Don’t get me wrong. I love big tastings where you get a chance to taste lots of wine. It’s an incredible opportunity for a wine writer to be able to taste, in the space of one day, perhaps 80 different wines. You rapidly build up quite a stock of tasting notes.<\/p>\n
But there are severe problems for those whose professional life consists solely of quick tasting samples like this.<\/p>\n
First of all, while this approach is fine for quick rough-and-ready assessments of commercial wines, it doesn’t serve serious wines well. In a tasting like this, I can spot the duffers from the good bottles, and it flags up potentially very good bottles. But it doesn’t tell me just how good those very good bottles are.<\/p>\n
Perhaps this is why the besetting sin of winewriters seems to be that they aren’t very good (generally) at distinguishing among high-quality commercial wines and serious fine wines. And this might be why many of them fail to get really serious natural wines, for example: these are wines you have to have a relationship with, not a one-night stand.<\/p>\n
Secondly, the most serious wines tend to have a temporal dynamic to them. They are alive, and change with time. If you taste a sample, you don’t spot this. If you sit down with a bottle, you have a chance of catching it. Great wines demand a response from the drinker. It is almost as if there is a dialogue taking place. We have a conversation with the wine that can last an evening.<\/p>\n
Finally, palate fatigue can prevent even the best taster from making the fine discriminations that are the difference between top quality commercial wines and serious fine wines. And there is a very real difference, in my opinion.<\/p>\n
The sorts of wines that really thrill me don’t reveal themselves straight away. You get a sense that they are serious; that there is more than meets the eye. But this takes some teasing out, glass in hand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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