Don’t disregard context of wine

A prime motive of Wine School has been to make evaluating wine more relevant to the people who are actually doing the drinking.

So we’ve departed from the usual clinical examination of wine in a vacuum. That approach, in which many wines are given scant attention in a routine of rapid sniffing, swirling, tasting and spitting, has dominated wine criticism. It accounts for the multitude of often inane tasting notes and scores found in consumer publications that purport to appraise hundreds of different bottles.

It has long been my contention that, while this may be the simplest method of convincing consumers that they are making educated buying decisions, it is the least effective way of assessing a bottle of wine. It also does nothing to help them learn for themselves how to evaluate wine or to discover their own set of preferences.

With the thought of helping consumers gain confidence in their own critical powers, Wine School began in 2014. The idea was simple: I would select a genre of wine, and recommend three bottles and some alternates. Readers would buy the bottles and drink them as wine was meant to be consumed: with family or friends over a meal in a relaxed setting. Readers were then invited to share their thoughts by commenting at nytimes.com/food.

I’ll leave it for others to debate whether this approach can be effective on a mass scale. But judging by the comments in our recent evaluation of albariño, I would say that for participants, it has been a rousing success.

The three albariños I recommended were the 2015 Albamar, the 2014 Do Ferreiro and the 2014 Pedralonga, all white wines from the Rías Baixas region of Galicia, on the Atlantic coast of northwest Spain.

Most readers naturally tried to describe the aromas and flavors they experienced. This is worth doing. But I was gratified that rather than issuing exhaustive grocery lists of esoteric descriptors, readers seemed to focus on general terms: tropical fruits, apple and mineral, rather than papaya, Gravenstein apples and so on.

The more general terms indicate the discernible properties in a wine. Tropical fruits may convey a high level of ripeness when the grapes were harvested, while apples indicate a tartness that

may come from lively acidity. You could just as easily say “very ripe” or “tart,” but why spoil the fun?

Highly specific descriptions, however, do not clearly convey information that can be useful to others. “Notes of rambutan,” for example, serves better as a personal mnemonic device for remembering a wine than it does to communicate its character to others.

More important than descriptions, though, is the context in which wine is consumed. The albariño comments were filled with references to context, which crucially influences how we experience a wine.

What was the temperature of the wine when you first drank it? How did the wine change as it warmed in the glass? What did you eat with it? How did the food change the wine, and vice versa?

One reader, VSB of San Francisco, often lists the music that accompanied a meal. The soundtrack for albariño was the Gipsy Kings. It seemed to be a blissful combination, though I don’t anticipate the Gipsy Kings making it to my playlist.

I have harped continuously on my belief that we often drink good white wines too cold. Straight out of the refrigerator, the best whites seem muted. The cold blunts nuance, which is a good thing for a bad wine; you want that glass of pinot grigio you ordered at an airport bar to be as cold as possible. But for good wines, you want to detect every nuance. (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.) Dan Barron of New York and his wife, Barb, noted how temperature affected the Albamar, which helpfully notes on its label that it is optimally served at 12 degrees Celsius, or 53.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The wine went best with a dish of curried hake, he said, when it was nearly room temperature, and “turned sweeter, friendlier, more generous.”

Sadly, he added, the wine went much better with a side of charred cherry tomatoes when it was cooler. I had not thought of the necessity of coordinating main and side dishes, but perhaps it’s something sensitive eaters may want to consider.

Joseph of Île-de-Francenoted that as the Do Ferreiro warmed in the glass, its inherent minerality emerged. Since minerality is prized by many wine lovers, this is yet another reason to shun the ice bucket. Joseph also noted that oysters in a spicy dressing and blackened salmon overwhelmed the delicate wine. I will say that curried fish and blackened salmon offer complex sets of flavors, contrary to my suggestion of simply prepared seafood. On the other hand, Martin Schappeit of Forest, Virginia, tried a José Andrés recipe for octopus, a classic Galician preparation, and found the dish, with the Pedralonga, to be a wonderful pairing.

Ferguson of Princeton, New Jersey, loved the albariños with risotto nero with squid, while Max D. found a 2014 Bodegas Chaves albariño perfect with grilled lobster. I thought each of the three albariños was terrific, though I liked the Do Ferreiro and the Albamar a bit more than the Pedralonga. The Albamar had a ripe peach and citrus aroma, and a spine of minerality on the palate, with a slight but discernible bitterness, almost like tonic water. The Do Ferreiro had a richer texture — unctuous, as Max D. put it — yet was lively, energetic, complex and pure, with herbal, floral and citrus flavors, and a firm minerality.

The Pedralonga was a little more tart, with clear apple flavors, as several readers noted. It, too, had persistent mineral flavors, but it seemed less energetic than the other wines. I might not have noticed if I were not trying the wines side by side.

Each of these wines, however, went beautifully with two recipes I prepared: shrimp with green sauce, which VSB also enjoyed, and orecchiette with cherry tomatoes and arugula, not a typical regional pairing but one that I imagined would work.

Going back over our study of albariño, I was struck by how dependent the wines were on external circumstances. Each element — whether temperature, overly complex dishes and other factors, like mood and weather — can demonstrably affect a wine, although you have to pay attention to notice these things.

Attentiveness to these details is both a curse and a blessing. No doubt, blissful ignorance would diminish the disturbing effect of a wine that is served at the wrong temperature or that clashes with a particular dish. Others, for whom the minutiae of food and wine are unimportant, may deem you fussy if you notice too demonstrably. But far more important are the pleasures when the fine points do align. (Honestly, I’m not hard to please.) It’s like music, which you may find to be pleasant when you listen passively, but which may inspire something akin to religious awe when you take in the details. These are the feelings and emotions that cause people to pursue wine, whether as a passion or a calling. It’s a complexity that can’t be gotten at when you’re tasting and spitting dozens of wines. It must be lived with and consumed.