Eric Asimov, the wine critic of “The New York Times,” has an interesting column in today’s paper that many consumers could benefit from reading – at least in part if not in full. You can find it here.
Asimov starts out by asserting that detailed and often florid descriptions of a wine’s aromas and flavors – the sort of descriptions one encounters all too often – generally don’t help consumers understand the character of a bottle of wine or the degree of pleasure they might experience in drinking it.
“All you have to do is compare two reviewers’ notes for a single bottle: one critic’s ripe raspberry, white pepper and huckleberry is another’s sweet-and-sour cherries and spice box,” he says.
I couldn’t agree more and in fact have provided what I think is an excellent example of this sort of nonsense in a posting entitled “The Flavors of Wine.” You can find it here.
In short, I took a look at seven descriptions of a Morgan 2007 “Twelve Clones” Pinot Noir – that of the winery itself followed by those of six outside reviewers – and discovered little agreement among any of them. But they all liked the Morgan so much that the winery happily provided links to their disparate descriptions from its website. Reading them in sequence is both illuminating of the issue under discussion here and highly amusing.
I wrote about what transpired with respect to the Morgan pinot to illustrate why I personally don’t attempt to parse out more than a couple of very dominant individual flavors in the wines my fellow panelists and I sample.
Asimov goes on to point out that even if a wine exhibits certain flavors at one moment, it may taste quite different fairly shortly thereafter – when it is consumed with one food or another or as it comes into contact with more and more oxygen in the glass. It may also change after being cellared for awhile – and almost surely will change very considerably if cellared for many years.
So what is one to do?
In his article, Asimov suggests that it is more useful to try to figure out whether a particular wine is “savory” or “sweet.” In this case, sweet does not mean sweet like a dessert wine. It is far less dramatic than that.
In the first paragraph of this posting, I suggest that consumers may not need to read the NYT column in full. The reason is that Asimov tries to be too comprehensive. He rushes through a very long list of different wines, trying to say where each fits on the sweet/savory scale.
While I think Asimov’s methodology is useful and provocative, it isn’t the only way to help consumers decide whether a wine will be suitable to their tastes. “Savory” can conjure up a lot of different flavors and when Asimov talks about “sweetness” in wine, it isn’t quite akin to a discussion of the degree of sweetness in, say, cookies.
To me, a very important and possibly more understandable scale has to do with acidity – essentially the degree of tartness in a wine. Too little and wines tend to eventually taste flabby and boring although they may initially seem agreeably smooth. Too much acidity and a wine can taste unpleasantly tart and assertive, or even downright harsh and difficult t0 digest, especially if consumed without food.
Wines that have “good acidity” taste lively and fresh without being at all unpleasant and they tend to go better with most types of food than wines that are insufficiently acidic.
But maybe what Asimov has to say makes more sense to you. That’s fine. What matters is getting away from a long list of flavors, many of which like “underbrush” don’t mean anything anyway, as a means of choosing which wine to purchase.
Next, maybe we can address another bit of nonsense that is rife in the world of wine – assigning numerical scores.
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