Am I a "better" wine taster than you?

On the contradictions of being a 'good' wine taster

I was at lunch with a group of journalists the other week. I turned to a jovial Italian fellow, who was pulling off a journo-chic fashion combo in a way that only Southern Europeans can (tasteful greying crop and snappy beard, slightly boxy glasses, thick-weave olive shirt and expensive-looking Swiss bag - fabulous), and struck up a conversation:

ME who do you write for?

HIM I’m really mostly lifestyle journalism. I hate ‘technical’ wine journalism. What about you?

ME (short dramatic pause) I write technical wine journalism

Hidden in the distrust is, I think, a quiet vein of anti-authority sentiment: journalists are not naturally deferential, but critics, by their nature, have to at least pretend to assume some level of authority on their subject. I dare say that if I, in journalist mode, met a literature critic over dinner, a small guerilla cell in my consciousness would be dedicating itself to proving why the books they rated were actually rubbish.

I like my wine tastings like I like my…wines. Dry.

Wine suffers when this sense of authority says “I can taste better than you” rather than “I can contextualise what I taste better than you”. What does ‘better’ actually mean? I know plenty of people that can identify Burgundy Crus blind, but I have to say that this cataloguing skill does not always go hand in hand with being able to spot quality; my seven year old son knows every car manufacturer by sight, but gets as excited by Kias as Maseratis (he likes the badge).

Langford-Moore and the The paradox of analysis

I’m sure someone else has written about this, but I can’t find it, so here it goes - there seems, to me, to be a painfully-obvious irony at play when it comes to being a ‘good taster’.

The Langford-Moore paradox states that analysis cannot be both correct and informative. It can only be informative, or correct. In other words, whenever we write a definition, or an analysis, of something, the very fact that we are trying to be informative about that subject of our analysis means we are slightly changing it. I can never tell you what a wine really is. You can’t rebuild a wine from my tasting note.

Consider, then, the following premise:

I am a professional wine taster. I am unusually skilled. I have an excellent palate, so I am able to tell you which wines are good and which aren’t.

You are a wine consumer. Your palate is not as good as mine, but you like wine. You need someone with a good palate to recommend wines to you.

If I can only tell if wines are good or not because I have an excellent palate, doesn’t that mean that my recommendations are only useful to people of equal gustatory refinement? Aren’t my recommendations akin to an opera critic recommending one recording of La Traviata over another to a person who only ever wigs out to The Monkees?

I don't think so.

Harder, Faster, Stronger… ‘Better’?

Here, I think, is what wine pros are good at:

speed.

The best environment for criticism? Getting twelve wine lovers around the table, for two hours, with twelve bottles open, and drinking them with some food, some chat and perhaps a little music. This, after all, is what it is all for. This is the real-world test. At the end of that time, we really know how delicious and purchase-worthy those wines were - I’d review every wine I taste in this way, if I could.

But I can’t. It’s too slow. And injurious to health. So my job is to try and get to that point, for your information and buyer’s guidance, as quickly as I can. What it takes an amateur a leisurely half an hour with a glass to decide on, I have to get to in five minutes, at 10am, in a conference room with sixty wines on the spreadsheet. And that takes…..

technicality.

As a musician I often had to audition candidates for various programmes, and you’d often get clues as to how things were going to go even before the pieces started: tone, tuning up, posture, even the language being used around the music. Sparkling wines give you technical signals, too, that are useful for ‘fast-forwarding’: reduction/oxidation problems, over-extraction and clumsy phenolics, unclean fruit, dosage integration…all things that might escape a half-glass, but can spoil a bottle. Things that everyone, ultimately, will respond to - these are not problems that only critics can taste. But they’re ones we have to spot, immediately.

Interpretation.

Finally, I have to be able to put out a take on a wine that is relatively erudite, reads well and is…well, informative (despite the paradox). This is a skill. But it’s also where wine criticism starts shooting itself in the foot:

The language of tasting notes fosters an impression that the critic is off on some rarified higher plane compared to you, dear reader, who cannot immediately recall what bergamot zest, or black cardamom, or magnolia, smells like, or what the 2002 tasted like. Perhaps, once upon a time, there was a sense of exoticism around this sensual language, which is still used in sincerity and love by critics (including me, I have to say) who find joy deep in the weeds of individual scents, no matter how obscure. There are some who do it very, very beautifully. But it’s not the only way.

Perhaps, in the past, this sort of language helped build a corresponding sense of exoticism around wine critics, too. Today, though, I feel both are waning. Perhaps that’s no bad thing; we just have to change, to try and get the essential, transmissible deliciousness of a wine down, in words and (yes) in scores, in appealing, original and honest language that connects.

Would that make me a better taster than my readers?

I don’t think so. Just, hopefully, a better ‘technical wine journalist’.