A few thoughts on wine tasting

By Jeff Miller 2011-3-15 18:11:46

I had dinner last week with Arthur Przebinda, aka the Wine Sooth, at a restaurant in South Pasadena. Afterwards, he gave me three bottles of wine to try out and give me his thoughts about them. So I took them home to Napa, and had two of them with dinner a few nights apart with my wife.

Since this isn’t intended to be a review, I won’t name names, but concentrate instead on the reactions that we had to the wines. The first was an older (2004) Pinot that my wife just loved. I liked it, but not nearly as much as she did. She’s something of a Pinot fanatic, so she tends to respond more favorably to Pinots generally than I do (even though I do truly love Pinot as a variety). The wine to me had excellent, lively, and typical Pinot Noir fruit, good acidity, though the fruit was noticeably underripe (much less of a problem with Pinot Noir than with some other varieties, e.g., Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot).

I reported back my comments to Arthur, who responded that he had found the wine unduly soft and over the hill.

So three people tasting the same wine (though one was tasting from a different bottle) had reactions that were different, and, in Arthur’s case, very different, than the other tasters.

Thinking about this experience in a little greater depth, all of the these factors influence how we three tasters responded so differently to the same wine:

How much each of us liked the particular variety. My wife’s love of the wine was probably due in large measure to her love of Pinot Noir.

The different bottles. Even though we were tasting the same wine, how much of the different reactions could be due to bottle variation? I suspect this is a main culprit in Arthur’s reaction to the wine being so different than mine, since we usually aren’t that far apart on assessing a wine that we drink when together.

Part and parcel of the last comment, is the fact that the wine was an older wine, a 2004, which is getting up there for most Pinots. I think bottle variation is something that’s very slight (if evident at all) in a wine coming off the bottling line, but can be quite evident in an older wine, where the simple passage of time can result in a divergence of one bottle to another. I think this is particularly going to be the case where there are differences in the bottles themselves (primarily the different rates at which different corks allow oxygen into the wine) as well storage conditions. But even when a cork is used that is very uniform (e.g., a technical cork or screwcap) and the storage conditions identical (two bottles pulled from the same case), bottle variation still exists, and can be pronounced. Why is a mystery.

I don’t know the circumstances under which Arthur tasted the wine, but certainly they were different than my wife’s and mine. We (Arthur vs. us) were tasting the wine with different foods (or, in Arthur’s case, perhaps without food at all). It’s amazing how a wine that can taste flat and lifeless in one setting paired with one food can taste vibrant and balanced paired with a different food.

The second bottle that we had was a 2007 Cabernet Franc. I generally believe that Cab Franc should be used as a blender, not as a variety on its own. It tends, on its own, to be somewhat hollow and thin, having plenty of nose but not much on the palate. As a blender, it adds the nose part, but on its own is just nose. But if that’s the case, this was the exception that proved the rule. This wine was, for me, filled with good cherry fruit, very well balanced, with full but soft tannins. If I were in the business of giving scores, this one would have earned probably a 93 or 94. Inexplicably, my wife didn’t care for it at all. It’s hard to attribute this to any external variation, as we were both drinking from the same bottle and consuming it with the same food. Arthur, who, again, had tasted from a different bottle and at a different time, noted primarily its tannic, astringent quality.

So, as between me and my wife, tasting the same wine in the same setting, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that our different assessments said more about the tasters than the tasteds. Clearly, what appealed to me in the wine was no different for her than for me—it was just that what appealed to me didn’t appeal to her.

Arthur, who emphasized the tannic/astringent quality of the wine, is perhaps a little easier to explain. My guess is that most tasters would probably find the wine on the tannic side. I love tannin, plain and simple. I would except out those tight, hard, green tannins that some wines exhibit (e.g., young Bordeaux), but, putting those aside, I never met a tannin I didn’t like. I also think my perception of tannins is lower than for most people, since an amount of tannin that have most people reacting with shock and awe I find entirely acceptable.

So here we have a situation where, with two wines, for various reasons, we got very different reactions from three tasters. The Cab Franc, in particular, got ratings from excellent to poor. The Pinot, though from the same maker and vintage, perhaps had a high degree of bottle variation, which would explain the widely divergent assessments of the wine.

Which gets me to the bottom line. If these two wines got such different reactions from three different tasters, shouldn’t any wine review be taken with a grain of salt? Doesn’t the condition of the bottle, the circumstances of the tasting (particularly the food pairing), and the subjective preferences of the taster have as much to do with the assessment of the wine as the innate characteristics of the wine itself?

From artisanfamilyofwines.com