asajoseph
Posts: 374
Joined: 11/20/2013
From: Sydney, Australia
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quote:
ORIGINAL: jhannah27
quote:
ORIGINAL: brigcampbell
Wine is like food. I don't need someone to tell me if Indian or Mexican food is good.
+1
Then again, I'm sure most people can spot a qualitative difference between (for example) Taco Bell & Mexique (Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant in Chicago). Likewise, I’m sure anyone who’s ‘into’ wine could fairly easily spot the difference between a Yellow Tail Shiraz & a Penfolds Grange.
This discussion happens a lot, and it always seems to seem to diverge into two streams of argument which aren’t actually mutually exclusive.
On one hand, you have people who’ll tell you that as a consumer, or as a oenophile, you should just drink whatever you like, regardless of the costs or the critics, so long as you enjoy it. If that means you’re drinking a case of Apothic every week, then so what? It’s what you enjoy that counts, and who can really disagree with that?
On the other hand, there is a clear qualitative spectrum when it comes to making wine. We could all (I’m sure) tell the difference between the Grange & the Yellow Tail. They’re on opposite ends of the spectrum. The trouble is, the closer you get to the centre, the more the lines blur, the more subjectivity takes over, the more external environmental factors come into play, essentially the harder and less meaningful the ‘judging’ becomes. Imagine 100 ‘wine experts’ are tasting 100 wines, ranging from the Grange to the Yellow Tail in quality, and asked to rank them from 1-100. How often do you think the Yellow Tail would end up in the bottom 10? How often would the Grange end up in the Top 10? Personally, I think the results here would show some consistency.
The real question, I suppose, is what happens when you start dealing with the middle ground. No wine taster is ‘perfect’. Nobody really pretends they are (even Parker). At some point, when drinking up the spectrum, things will start to blend into one another, memories will fade, perceptions will become clouded, and essentially things are going to become arbitrary. But that doesn’t mean that, on the way there, these ‘experts’ don’t come up with some useful insight. I’d trust most experts to pick an excellent wine, and I’d trust most to flag up an awful one. Where it gets difficult, in my opinion, is working out who to trust when it comes to that blurry middle ground. And that can’t be a hard job. Can anyone really taste 150 Cru Classes Bordeaux and come up with meaningful scoring for all but the best and worst?
So for me, the mark of a good taster is not someone who can effectively score wines that occupy the middle-ground of any grouping. It’s those who can pick the largest number of ‘top wines’ out of any tasting, and produce consistently good lists. I buy lots of claret, personally, and in my experience I think it’s worth trusting Parker over (for example) Jancis (though I find the latter far more engaging generally). The key thing to remember, in my opinion, is that not everybody is right all the time, and whilst you can find better ‘tasters’, the best experience to trust is, generally, your own.
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Are these truly fighting words? - 
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