The Auswine Forum

after working my way with a few friends through some sample bottles tonight (and being horrified at the sight of my black teeth and lips in the mirror), i was thinking about the differences in review processes.

most of the time, it's a race against the clock with inidivudal wines in a flight rarely getting more than a couple of minutes' attention. other times, I'll open a sample bottle with dinner and watch it evolve over time, particularly if i know what its like and i want to make comparisons based on time, food matching, breathing etc.

as we all know, it can sometimes take hours for a wine to be at its best and come together after unattractive aromas have blown off so logic dictates that a wine you can spend an evening with and really get to know is a wine that you'll get to know very well (kind of like going out with a girl and forming a deep relationship with her) whereas the blind-samples-in-a-flight are more like your one night stand.

so fellow wine lovers, i'd be very interested to hear all your thoughts on this matter. should all review 'processes' should be generalised? should wine writers refrain from spending long amounts of time reviewing a bottle of wine?

I've posed this question on another website as well with a different crowd to auswine and I'd be interested to see the differences in opinion!

Have a top grand final weekend all!

cheers
Max

ps for those in WA - i've just launched my website and newsletter dedicated to food and drink in our top state.. click the link in my signature to find out more!

pps - ill get some TNs up as well soon!

Max

Congratulations on the site - excellent.

Regarding the wine review process. If you are Robert Parker Jr then (according to the recent biography written about him) you take about a minute to review a wine. (I find that hard to believe as it would take him at least that long just to dictate some of the TN he comes up with.)

I doubt that you will ever get any agreement on a review process. For what they are worth my experiences are below.

I attend two types of organized tasings. One runs each month and we get from 6:30PM to when the shop closes (if we want it) to review 8 wines, although the formal discussion of the wines and voting is done after about 20-30 minutes and the wines have usually been poured for about 2 hours; the latter point I'm never happy with but I'm always in the minority over this. I ususally take about 90 minutes over the wines just to see if they change. Wines are tasted single blind.

The second is a weekly tasting that will run 11AM-3PM and you can come in when you want and take as long as you want, and bring food if you want. If I go to the tasting I'm there for about 90 minutes and the wines may be anywhere from fresh bottles to open (and poured from) for several hours. At the same time I also sample wines from the wine bar and here the wines could be from bottles that have been open and poured from for over 24 hours. The first group of wines are tasted single blind, the wine bar wines are tasted unblinded (because I select the wines and so I know what they are). I usually well on the way to being blind when I'm finished.

The final approach is to open a bottle at home and spend several hours with it, and then store it under vacuum in the cellar for another taste the next night. This is obviously unblinded.

If I wanted to pick just one method it would be a combination of all three, i.e. multiple wines tasted single (or double) blind over several hours in a non-stressed environment. Oh, and no decanting (unless sediment is expected)!

Mike

Max,

Good topic. From my perspective I completely dislike "power tastings" as IMO at best you get a cursory look at the the wines. I also find that my palate does not have enough time to recover between wines.

Whilst I can taste 10 wines in an hour and make TN's, I prefer doing about 6 per hours. That gives me time to think about the wine and gives my palate a chance to stay "fresh."

However, the best way to get a real perspective is to try the wine at home over a number of hours. Open it, sniff it and get a first impression as soon as it poured. Leave it in an ISO for a few hours to breath. Then taste and write the TN up over a space of time. If I have six bottle open, I am happy to taste them over a few hours and keep going back to them to see if they change.

Max,

I have three regular tastings (weekly, fortnightly and monthly) and the wines are all presented in brackets of 4 or 6, single-blind, i.e. masked, but we have a list of the wines.

The 6-wine brackets are assessed over an hour (sometimes leftovers come home), at the monthly tasting three 4-wine brackets are assessed over about 30-40 minutes, with a round of palate-refreshing chilli pizza that usually arrives just after the final bracket of wines are poured.

Some attendees of these groups use 20 or 100 pt scoring systems or other esoteric rating systems as well as ranking them in preference order. The individual preference rankings are collated to a group average so people can consider other peoples preferences. Unless forced into it by particular circumstances I don't personally use point scores.

For me these tastings have two purposes, for current/new releases it is to decide whether to buy or not, for older wines it's to assess how they are progressing against expectations.

I will some times buy based on the results of these tastings, sometimes I will buy a bottle of the candidate wine and try it at leisure, usually with food.

At winery or trade tastings such as Wine Australia, each wine has an quick first assessment and only those with outstanding initial impressions receive further attention, maybe a glass put aside to come back a little later, maybe another pour, a bit more swirling in the glass, maybe take a bottle off to dinner.

I'm sure I miss some desirable wines this way (I know I've rejected many high-priced or highly-reputed wines based on a first impression), but there are still way more good wines than I can possibly buy, so it doesn't matter a lot, the key thing is not to make too many mistakes in buying wines for cellaring.

Of course there are all the old tricks of olives, nuts, soda water, sniffing coffee beans and even a quick sip-swirl-spit of the driest fino sherry you can find to kick the palate back into shape.

After doing this sort of thing for nearly 40 years, for me at times it is an automatic process, if the wine has the "right" characteristics in the right balance it just triggers an immediate positive response inviting closer attention, without much conscious thought, if not it just gets filed as an "also-tasted" in a spare memory cell that natural selection will clean out depending on the importance and amount of good red wine consumed.

I guess that's not much help to people in the early part of their wine-drinking lifetime, but I do believe the best and most desirable wines (for my tastes) nearly always give that good initial impression of balance and structure, even as young wines. You don't really have to assess all the nuances of black/red fruits, plums or cherry, licorice and chocolate when the wine is whispering "I'm a nicely-structured, balanced, warm/cool-climate shiraz that is good for 10 years in your cellar".

Very interesting and insightful gents,

Brian - completely agree, a couple of hours is what I'd prefer too! Trouble is when you're at a roadshow and racing through wine samples you don't really get a full picture of the wine, more like a snapshot. Hopefully in those situations you're dealing with bottles that have been open for a little while and given time to breathe.

It's just something I'm mindful of when tasting wines, epsecially if I'll be reviewing them. But that's part of wine's nature and appeal - a drink will mean something different to everyone and everyone's drinking experiences will be affected by the food served, the wine's age, storage... even what they've done that day!

cheers
Max

PS Thanks for the comments roo and Mike - glad you liked it!

Many is the bottle I've got to know intimately over an evening at home, much to be said for it.

Blacktongues is ten glasses in nfront of you and an hour to make choices, plenty of time for wines to breath and evolve.

Wine shows are hard work, difficult to get more than a fleeting glimpse of what's in the glass. One of the reasons wine show results are so often astray from what we find with more time to look properly.

2004 Adelaide Wine Show, Class xx, Exhibit xxx, no medal, not even a Bronze. My group drank a whole bottle at the public tasting and it was great wine - 2003 Kalleske Grenock Shiraz. Nuff Sed!

Morning all

I find it very hard to assess particulary red wines at the time of opening, esp those which are released so young on the market.

Indeed, it is often on the second day after the oxygen has worked its accelerated magic that a wine starts to really show its true colours.

IMO the 2003 and now even 2004 reds are too raw to be assessed so early and then trying to crystall ball gaze into what it will be like into the future is really hard work.

If I have any doubts initially I now tend to leave the wine til the next day and more often that any initial concerns seem to work off.

White wines we tend to serve too cold and this also adds to proper assessment.

On another point I feel I cant taste wines properly at big wine events/ roadshows at all as the environment is artificial, the glasses are poor, lighting bad, crowds, marketing hype etc. I use ticks now rather than any formal system as it is largely only an exercise in trying the odd wine that I have heard about or discovering a new winery perhaps.

IMO The best way to taste is over dinner and with food, one bottle at a time (with good company).

I really dont know how wine judges/ writers can assess a wine in minutes (i realise why etc) and then do it any justice on assessment - suppose this speaks volumes for the variable results of wine shows, medals and the books that are written that I/ we do and dont seem to agree with generally.

My 2c worth.

NN