| Appreciating Wine in Context | | | | By: Alder Yarrow |  Page 1 of 3 next >> |
What did you think the first time you heard Mozart? Perhaps like me, you had a mother who would play classical music throughout the house on Sunday mornings –- and smile knowingly when you squirmed your way off the couch rather than sit for another minute listening to that stuff. To your eight-year-old ears, it was boring, complicated and inaccessible: You lacked the context in which to appreciate it.
Perhaps as you grew up, though, you started to appreciate Mozart, if not enjoy it; perhaps because you learned more about how to listen to his music. You gained an understanding of its context.
Most wine drinkers, no matter their level of knowledge and sophistication, are on a similar path of evolving understanding. Each mouthful whose flavors and aromas we drink, each bottle label we unconsciously imprint in our memory, each line-item on a wine list that we select for the evening’s meal is another volume in our own library of experience, and determines how we will experience the next. The more wine we drink and the more we learn, the better context we have to evaluate (or enjoy) every future glass.
Ostensibly, wine critics and wine professionals exist to aid in the education of wine lovers, making the process of becoming a better wine consumer easier, quicker and more enjoyable. Yet sadly, much of the professional world of wine, along with legions of devoted followers, operates in denial of the importance that such context plays in the evaluation of wine.
These critics -– and the wine lovers who follow them -- suggest that wine must be (and can only be) evaluated on its own individual terms. They suggest that the only thing that really matters when trying to determine whether a wine is “any good or not” is the particular combination of aroma, texture, flavor, acidity, tannic structure and complexity. To such people, sensory analysis is wine criticism, and its products – a compact tasting note and numerical score -- represent a job well done for the critic.
If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.
Despite the shortsightedness of such a position, many find it difficult to counter the Sensory Analyst’s point of view; no doubt in part because it is essentially true. Sensory analysis is the core of wine criticism. What’s in the bottle does matter the most, but those who maintain that it is the only thing that matters are not only dead wrong, they are in denial of their own knowledge, psychology and personal history with wine. They are either deliberately or naively ignorant of the contexts within which we experience wine. The understanding, the evaluation, and, I would argue, the full enjoyment of wine depends upon many layers of context, each of which builds on the other to fill out the most complete picture of a wine.
The Senses
The Sensory Analysts start from a good place: They pour a glass of wine. They swirl it. They appreciate the color, viscosity and shine in the glass. They smell it, inhaling deeply to make assessments of the aromas. They drink deeply, feeling the texture of the wine on their tongue, and tasting the flavors swirling in the nooks and crannies of their palate. They then swallow (or more likely spit), and carefully evaluate the lingering and fading aromas and flavors in the mouth. This is the root of all wine appreciation, but it is not the full vine.
Typicity
All but the most die-hard Sensory Analysts (and there are surprisingly quite a few of them) will admit that a proper evaluation of wine involves at least one additional layer of context beyond this purely organoleptic one. The knowledge of what grape variety has gone into making the wine, and where those grapes were grown, allow the taster to better evaluate the wine. In particular, this understanding provides a layer of context for the sensory analysis that enables us to evaluate whether the flavors of the wine are typical for the varietal, and whether the wine’s expression of the place it was grown (if it is good enough to express such things) is usual or unusual. The better Sensory Analysts hint at such things in their tasting notes, and the best of them make it a point to reference this context.
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