BOTTLE BY BOTTLE, SIP BY SIP

Jancis Robinson published a piece in the Financial Times and enlarged upon it on her website, about the many vagaries of bottle variation. She (and the redoubtable Tamlyn Currin) cited the many external factors whereby bottles of the same wine might differ. Many of them would surprise you, unless you were in the wine trade or handled shipping logistics.

It needed saying, because wine reviewers are often taken to task for the divergences of praise (and ugh, “scores”) among different tasters and sometimes even the same taster on different days. Readers think it’s all a con game and we’re basically full of it, and while one can see why such conclusions might be drawn, they do betray either ignorance or else simple misunderstanding of what it is we seek to do.

Anyone who tastes wine and writes about what we taste stands before an epistemological conundrum. It states the question: What can we know about how a wine tastes? And appends an even sneaker question; what can we know about a given bottle of wine?

My answer to these koans is in two parts. Part one says that we can know nearly nothing about a bottle of wine as the question is asked, but what we can know we can know close to absolutely. To get at this we have to appreciate that wine is tasted dimensionally, not in a straight line from alpha to omega, but rather in circles, zig zags, ascents and descents, and in widths and depths.

Here is what I mean, and what I bear in mind in my own professional tastings.

We cannot know a wine essentially, because of the bottle variation of which Jancis wrote so insightfully.

We can only know how it tasted from the glass we used to taste it. This is why I insist in always tasting from at least two glasses. If I find a through-line, that suggests there’s something ineluctable in the wine, and if I don’t, that tells me the wine decidedly prefers one glass over another, which is also revealing.

We can only know how it tasted at its temperature when it was poured.

We can only know how it tasted by where it was in the tasting sequence, i.e., what wine preceded it? Further, we can only know how it tasted in the context of the total number of wines we are tasting.

We can only know how it tasted in the atmosphere prevailing where we tasted it. Is the room warm, cool; is the air fresh; is it markedly dry or damp?

Apart from these environmental and external factors, we have ourselves to consider. Did we eat beforehand, and if so, when and what? Are we tired or alert? Are we adequately hydrated (and this one’s quite important and gets too little notice); are we allowing for the palate distortion created by the preceding wine(s), and if so, how are we “neutralizing” our palates? Is this actually possible at all?

It happens I taste for my website in my kitchen, as the setup is ideal. Yet I must also take care for ambient aromas. A chicken stock my wife may have drained off six hours beforehand may leave an echo-fragrance in the air. If she made coffee any time in the previous hour, I’ll notice it. These things don’t “ruin” the tasting but they must be accounted for.

When in the day are we tasting? Most of us have a morning-palate that differs from our afternoon-palate, provided we haven’t altered our palates by the food we ate at breakfast.

Thus my answer to the question, how can we know what “a wine” tastes like is, we can’t. But we can know what that bottle tasted like if we take our external and internal ambiences into account, and if we remember that the glass we use is an arbitrary choice we make (with greater or lesser sensitivity and skill). We can assemble all these relative and provisional “truths” into something that comes close to perfect truth but must inevitably yield, at which point we can only describe the evanescent tasting moment as accurately and diligently as possible.

If you take any given tasting note I write and ask me “Is this true?” my only possible answers are:

Pretty much.

True enough, considering my experience and the cares I take.

Your mileage may vary depending on how you drive.

You’re asking the wrong question.

The proper and useful question is, have I explained my subjectivities clearly enough for you to bear them in mind? Because I try to. We tasters might pretend to be machines (viz. “scores”) but we aren’t. We’re mostly nerds and ne’er do wells who are only tenuously suited to “real” work. The least we can do is figure out WTF we’re actually up to, and tell you the truth about it.