Andrew Jefford
‘Does wine-tasting experience imply the loss of wine-tasting innocence?’
My friend Julien came to stay back in May, and we tasted a few wines together, as well as talking about what we’d both been tasting recently, and what he enjoyed drinking. He’s a frenchman who has lived in China for 13 years and taught wine there for the last 10; we’d tasted professionally together in the past, but never really had a chance to compare notes in a more relaxed setting.
My guess is that most Decanter readers are familiar with these kinds of discussion – like music fans comparing notes on favourite composers or bands, or book lovers chatting about novelists or poets. Because the frame of reference is so familiar to both parties, the talk moves swiftly; a palate is deftly mapped. Julien and i didn’t agree about everything. There was, though, plenty of overlap.
He fell silent at one point, then produced what sounded like both a laugh and a sigh. ‘i sometimes think,’ he continued, ‘that my palate has become over-educated. i generally know when i sniff if i’m going to like a wine or not; one sip is enough to confirm.’ i know exactly what he meant. We both suddenly felt like old wolves, looking with wary eyes over the tundra as the first snows began to fall.
So here’s the question: does the acquisition of wine-tasting experience always imply the loss of wine-tasting innocence? Can you, in other words, learn enough to find your way around the wine world without getting muddled and confused, while at the same time retaining enough ‘palate width’ to continue enjoying most well-made wines, regardless of their source and their style?
Assuming that you are truly drinking wine for the pleasure of aroma and flavour, and that slipping alcohol in your bloodstream is a secondary or incidental factor, i doubt it. if you have a sensitive, finely tuned palate (again the musical analogy comes to mind), it’s hard not to recognise when something is out of tune, and to feel pained by it, and to abandon it. That’s why the key question for me, when i’m tasting wine in a competitive setting or surveying unsolicited samples at home, is: ‘Would i really want to drink this?’
There is much that can be enjoyed in sensational terms as you taste: all manner of drama, concentration and extravagance. But drinking is very different. Subtlety and harmony then assume a much more prominent importance than they do for the mere taster: the wine has to work as a sensually alluring device, burying itself seamlessly, nourishingly and pleasurably in your soft human fluids and tissues. if there is pain or discomfort (or indeed tedium) involved in the process, then that wine, as device, has failed.
The innocent taster is wide open to every sensational overture, and merrily sets off into the wine with generous swallows. The experienced taster can read what lies in wait, and may well set his or her glass quietly aside after a sip or two.
i should point out that since palates differ (individually, nationally and culturally), my definition of ‘subtlety and harmony’ may not tally with yours. The point about experience, though, still holds. if experience is a process of fine-tuning, then you will eventually come to notice acutely what is out of tune – by the lights of your own palate.
i’ve now come to accept this ‘overeducation’ as a sort of necessary sadness – and there are, happy to say, two major compensations. The first is that you can sometimes make exclusions (based on the experience of a second-rate example of a wine) which you later discover, via better examples or via the humbling lessons of blind tasting, to have been erroneous. That’s fun. i thought my relationship with Sauvignon Blanc was on the skids, but a recent chance to retaste some Sancerre and Pouilly-fumé ranges has taught me how splendid such wines can be.
The other compensation is that depth compensates for width. What the fine-tuning process excludes in terms of universal enjoyment can be magnificently repaid by the profundity of pleasure you find in those wines that you relish most of all.