Your discussion about art vs craft, 100% I'm a craftsman, not an artist, I said so much in a post a couple months back.
Tasting notes, I can't stand them. I don't even write a note on the back of the bottle. Useless. But the trade still wants them. Distributors offer them. Grocery stores use a version of them. AI/LLM are collecting them and their frequency online improves search. Necessary evil.
How many wine can you taste in a sitting. Which I will be doing about thirty minutes after this comment at 9am pacific. I'm good for about 30 different wine versions on a theme (15 Merlot and 15 Cabs) before lunch. Once lunch hits and I eat anything, anything, it could be cold gruel, my palate changes. I can do technical, flaw stuff nearly anytime of day, but the best tasting for me is in the morning and really no more than 30. After lunch I could rotate if necessary to something completely different, but not till about 3pm.
Wine writer: Two dozen unidentified glasses in a sterile atmosphere. One laptop. See, swirl, smell, sip, spit. Write a two-sentence review with a score. No normal person drinks wine this way. My 18-plus years as a wine writer—17 years for Gannett-USA Today—has focused on the story behind the winery, the people, the grape variety. So, I am with your sentiment, Meg. Write on!
Cheers, Gus. The way we professionals taste all just so—unnatural, but good luck convincing the consorzi and syndicats and trade bodies and everyone else with a vested interest in wine promotion to switch it up. Believe me, I've tried.
I have so many thoughts about this article. I’ll share one. I am contemplating the idea of time—specifically the time it takes to get to know a wine. I crave more time to know one bottle. To properly know it and share it. Is it even reasonable to crave that? How do we produce—what mediums allow us this luxury—when there are deadlines and shortened attention spans, mostly mine. It’s 8:48 PM, and your article makes me want to abandon my work and have a week-long conversation with one single bottle.
Thanks for reading, and I'm happy it stimulated some thinking.
The industry as currently constructed doesn't allow writer-critics that luxury of time to get to know a wine before rendering judgment. But I believe it's vital to understanding wine, or at least good wines. And that time isn't merely the few days we might experience a single bottle, or the several months over which we try it repeatedly, it's also about tasting over years, over vintages, which gets us closer to knowing not only wine but site. In the "olden days," this is how it worked; we tasted our local wine over days, months, years, and understood more about our place and ourselves. With the global explosion of availability, that's not possible for most of us. Yet many of us still crave it.
Your discussion about art vs craft, 100% I'm a craftsman, not an artist, I said so much in a post a couple months back.
Tasting notes, I can't stand them. I don't even write a note on the back of the bottle. Useless. But the trade still wants them. Distributors offer them. Grocery stores use a version of them. AI/LLM are collecting them and their frequency online improves search. Necessary evil.
How many wine can you taste in a sitting. Which I will be doing about thirty minutes after this comment at 9am pacific. I'm good for about 30 different wine versions on a theme (15 Merlot and 15 Cabs) before lunch. Once lunch hits and I eat anything, anything, it could be cold gruel, my palate changes. I can do technical, flaw stuff nearly anytime of day, but the best tasting for me is in the morning and really no more than 30. After lunch I could rotate if necessary to something completely different, but not till about 3pm.
All good stuff in the article, I'll stop there.
David, thank you for reading our conversation, and for sharing your experiences.
Wine writer: Two dozen unidentified glasses in a sterile atmosphere. One laptop. See, swirl, smell, sip, spit. Write a two-sentence review with a score. No normal person drinks wine this way. My 18-plus years as a wine writer—17 years for Gannett-USA Today—has focused on the story behind the winery, the people, the grape variety. So, I am with your sentiment, Meg. Write on!
Cheers, Gus. The way we professionals taste all just so—unnatural, but good luck convincing the consorzi and syndicats and trade bodies and everyone else with a vested interest in wine promotion to switch it up. Believe me, I've tried.
I have so many thoughts about this article. I’ll share one. I am contemplating the idea of time—specifically the time it takes to get to know a wine. I crave more time to know one bottle. To properly know it and share it. Is it even reasonable to crave that? How do we produce—what mediums allow us this luxury—when there are deadlines and shortened attention spans, mostly mine. It’s 8:48 PM, and your article makes me want to abandon my work and have a week-long conversation with one single bottle.
Thanks for reading, and I'm happy it stimulated some thinking.
The industry as currently constructed doesn't allow writer-critics that luxury of time to get to know a wine before rendering judgment. But I believe it's vital to understanding wine, or at least good wines. And that time isn't merely the few days we might experience a single bottle, or the several months over which we try it repeatedly, it's also about tasting over years, over vintages, which gets us closer to knowing not only wine but site. In the "olden days," this is how it worked; we tasted our local wine over days, months, years, and understood more about our place and ourselves. With the global explosion of availability, that's not possible for most of us. Yet many of us still crave it.
My two favorite wine writers writing as a team. What strange world is this where such a collaboration could take place?
A really lovely world. 😉
😉
A beautiful world!