When you are shopping for wines, do you find yourself looking at the scores they received from The Wine Commissioner right there next to the price tag? Or perhaps you bring in your copy of Clive Plonk’s Wine Adviser, searching for that French colombard he awarded 95 of 100 points. Do you ever wonder how those scores were arrived at? Would you like to take matters into your own hands?
Wine tasting is like the appreciation of art or music; it’s subjective. Who’s to say Beethoven is better than Brahms, Picasso more gifted than Rembrandt? A person’s taste in wine depends not only on physical ability (some “supertasters” have more taste buds than the rest of us), but also on experience and exposure (a daily diet of French wines will turn out a different palate than one raised on American bottlings).
With all this variability, why look to The Wine Expert, whose preferences are almost certainly different from your own?
“There are 30,000 wines on the market,” says Craig Goldwyn, president of Beverage Testing Institute in Chicago whose “World Wine Championships” appear in “The Wine Enthusiast” magazine. “The average consumer doesn’t have the time to wade through them all. What we offer is a guide.” (This writer has judged for Goldwyn and works with him through America Online.)
But what exactly makes a good guide? Knowing how some of the country’s major wine critics operate might help you assess their assesssments, so to speak. Their tactics also can guide you in setting up your own tastings.
How blind are you?
“Tasting blind” means the taster doesn’t know the identity of the wines. The idea is, without seeing the label, a taster can have no preconceptions about style, quality or anything. An obscure wine is on the same playing field as the more renowned.
Most professionals taste partly blind. To judge against a standard (a grape or a region), they are given the basic information. Most critics interviewed for this story said they judge wines blind.
But when a taster visits a particular estate or producer, there’s no doubt whose wine he will be tasting. Jim Gordon, managing editor of “The Wine Spectator,” said his tasters arrange these “in-region” tastings in advance, gathering different producers’ wines in one place and tasting them all blind together.
Robert W. Parker of “The Wine Advocate” says he prefers to have other people arrange blind tastings for him in Bordeaux and the Rhone. But in Burgundy, where this can’t always be arranged, he says he does obviously “know what I am tasting” when he is at a given estate.
Tongue-tired
Palate fatigue, boredom, intoxication (however minor) and after-meal psychology are among the hazards that can skew tasters’ judgment. Wine fairs that present annual competitions can judge hundreds of wines per 6- or 7-hour day; most of the publications contacted for this story indicated a range of 25 to 120 per day.
Parker estimates he will taste 25 to 130 wines a day, depending on whether he is at the office or in wine country; Steven Tanzer, who publishes International Wine Cellar, can sample 25 to 80 wines in a day. “The Wine Spectator” will have gone through 9,000 wines in 1997, while the Beverage Testing Institute tries 6,000 products (it judges beers and spririts as well).
Second chances
Although it is becoming increasingly rare, there are occasions when a bottle of wine just isn’t up to sniff. It could have been badly stored; it may just have been bottled (ever try to get a coherent answer from someone who just woke up? Same thing with wine). Or it may smell of a moldy, musty cork.
If the tasters are competent enough to recognize the off-character of the sample, they can try another bottle–if they have one. But if not, or if there are so many samples that a mildy defective one gets by the tasters, then the wine may not receive the attention–and the score–it would have.
Considering the 25-to-120 count mentioned above, double-tasting isn’t easy or economically feasible, even when many of the wines tasted are free samples (which is common). Only one of the publications covered, the smaller and newer “Wine X” out of Santa Rosa, does so. Darryl Roberts, editor and publisher, said the magazine has two groups of three tasters; each group tastes the same wine from different bottles and then the scores are combined.
Who does the tasting?
There are two schools of thought here: Do you trust group effort or the palate of a single taster?
Tanzer and Parker use only their own notes. (Parker recently hired an assistant, Jean-Pierre Rovani, who will handle the Loire, Germany, Austria, Southern America, New Zealand and the Pacific Northwest). If you find you agree with him most of the time, he can be an invaluable guide. But even if his tastes oppose yours, his recommendations can steer you away from wines you probably won’t like.
Groups offer a different sort of consistency: An average score can round off the effects of one taster’s bad day.
Goldwyn of the Beverage Testing Institute is emphatically in favor of the panel result.
“The more data (from more tasters), the better results,” he says. “From a scientific point of view, you have a lower standard deviation with a group’s input than with any single individual taster’s.”
Out on your own
Keep the above factors in mind when arranging a serious tasting at home. Some other tips:
– To avoid distractions, keep the table talk to a minimum.
– Although most wine is best appreciated with a meal, to get the best read of a wine, try it alone first and then have it with food.
– Don’t serve the wines from bags that obscure the label. People are consciously or otherwise stimulated to draw a conclusion by the bottle shape or color, by grungy capsule-tops (European wines, mainly) versus NASA-clean ones (U.S. and other New World wines). Instead, pour the wines into clean decanters and give them numbers or letters.
– For a tongue-in-cheek look at wine-tasting, check out the “Wine Boobs” reviews on the Internet: www.cis.upenn.edu/breck/WineBoob/wineboob.html. And have fun.
