Archive for the 'Critics/Competitions' Category

When was the last time you read an article saying, “I hate French wine. It sucks. I never drink it anymore and I pour it down the drain.”

Talk about rash generalizations. Talk about Francophobia. Talk about intolerance.

But that’s basically what wine writer Alice Feiring said in an op-ed piece in the LA Times. Only she didn’t say it about France, she said it about California.

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I suspected that Jancis Robinson had more to say about her widely quoted remarks at the Wine Creators conference in Spain last weekend. So after my post yesterday on this topic I asked her for details and she provided them.

She thinks her brief comments about wine writers being parasitical and needing to have more humility were taken “completely out of context” on Decanter.com, and resulted in “witch hunters” going after her on eRobertParker.com. She pointed me to an elaboration on what she said in Spain on her own site yesterday. Here are a couple of key paragraphs.
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Author Jancis Robinson chastised her wine-writing colleagues recently for not having stiff enough spines. According to a Decanter article she told them at a posh gathering in Spain that they need to be more open about wines they like and dislike and resist vintners efforts to “keep us sweet.”

Ironically, the event itself was sponsored by La Melonera, a wine-related development project, and journalists attending were treated to two days of great wines along with discussions between winemakers from several countries and international journalists. It was unclear whether the journalists had to pay the 2,000 Euro fee, or were admitted free as is often the custom at wine industry events.

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How are wine drinkers supposed to understand the language that wine writers use to convey the tastes of wines they like when some of it comes from way out in left field?

Even winemakers themselves compare their creations to things as extremely unpalatable as cat pee and insecticide. What do you think when you read a tasting note for a Sauvignon Blanc that alludes to “cat pee,” for instance?

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Could you tell a Merlot from a Cabernet from a Syrah in a blind tasting? Faced with three unmarked glasses from three brown-bagged bottles with no clues other than a Napa Valley origin, I couldn’t. Neither could food and wine authority David Rosengarten, Chicago Tribune wine writer Bill Daley and editorial director of Curtco Media, Brett Anderson.

These three experienced wine writers were leading a seminar during last week’s Symposium for Professional Wine Writers, based at Meadowood Resort in St. Helena, California. While the rainstorms came and went, and the flowering mustard waved in the wind between the rows of dormant grapevines, 60 wine writers and editors from around the country studied how to improve their craft.

The blind-tasting exercise was supposed to help wine reviewers compose better tasting notes, but to me it made one or both of the following two points:

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This happens every day in group wine tastings or competitions: one group of tasters loves a wine that the other group really hates. These are experienced tasters who love wine. So how can they be so far apart?

I’ve often thought that the reason people can’t agree over which wines are best or worst is simply because they have different likes and dislikes. It must be comparable to people who love classical music vs. those who love hip hop. They’ve been enculturated to like one, and may extremely dislike the other because it’s not their’s.

But it’s becoming increasingly clear that something else is happening in wine tastings.

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It bugs me sometimes when I hear other wine writers and critics dissing California wine for being too big, too flavorful, too much. Disclosure: I live in Napa Valley, and I’ve lived about 40 percent of my life in California, so I do have an urge to support the home team.

The dissing sometimes strikes of condescension from people who learned about wine from a Eurocentric perspective and will never be able to acknowledge that a style different from the generally lean and underripe European profile could be desirable. So I defend the generally bigger style of West Coast wines, but I also like to point out that they make smaller wines here, too.

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Led Zeppelin, like a Ravenswood Zinfandel?

We all know the arguments against the 100-point scale, but the question is, what’s better? Some years ago, Kermit Lynch, the Berkeley wine merchant and importer, who was definitely not a fan of the points system, suggested in a seminar that people get creative with how they convey the style and quality of wine.

He recommended that people compare wines to art, to architecture and other forms of creativity instead of reducing them to digits. It was a fun idea, and I spent the rest of the day rating wines by architectural styles. Something like a 1961 Haut Brion would have been the wine equivalent of a Georgian townhouse in D.C. A Hanzell Chardonnay 1990 conjured a Bel Air contemporary mansion, and so on.

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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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