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This page is for stuff: articles I have recently written; random thoughts that may amuse you
WHAT'S IN A TASTE?
I'm sitting here with a glass of wine, thinking about how difficult it is to describe aroma and flavor. What is taste really all about? Swirling the glass, I put my nose over the deeply red liquid inside and inhale. Marco Polo, I think. Spice caravans of ancient Venice. There is a whiff of clove here; maybe a little cinnamon, some black pepper. I am transported to my fourth grade classroom, where my history teacher read "The Travels of Marco Polo" aloud. As I listened (I recall), I would to put my head on my arm and imagine the intrepid merchant with his sacks of precious spices. When the teacher droned on, although I was interested, I got drowsy. To stay awake, I bit my arm a little. Then, I bit it harder. Tasting the wine, now, I pick up flavors that confirm this whole metaphor of memory. The wine has a certain fleshiness. It tastes a little like blood.
Now, by virtue of these associations, this particular wine has become far more to me than an amalgam of water, ethanol, esters, acids and phenols. The experiences I now identify with it have personalized it. This wine will never be the same for anyone else as it is for me. I will never be able to drink it again without thinking of Marco Polo. And it's not even an Italian wine.
Sometimes, when I read a wine review, I find the descriptions annoying, however well-crafted they may be. Here's an example: "The Wine Spectator" (June, 2004) gave a 2001 vintage "Landmark" (Sonoma Coast) Pinot Noir a score of 86, which means that the tasting panel thought it was "very good; a wine with special qualities." The description of the wine reads, "Falls closer to the Syrah camp than to Pinot Noir with its smoky bacon, leather and stewed plum aromas and flavors. It's also quite firm and muscular, with chewy tannins. It finally finds its Pinot character on the finish, with touches of dried cherry and spice. But it could fool some."
And for that, the customer should happily pay $45.00 a bottle? Not only do the descriptive words make the wine sound unappealing, they indicate spoilage issues in the wine. "Leather" is a common descriptor for a wine that has been tainted with Brettanomyces. Stewed plums sound unattractively over-ripe. And if I want smoky bacon, I'll go to Oscar Meyer for the real thing. Firm and muscular? Well, it is a wine from Schwartzenegger's state, so maybe that's an acceptable characteristic. Maybe it's a wine for body-builders.
Now, to be fair to the wine, since the tasting panel obviously liked it, let's imagine that there is another way to describe it that brings out the tasters' emotional connection to it. What if they said that the wine is "a bit schizophrenic, like Uncle Marty, who pretends to be nice but is really a mean bastard. And yet, for all Marty's passive-aggressive nastiness, we love having him around because he tells such interesting stories."
Maybe I could see my way to paying $45 for that.
There are scientists who have spent whole careers working on developing descriptors for wine, all in precise categories. Anne Noble at the University of California at Davis created a "flavor wheel" that is the standard for the industry. I do admit to using these descriptors, since they help to get a handle on the style of a wine. They help me identify what it is made from, and how it's made. Yet these descriptors alone relate to only a part of the wine experience, and it's a meager part, at best. They don't offer any sense of the true impact of the wine. A great wine will change as you taste it. It will be alluring, and then, in some respect, it may have some unpleasant aspects. To be truly great, it must connect to your emotions or to some font of memory, even an inchoate memory that's more like a dream than like something that actually happened. Chances are, that experience of greatness will never be replicated in the same way, although you may find others who agree that the wine is exceptionally good.
Often, I have been in a situation where I am in a group of people who are offered a glass of a very expensive wine. If they are told ahead of time that the wine is expensive, it will be very hard for them to come up with any negative descriptive words for it. But if they were given the same wine and told that it is cheap, what they were calling "exotic" would now be called "weird," and what was described as "structured" would now be called "ungenerous."
So much of wine appreciation is also culturally biased. The ancient Greeks and Romans added pine pitch and salt water to almost all their wines, along with other flavoring additives. Greek wine (retsina) still has the distinctive flavor of pine pitch. Some folks are genetically disposed to like coriander, while others can't abide it, and the same thing goes for that "green bean" smell found in Sauvignon Blanc, which some describe as "cat pee."
The next time you taste wine with friends, I suggest that, rather than trying to identify fruit or vegetable characteristics in it, you take turns describing it as if it were a person, or a place. Psychoanalyze it. Your descriptions will come to life, and they will probably be more meaningful than if you limit yourself to the words on the aroma wheel.
THE WINE PRESS : WINE COMPETITIONS
It's 8:00 on a Wednesday morning in mid-May. In an unadorned art gallery, the judges for the Los Angeles County Fair International Wine Competition are gathered to judge over 4,000 wines during the course of three days. Seated at fifteen round tables, groups of four or five sit with grave concentration on their faces. An arc of wine glasses is arrayed before each judge. At the center of the table are cubes of white cheese, grapes, and bowls of olives; bottled water and Perrier are also in profusion as palate cleansers. Each judge has a trash can full of sawdust and a smaller container for spitting out the samples of wine as they are evaluated.
At first, the room is silent, except for the clinking of glasses. A TV crew wanders around the room, zooming in on pursed lips, smiles, and scowls. Soon, however, the whispers turn to a general buzz of conversation, eventually laced with laughter.
After each panel of judges silently makes notes, they share their impressions of the wines in order to determine which wines deserve medals. There is no limit to how many medals may be given, but it usually works out that about 30% of the wines do earn something. At some competitions, the judges use numerical scores; at others (like the L.A. Fair), they rank each sample according to their opinions of its medal-worthiness. Then, the panel discusses their impressions in order to come to an agreement. This is where the fun comes in, as novel descriptive words emerge to pinpoint the merits or demerits of the wines. A Cabernet Sauvignon may smell like a "fishtank." Pinot Noir may have an aroma of "wet dog." Or maybe a wine is "insouciant;" "irascible;" "suave."
Wine judging is serious business. But the nature of wine is pleasurable. No matter how important the competition is, levity is part of the equation. Wines are as different as people. They don't adhere to set standards. So when different people are judging different wines, the results are often surprising and sometimes controversial.
If there are no objective standards, why have a wine competition, then? You might well ask, do those gold and silver and bronze medals mean anything? If you see that a wine has won an award, does that mean that you will like it better than a wine that hasn't won anything?
First of all, it's important to acknowledge that a wine competition is a commercial venture. Whoever sponsors it wants to make money one way or another. In the case of the L.A. Fair competition, the fees don't cover the cost of hosting sixty judges for three days and nights, but the competition brings attention and prestige to the fair itself. In any event, there are definitely ulterior motives to wine competitions. But that doesn't mean that they are invalid. If a competition has enough entries, and enough experienced judges, the results will be meaningful for the consumer.
The top wine competitions are in competition with each other for the most prestigious judges. Someone like Wilfred Wong, who has taken notes on every wine that he has tasted in the past thirty years (and has the notes in uniform notebooks to prove it) is a much-sought-after judge. So is Heidi Peterson Barrett, who is one of California's most famous winemakers. There is merit in having judges from two worlds, that of winemaking and that of wine sales, but when they sit at a table to judge wines together, they don't always come up with the same scores. A winemaker understands more about the true elements of the wine: does a smoky aroma come from a barrel, or is it a whiff of cork taint? If a Sauvignon Blanc smells floral, does it have a percentage of Riesling in it? The judge whose experience is in marketing wine will look more at the salability of the wine: Is it soft? Round? Does it conform to the public's expectations for that varietal?
One of the significant aspects of a good wine competition is a general winnowing out of wines that do not meet current standards of desirability. In judging wines myself for the past eight years, I have seen many trends in winemaking that have been influenced by the judges' scores. For example, five years ago, when I judged a large group of Sauvignon Blancs, they were heavily oaked and almost indistinguishable from Chardonnay. A couple of years later, many of them were aggressively fruity. This year, the SBs were the best category I judged. A large percentage of the wines were fresh, clean, bright, and not too oaky. Where my panel gave few medals in earlier years, this year we had to restrain ourselves from medalling nearly everything.
Because the judges negotiate the scores of each wine at the L.A. Fair competition, there are too many wines that are awarded bronze medals. If one judge thinks a wine deserves a silver medal, two want it to get a bronze, and one detests the wine, it will get a bronze. For this reason, bronze medals are almost worthless. The only thing they have going for them is that the winery can then boast of having made an "award-winning wine."
For a wine to get a silver medal, chances are good that someone thinks it deserves a gold. But to get a gold, there has to be unanimity. Therefore, a gold really is much better than a silver. Both gold and silver medal-winning wines should prove to be above average in drinkability, but that doesn't mean that you as a consumer will like them. Often, it is the most robust wines that win wine competitions. Needless to say, there is great risk of palate fatigue for judges who are assessing two hundred wines a day. The more forceful the qualities a wine has (more alcohol, more glycerol, more wood, and sometimes more sugar), the more it stands out from the competition.
This is a problem for wines coming from cooler regions. A wine from the Finger Lakes, or from Long Island, for that matter, will have more subtle qualities than your average California wine. With food, those subtleties will emerge. The simple wines may develop complexities that are not apparent during the mere seconds that a judge may take to evaluate it during a competition. How can a judge even begin to perceive these subtleties when such a wine is eighth in line after other wines that have over fourteen percent alcohol?
For a new winery to establish a good reputation, winning medals may be a worthy route to success. If the wines are delicate, it's best to enter them in a competition with wines from the same region. The consumer rarely pays much attention to where a medal was won. There is no question about it; it looks impressive when a winery has a wall of medals in its tasting room. For the wine industry as a whole, the merit in the competition is not in the choice of specific wines, but in the influence the judges bring to bear on wine style trends. Either way, it's a win-win situation.
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