[question] Question submitted by Gary Walsh, Australia What are your thoughts on blind tasting and do you review (where practical) wines blind? [/question] [answer] As far as I am concerned, the first and most important thing about tasting wine as I do is to do it in as consistent a fashion as possible. Secondly, many of the wines that I taste are either at staged events conducted by wineries or wine regional bodies, or tastings I have requested at wineries or at dinners conducted all over the place. Hardly any of these wines are tasted blind. In some cases, these events represent the only time in my life that I might ever taste the wines being presented, and many of these wines would be considered by most wine enthusiasts to be very important and influential. Thirdly, in blind tastings conducted by a panel of one, which is how I conduct my tastings, it is indeed possible for finer, more savoury and elegant wines to go missing, usually at the expense of more forward styles based around riper fruit and sweeter oak. Show judging panels typically comprise three judges and two associates, so numerically at least, finer styles should get more of a chance in this blind situation, despite the obvious fact that in most cases they most certainly don’t. Fourthly, and I believe my track record would support this, I have no qualms in pulling back a tall poppy provided I am genuinely convinced it deserves it. I believe I was the first, for instance, to query the 1998 Henschke Mount Edelstone and the 2000 Penfolds Grange (which still I maintain should never have been released and which I told nearly every single living Grange winemaker at a Rewards of Patience tasting). I believe that provided a critic or taster is genuinely honest and not influenced by the reputation of a label, that it is indeed possible to provide a true and open evaluation of a wine. As a result, I taste most of the wines I do in full knowledge of what they are. I don’t really care what other critics do, or what my readers or subscribers think about this. The important thing for me is to produce the best possible and most repeatable result (within obvious parameters) that I can. Neither of the 1998 Mount Edelstone or the 2000 Grange were tasted blind. While I have actually tasted both wines blind since (with virtually identical results as it happens), I have no problem with the process that led me to do this. An analogy for me perhaps is the type of glassware I use. Not because it is the best possible glass, but because they exist almost everywhere, I choose the ISO tasting glass wherever I can, often upsetting winemakers who have brought significantly larger and more expensive stemware for a tasting occasion. In many cases, I believe, a fabulous piece of glassware is worth around 1.0 to 1.5 points out of 20 for a really good wine. Winemakers, of course, are acutely aware of this. But it would be blatantly unfair to use these glasses for some, but not all wines, and to do so would significantly distort my scores. Again, it’s the consistency that is important, as I do my level best to minimise the influences that make wine evaluation a more subjective and less objective process. One day, perhaps, I will buy a phenomenal number of top-level glasses with which to evaluate all the wines I taste, but in doing so I would certainly prejudice older wines tasted before this change in approach. So, to return to the issue at hand, given the four parameters outlined above: that it is impossible for me to taste all wines blind, that consistency in the process must be paramount, that finer wines are always going to struggle in blind tastings conducted by a single individual and that I genuinely believe that I am not influenced by labels, I believe at this moment in time that I do my best work by knowing what the wine is. I taste wines with their label right in front of me. Different tasters of different personality types and in different situations might understandably feel differently about the issue. That is their right. It is, however, the consumer’s right to pick and choose the people whose opinions they value. I think that the smarter consumers will be more concerned about the quality and consistency of the results they see than necessarily the means the critics deploy to get there. [/answer]
