En francais

In the last blog I said that wine should be about enjoyment, whether you like the wine is surely the most important aspect of wine tasting. Yet, when I read tasting notes that issue is hardly ever mentioned. There are long descriptions of colour, aroma and flavours. There may be mention of the persistence of taste in the mouth, possibly of wine faults and, perhaps, of the typicity of the wine in terms of grape, origin and year. But not very often do you read whether the taster actually liked the wine.

I was, and still am, asked to judge in professional tastings whilst in France. I attended two, one for a well known wine guidebook and another for regional medal awarding. I have to say I came away rather disillusioned. There were some true benefits, having to analyse the wine according to sight, smell and taste with guidelines for marking those. Having to do so in a short space of time concentrated the mind and my French language skills.

One of my judging experiences

However, in one tasting the group I was working in was told in advance how many medals would be awarded, that is before the wines were tasted! Some bottles received medals which truly didn’t deserve them. In the other tasting there was discussion about our individual marks and thoughts but then as lunch approached the chair said he would just hand in his results so that lunch was not missed. In neither case was actually liking the wine ever discussed or taken into account. Importantly there was huge disagreement amongst the tasters, all of whom were professionals. Marks varied, they are always subjective no matter how much the guidelines are given to establish an objective framework for scoring.

Just this week two well known professionals had a little spat on Twitter about the reliability of scores. Many professionals defend their accuracy, but then they would wouldn’t they?

I have often tasted wines which were correct, well made, ripe grapes. Technically they deserved high scores but they were dull, lacking personality or excitement. Would I buy them? Certainly not. Yet they are the ones which often wear their medals on the bottle and that is a real boost to sales in supermarkets etc. This is one example of how a little education would benefit the wine drinker who simply wants a nice glass of wine and is not interested too much in the story behind it. Medals and high scores, in my opinion, can be misleading and a red herring.

Similarly I have drunk wines which had a hint of faults, a touch of volatility or a bit farmyardy and yet, they were exciting wines with personality. Not that the fault made them good, just that the wine could accommodate it.

I shall return to the question of the story behind wines in the next article.

As for newspapers and wine magazines. Too often they are basically publicity puff pieces, advertorials for wines. I gave up on wine magazines a long time ago. Until they are more honest and describe poor wines as well as good then I shall stick to tasters whose opinions I respect on the web or in person. And trust my own judgement too.