for instance, Chinese cuisine or Peruvian food may be more inclusive, but it re-inscribes the problem of accessibility since these terms would be just as unfamiliar as the French terms to many people.

Yet she doubles down on this as the solution:

Part of the work, certainly, has to do with deliberately exposing oneself to new flavors, something that happens to be very feasible when you live in the Bay Area. Another part of it is really, truly paying attention to those flavors, whether it’s the pungent saltiness of XO sauce or the mouthwatering tang of umeboshi.

Again. How does this make wine language more accessible? Are we to replace French cultural references with those available to residents of the Bay area in California? Expanding our wine vocabulary to include references familiar to non-Westerners is a worthy goal in itself, especially if it improves our ability to describe wine accurately. But it’s wishful thinking to assume that it will make wine more accessible.

But at the end of her essay, she makes a useful suggestion:

Then again, talking about wine isn’t just about fruits and flowers and sauces. Sometimes, the exercise of conveying what a wine tastes like may require a little more imagination.

She praises use of the term “petrichor”, which refers to the smell in the air after a rain, because it is “universally intelligible”. I think there is an important clue here for how we might solve this problem of accessibility.

To my mind, personality traits and emotions are, for the most part, universal, despite some cultural variability in how we experience them. Metaphorical descriptions of wines as angry, joyful or dour can capture the holistic character and individuality of a wine in a way that a list of fruit descriptors cannot. It does require an imaginative leap to view wine as a person. But once that leap is made, it opens up a rich vocabulary for describing wine.

Finally, her discussion of gendered terms is much more straightforward.

For example, it’s commonplace to describe wines as “masculine” or “feminine.” A masculine wine, we’re meant to understand, is aggressive and muscular; a feminine one, delicate and floral. I’ve used these terms myself in the past, but I won’t in the future — not only because this wine-gender binary feels like it adheres to an outdated, irrelevant set of gender norms, but also because it happens to be vague and unhelpful. Sexism aside, these terms fall into the same obnoxious camp as “wet river stone.”

There is simply no excuse for using “masculine” or “feminine” to describe wine. If a wine is aggressive and muscular then call it aggressive and muscular. The gender term adds nothing to the description; it’s just lazy.

Does a Novice and an Expert have the Same Sensory Experience?

22 Wednesday Jul 2020

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wine glassSome philosophers hold the position that wine tasting (or any kind of tasting for that matter) is a purely sensory experience. No input from the mind—thoughts, knowledge, or use of language—has any impact on what we taste.

Thus, a novice with little experience tasting wine and a highly educated wine expert, when they taste the same wine, are having the same sensory experience, assuming they have similar biological capacities. The expert can use her knowledge to compare the wine to other wines and evaluate it according to criteria which the novice cannot do. And the expert will get intellectual pleasure from her knowledge of how the wine was made or where the grapes were grown. Knowledge may contribute non-sensory pleasure to the experience.

But with regard to the sensory experience itself, no cognitive input is necessary.

This strikes me as implausible. In the transition from tasting novice to expert, I imagine we all have experienced our tastes changing as we gain more knowledge of regions, varietals, winemaking styles, etc. The increasing expertise seems to be having some impact on what we are able to taste.

It has also been firmly established in countless studies that our beliefs about, for instance, the price of a wine influence not only our judgment about the wine but the properties the wine is perceived as possessing.

Furthermore, I think it is rather common to be puzzled about what aromas a wine exhibits until someone says “that’s baked apple” at which point the baked apple becomes crystal clear. It seems to me the suggestion doesn’t merely give me a label to assign to the aroma. It makes the aroma more salient thus changing the experience.

On my view, beliefs, knowledge, and linguistic signs regulated what is salient—what stands out from the background—and thus directly influences the sensory experience.

The novice and the expert are not having the same experience at all.

Holistic Tasting and the Fear of Subjectivity

03 Wednesday Jun 2020

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word cloudTasting notes are often derided as excessive, boring, or unhelpful. But most of these criticisms miss the main drawback to most tasting notes. They fail to identify a wine’s aesthetic appeal and the aesthetic properties that make it appealing. The culprit is the reigning practice of analytic tasting, the separating out of individual components,  that governs wine tasting as practiced by wine professionals.

There is much in Burnham and Skilleas’  book The Aesthetics of Wine that I disagree with but their account of the importance of tasting synthetically in addition to analytically is entirely correct and crucial to understanding this idea of aesthetic appeal:

“But separating out (i.e. analysis) is only part of the work of tasting, and perhaps not even the most important. The taster must also be able to put the elements back together,  so to speak, in order to perceive and evaluate relations among them and with respect to other wines…The ability to experience relations of sensations is different from the simple ability to experience sensations individually.” (15)

The various aromas, flavors, structural components and textures in a wine are, of course, “mixed up” and the first stage of learning to taste is to learn to disentangle them. But aromas, flavors and textures also happen in sequences and exhibit various values such as clarity, focus, distinctiveness or nuance all at various degrees of intensity and duration.  Once we learn to separate all this out we then have to put the wine back together, so to speak, and experience how all these elements come together. Wine quality crucially depends on that “coming together” and most tasting notes tell us little about that.

The term “balance” doesn’t capture it. Balance usually refers to the relative prominence of fruit vs. acid vs. alcohol. That doesn’t describe the overall character of a wine.

“Harmony” gets closer but all quality wines that have been sufficiently aged will taste integrated just as all competently composed symphonies (putting aside deliberate attempts to eschew tonality) will be harmonious. There are after all many ways of being harmonious that matter crucially in our appreciation of a piece of music. A music critic who simply pointed out that the orchestra sounded harmonious last night would be laughed off the page.  What matters is how that harmony was achieved and what it’s impact was. To describe these effects, only aesthetic properties will suffice.

The same is true of wine. By “aesthetic properties” related to wine I mean properties  such as “elegant”, “profound”,  “vivid”, “powerful”, “dynamic” “complex”, “unified”,  “delicate” and “brooding” to name just a few of the more prevalent aesthetic properties in wine.

These sometimes find their way into the best tasting notes but too often we just get a list of fruits and other aromas. In fact the tasting grids used by certification organizations to train wine tasters seldom go beyond the listing of analytically determined properties.

Why? Why limit the vocabulary of wine tasting to elements rather than overall impression?

The answer I think is that wine professionals are introduced to wine tasting via the blind tasting model where the aim is to identify the origin of the wine and give an indication of quality level largely by judging a wine’s typicity. For this task, those analytical tasting notes suffice. But there is more to wine tasting than identifying origins.

Furthermore, I think there is a widely-held assumption that by sticking to analytically determined elements, wine tasting will be more objective. As Burham and Skilleas point out, aesthetic properties are emergent properties and “their use is not entailed by the application of objective criteria.”

By “objective criteria” Burnham and Skilleas mean descriptive properties of a wine or a group of wines that would Invariably constitute elegance, profundity, or vividness. There are no such criteria. No listing of flavors, aromas, or textures (let alone a listing of the chemical compounds in the wine that produce these aromas and flavors) will  invariably explain the presence of profundity or vividness and no spectrographic analysis will detect elegance. Aesthetic properties can be detected only by human perceivers with their differing perspectives and experiences.

It’s fear of subjectivity that limits wine tasting to boring fruit descriptors.

Thinking Differently about Objectivity

21 Thursday May 2020

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wine criticismJudgements about wine quality and which features are exhibited by individual wines  are unavoidable in the wine community. Everyone from sommeliers to critics to marketing departments to winemakers communicate about the properties of wine, distinguish good wine from bad, and believe that distinction matters. However, we are uncertain about what vocabulary to use when discussing wine quality.

Some insist that wine quality is subjective which means that judgments about wine quality and the properties that constitute it have validity only for the person making the judgment. But if that is true there are no standards of correctness when describing a wine and no meaningful concept of wine quality that could be communicated to others. Thus, the language of subjectivism cannot explain the aforementioned assumption that there is such a thing as wine quality and that when we communicate wine descriptions we are communicating something real. It also can’t explain how some people pass rigorous wine tasting exams or why there is broad agreement among professionals that Bordeaux Premier Crus is of higher quality than Barefoot.

Others insist that wine quality is objective. Properties attributed to wine are in some sense “in the wine” and correct judgments about a wine have validity for anyone properly trained to discern its features. But objectivism cannot explain why there is vast disagreement among experts about wine quality and why experts assign incompatible, contradictory properties to a wine. For the objectivist, when two qualified tasters disagree about a wine, one of them must be wrong. But in most cases of such disagreement among demonstrably competent tasters, it is implausible to think someone is making a mistake.

A third option is that wine quality is intersubjective. Properties attributed to a wine, including quality level, are a product of the agreements experts have forged throughout the long history of wine tasting and the on-going conversation about wine in the wine community. The result of that long conversation is a set of widely accepted conventions and shared standards of judgment. Thus, there are widely held agreements about what, for instance, Brunello should taste like or what properties a properly made Syrah should exhibit. Judgements about wine quality are valid for people within that community.

The problem with intersubjectivity is that people in the wine community disagree vehemently, not only about which wines meet those standards of quality, but about the standards of quality themselves. Disagreements between fans of top-shelf Napa Cabs and connoisseurs of natural wines are fundamental disagreements about aesthetic values. There is no shared set of standards that govern the wine community as a whole. Thus, the notion of intersubjectivity can explain agreement only among separate tribes of wine tasters and is utterly incapable of explaining why people with demonstrated competence within their tribe would disagree. Furthermore, to the extent intersubjectivity relies on traditional quality standards and conventions, it leaves us with no account of how we are to judge wines that fall outside conventional categories.

Is there an alternative way of understanding standards of judgement? I think there is but it will require we give up two harmful assumptions.

(1) We need to lose the idea that agreement among wine tasters is desirable. There is nothing intrinsically sacred about agreement. Given the fact that people differ with regard to their capacity to detect flavor and aroma compounds in wine, we should want professionals with a variety of different palates from as many perspectives as possible. Disagreements are more likely to give us a more comprehensive understanding of a particular wine. A wine will affect different people differently even when they share basic competencies. We should welcome that.

And (2) We should lose the idea that agreement is a sign of objectivity. The sign of objectivity is an object that is just beyond our understanding, that our concepts can’t quite capture. The sign of objectivity is a commitment to be true to the wine, to be equal to the test that each wine poses. Norms and conventions guide us when we are learning to taste. But as tasters our obligation is not to those norms; it is to the wine itself. A great wine sets its own standards. It is up to us to discover them. A judgment has validity only in light of that struggle.

Wine Drinkers are from Venus; Wine Tasters are from Mars

11 Monday May 2020

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misunderstandingMany discussions about wine that appear in popular writing or in casual conversations fail to distinguish the practice of wine tasting from the activity of wine drinking.

Wine tasters bring at least a rudimentary knowledge of regions and varietals as well as some experience to their tasting practice. Wine tasters, even if they are novices, have made  a commitment to learning more about wine and have begun to reflect on their experiences and commit them to memory. They have learned some of the procedures used to maximize their ability to discern features of the wine and have begun to enter into conversations about wine, internalizing some of the vocabulary historically used to describe wine. For wine tasters, wine is no longer solely about immediate sensation; it is a practice that requires discipline and a variety of skills.

Wine drinkers, by contrast, bring none of this to their  experience. They seek immediate enjoyment only. There is of course nothing wrong with that but the experience of the wine is quite different for a taster vs. a drinker.

There can be some overlap. Wine tasters can sometimes relax their commitments and be wine drinkers. But the relationship is not symmetrical. Wine drinkers cannot be wine tasters unless they acquire the commitment of a taster and cannot discover the virtues of tasting until they do so.

It thus would not be surprising that the advice wine tasters give to wine drinkers is not helpful or that the activity of wine drinking seems unreflective and impoverished to wine tasters. Mutual incomprehension would seem to be baked in and there is probably not much to be done about it. Live and let live is the best attitude for both.

Between Liking and Judging Quality

23 Thursday Apr 2020

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wine judging 2In answer to the question whether wine evaluation is fundamentally subjective, most people writing on the philosophy of wine insist on making a distinction between liking a wine and judging it’s quality. Whether one likes something depends on personal preference and that is entirely subjective. If you grew up in New York you probably prefer New York pizza. If you grew up in Chicago, deep dish is the way to go. Preferences are about our individual histories and biology. To criticize someone for their preferences is obtuse. They are what they are and no argument will change them.

But, so the argument goes, judging quality is a different matter. An experienced wine critic can judge a wine’s quality independently of whether she likes the wine or not. Thus, wine evaluation can claim some degree of objectivity.

I think the matter is more complex than this argument suggests.

With regard to basic quality level, I think the argument holds. Surely we can judge whether a wine has sufficient complexity, intensity or balance to qualify as a fine wine even though it is from a varietal or producer you don’t prefer. But with regard to more fine grained judgments, I’m not persuaded we can separate preference from quality. Judging a wine’s complexity might mean just counting up the number of aroma notes that clearly present themselves. You don’t have to like the wine to do that. But judging whether the aromas are coherent and make sense together is a different matter. If a wine’s complexity comes from oak-derived aromas and I don’t like oaky wines, how would I make an objective judgment about the quality of the aroma profile? My perceptions would tell me the wine had too much oak. I could of course make allowances for my lack of appreciation for oak by trying to imagine what someone more disposed to oak would perceive. But then my judgment is no longer based on my perception but on my ability to imagine the perceptions of someone else. How objective would such a mental exercise be?

Unless you like a wine, there are certain properties of the wine you won’t be able to discover.

There is one more standard that a wine evaluator might employ to help with objectivity. Even though she might not like a wine, an experienced judge could nevertheless determine that a wine is typical of its varietal and region. Typicity is a critical standard that helps establish a degree of objectivity for wine tasting. But obviously this will not work if one is tasting a wine that is atypical.

The conclusion to draw from this is not that wine tasting is thoroughly subjective. General quality level and typicity are important critical standards and I imagine for most critics, most wines fall into the realm of “likeable enough” so they don’t generate strong aversions.

But I doubt we can always distinguish liking a wine from evaluating its quality.

Wine Tasting in the Age of Corona

16 Monday Mar 2020

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croweded tastiing roomAs the U.S. begins to implement social distancing in order to reduce transmission of the coronavirus to manageable levels, there are two things we should not be doing right now:

(1) Mingling in crowded public spaces; and

(2) Listening to Republicans who are trying to make you sick.

This is a real crisis and the basic mathematics of exponential  growth tells us so.

Given that tasting rooms at some wineries on Saturday afternoon are basically just a crowded, elbow-to-elbow  barroom, now is probably not a good time to go wine tasting. Just stay home.

However, at some point in that dimly seen horizon called “the future”, people will emerge from behind their battlements seeking social contact. Even then, barring a medical breakthrough, this virus will still be with us. I suspect some degree of social distancing will be necessary for quite some time.

What does that mean for visits to wineries?  Many wineries will develop innovative ways of adapting in order to sell their wines. Here are several good suggestions from Rob McMillan for how wineries can start thinking about adapting to the situation.

But what about the consumer visiting the winery? How should we adapt? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Take advantage of private tastings. They are more expensive but your health is priceless.

But If you’re going to a public tasting room:

2. Choose one that isn’t crowded. If you arrive at your chosen destination and it’s too crowded go to the next one. Plan ahead with several destinations in mind.

3. Bring your own glassware, pen and notepad.

4. Sit outside. Most wineries have outdoor seating and they will probably make it even more accommodating as a way of encouraging people to visit.

5. Do not touch the menu or flight map. Again, wineries may find ways of supplying informational material that does not require handling.

6. Wipe down your seating area with hand-sanitizing wipes. Wineries should make these available.

If we become accustomed to following good social distancing practices visiting a winery should not be especially dangerous once the period of peak transmission passes.

More Evidence that Tasting Expertise is Real

12 Thursday Mar 2020

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wine judgingThe best evidence that tasting expertise is real and that some dimensions of wine tasting are objective is the fact that, each year, many people past the rigorous Master of Wine and Master Sommelier exams. If wine tasting is not a genuine skill what explains their ability to pass the exam?

But it also helps to have real world experiments like this one conducted by Christian Wolf, the organizer of the European wine competition Mundus Vini.

Twice a year, MUNDUS VINI brings more than 280 international judges together to taste in groups of six or seven. For the summer edition in 2019, Wolf created eight special groups: there was a table of women; a table of men; a table of Germans; a table with older jurors; a group of younger jurors; people drawn from the wine trade; a table of sommeliers; and a table of wine writers.

Each group was presented with a flight of wines that was also given to another table, while individual wines were doubled and given to different juries.

Regardless of age, gender or nationality, the wines received the same scores.

Wolf was testing the hypothesis that there are cultural, gender, or age differences in how professionals judge wine. Apparently that hypothesis is not warranted.

Wolf attributes the consistency of these results to the method of scoring he uses for his competitions. Called the OIV judging system, it requires judges to focus on one wine at a time, rather than as part of a line up. The score is determined by summing subscores on a variety of specific attributes.

Truth be told, not all competitions show this level of consistency. Wolf might well be right that the discipline of assigning scores for various dimensions of a wine is the key to consistency among tasters.

Wolf intends to replicate this test with a much larger sample size.

Tasting Vitality IV: Basic Elements of Wine Structure

04 Wednesday Mar 2020

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Iwine-in-glass’ve been focused recently on creating a tasting model that puts greater emphasis on a wine’s perceived motion on the palate as an important element in wine quality. (See this post for an explanation and links to earlier posts in this series.)

The features of a wine’s movement on the palate that I have emphasized thus far are abstract although necessary to provide a foundation to what follows. They include velocity, acceleration, duration, and force—general features of all movement and processes.

It is now time to focus on the perceived qualities of the wine produced by these general features of processes. I’m going to begin by discussing mouthfeel because the way the wine feels in the mouth—primarily tactile sensations—gives us access to the wine’s structural elements—Sweetness, fruit power, tannins, acidity, and alcohol. Such access is not wholly a matter of tactile sensations. Acidity sometimes tastes sour, alcohol can leave an impression of sweetness, tannins can taste bitter. Nevertheless, it’s through mouthfeel that we get the most information about a wine’s structure.

If we are to understand the perceived changes a wine undergoes on the palate, we first need an account of what is changing. Thus, I begin with a static description of wine structure and balance. These dimensions will be expressed as continua because all of these features admit of degrees. Each wine will occupy a position on each continuum.

The tasting model then follows a logical progression. After the basic structural components of wine and their range of expression are described and the concept of balance clarified, we move onto the basic mouthfeel characteristics resulting from the interplay of these structural components. The focus here will be on various dimensions of what we call a wine’s “body”. For experienced wine tasters this will be familiar and unsurprising.

Finally, we put the structure of wine in motion describing how the mouthfeel of a wine unfolds in time and detailing the various kinds of expressions of which wine is capable when we look at its movement on the palate. This latter section will be conceptually innovative.

This discussion of wine in motion will include reference to vitality forms, a topic I covered in two Three Quarks Daily columns last year. (Vitality forms and music; and vitality forms and wine) Each continuum that describes the range of a wine’s motion will be associated with vitality forms that express a position on that continuum. Vitality forms, as understood in psychology, are the psychological experience of how something moves, from which we gain a sense of something being alive. They are the “flow pattern” of experience. Vitality forms are implicated in emotions, and patterns of vitality forms are in part constitutive of the expression of personality traits.

Because wine is experienced as moving across the palate, wine also exhibits vitality forms and each distinctive wine will have a distinctive flow pattern. Thus, the flow pattern of wine across the palate exhibits similarities to other things that move. The problem is how to describe this flow pattern in a way that captures the individuality of a wine. The richest vocabulary we have for expressing the individuality of distinctive flow patterns is the realm of emotion, mood, and personality. Thus, I argue that the best way of capturing the individuality of wines is by utilizing metaphors based on the domain of mood, emotion, and personality. I will conclude this section of the motion of wine by explaining how wines can be viewed as expressing emotion and possessing personality.

Much of that will be laid out in future posts. In this post which is already too long, I stick to the basic elements of structure.

Basic Components of Structure

The texture and mouthfeel of a wine depend on its structure which consists of five basic components—sweetness, fruit power, acidity, tannins, and alcohol. Analytic wine tasting separates out these components and assesses their contribution to the overall structure of the wine. These are expressed as continua.

Fruit power:

Intense ….meagre

Persistent ….fading

Fruit power includes the perception of aromatic/flavor intensity as well as the persistence, force and dominance of fruit in the structure of the wine accessed via its mouthfeel.

Acidity:

Dull…..bright…..green

The influence of acidity can be assessed only after considering the wine’s movement on the palate. But as an initial assessment, the amount and quality of acidity can be judged via this continuum. “Green” refers to acidity from fruit picked prior to developing sufficient ripeness and will taste hard and harsh. Wines with low acidity will not only appear dull but will also lack vibrancy and will taste dull.

Perceived Sweetness:

Bone dry….dry….off dry….medium sweet….sweet

This dimension is about how the wine is perceived, not how much measurable sugar there is in the wine. Perceived sweetness is often influenced by acidity. High acid wines will taste less sweet than a low acid wine with the same amount of residual sugar. Sweetness can also be confused with fruit power. Dry wines with great fruit power often leave an impression of sweetness.

Tannins/astringency

Quantity: light….tannic

Grain size: Powdery….fine grain… medium grain…coarse

Quality: Soft….drying….chewy…..grippy

Alcohol:

Imperceptible …..hot

Alcohol does not have a linear relationship with qualitative properties. In dry wines, higher alcohol can contribute to perceptions of increased sweetness, weight, roundness, softness and viscosity. But low alcohol wines with residual sugar might also taste heavy and viscous. The perception of alcohol will depend on its relative prominence compared to other components of the wine’s structure. Alcohol has a multitude of functions that can’t be captured on a continuum. However because alcohol produces a tactile sensation akin to burning, high alcohol or unbalanced wines tend to taste “hot”. Since this will mask other flavors and aromas and detract from the enjoyment of a wine, this is considered a fault. Thus, in tasting notes alcohol gets a mention only when the wine is unbalanced. Much of the influence of alcohol will be covered as a component of other features of the wine such as body.

Balance:

Unbalanced….balanced….integrated/harmonious

“Balance” refers to the relative prominence of the various structural elements.

Balance is an essential but controversial concept. Most wine experts agree that balance is crucial to wine quality and what counts as balance depends on the varietal and style of a wine. For instance, a balanced Cabernet Sauvignon will have firmer tannins than a balanced Pinot Noir. The penetrating, astringent attack of acidity in a Chablis would be out of place in a Gewurztraminer. But there are several definitions of balance. Karen McNeil, author of The Wine Bible, defines a balanced wine as “A wine that incorporates all of its main components – tannins, acid and alcohol – in a manner where no single component stands out.” This is perhaps the most common definition although most would include fruit power/sugar in the list of components that must be in balance. “Balance” in this sense is a minimal standard. Many quite ordinary wines will seem balanced in that no structural component will stand out as excessive or lacking.

The great wine scientist and educator Emile Peynaud, in his classic, The Taste of Wine adds a crucial dimension to balance. “A wine is said to be harmonious when its elements form a pleasing and well proportioned whole. In a good wine, everything should be harmonious; quality is always linked to a subtle play of balances between tastes and smells.” Peynaud’s suggestion is that it is not sufficient that the structural components achieve equilibrium. Rather they must enhance each other. Acidity makes the fruit taste vibrant. Tannins and alcohol give the wine depth and prevent the acidity from tasting sour, and fruit power acts as the focal point seeming to reign in the other components. I will return to this concept of balance and harmony below when a wine’s rhythm will come into play.

In the next post in this series I will look at how the interplay of these structural components produces a wine’s mouthfeel.

A Motto That Makes Me Run Away

02 Monday Mar 2020

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run awayI recently came across a winery whose motto is “if you like it, it’s good”. That motto is a really good reason not to visit this winery. The wine is unlikely to be worth exploring.

“If you like it, it is good” assumes there is nothing beyond your merely liking something that accounts for its quality, nothing more to be discovered and nothing more to be enjoyed beyond what you already like. It assumes that  you have no reason to recognize the limitations of what you like or search for something better. It is a shame to encourage such an attitude in wine drinkers.

People in wine education, of course, know this is misleading—that is why they put in the work to gain expertise. But they pretend otherwise because customers want their palates validated and are perceived to be intimidated if wine becomes too serious. Granted, not every situation is a “teaching” situation and sommeliers/merchants must be sensitive to what the customer is looking for. But to dismiss the possibility of educating a palate is irresponsible.

Of course, we can appreciate a wine for all sorts of reasons that are only modestly related to its quality—when relaxing after work for instance. Enjoying what is in front of you regardless of merit may be all that matters in some contexts. But it is to be hoped that a winery is striving for some sort of excellence; that some of their wines meet a less subjective standard in which discovery, learning, and insight can be gained from drinking their wines.