Being Halliday

James Halliday shares his finely tuned tasting process

Wine tasting, whether it be for wine shows or the Companion, is extremely tiring, but not for the reasons many people guess. The mental stamina is hard to maintain for six or seven hours, and you simply have to exclude all other thoughts or happenings

around you as you concentrate on the wine.

MY TASTINGS for each Halliday Wine Companion effectively go on for 365 days. You have to remember that more than 8775 wines were tasted for the 2020 edition, with full tasting notes for the 3943 wines that could fit into the book, plus another 3268 notes that partly appeared with ratings, drink-to dates and prices. Then there was a further 2500-plus tasting notes that were written and scored, but only appear on the website.

At one stage in the past, I would taste 150-plus wines a day, but over the past three or four years, I have progressively wound that back to a total of 60 to 70. It still takes me just as long to write those 60 to 70 notes as it did to write the 150; I have to concentrate harder, and need to take longer to assess the positive and negative qualities of a wine, than I did years ago.

THE TASTING PROCESS

To assess each wine, I need to first write about its colour, particularly if it’s a red wine, and then start assessing the bouquet. I will swirl the glass and deeply inhale the aroma, usually repeating this step. I write initial comments on the bouquet, and then taste the wine for the first time, and normally add comments. I then go back to the bouquet and the taste, and complete the note. It is only once these repeating processes have taken place that I write the score, which is out of 100.

Some 40 years ago, or thereabouts, the wine shows of Australia, with which I was intimately involved, used a score out of 20, with three points for colour and condition, seven for bouquet, and 10 for the palate. You assessed each of those three components and then added them up for the wine’s total score. I, and others with similar experience, would walk past the 3/7/10 fence posts, and simply go to the total number out of 20. In those days, 18.5 to 19.5 points was a gold medal, 17 to 18 was silver, and 15.5 to 16.5 bronze. What we all realised was, when using the staged approach, you didn’t end up with the score you really wanted to give the wine, so you simply amended the three points to come up with the total number you considered the wine to be worth. These days it seems remarkable that someone can taste a wine and come up with a score out of 100 with seemingly nothing to go on. But, of course, there is a great deal involved, in terms of general experience as well as a particular wine’s style, variety, age and other factors you are dealing with.

Wine tasting, whether it be for wine shows or the Companion, is extremely tiring, but not for the reasons many people guess. The mental stamina is hard to maintain for six or seven hours, and you simply have to exclude all other thoughts or happenings around you as you concentrate on the wine.

THE TIPS AND TRICKS

There are, of course, some limits and tricks to get over the repetition that goes on. Many years ago, I migrated to Sensodyne toothpaste, although there are now others in the field with similar results of stopping nerve pain from the constant exposure to acid. I’ve also added soda water and olives to my tasting regime. The olives

(which must be green and still be on their stones) are wonderful for reducing the impact of tannin in the mouth from red wines – shiraz and cabernet the main culprits. You simply nibble a small piece off the olive, and it might take six or seven nibbles before another olive is brought into play. You are not – repeat, not – having a morning tea of olives. Rinsing the mouth with soda water at intervals of five to 10 wines is essential for red and white wines alike.

White wines are generally slightly more acidic, with a slightly lower pH than red wines, and two things come into play here.

The first is hard cheese to nibble on, rather like the olives, which helps to buffer the acid build-up. White wines are the best possible mouthwash when you are coming to the end of a long day with far more red wines to deal with than white. In past decades, the split between white and red wines was either 50/50 or 60/40 white to red. Now it can be anything up to 80 to 85 per cent reds to 15 to 20 per cent whites in a standard sample distribution.

I set up my tasting table with red wines down one side, whites down the other. I typically start with red wines in the morning, getting in some of the hard yards before I become tired, and will then tablehop backwards and forwards according to the state of my mouth. I have to confess that when I was at my peak, I really didn’t need to taste the wine; about 90 per cent of the time, I would be able to complete a word and score picture of the wine from the bouquet alone. About 10 per cent of the time, I would find something quite different when I did taste the wine, so that is why I did in fact always taste it, even though in many instances it simply served to confirm the decision I had already reached. These days I have to work harder in the tasting process and also be on the lookout for retronasal assessment of the bouquet.

A note in conclusion: there are two terms used with increasing frequency these days. The first is “reductive”, most commonly encountered in chardonnay. It can be used in a pejorative or simply descriptive way. Development in the bottle can diminish this character, more so when poured and aerated; the problem is that it can be identified by some tasters of a given bottle, with or without a screwcap closure.

The other term, brettanomyces (brett), has been a child of the 20th century. A form of bacterial spoilage, it is associated with characters of burnt rubber, dirty ashtrays and spoiled meat, to name a few. Originally restricted to red wines, some tasters are particularly sensitive to this fault and can even identify it in white wines. The problem is that some simply can’t taste or smell brett, while others are hypersensitive to it. Life wasn’t meant to be easy.