Tasting Protocols

PROTOCOLS OF TASTING

 

I see little point in reviewing wines my readers can’t buy, so all other things being equal, I’ll favor wines being offered by their importer.  But a contrasting principle is to discuss whatever wines the producers opted to send me, though I have suggested they consider wines available in the American market, or at least wines they madeavailable to the American market. In the event I find a gem that escaped the importer’s notice, they might do what was done in my “era” and make the wine available on a special-order basis with a (small) volume requirement, to justify the admin entailed.

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I’m not setting myself up to be the “commentator-of-record” on the vintages or the producers. I’ll report on what I receive. But I will start to encourage them to send me what they think is a decisively representative group of wines, irrespective of what’s available here or elsewhere.

I don’t expect to find very many wines I don’t like, but when I do I’ll tell you. While I’m certainly not a PR-arm for the growers, I know them and their wines, and expect to find much that is praiseworthy and little that isn’t. To the extent I receive samples from other importers/growers, I’ll approach them as an explorer of flavors, as I do with all the wines. As a merchant I used to say “Just because all my wines are good doesn’t mean I have all the good wines.”  That will continue. If you expect me to be “objective” then I submit, respectfully, that you misconstrue objectivity. I know “my” growers for decades now; I’m supposed to somehow forget that when I taste their wines? Not possible.

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What is possible is to be happy that I have/had such good growers, and happy that others had good growers too.

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 I won’t use points. I disapprove of points. I don’t recognize measuring wines against a notion of “perfection,” I think it’s a fool’s errand to assign absolute value to an ephemeral impression, and the more precise a scoring system purports to be, the more it actually misleads.

That said, my mind forms hierarchies of its own volition, and special wines warrant special attention. So I’ll revert to my deliberately inexact system of plusses – one, two, or three -  to recognize the most remarkable wines. My plusses are sort of like Michelin stars. One plus is a wine that stood out. Two plusses is a wine that made me stop and consider the depth of its beauty. Three plusses is a wine that tingles with greatness, and offers a moment of profundity. Feel free to superimpose whatever scoring system you deploy; the point-systems are harmful but the folks who use them aren’t evil, so if you want to conflate my three plusses with a scoring range that makes sense to you, be my guest.

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It has grown clear to me that I look at wine through two prisms, and that they are hard to combine. What I’ve discussed above is a professional’s determination of “quality,” but there is also a guy’s determination of WTF he likes to drink, and I don’t have a symbol for that.

So maybe I’ll try something like glug-glug-glug for those wines, what the magazine VINARIA calls “Trinkspaß,” or fun-in-drinking. Watch for these, please!

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As I’m not a merchant (for these purposes) I will only remark on prices or “value” if either is noteworthy. Nor would it be very smart to do so in a marketplace with so much flux; tariffs on or off, shipping costs gyrating crazily, exchange rates hiccupping, so if I posted “suggested retail prices” I’d very often be off base.

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I will hedge my bets on aging forecasts. For Rieslings, a basic rule applies; drink them young (1-3 years) if you like their chubby-baby stage (which can be really lovely and charming), and if you miss that stage then you’re on your own. Rieslings do not (as a rule) show their tertiaries for many years, and even decades. When I seek to guess how a wine will develop – however educated my guesses may be – I am too often wrong to ask readers to take my words on faith.

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HOW I TASTE FOR MY REPORTS

Over the years my protocols have solidified into what can be called a “tasting practice.” It’s perfectly attuned to my preferences, the kind of immersion I seek, the type of attention I wish to pay, and the encouragement to move away from typical “tasting notes” and into a more discursive, essayistic form of talking about wines – and wine.

 

I have controlled for all the variables I can control, and I account for the others in my notes when a wine has left me ambivalent and an uncontrolled variable might be the cause.

 

Chief among these variables is time. I have the luxury of tasting slowly, and I exploit that luxury. On rare occasions I’ll taste nine wines in a session, but usually I stop at six, especially when I’m tasting the wines for the first time. I’ve found myself taking as long as 25 minutes with a single wine. Air and temperature are factors in flavor, as we know.

 

But something else we know and don’t write about nearly enough is the effect on any given wine from all the wines that preceded it. A corollary issue is the impression of the first wine based on how one is prepared (or not). You might think this is a picayune level of detail, but if I had a salty and oniony dinner the night before, my palate will be affected until quite late the following day.

 

Of course I control for temperature, as best I can. Once the cellar cools down to 50-54º (usually starting in late November here in Boston) the whites are ideal but I need to “prep” the reds by bringing them upstairs in advance. In summer this is reversed; the reds are ideal at 62º and I have to chill the whites. It’s an inexact science but at least I have a decent degree of control.

 

I control for atmosphere. I taste in my kitchen, and if there are cooking (or other) smells I have four windows I can open for cross-flow to freshen the air. I also have a door that leads out onto a deck, and 95% of the time I taste a wine in-and-outdoors. Fresh air vivifies a wine, makes it more pixilated and vibrant; not every wine, but at least three quarters of them. I often find nuances outside that escaped me inside.

 

I control for sequence, and I seek to give wines every advantage, short of “flattering” them. I never, ever taste blind, because blind tasting is a racket at worst and a useless practice at best, at least for the nature of the tastings I do.

 

I control – perhaps most importantly – for stemware, and every wine is tasted from at least two different types of glass, side by side.

 

For white wines I have two “control” stems. One is the original Spiegelau white-wine glass, which I think has been discontinued. Tragically! This is the very best basic white wine glass I have ever used. My other glass is what I call “the Jancis glass” and which is a project of Ms. Robinson’s and a Mr. Brendel, who have created the glass that actually does what the (dreaded) Zalto “universal” purports to do, and does not do.

 

The Jancis glass explicates any wine you pour into it. Most of the time this is welcome, but if a (white) wine is at all spiky or astringent the stem will make those elements more annoying. The glass is fabulous for old wines, and I’d say it is (even) better for reds than for whites. Tasting from the Jancis is like putting your reading glasses on; everything is clarified and each outline is articulated.

 

I have a few random white wine glasses I use sometimes. Spiegelau has a larger version of its basic white wine glass, which I find more suitable for light-bodied reds. There’s a long-stemmed glass with a rounded bowl I like for the white Burgundy “type.” There are also a couple of options from the Oneida series made under the direction of Karen MacNeil. For my purposes they are ancillary, though they do what they’re designed to do.

 

For reds the Jancis is my control stem, augmented by Riedel’s “Chianti Classico” design and by Spiegelau’s generic red-wine glass.

 

For bubbles it’s the Richard Juhlin glasses in two variations; the original and a smaller version introduced recently that seems to emphasize fruit over minerality. I generally taste from both, side by side. I have some Riedel glasses they designed for Krug, which have been clunky thus far, with isolated exceptions. Finally I have some traditional flutes, on the wide side as those things go, which I’ll use if I want to preserve mousse. I am aware that the Jancis glass is recommended for sparkling wine (and Peter Liem seems to have alighted on it as his preferred glass for tasting) but I don’t deploy it. Call me stubborn. 

 

No wine is tasted less than twice and most are tasted more. I also use the wines for their intended functions, i.e., with food or just to sip while food is cooking, and I am certain that most wines are different when one simply drinks and enjoys them, whereas “tasting” is a curious exercise that lives in a different universe. There’s usually a through-line to be found between tasting and drinking, and combining the practices is far more enlightening than either one alone.

 

To sum up: To the fullest extent possible I control for tempo, context, somatic variables, stemware, condition of the samples, and environment. I nearly always taste alone, and always do so the first time through the samples. All notes are first drafts, spontaneous, and while I augment them as needed I do not spruce them up. They’re my schpew, for better or worse.