The Culture of Conservatism is a Matter of Taste
Stephen Potter neatly highlighted the pretensions of people who wish to claim that they know what they are talking about: “Say the bouquet is better than the taste, and vice versa.” Tasting wine is beset by a fear of committing oneself to the wrong opinion, the humility of perceived fallibility. We all make mistakes: I’ve seen masters of wine unable to recognise a blatantly corked wine, experienced wine buyers tasting lots of oak where none existed. What is more surprising is that some of these people often refuse to acknowledge their errors - as if anyone cared.
This leads me to pose the following questions: What do qualifications in the wine trade actually prove? Do we take the institutions for granted? Isn’t your palate every bit as good as mine?
Undoubtedly, a great deal of hard work and research goes into the study of wine. However, just as you can study music and be tone deaf, you can taste wine until it comes out of your ears and still not have a good palate. Also, because the courses are so wide-ranging and inclusive, you can come out of them saturated with knowledge, but devoid of ideas and ideals.
Change comes from the desire to kick away the status quo. During my former life as a buyer for restaurants I’d always been told that certain things couldn’t be done with restaurant wine lists. A wine list had to appeal to horizontal thinkers - hence the wines were must be itemised in price order and divided by country or region. Classics at the front, “others” at the back. To me a wine list had to be intelligent, informative, daring, fun and easy to negotiate. Dividing by grape variety about twenty years ago was highly unusual, whilst detailed and anecdotal tasting notes were considered revolutionary. I subsequently proceeded to break down lists by wine style; firstly, scientifically, and then emotionally and whimsically, then mixing the two. I jumbled the price order in the categories so that customers could see that style was about juxtaposition. I abandoned the concept of house wines and opened whatever people felt like drinking: that became the wine by the glass. I rotated the selection, offered glasses of different size, as well as small “tasters”. Wines would also appear on the food menu as a seasonal suggestion and to accompany specific dishes. Not only did I introduce a sliding scale of mark-ups to encourage customers to drink up the list I would also buy a fine wine for the day such as Chateau Margaux on which I would stick a flat tenner. At the time a few people huffed and puffed - it wasn’t done to treat wine in such a cavalier manner. In the last few years, however, the enlightened amateur approach has prevailed; wine lists have become more informal and are now, more than ever, shaped by the passion of the wine buyer.
I think good taste in wine involves questioning received wisdom and questioning ourselves, both in the way we think about wine and the way we taste wine. Wine was associated with elitism for a long period in this country; now it has been well and truly demystified. We are all consumers and accordingly express our opinions with greater confidence. Often these opinions are based on what we’ve read - or heard - that we should be drinking. The world of wine drinking is vast, and our reference, even when we are experienced tasters, is, by definition, limited. One might argue that the media, in its ambition to reach out to a wider base of consumers to popularise wine, dumbs down the subject by explaining away its mystery and simplifying its complexities.
The prevailing new conservatism has new orthodoxies and new heroes: the cult of personality borders on the obsessive and it seems that one of the steps to becoming successful in the wine trade is to develop a larger than life persona and to make oracular pronouncements. The new conservatism has furthermore anointed new arbiters of taste whose opinions and scores matter so much that they substantially affect the price of a wine - regardless of its real quality. The new conservatism is in love with science or rather the science of wine. The new conservatism talks about the winery rather than the vineyard, the personality of the man or woman rather than the place the vines grow.
Doing it the WSET Way
- I’m getting oak with plummy overtones
- I’m getting screwed on alimony
Frasier
I never gave much thought to the process of wine tasting, not being a stickler for minute analysis, nor a sucker for copious note taking, and I generally allow a certain madness to filter into my method. The more rigidly scientific your approach and the more reliant on methodology the less room there is for intuitive response. Wine tastings are generally conducted in a sterile atmosphere; you don’t go to praise the wines so much as bury them in analysis. Objectivity is all very well, but it necessarily limits the depth of perception. When you go to an art gallery you rarely have the time to appreciate the essence, the very mood of a painting as it was conceived. If you sit in front of a Rothko or a Van Gogh for half an hour you begin to develop a symbiotic relationship with the particular work of art. You experience it through the prism of your imagination; it takes you on a journey. Analytical tasting is as different to truly experiencing wine as glancing at a painting is to understanding it on all its many levels.
Tasting or experiencing wine involves giving of oneself as well as taking. When we smell a wine and turn it over in our mouth, we become engaged in the process of converting fermented grape juice into language. Our sense of smell is inextricably linked to our memories; in fact, smell unlocks memories and language shapes them into a tangible reality. Our personal response to a wine is what exalts our imaginations. This is not a new idea. Wine has been seen as the inspiration to unlock creative power of poetry and music since the ancient Greeks. If your tasting compass is set to due WSET you can totally miss the direction the wine is taking you.
Trade Tastings and Medalomania
Most trade tastings are intrinsically part of the endless media circus that promotes wine. Many of these events are held in locations which are aesthetically pleasing and nominally prestigious, but terribly impractical, often with vaulted glass roofs designed to create the maximum greenhouse effect. Tastings are conducted on an absurd scale ranging from a few dozen to hundreds of growers as if their proud boast is to get “everybody all under one roof!” Actually they are trade fairs or donnybrooks attracting people from all over the country. What is the point of these tastings: I suspect that the wines rarely show well and that the quality of tasting is poor.
If you wish to interpret the results of a typical tasting panel you would have to take into account various factors that influence the final decision about what comes top and what does not. We all arrive at a tasting with our particular baggage about wine. I prefer digestibility, elegance and fruit to extraction, oak and power. I particularly look for wines to evoke their terroir. I also strongly believe that wines should be tasted at the appropriate time of year. In the past I have tasted one year old roses in late winter, massively alcoholic Californian Cabernets in mid-summer and light, tangy Jurancons on a freezing cold day in March. Given this potential for misfiring on all cylinders it is not surprising that the wines that show best are often the wines that have least to offer and therefore least to lose.
When the marks are totalled it is quite possible that tasters will disagree substantially on the merits of a particular wine. Quite often we can’t even decide whether or not a wine is faulty! What is truth? said jesting Pilate. What we pretend is a science is actually a dialectic concerning subjective likes and dislikes. Perhaps Robert Parker’s mythic status as a pundit is to do with the authoritativeness of his judgements as much as the mechanics of a points system.
Those who are most confirmed in their opinions are not necessarily the wisest. “Man, proud man, drest in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he is most assured” as Isabella berates Angelo in Measure for Measure. Perverse parochialism is the nastiest nip to the taste buds.
That was great sex, darling - I give you 87 Parker points.
Points are the security blanket of the wine trade. Yet when the criteria for evaluating wines are so flawed (because the people who construct those criteria are fallible), points become truly pointless. I would much prefer to see a system based on that of the Guide Hachette with informed comment written by experts who, knowing an area in detail, taste the wines in the context of other wines from that area and in terms of their previous performance - in other words a mixture of sympathy and understanding allied to applied knowledge.