Attentive readers of this column will have noticed a philosophy of wine appreciation emerging. When I started writing I didn’t know I had such a thing, but that’s part of the joy of writing: it forces you to decide where you stand. So here is my advice to someone interested in getting more out of drinking wine than they do at the moment.
Teach yourself. Your preferences are unique to you and they can never be wrong. Forget the scoring systems that give one wine 92 points and another 93. A wine can’t be better than another in the way one washing machine is better than another. Forget the tasting notes, where one expert finds notes of bramble and over-ripe fig while another finds, in the same wine, tobacco and chocolate. Ask just two questions: do I like it and does it have enough character for me to recognise it again? Which leads to the second piece of advice: Continue reading My Approach to Enjoying Wine→
Every now and then this question is raised by a perfectly reasonable wine-writer, the evidence is perused and the uncomfortable conclusion, that the answer is nearer yes than no, is quietly shelved. The latest episode in this uncomfortable debate was outlined by David Derbyshire in The Observer June 23 2013. He describes the experience of a Californian winemaker, Robert Hodgson, who for years has entered his wines in various competitions around the State. He felt that awards were distributed at random rather than according to excellence. To test this he persuaded the organisers of one competition to let him present three glasses from the same bottle to the judges, mixed in amongst the 30 being tasted. He found that only 10% of judges who gave an award to one glass also gave it to another identical glass. Another 10% who gave one glass an award would give another identical glass an award but not at the same level (gold/silver/bronze). The other 80% showed no consistency. Continue reading Wine tasting – is it a con?→
How is it that some people can tell an enormous amount about a wine from one sip while others just know they like red more than white? I’m sure that some people are born with a greater sensitivity to flavours than others, but most of the ability comes from practice. And to learn from practice you have to be able to describe what you taste; without words the brain can’t learn from experience. And here comes the problem for the amateur. A description like “chewy ripeness with plenty of structure, limpid in the mouth and a fine zest on the finish” may mean something to the person who wrote it but it doesn’t mean much to the rest of us. Continue reading Learning to appreciate wine→
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