|
|
 |
|
When it Comes to Tasting, is Justice Really Blind?
• by Jordan Mackay
|
 |
|
|
The thrill of victory. The agony of defeat. Both are emotions felt in the Wide World of Wine’s version of blood sport: blind tasting. Blind tasting is a game played for high stakes on the professional level (one has to pass rigorous exams to get a Master Sommelier or Master of Wine accreditation), but you folks at home can play along, too. Its major risks are only to the ego, and playing it can yield vast benefits in the development of your palate. In the professional world, blind tasting is a common, if controversial, practice.
The rules are simple: Someone pours you some wine while you’re not looking (never a bad thing) and you analyze the wine, taking care to visually observe the wine in the glass, sniff into the mysteries of its aroma and finally chew on the wine a little with your tongue, assessing its flavors, acidity levels, tannin structure and finish. At the end, you call the wine. Easy.
Except, not that easy.
A lot of the time it’s not that easy to even guess the variety. I’ve seen great and legendary tasters go down in a flaming ball of fire, calling first-growth Bordeaux Chilean plonk. That’s where you have to not be too hard on yourself, especially since blind tasting has become more and more difficult with the globalization of the wine world and the homogenization of wine styles.
But even if you can’t say, without looking at the label, that the wine before you is a 1999 Méo-Camuzet Premier Cru Vosne-Romanée Les Chaumes, there is no better way for beginning wine experts (that’s us!) to learn about wine and judge its quality than by encountering a wine with only the senses, leaving all preconceptions at the front door when you walk in.
Preconceptions about a wine can both positively and negatively taint the experience of drinking it. If we’ve spent a lot of money on a fine wine, we’re less likely to see its flaws. We want it to be good, so we don’t feel we’ve thrown away our hard-earned scratch.
Likewise, we might be reluctant to admit that an inexpensive little number picked up at the grocery store can have some grand complexities and nuance. Some people suspect that critic Robert Parker, who often doesn’t taste blind, might be predisposed to give loftier scores to the loftier estates.
Blind tasting can cut through all that. Put an acknowledged great wine next to a minor wine and simply consider quality. The great wine should have concentration. That is, it should have a certain force of flavor throughout your mouth as long as you hold it in your mouth, and the echoes of its taste should linger after you’ve swallowed it (called the “finish”). It doesn’t have to be huge or loud, mind you. But it needs to have sufficient integrity. A lesser wine might have pretty flavors but only one or two, not an undulating mélange of them. A great wine should have balance. So maybe it has that concentration, but does it carry its power with grace, as might, say, a great track star? If it has extract and puissance but seems flabby, out of shape or searingly alcoholic, it’s not a great wine.
Sometimes we are not sure what quality means. I used to think, “Well, I don’t drink a lot of Burgundy, so I don’t know whether this is good or not. It doesn’t seem good, but maybe that’s the style there.” Certainly it’s important to ultimately develop a sense of the context from which the wine comes (how wines from the a certain place are supposed to taste), but the language of quality is an international one that should transgress borders.
But quality isn’t always readily apparent, nor is it a one-dimensional measure of a wine. This is where blind tasting runs up against its limits. Kermit Lynch, the famous importer, rails against it in his book “Adventures on the Wine Route.” “The method is misguided, the results spurious and misleading,” he wrote. “Such tasting conditions have nothing to do with the conditions under which the wines will presumably be drunk, which is at table, with food … There is a vast difference, an insurmountable difference, between the taste of a wine next to another wine, and the same wine’s taste with food.”
Lynch’s point is that, when used as a method to judge and compare wines, blind tasting is flawed, because it assumes the same use for each wine. Nowadays, many wines are made with the intent to stand out in blind tastings. They have huge extract, flashy oak, ready-made deliciousness. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it can tend to shout down other wines that are made to evolve or whose complexities require time and attention to realize. That’s why I recommend blind tasting as a learning tool but not necessarily as a tool to judge. When you judge a wine, do it with your eyes open. Think about it with food. Think about the occasion on which you’d like to drink it. And, mostly, don’t just blindly judge its quality: Think about how you could enjoy it.
MO Wine Archive
View Complete Archive
|
|
|
|
