ROCKIN’ WITH SCHROECK ‘N SONS

These days I’m preoccupied with trying to do what one puny guy can do to make wine less forbidding so that we can slow down (or even stop) the attrition of drinkers. A dialogue I had with my friend Meg Maker was published in the latest World Of Fine Wine and seemed to tickle some vagus nerve of the zeitgeist, and even engendered a bit of snark from some chap whose piece circled the drain while missing the points that Meg and I were addressing. But most of the subsequent online conversation has been productive.

I’ve been skeptical about the conventional “tasting note” for a long time now. Unless one is an excellent writer - think Tamlyn Currin, Andrew Jefford, among a few others -  they have little to say to me.  And yet, I write them.

This new piece will, I hope, display the limits and opportunities of “tasting.” That is because I turned out to have been wrong about several of the wines, and if I’d done the so-called “professional reviewer” thing of tasting blind and registering my notes into some publication’s data-base before I could ponder whether I’d been correct (which is the smallest among the parameters of accuracy), I’d have committed the misdemeanor of saying the wines tasted one way when they actually tasted another.

So instead, the notes tell a story, of each of the several encounters with these wines, and how both they and my impressions about them evolved over time. This goes to the heart of what I seek to do here: less to write “tasting notes” than to record and transcribe the stories of encounters with wines to which I pay the respectful attention they deserve.

When this was done I wrote to Heidi Schröck and told her what had happened. I said her (red) wines had seemed to awaken from turbid dreams only to blossom in the glass over a few days. It’s worth remembering how wine can do that. It’s more important than spewing yet another tasting note fatuously depicting precisely how “good” a wine was and whether you should buy it. Or so I suppose.