Reviews Squared – Part Two

In part one; I dealt with my view about the usefulness of wine tasting reviews.  Mostly, I tried to illustrate how subjective wine tasting is, and that in essence, the only thing that matters should be your personal preference.

I have just passed the quarter-century mark as far as experience in the wine industry.  I sat on many tasting panels, participated as a judge in three commercial wine competitions (and have a plaque in the garage to prove it), and continue to taste wine regularly as part of my job.  Here is what I find to be very frustrating:  The wines I tend to rank high in a blind tasting of similar wines are NEVER the wines I like to drink!

Sounds crazy, right?  I encourage you to try this:  Get a group of friends and collect a range of Sonoma County Pinot Noirs.  I’d say five is a minimum, ten maximum.  Remove the corks and foil capsules (there is a cheater in every crowd), bag them in brown paper bags and have a person who is not part of the tasting write random, non consecutive, three-digit numbers on the bags.  Pour the wines to the tasters, ensuring they are NOT TASTED IN THE SAME ORDER by all.  Go ahead and conduct a blind tasting.  Here are the rules: 1) No talking while everyone is tasting.  2) Everyone has to write down their preferences and rank the wines.  3) Collect and tabulate the rankings, the wine with the least numerical points is the winner (most preferred).  If you wish, discuss what people thought about the wines, starting from least preferred to most. DO NOT reveal the wine’s identities, just yet.

Now comes the fun part:  put away all the tasting notes and spittoons (keep the wine glasses).  Using clear tape, attach a piece of paper with a new random number on each bottle so that the old numbers are not visible (but can be verified later). Now serve a scrumptious dinner designed to go well with Pinot Noir (check out my tubular Salmon recipe).  Enjoy the company of your friends and try to avoid discussing heavy politics (Sarah Palin jokes are welcome).  At the end of dinner, poll the tasters and see which wine they kept drinking with dinner.  Only then, reveal the wine identities.  Please let me know if you ever find out that the same wine won both categories… it has never happened to me.    In my experience, it is always a wine that was ranked in the middle of the flight in the blind tasting that wins the dinner flight.

The above exercise illustrates for a simple, and very human, phenomenon.  In a blind (we call it “beauty contest”) tasting, we tend to look for intensity as a measuring stick.  Thus, the wines that tend to score high are usually the most intense wines and are often (not always) a bit of a caricature, a bit exaggerated.  These wines are typically not well balanced to go with food.  If you ask most winemakers – they would like to produce the wines you want to drink with dinner.  The one exception is winemakers whose salaries or bonuses depend on numerical scores given to the wine by certain reviewers (you all know who they are).

By now, I imagine you saying: “Oded, do you mean to say that wine critics are useless and wine reviews are all nothing but meaningless opinions?”  And my answer is: “Of course not!”

I know Steve Heimoff (Wine enthusiast) and I have interacted with Charlie Olken (Connoisseurs Guide), Dan Berger (Vintage Experiences) Jeff Cox (PD Food and wine reviews) and at least ten other wine writers or critics.  I do not always agree with what they write and they do not always like everything I produced.  Heimoff, for example, recently rated one of my best selling wines a measly (sorry Steve) “82” but it does not change a thing about my high opinion of him and his work.  As a winemaker, I sometimes chuckle as I read some of Janice Robinson’s writings, but I do read them with interest.  I have never met Robert Parker and I do not care so much for the methodology of his tasting but I have to have respect for his work.  Clearly, all these men and women started with a passion for wine, just like all of us.  That, to me, is the key, the beauty of it all.  We are all part of a process.

California wines are still referred to as “New World Wines” by Europeans.  Although grape growing and winemaking traditions here are more than 100 years old, we are still a very young wine drinking nation.  Some of us, who order a glass of non-oaked Russian River Valley Sauvignon Blanc to go with our Frisee and shaved fennel salad, still remember our parents downing a martini or two with their meatloaf and mashed potatoes at lunch.  Soon, our children will be ordering a Sonoma Coast Red (I truly believe regional blends are the wave of the future) and will laugh as they discuss how their parents drank over-oaked, sweet Chardonnays on a regular basis.

We are all taking part in refining the American palate.  By all, I mean growers, winemakers, writers, chefs, critics, financiers, marketing folk, salespersons, waiters, sommeliers, instructors, bloggers, collectors and even corporate sharks (you think Costco does not play a role in introducing wine to Americans?).  More than any of the above, wine writers (critics, journalists, book authors and bloggers) make sure information is flowing to the interested public.  They do it on a daily basis, and if you think their job is ‘easy’ then try to do it yourself and have your mortgage paid….

Wine writers and critics do not always get things right, they have bad days like we all do; they are human and thus prone to make mistakes.  Some may be total idiots.  George Carlin use to say: “somewhere out there there is the world’s absolutely worst doctor, and one of you may have an appointment with them tomorrow!”  Some are visionaries, they really “get it” and try to let us know what is happening. Regardless of skill, wine writers provide us with a great service; they give us feedback and put a mirror to our faces and our actions.  Writings propel us forward because they connect us with the past; just like the kite string Tom Sawyer uses to explore the cave and find his way back out. 

The beauty, as I see it, lies in our choice.  We can chose to read 27 pages of numerical scores at the back of a wine magazine or just read the articles before we use toss the rest to the recycling bin.  We can choose to buy a wine that was recommended or just chose one because we like the artwork on the label.

As a junior winemaker at Jordan Winery, I used to walk to the parking lot with André Tchelistcheff when he came for tastings to smoke a cigarette or two.  During one of these cigarette walks, I once asked him how come he does not keep notes and how he manages to keep track of the details of consulting to so many different wineries.  “Frenchie” he said, as he took a deep drag (he never believed I am really an Israeli) “Forget the details, they are not important.  It is only the process that is important”.  I threw away my tasting notebook the next day.