I’m not here today to dissect Jon’s responses (many of which ring true for me, and are worth a read because he’s a very, very intelligent guy), but one answer he gave to the IntoWine folks struck me as a bit odd. To the tape (emphasis is mine):

“The average consumer still feels intimidated by wine and wine-speak. Are publications like the Chronicle partly responsible for the prevalent feeling among consumers that wine is somehow beyond their comprehension?

If we’re going point fingers at the idea that wine is pretentious, let’s start with the spread of overpriced, mass-produced wine sold as an aspirational luxury. I’ll borrow a phrase from a conversation with a fellow writer a few days ago: You write up to your audience, not down. If sportswriters had to explain a two-point conversion every time they mentioned it, we’d all die of boredom. That’s not an excuse to fall into jargon. But there is no shortage of amateur wine criticism out there that doesn’t contribute to the conversation.”

The trouble for me is that I’ve got no idea what conversation Jon is talking about in that response.

It might be that there is a hidden wine conversation, one available only to a Romanée-Conti-sipping secret society of critics with wine review superpowers like UV vision that can detect the exact number of Brett, fruit, and mushroom particles floating around in a glass of Burgundy and determine at a glance if they are at an appropriate level. A secret society that meets in an underground lair at an undisclosed location (guarded by pools of sharks with lazer beams attached to their heads) and through joint nefarious consensus determines what wines will get the really high scores this year.

The bottom line is that this secret society might as well also be made up of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, because the real wine conversation is actually the one that the amateur critics are having. Or, I should say, it’s the thousands of real and virtual “water-cooler” conversations that the amateurs are having every day, all over the world…

While I’m not sure what Jon was getting at in his answer exactly, I suspect that it means there are people reviewing wine publicly who have neither the experience or background to make determinations on its quality in comparison to the greatest wines in the world. And on that point, he’d be right. I can tell you firsthand that the man knows his shiz, is sharper than a tack, and isn’t afraid to voice (and defend) a well-considered opinion – all traits that make me deeply admire his work.

But if I’m right about the reasoning behind the view he expressed to IntoWine, then I can safely conclude that the view is skewed, in that it ignores a fact that is fundamental to how wine information is being consumed today: nearly everyone who buys wine and decides to talk about it in their social circles is now an amateur wine critic to some extent.

This is not new news – in Internet terms, which are more akin to the rapid aging of dog years (and even then, those are parallax dog years, in accelerated speed-of-light terms compared with the orbiting-close-to-the-black-hole-event-horizon off-line world), it’s a bit of ancient history; studies that demonstrate the power of en masse customer reviews have been with us for years; and it’s not as if the pace of the Internet has slowed (or become less of a popular draw) since then. That wine should be somehow immune to the same forces of customers easily sharing their opinions on-line is, simply, insane-asylum-strait-jacket crazy.

This isn’t to say that the role of critics isn’t important – it is, precisely so that the barometer can be set for how wine’s compare across the entire quality spectrum, from the banal to the truly sublime; and not only across the less-experienced spectrum of each consumer’s taste-buds. But that doesn’t make those consumers’ taste buds somehow irrelevant – in fact, within immediate social circles, those consumers’ taste buds might not only be relevant, they might be the only taste buds that matter when it comes to wine recommendations, period.

So what’s a (professional) critic to do when everyone is a(n amateur) wine critic?

The answer, I think, is simple: help the amateur critics.

Professional wine critics now serve at the pleasure of the audiences who give them the honor – and humbling responsibility – of following their advice. Critics must therefore serve their audience above all else – and if separate conversations are being had when it comes to wine, then it seems to me that one of the critics duties in this now-not-so-new world is to help bridge the gap between those conversations, amateur and professional.

In other words, join the (lively, exciting, and engaging) amateur conversations, and invite the amateurs to join in theirs. Social media tools make this very, very easy to do – but that’s another topic entirely, and I’m already thirsty…

So for now, let’s just leave it at this: Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not adding to the wine conversation – because you are the conversation; and no matter what knowledge level of conversation you’re having, rest assured that your voice now matters, and matters more than it ever has!

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at You Are The Wine Conversation (What’s A Wine Critic To Do When Everyone Is A Wine Critic?) from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

The quizzes will appear a week behind those that run in The Juice – otherwise the folks at LocalWineEvents.com would be (quite justifiably!) upset with me.

So… here’s last week’s The Juice Quiz, with the answer hidden (click the “+” button below to reveal; those reading this through RSS are just gonna have to exercise enough restraint not to scroll down far enough to spoil the fun) [Editor's note: see comments, we're turning off this feature in favor of adding a bit more suspense to future quizzes - the answer will appear later in the comments section from here on out!] to help slake your thirst for wine knowledge (the theme for the first several quizzes is my personal fave bubbly action – Champagne).

Enjoy!

The Secret History Of Champagne?

Many of you were ringing in the new year with Champagne, but do you know who might have invented sparkling wine, in terms of deliberately trying to make still wines get fizzy? It almost certainly wasn’t Champagne icon Dom Perignon, who likely tried to prevent his still wines from fermenting for a second time in their bottles, thus causing the bubbly action (and exploding a not-insignificant number of those bottles!). According to award-winning wine writer Tom Stevenson, evidence suggests which country may have been the inventors of sparkling wine?

• A. France
• B. Spain
• C. England
• D. Italy
• E. Portugal…

And the answer is…

C. England

Yeah, really.

In The Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia, Tom Stevenson makes a compelling argument for England being the home of sparkling wine invention (in terms of deliberately trying to induce bubbles in still French wines via secondary fermentation in bottle). While the French were still trying to keep their Champagne from developing bubbles in the early 1700s, English dramatists were mentioning sparkling Champagne in plays dated from the 1600s; and, according to Stevenson, the English had not only the technology to induce a secondary fermentation, they also had the means for keeping those bubbles safely contained – namely, corks (something the French wouldn’t use widely until about 130 years later).

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Weekly Wine Quiz: The Secret History Of Champagne? from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

The first month’s quizzes will focus on trivia about Champagne, in the hopes that it will help lighten the serious hangover that the stuff gave you during your libation-filled New Year’s Eve celebrations.

I’ve long admired LWE founder & CEO Eric Orange (and not just because he’s a local PA guy!), and was a subscriber to The Juice back when 1WineDude.com was just a twinkle in my Riedel stemware. So I’m excited to be helping him out, and I’m very much looking forward to all the flaming I will get from The Juice readers telling me that my Quiz answers are actually all wrong interacting with The Juice faithful!

If you’re not a subscriber to The Juice, then you’re missing out – it’s one of the best ways to zero-in on wine events happening in your area, or wherever your travels might be taking you during any given week; and the website and newsletter have become invaluable resources on wine happenings for hundreds of thousands of wine geeks across the world. So, go sign up already!

I’ve not finalized the Quiz themes going forward, so if you’ve got great ideas for topics/themes on which to focus for future editions of The Juice, please shout ‘em out!

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Getting All Juiced For 2012 from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Some background: Wine critics generally use a 100-point scale when evaluating wines (I know most of you know this, bear with the exposition, people!). I don’t, because I think it implies a level of accuracy in evaluating a moving-target product (that can change within hours in the glass, let alone within years in the bottle) and so I (begrudgingly – hey, you asked for them!) use a “fuzzier” scale to evaluate the wine that I’m fortunate (and, ok, sometimes not-so-fortunate) enough to have cross my lips.

Generally, it’s assumed that many (probably most) wine critics reserve some part of their rating score for a wine’s color. For example, long-time Wine Spectator editor James Suckling once explained via video how he doles out his points when reviewing a wine, in which “things like color get 15 points.”

But is a wine’s color an important enough aspect on which to base 15% or so of one’s critical rating?  According to a (very) informal poll I took recently via twitter and facebook, the answer is probably “No.”…

It’s not that color isn’t important – it is, as any hard core wine geek (like me!) should be more-than-willing enough to tell you.

The clarity of a wine (which is, in some sense, an aspect of its color) can give you a hint as to whether or not the wine is flawed (there are many, many exceptions to this, but generally spoogy gunk misting up your wine inside the bottle is a portent of bad things to come).  Color can reveal a ton of info about any given wine for the truly geeky, most notably the general age of a wine (reds generally brick and get lighter with age, while whites generally darken and take on browner tinges) and maybe even the grape variety, given enough evaluation experience.

But the average Joe and Josette don’t seem to give much of a hoot about a wine’s color.  Even those with modest wine experience (again, based on my totally non-scientific, gut-reaction twitter & facebook “poll” I took last week) seem to have clued in on the fact that a darker red doesn’t necessarily indicate a more robust wine, a lighter red doesn’t necessarily indicate a softer or fruiter wine, a lighter white doesn’t necessarily mean a more refreshing wine, etc., etc., etc.

Disclaimer: Yes, this crowd-sourced stuff is subject to the evil Fallacy Of Small Numbers, so I will spare you a list of the exact responses.  But I’m not one to doubt the wisdom of the collective crowd when it comes to wine matters, particularly when that crowd consists of people who are wine lovers!  In other words, this is not the be-all-end-all on the subject by any means, but it’s not something to casually dismiss, either.

Anyway… In the end, a wine’s color can be beautiful, even spellbinding, but not necessarily an indication of future olfactory or gustatory performance – and 1WD readers have garnered enough experience under their gustatory wine belts to be pretty certain of that.

And while there’s little doubt that a wine’s color gives real aesthetic pleasure – have you ever seen the color on a world-class Tokaji?  it will positively blow your f*cking mind! – there’s certainly doubt to be casted on whether or not a wine’s color that pleases you will please anybody else. In terms of pure aesthetic pleasure, my wine color Picasso-Blue-Period might be your personal failed-art-student-water-color.

Part of the general lack of color-concern on the part of wine consumers is likely due to the level of filtering/clarifying/fining to which many wines are subjected now in order to achieve maximum clarity and luminosity. It can be argued – and is argued in the stunningly tasty results of cloudy wines such as Churchill’s White Port and the Natural Process Alliance’s Sauvignon Blanc – that too much of that processing robs a wine of some its more interesting characteristics.  For better or worse, as wine drinkers we’ve accepted and established a wine-color standard (or, at least, we’ve let the most influential wine critics establish a standard), but like the current woeful state of airline travel service, or the proliferation of high alcohol fruit-bomb wines, this might not necessarily be the standard that we need.

As for me, after examining the wine visually for flaws, etc., I generally only note a wine’s color if it’s particularly stunning to me, and generally this doesn’t make or break a review/rating – aroma, taste, mouthfeel, and finish far, far, far outweigh the color in my reviews. In fact, my color-rating percentage is probably more like 2% or 5% in my wine-rating-fuzzy-math.

So it seems that a good portion of the 15% or so of valuable review point space is actually wasted on evaluating whether or not a wine’s color is up-to-snuff (at least when it’s measured on an informal standard), when the customers of those reviews – the wine-buying public – might not care the 15%-worth about it themselves…

Should our point-scoring critic friends save the 15 points and doll them out in other areas that matter more?

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Are Wine Critics “Wasting” Points On A Wine’s Color? from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Today we will speak of current NFL coaches, former baseball catching stars, and Jedi Master Yoda.  And wine – almost forgot about the wine…

See, I’ve been getting a little bit of flak over how publicly I’ve worn my NFL team allegiance colors on 1WD. And so, true to form, I’m going to go deeper into that forest today. Because at heart, I am a stinker.

For days now I’ve been rubbing the almost-scabbed-over wounds of the Steelers dismal showing of a season opener against the hard-hitting Baltimore Ravens, because part of the healing process for sports fans after such a loss is wallowing in your pain and misery as long as reasonably possible, taking in as much about the heart-wrenching as you can, before letting it all (ok, most of it) go. Real fans know what I am talking about here – sure, the Steelers romping all over the Seattle Seahawks last Sunday salved the aching a bit, but c’mon – it was the Seahawks.

And so it was in that wallowing-mode capacity that I came across this little ditty of a quote by Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, when asked about the dreadful day one loss:

“I think the people that know and compete in this league understand that there is a fine line between drinking wine and squashing grapes. Obviously, last weekend we were grape-squashers.”

Ah, the sanctimonious pleasure of shared pain! Tomlin’s it-makes-sense-until-you-reread-it, Yogi-Berra-worthy reference to vino got me thinking about the difference between drinking wine – really drinking it and appreciating it, I mean – and throwing it down our gullets the same way we in the U.S. do with most of our food; which is to say, devouring it so quickly that it looks as if we’re worried someone will come along and snatch up our plates if we don’t clean them off within 4.2 nanoseconds…

In the former scenario, we’re taking the time to actually pay attention to a wine (whether we love it or not), so that we’re learning – about the wine, the grape behind it, the place behind it, the people behind it – even if what we’re learning is that we don’t personally care for those flavors, tastes, grapes or places (or people). In the latter, we’re letting the wine’s messages pass us by at lightening speed (and probably setting ourselves up for a date with a Pepto Bismol bottle latter – though I could have used that kind of bottle after that belly-acher of a Steeler’s opener, booze or no booze).

In my experience, the people who tell me that they could “never” learn to appreciate wine are often the ones who look at eating as a race against the clock. It’s not that they lack the ability – because the ability is, simply put, not all that difficult to acquire – it’s simply that they lack the the attention span.

Which is one of the reasons, I think, why people turn to scores and use them even without context to purchase things like wine – a short-cut path that seems like a wicked cool secret at first but will probably lead you to vinous misery in the long run. Can’t you just hear Yoda chiming in now, warning you against the powers of the Wine Dark Side… “I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience!”

Of course, Jedi Ghost Obi-Wan Kenobi’s famous reply is “He will learn patience…”  Which is exactly what we need to do if we want to be drinking fine wine, instead of performing the equivalent of shoving our mouths full of squashed grapes – exercise our patience.

It’s tempting, as I sample ever-increasing sh*tloads of wines, to speed things up and rate/score with nearly reckless abandon just to try to get through the backlog of wine samples being sent to me.  But I’m gonna listen to my inner Jedis, and not give into that Dark Side.

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Are You Drinking Wine, Or Just Squashing Grapes? from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!