How do people discover wine? What proportion of non-involved consumers end up morphing into involved consumers? And how do people make this transition? These are all very interesting questions. The…
We don’t want our wines to taste nicer, but truer
When I started drinking wine as a student, I was bottom feeding. Buying cheap wines from supermarkets. Most tasted bad. Now wine tastes better, even at the bottom end. That’s…
Some thoughts on wine quality: an intrinsic or extrinsic property of a wine?
How do we define quality in a wine? Is it an intrinsic or extrinsic property of the wine? That is, is quality something that a wine possesses independent of…
The importance of stories, good and bad
One of the most popular programmes on BBC Radio 4 is Desert Island Discs, which is presented by Kirsty Young. It has been running forever (since 1942), and the idea…
The social licence of wine
I’ve been at the excellent Australian Wine Industry Technical Conference this week, where I presented on two topics. The first was on whether or not we make too much of…
Framing and wine tasting: how words can get in the way of experience
Framing is a social science term which refers to a set of concepts and perspectives that then form the background that influences how we think on certain issues. In this…
Accessibility and interest: how we grow to like wines
David Huron, Professor of Music at Ohio State University, has written an absorbing book titled, Sweet anticipation: music and the psychology of expectation. When we listen to music, our relationship…
Who would be the ideal wine critic? A specialist or a generalist?
The wine world is big. Properly big. I’ve been travelling it now for quite a few years, and since 2008 as a full-time wine writer. There are still so many…
Internal change, living in the now, and our approach to wine
How we approach life is so important. If we change our viewpoint, it changes everything. But this sort of change is incredibly hard for most. In our pursuit of happiness,…