Do You Think Like a Pro? Pt. 1

Charles Krug Winery, Napa Valley’s oldest winery estate, founded 1861. Site of the Judgment in Napa tasting, October, 2021

photo from https://www.napawineproject.com/charles-krug-winery/

And Now, For Something Completely Different

There was a major, perhaps historic, wine tasting in Napa last October. I’m less convinced of the historic part, but I just figured that if you’re interested in wine you ought to know about it. At the very least, it was an impressive party.

One of the judges from that tasting published the notes that she made to herself as she went along. Selections from those notes follow below. This gives you the chance to really experience how a professional wine taster is thinking about wine tasting as she is actually tasting —and how she comes to her conclusions.

It also gives me a chance to point out some of the differences in the way a winery owner, or anyone involved in the actual making of wine, approaches wine tasting, and the way a critic or sommelier does.

I wasn’t there so I have no idea what the wines actually tasted like. What follows is, therefore, not about judging the wines or arguing about the rankings. I assume the tasters were sincere and doing their best and I take the rankings as they were given.

It’s the process itself that I want you to walk through.

The Tasting

The tasting was the “The Judgment of Napa Challenge” which was held on October 6, 2021 at the Charles Krug Winery in Napa Valley and published in the London based Decanter Magazine, which is probably the leading wine magazine in the world.

That tasting itself was an “homage” to the most famous wine tasting of all, “The Judgement of Paris” , held 45 years ago in Paris (1976). That tasting was organized and publicized by Patricia Gallagher, Steven Spurrier and George Taber. There was a movie made about it which you can learn more about at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12874068/

It was at the Judgment of Paris blind tasting that French wine experts and critics scored California wines as equal to or better than the best French wines for the first time in history. At the time, that was unthinkable, especially in France.

So unthinkable, that several of the French judges were fired after the results were publicized.

Suddenly, California wines and especially Napa Valley wines were recognized as world class by the French. After that, everything in Napa changed and it became what it is now.

I had only been in the wine business for about 5 years at the time and it totally changed my life, too—where I worked, what I sold, what styles were “the best” and what styles weren’t.

You’ll see later, that the “Judgment of Napa” last year provided a similar moment for today’s Australian wines.

The original “Judgment in Paris” where French wine experts and critics judged California wines to be as good, and in some cases better than the best French wines. Several of the French experts were fired after the results were publicized.

The Tasters

There was a panel of “world renowned wine experts,” but for our purposes we are only interested in one of them, Clare Tooley, who is a Master of Wine. Master of Wine is a certification similar to a Master Sommelier, except Master of Wine is for anyone who works in the wine business— whereas to become a master Sommelier, you have to specifically have restaurant experience.

Neither of these certifications teach you how to make or blend wine, or manage a vineyard. What they do is teach you to think about wines after the wineries have made them. And, of course, as you can tell by the title, pass judgments.

Clare Tooley published her notes in Decanter Magazine (London, England) on December 28th, 2021. My gratitude goes out to her for providing a teaching tool based on real life and in real time. There’s a button at the end of this article that will link you to the original article if you’re interested.

To keep things as clean as possible, I will indicate quotes from the Decanter Magazine article with the usual quotation marks rather than mention Clare’s name 536 times in attribution. All rights to those words in quotes belong entirely to Decanter Magazine and/or Clare Tooley.

I don’t know Clare, or anyone who matters these days at Decanter either.

The Opening

Clare writes, “We stepped into the darkened barrel cellar thumping with club music. The smoke from dry ice billowed around our feet, while a giant glitter ball flashed off the hundreds of Riedel glasses set up at the trestle tasting tables.”

OK, we got some party going on here, huh? Billowing dry ice, darkened wine cellar, glitter ball and club music. Oh yeah, and clouds of dry ice. Cool.

Not to mention trestle tables. I don’t know what a trestle table is. That’s why I’m not mentioning it.

I probably should leave well enough alone but I feel obliged to point out that I have a whole ebook (“Wine and the Five Senses: Music”) on the effect of music on the taste of wine. Pretty much the last thing you want for a serious wine tasting is dry ice, club music and glitter balls flashing off of wine glasses. Even if they are Riedel.

Darkened cellars are not helpful either, but I presume somebody had a candle or a real light somewhere. It would appear sunlight was not invited.

So, right off we establish that you can’t see the wines’ colors accurately or taste what the wine would actually taste like without all the noise. At least, not based on these notes.

That’s why I’m having trouble with the historic part. But, of course, the wines are not the point in an event like this, despite what the press says.

The point is the party.

The Tasting

“We were given no clues, simply that they were not necessarily all from France and California – as had been the case 45 years ago in Paris.”

The glasses were lettered A to J, we had small score cards for minimal tasting notes and were asked to rank them 1 to 10. We were given 22 minutes to do so, accompanied by a persistent beating musical background.

So where do you start? … I stepped in towards the wines as a sleuth, stepping back from them as a drinking customer…

Knowing they were all 2018 Chardonnays and knowing they would be special, I nosed them all first. I notated aromatic traits that might suggest their winemaking treatments and their provenance (oak treatment, malolactic fermentation, expressive development, ripeness, fruit quality etc… )”

I never actually heard anyone in the business of making wine use nose as a verb, but upon reflection, I’ll just ignore that.

Notice how little time they were given to evaluate 10 wines—roughly two minutes per wine—and how she made the adjustment from her own preferences as a “drinking customer” in search of some greater objectivity.

That ability to make quick decisions and evaluations is part of the gig.

She also is looking for aromas that will give her clues about how the wine was made, what techniques were used, and idea of the quality of the fruit— just as we have talked about before in this space.

Internal Shift of Attention

“This, I trusted, would begin ‘the flow’ process of blind tasting: that trigger required to distance you from your physical surroundings and start the broadening mind-mapping process that unearths the clues to a wine’s quality hierarchy as well as the point it has reached in its evolution and its origins.”

This is important. Your attention shifts from the event and all that smoke and glittering to the actual wine and your own experience. That’s why professional wine tastings are usually silent.

At least, based on these comments, Clare doesn’t consider the direct sensual experience of the wine to be relevant, but instead looks to logic and memory as the main process—-in this case, hierarchy, evolution and origins. That is normal for these tastings and it is what wine schools teach.

You can’t smell a rose and think about smelling a rose at the same time. Your attention will get crushed in the traffic jam of ideas in your mind instead of resting in your body where your senses are harvesting the aromas.

A sudden euphoria of vocabulary words blots out any experience of the wine itself.

It’s one of the biggest weaknesses of this approach, because people don’t drink ideas.

The Process

“Then I started with Wine A and worked alphabetically through to Wine J, tasting each twice, making notes as I went. Once I’d tasted them all, I went back through my notes and prized out my top five. I retasted those and tried to rank them fairly.”

Ok, so again with nouns pretending to be verbs. Prized out is a weird phrase. Since winery owners don’t give prizes to themselves, it makes no sense to me. Still, it's obvious what she means. This is an artifact of the underlying presumption that the wines need to be judged and ranked rather than experienced.

Notice she tastes each wine twice, and makes the notes reproduced here as we’ve discussed. Then, she sorts for the top 5 (out of 10) and re-tastes those before ranking them. She’s not scoring them 1 -100, she’s just saying “this one is better than that one.”

There is a process to improve ranking accuracy, but she doesn’t use it so we’ll move on—her rankings are her rankings, and therefore valid whether they are accurate or not.

In fact, there is no such thing as “accuracy” for rankings. All rankings are subjective.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK…

So how will she rank them? Check in next week to see how it all comes out!