Humbled by bubbles

A few hard lessons on getting it wrong

We all get wines wrong, sometimes. Tim Atkin wrote a poignant newsletter about this recently:

“Turn up to an appointment in a bad mood and it’s easy to let that carry over into your assessment of the wines”.

Now I’ll admit I’ve yet to be in a terrible mood when tasting sparkling wine (even when I was pretty sure I’d knocked the front bumper off the hire car on an unfilled trench on the dodgy road in-between Cramant and Chouilly last year). But, as Tim implies, you have to have some self-awareness when you’re tasting. Some self-levelling instinct.

At a recent launch I remember looking over to one of my most trusted (and zero-shit-giving) colleagues in the wine media as we exchanged furrowed brows and shrugged shoulders: neither of us could smell a thing. There was something about the room, the cooking…we ended up huddled by a crack in the window, swirling and sniffing like a couple of loons as the rest of the table sat and enjoyed their lunch. What we do for love, folks.

Perfect bottles for tasting at Waris-Larmandier in Avize. One glass missing, opened the day before. Very tasteful spittoon, too.

I was glad not to be scoring that day. Even if you’re not blessed, or cursed, enough to have to assess wine professionally, I’m sure you’ve all had times when you’ve tasted some wines somewhere - at the vineyard, in a restaurant, at an event - only to find the bottles you brought home don’t quite live up to their billing in your taste memory. Here, for what it’s worth, are five things I’ve learnt, sometimes the hard way, to be wary of: