Archive for the 'Critics/Competitions' Category

A study at the California Institute of Technology came up with scientific backing for the widely observed phenomenon that people tend to like expensive wines more than less expensive wines.

The interesting part, to me, is not just that knowing you are drinking a high-priced wine makes you say that you like it better, but that something happens in the brain so that you really believe it’s better. You’re not simply being consciously snobbish.

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I’ve long harbored the fantasy, nightmare really, that a computerized wine tasting device would be created that could chemically analyze wine for aroma, flavor and finish as well as, and probably better than, any wine writer or master sommelier.

Never got to use the idea in a magazine article, but that’s the beauty of a blog. You can make it up if you want to. I pictured the illustration that would go with it. Kind of a 1960s style computer, with a large aluminum funnel poking out the top, great wheels of tape spinning on the front, and a long ribbon of yellow paper punched with the results streaming from a slot in one side.

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I’m sure the owners of chateaux in Bordeaux don’t like the public tastings of their wines vs. California Cabernets. The California wines usually win, and the Bordeaux folks don’t need that kind of rejection.

But a recent tasting in Bordeaux, by a roster of chateau owners and directors, took a different spin. The Vintners Club of San Francisco, a non-profit group that since 1971 has been conducting tastings for its members, took its show on the road. The Vintners Club set up a nice, friendly tasting event in Bordeaux that only included California Cabernet-based wines from 2002. They took the wines to Chateau Brane Cantenac and last Friday a few dozen Bordeaux vintners tasted them blind.

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Is it better for wine critics and wine competitions to buy their wines at retail, rather than accept free samples from wineries and importers, as is usually the case? The risk of getting what Robert Parker has called a journalist’s cuvee or writer’s cuvee from a winery instead of the real wine that people are buying in stores is, theoretically, always there.

A winery, an importer, a rogue PR person bent on getting only 90-plus scores for his client takes a day off from blogging, goes to the store and buys a few bottles of $60 Russian River Chardonnay or $200 Montrachet. It’s easy with a home winemaker’s tools to empty a few bottles of the client’s wine, refill them with the expensive stuff, recork them, even with the original corks if he took them out with an ah-so. A bit trickier is replacing the foil and spinning it on, but with a supply of the right foil caps and a foil spinner that you can rent from a home winemaking store, it’s not difficult.

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I’ve been mulling over the status of Two-Buck Chuck as the best Chardonnay in California for about two weeks now and I still can’t accept it. The news leaked on about June 27 that judges at the California State Fair Wine Competition gave Charles Shaw Chardonnay California a double-gold medal, but the official results of the judging won’t be released until Thursday, July 12.

How could a simple, cheap wine come out of a respected wine competition with a double gold medal? I was going to let the question go and get on with my life when I did a blind tasting of four Chardonnays last Friday. It was strictly blind.

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