[question] Question submitted by Brent Smith, US When tasting or rating a group of wines, how much does the flavour profile of one wine affect the taste of the next wine? Does this bias wine ratings? [/question] [answer] This is a good question, and nobody with any experience in tasting a lot of wine could possibly deny that there is some validity in the point you raise. In my view, there is only one really good way to taste wine. It would involve opening a bottle, tasting it immediately on opening, letting it breathe if required for the correct time, comparing how it has changed, taking it home for dinner, watching it over food, then leaving some in the bottle and revisiting it for a day or so to confirm impressions of stability and longevity. Of course, while this approach works fine for the public, it’s simply not practical for people like me who need to taste several thousand wines each year. There just isn’t the time available to give every wine you taste the best possible chance to show its best. So, in a professional context, every time I taste a wine in a line-up, it’s a compromise. The best I can then do is through my knowledge of how I taste best, and through my knowledge of the wine in question, to make the best practical compromise to give me the best possible result. The show system, in which judges are often required to evaluate more than 200 wines in a day, is also structured to take the compromise into account because three judges taste every wine. The theory is that if one or two of them miss a salient point about a given wine, that the other or others will pick it up. I structure my tastings in groups of two to three dozen. I’ll start with perhaps a couple of dozen rieslings, then the same number of semillon/sauvignon blancs, then chardonnays, and then reds. I’ll begin with pinots, then steadily build through Rh̫ney blends and merlots to shiraz and then cabernet, which is generally but not always the most astringent. This way I keep changing what my palate is encountering, which helps not only to keep me fresh, but interested as well. The idea is that my palate will never get too hammered by too many heavy reds, which do make difficult tasting when you’re in a panel of just one, and don’t have two other tasters (plus two associates as you get in shows) to back you up. When I’ve judged in South Africa I’ve noticed that they sometimes take a different approach entirely. Keeping the numbers of wines in classes quite small, they sometimes break up the sequence in a rather provocative, but indeed effective way. They might begin a day’s judging with a rich red bracket, then a sparkling wine bracket, then a medium-weight red bracket, followed by dry whites. It takes a little getting used to, but once you’re in the frame, it works surprisingly well. The biggest challenge is when tasting a large number of wines in a class, ie 100 two year-old shirazes, that two or three really heavy wines precede a more delicate and subtle one. These more reserved wines hardly ever succeed in wine shows, regardless of how good they are, and it’s easy to see why. This is the reason I taste wines unmasked, which is something I wouldn’t do if I was afraid of marking down a prestigious or expensive label, which I have a track record of doing when I have seen fit. I defy anyone to suggest I’m influenced by what’s on the label with respect to scoring a wine. I believe this approach is essential when you’re working alone, since it’s so easy to miss something when tasting a lot of wine and striking more restrained and complex wines in the company of more assertive examples. The other reason I do this is as a measure of safety check against cork failure. An example of this occurred just the other day, when I was tasting the 2004 Dalwhinnie Shiraz. The wine was ok, but nothing special. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it, but there was not a lot to excited about, either. Had I not spoken to a friend who knows the wine very well, and who had raved about it to me, I would have just assumed that this was the wine as it was meant to be. Armed with enough knowledge to have a suspicion about the bottle, I opened another. It was close to perfect, and is one of the best Victorian shirazes I have ever tasted. Yet had I tasted the wine blind, I would have been none the wiser. Tasting wine is very much a matter of making something that can be very subjective into something else as objective as possible. From my perspective, that means removing as many of the influences that promote subjectivity as possible from the process. That’s why wherever possible I don’t taste wines with their makers, at the wineries, amid noisy crowds of people, or if I’m unwell or tired. It’s why I structure my day’s tasting the way I do, and why I’m very mindful of the question you pose. The rating I give a wine might never be quite as good as if it were made using the ideal but unrealistic process I described earlier, but will hopefully reflect a genuine effort to remove or take into account as many as possible of these influences that can detract from their validity. [/answer]
