Tasting 50 wines a day for 30 days: Am I crazy?

As far as I know, I’m the only person who tastes nearly all the LCBO’s wines in a one-month period each year. That means tasting about 50 wines a day for 30 days on end. I’m not looking for a medal or expressions of awe. But I think about it as I approach the 30-day period again — it’s all of April — and wonder if I’m crazy.

I do it to select 500 of the wines for the next — seventh, to be exact — edition of my annual guide to the best-value wines in the LCBO. I do it in such a concentrated way in a 30-day period partly because it gives me a unique take on the LCBO’s portfolio.

I can taste all the sauvignons one day, all the pinots another, and the chardonnays over a few days. I get a good sense of the range of styles and quality, and — most important for my purposes — the range of value.

Value is the price-quality relationship, and it can be found at all prices. One $8.95 wine can be very good value for the price, while another might be poor value. The same goes for wines at higher price points. The current edition of my book includes wines that sell for under $8, and wines costing over $60.

And I do the tasting in a concentrated period also because I’d rather get it over with as rapidly as possible. A month seems reasonable. I taste more than 50 wines in a day quite often (at wine competitions, for example), but this is the only time I taste 50 a day for so many days in a row. I could spread the tasting out over six or eight weeks, but why tie up so much time?

Before anyone thinks it’s fun: I taste alone, start early in the morning, and make notes on each wine as I go. I divide the wines into clear “best-values,” potential “best-values,” and wines that clearly won’t make the cut. Then I go back and re-taste the group of potentials, and put everything in rank order. Before the tasting, there’s chilling the whites, cooling the reds, and opening them all. At this time of year I love screw cap closures more than ever.

Tasting like this quickly becomes just work. Now and again there’s a great, pleasant, surprise when a new wine or the new vintage of a current LCBO shows really well.

There are also disappointments and a few faulty wines, but they are quite rare.

In the end, each year my list of 500 best-values includes about 150 new wines. Sometimes they are new to the LCBO, sometimes they are older listings that have improved. The portfolio in the LCBO is ever-changing, and this is one way I keep up with it.

Think of me in April.