Big bad tastings

Generic tastings may not be the vital draw for wine lovers in the on-trade, but the complete absence of sommeliers the other week for one of the major ones of the year (I’ll spare its blushes) was truly the dog that did not bark in the night. I was doing a reckonable impersonation of an octopus with St Vitus’s dance trying to pour wine for the sundry folks who clamoured to be served simultaneously at our table so I hadn’t noticed that, behind the pillar, lurking by the next table, there was no sommelier; nor by the entrance to the door, nor skulking near the loo, nor knocking back lattes by the coffee machine. In fact these no-sommeliers were absent in heroic numbers, which, considering we had taken our gaudiest specimens (beautiful plumage!) to the tasting, was somewhat disconcerting.

So agents and pourers were twiddling their thumbs and forming doughnuts around their table to create the illusion of busyness. The occasional journo flutters by, alights like a butterfly on one wine, sips, ticks and vanishes with (or often without) a smile. But even they are becoming rarae avises. Only the retailers really are present to investigate the possibility of adding excitement to their portfolios..

The problem is that the wine calendar is a fast-fermenting crush of tastings and associated wine events and there is little point trying to spread one’s favours. In peak season there are hallowed professionals who endeavour to pack in three or four in a day as if knowledge might arrive more quickly by running towards it at full pelt with an open mouth. Experienced tasters boast of sampling up to thousand wines a week which somehow implies that sheer volume fine-tunes the palate. In the business it is called finding the benchmark, but to me it is more a case of eating the bench. Just as in sport one can over-train or lift weights in such a way that no real benefit accrues, so tasters can suffer from flagrant palate-fatigue. One can only speculate on the deleterious effect of allowing a surfeit of substandard wines to cross one’s lips!

So is this pain with a purpose? The generic or regional tastings, for example, can be mix of the good, the bad and the ugly with cheap brands jostling with boutique wines. Consumers tend to select the wines they want to taste beforehand which are usually the wines they already know – no serendipitous discoveries here! Some tastings have an area that may focus on single grape variety or a region in a comparative “central table” line up so that a prospective taster can enjoy a snapshot of the whole tasting. However, the very rationale of tastings is inevitably skewed. Who attends – and who doesn’t?

Which leads me to question the point of mass tastings.  We assume our religious duty to congregate daily before the altar of wine-for-wine’s-sake, to swirl, sip, spit and evaluate (or devaluate), each of us a super-analyser. Ultimately, our impressions of the tasting are condensed to highlights and lowlights, but if we had to taste everything we would see how much mediocrity flourishes. Is the purpose to shake and sluice the gold pan to sort the shiny nuggets from the dross, or is it to assess the overall quality of the tasting? I suppose it depends what purpose we have in being there. The restaurateur or wine buyer needs excellent wines at good value for their list, so no matter how bad the overall standard of the tasting, just as long as a few things stand out, their needs will be requited and the tasting deemed useful. Journalists, however, might be seeking to take the pulse of the whole tasting, or they might simply be looking for recommendations for their readers. The purpose of tastings is as much the purpose that the taster brings with them.