Wine’s long history is replete with fact and fancy. Over the centuries, its enthusiasts have wrapped it in a cloud of myths, tropes and what today we call memes. One of the more persistent — dare we call it a canard? — has to do with what real wine expertise consists of.
Who is the wine connoisseur, anyway? In the popular imagination, it’s one who can invariably divine what’s in the glass, guided only by eye, nose and palate. Stories of prodigious feats of identification, descending to astonishing granularity are told. But how much store should we put in them, and to what degree can success at the guessing game be considered a meaningful marker of wine competence?
Clearly, the ability to identify wine in the glass demands both extensive experience and an ability to store and recall information quickly and long term. It’s easy to see that if you were, say, a winemaker with 10 or 20 acres of vines spread over a handful of plots that, over time, you would get to know the character that each parcel imparted to wine made from its fruit and be fluent in identifying it. The sample size is small; the time spent familiarizing yourself with it is correspondingly long. Under these circumstances, it doesn’t seem remarkable that you would soon become the world’s leading expert on the wine from your little property.
It may also be the case that your neighbors are making wine from the same, or very similar, plots. Chances are that you’re familiar with their wine too, and can even recognize how neighbor A’s wine differs from neighbor B’s and how each diverges from your own. The sample size is still small, and you would have plenty of opportunity to refine your knowledge.
Next, let’s imagine you’re a broker or buyer who travels around buying up various lots of wine from here and there with the intent of bottling and selling it under a brand name, as was the model in Bordeaux for generations. Under these conditions, you might well, with time, become so familiar with the output of the various townships and sub-regions as to be able to distinguish them in the glass with confidence.
The sample size is now getting so large that it would not be possible for you to do so with perfect accuracy, or to be infallibly certain of the vintage in every case. Still, over years of doing business, you might well arrive at a point where you could trust your palate to confirm with reasonable accuracy that the wine you are sampling is what you are being told it is, and not something else.
Now, let’s imagine you are neither winemaker nor buyer, but a wine writer and critic whose purview is many times larger than that provided by the foregoing examples. Thousands of subscribers look to you for advice on what to buy. You taste and report on hundreds of wines each year. Even if you have a specialty — Italian wine, let’s say — the sample size is now so enormous, and your attention necessarily so divided that the chances you would be able to correctly identify a given wine in more than general terms (varietal; region; a flyer at the vintage) are increasingly remote.
Does this make you something less than an expert at your main function, giving your readers sound advice about what wines offer the most quality and value? I think not.
For certifying bodies such as the Institute of Masters of Wine and Court of Master Sommeliers, blind tasting skills are important. But in each case, the emphasis is less on nailing the ID than in showing that you can reason in a capable way about why you think what you’re tasting is Chassagne-Montrachet and not something else. And there’s good reason for this.
The popular vision of the connoisseur took hold when the wine world was a pretty stable place, where winemaking techniques tended to remain unchanged over long periods. That era is over. Today, the reliable markers we used to employ to identify wine and distinguish one from another are blurring and, in some cases, disappearing.
The number, variety, diversity and geographic distribution of wine may, at some quite remote date, have been greater than today. But the number, variety, diversity and geographic distribution of wine actually on offer in local outlets around the world is simply unprecedented. In this context, the myth of the all-knowing, all-identifying, all-unmasking wine connoisseur is in need of a little confrontation with reality.
What’s that? You want to know if I’ve ever mistaken Burgundy for Bordeaux?
Well, yes — but not since lunch.
Well, yes — but not since lunch.