DarrenBarefoot.com

Darren, i’m afriad you’re indeed out to lunch on this one. It’s not our fault that you don’t experience good wine from time to time. And we’re all entitled to listen to each others opinions on what’s good wine and what isn’t, what tasted good and when. If it all tasted the same, we wouldn’t have the conversations.

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First, a bit of disclosure. I’m a certified beer judge (http://www.bjcp.org/) and I have also judged in homemade wine competitions. I’m actually trained to notice things like oak with a hint of cherry.

That being said, wine talk, like any *other* talk that gets into the minutiae of a subject, can be unnecessarily pretentious. (Is that redundant?) Does it really matter if this particular wine has notes of pepper, or tobacco, or mint? Comments like those about wine are like comments about the lighting in a stage production. They’re simply observations.

The most important question is, do you like the wine, or not? Doug Frost, one of the few people in the world to hold the tiles of both Master Sommelier and Master of Wine, wrote in his book “On Wine” that if you get cornered at a party by someone going on about how such-and-such a vintage of such-and-such a French vineyard and how it compares to other vintages from that vineyard, find someone else to talk to.

I can identify a few varieties of wine by their aroma; Gewurztraminer smells like honeysuckle blossoms to me, and Sauvignon Blanc like grapefruit. I can sometimes distinguish between a Merlot, a Shiraz, and a Zinfandel by the flavor. And it doesn’t matter one bit in the grand scheme of things.

The analogy that just occurred to me is music. Before I got into classical music, music was just sound; pleasant, sure, but just sound. Then I discovered JS Bach, and started noticing that there’s a *lot* going on in there — themes, interplay between instruments, that kind of thing. Then I started noticing it in popular music. (Kathy Valentine’s bass work for The Go-Gos *still* blows me away.)

Wine and beer are like that for me now, too. (And food, now that I think about it.) It’s fun, somehow, to pull apart the experience, to try to identify the individual aromas or tastes that make up the whole.

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I find wine talk remarkably similar to font talk. I agree that there *are* noticeable characteristics and distinctions to the trained connoisseur, but:

(a) Words rarely express those characteristics properly. (Listening to wine geeks and typeface geeks argue the minutiae of their obsessions is an uninformative bore to nearly anyone else.)

(b) For most people, it just doesn’t matter. I like a good red wine, and I can tell which ones I like better than others. Similarly, I prefer certain fonts to others. But I don’t necessarily care if I’m “wrong” or “right” according to the experts — because the experts can’t seem to agree either.

I think there’s a similar reason why I prefer sports like downhill skiing to ice skating: the fastest person down the mountain is inarguable, while the best skater seems left up to the whims of the judges.

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The vocabulary used to describe wine, and the management of the events, is pretentious as hell, I’ll grant you that. But there are great differences in flavour and for that matter in aftertaste and aftereffects. IMHO life is improved by learning to recognize these, so that you may drink more of the good stuff and avoid the bad stuff.

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Craig said a lot of good things I agree with. One thing no one has mentioned about wine talk, whether snobbish or not, and sports talk, and perhaps font talk in certain circles is that there is altogether too much of it.

After living in France for six years and moving back to the US, that’s one thing I noticed. In France, part of being an upper middle-class adult is being somewhat knowledgeable about wine. But that doesn’t mean they talk about it much. Instead they buy a case here or there, visit some producers on a weekend trip, and share it with friends and family at meals. Guests will compliment hosts on the wine (or vice versa if the guests brought it), but they won’t go all analytical about it. Guys (mostly) will sometimes talk together about a good producer or a good bottle on sale somewhere, but the whole idea of analyzing wine is reserved for wine clubs and conventions.

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I read this morning that a group of wine connoisseurs were given two glasses of wine, one red, one white wine dyed with food colouring to appear red. 57% of them thought the dyed wine was the real deal. Voici, le link.

They’re likely the same people who used to come into the winery I worked at and proclaim that our chardonnay had the flavour of ‘wet slate’. As a compliment.

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All wine tastes of one thing… wine.

All of it.

I’ve often been forced to endure wine talk… and usually it has a “deep hint of clap-trap… subtle bullshit overtones and a thrust of heady pretention and snobbishness that linger as a aftertaste of complete and utter bollocks”

it’s a fairly cheap alcoholic drink made from fermented grapes. Thats all. Get over it and go read a book.

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