There are many different ways to taste wine, from formal evaluations done for scientific reasons all the way to sipping a chilled white wine at a barbecue.
Each setting has its own requirements, each with drawbacks. In a scientific judging, for instance, quality usually isn’t the issue. Judges may be looking for specific element. Sometimes the wines aren’t even drinkable.
Judges at wine competitions see wines differently from average consumers. At most dinners there are two or three wines available. You drink your favorite. Competition judges often suffer sensory assault. It ain’t a barrel of laughs.
Some years ago a wine competition director assigned my panel to taste 17 viogniers, 85 syrahs and 90 petite sirahs in a six-hour period. That’s 32 wines per hour. I still don’t know what I was convicted of.
At some point, the red wines appeared to be getting more and more tannic. Actually the wines weren’t more tannic.
But as we tasted, our bodies couldn’t regenerate the palate-protecting saliva as quickly as needed.
Massive tannins that weren’t resolved had assaulted our mouths, and that combined with high alcohol.
Our palates quickly became numb, then painful. Thus we all got progressively more sensitive to tannins, acids and alcohol. There simply wasn’t enough time between flights.
One judge left a competition early after he developed a blister on his lower lip.
It is for reasons like this one that I prefer to have judges at the competitions I coordinate evaluate no more than 70 wines day, about 10 to 15 per hour.
Another way to evaluate wines is to pour three of the same varietal and serve them “blind,” without knowing which is which.
Aim for three wines of the same vintage and about the same price and see if one of them stands out. We discovered our featured wine pick that way this week, and it’s a relative bargain.
It is pointless to try to evaluate wines when extraneous aromas are ambient. At a dinner party in the 1980s, I walked into the hostess’ kitchen.
Someone I had never met handed me a glass of a bronze-colored white wine, and said, “What is this?”
I took a whiff and knew only that it was spoiled because of very poor storage. Without much hesitation, I said, “Braised lamb.”
He said, “What?!”
I replied, “My batting average with older wines like these is perfect. I never try to identify wine in the presence of brilliant oven aromas.”
Similarly, at a hosted dinner in a Larkspur restaurant some years ago, the winemaker asked how I liked his new pinot grigio. I said it had a distinctive aroma of Old Spice.
He looked up, shocked, until he saw me winking and surreptitiously pointing to the waiter, who reeked of the stuff. After a chat with the manager, we were given a table in another room.
People with old, rare red wines rarely serve them blind because wines always taste better when it is known they are classic and iconic.
But professionals know what’s up when a problem arises.
At a private home in Los Angeles some years ago, a wine collector invited a dozen wine lovers to a tasting at which, he had said, he would open a magnum of Chateau Petrus, a treasure, we expected.
The vintage turned out to be 1969, a horrible vintage, and it was one of the worst wines I ever tasted.
Still, no one outed the offender, and a few people actually cooed about the greatness of Petrus.
The host of the event even acknowledged that this wasn’t a great bottle. I quietly told a friend, “Neither are any other 1969s.”
Featured wine pick: 2016 Cloudline Pinot Noir, Willamette Valley ($19): Almost in spite of a recent comment here that there are very few inexpensive pinot noirs worth drinking, Domaine Drouhin (drew-ahn) Oregon, a project of the fame French Burgundy house, has released this terrific lighter-styled red wine from purchased grapes. The fragrance is not dissimilar from classic Burgundy with a hint of Beaujolais fresh fruit, and the wine is impeccably made and has plenty of stuffing to improve for a few years. Trader Joe’s chain of stores has featured this wine recently for $16. As good as most $30 PNs.
Sonoma County resident Dan Berger publishes “Vintage Experiences,” a weekly wine newsletter. Write to him at winenut@gmail.com. He is also co-host of California Wine Country with Steve Jaxon on KSRO Radio, 1350 am.
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