Archive for the ‘Musings’ Category
B.C. Wine and the Ideology of Quality
Posted by Shea in Building BC's Wine Industry, Musings, Spotlights, Vancouver 2010 Olympics - BC Wines on March 4th, 2010
With my series on B.C. wines over the Olympics I’ve done something I have never really done before – I’ve reviewed free samples sent to me by wineries. My logic behind this practice was as follows:
1. Arg, the Olympics is coming, how will I get to work?
2. Well I guess a lot of people will be celebrating B.C. during the Olympics – that’s good.
3. Wait, why are all Olympic venues dominated by large multi-national corporations?
4. No one will be celebrating what is truly B.C. during the Olympics!!
5. What can I do?
6. Well, I don’t usually enjoy or drink that many B.C. wines, but perhaps it’s time to do a profile on B.C. wineries during the Olympics.
7. But, I can’t really afford to pay for wines that I wouldn’t normally drink. I have a limited budget and like to spend it on things I’m excited about.
8. Hm, well since I’m going to put a ton of effort into researching, reviewing and writing about these wines, maybe the wineries will just send me samples. It seems fair and reasonable.
9. Ok, I’ll do it – at least to give the small guys a voice during the Olympics.
During this process I’ve been reading a lot of opinions and criticism about wine writing in both the traditional media and blogging. Complaints about bias and lack of integrity abound in the world of wine lovers and industry types. What are some of these concerns?
• Wineries and wine associations pay for free trips of wine writers and those connected in the industry. How can these individuals offer fair and unbiased opinions?
• Corporate interests are dominating the public’s access to and appreciation of wine. There are no real venues in B.C. to market and share small artisanal and family producers that are kicking the SH*!()$* out of the big guys in terms of quality.
• Some wine bloggers never write negative reviews, and simply lap up samples of low quality wine and shill them on the public in puff pieces.
• Some wine publications do exactly the same thing.
No one likes to be unpopular. It’s tough to be truly and fairly critical – to strike the balance between accuracy, fairness, and honest opinion. It’s also tough, as an amateur and in a media environment where advertising dollars are flushing down the drain, to afford to taste and drink the 1000’s of wine it is necessary to drink to educate your palate. The more I think of it, the more I realize that it is costly and risky to have integrity as a writer and journalist – but it is just these sorts of people that we need to support.
My philosophy is simple – one should be independent (fiercely so) and one should not be writing about wine if one’s career depends on connections within the industry and if one can advance their career by being sycophantic. These are just principles of journalistic integrity, much of which is depleting as it is more and more difficult for news agencies to be independent from corporate interests.
There is also the sheer ridiculousness of writing about wine based on tasting through 100’s of wines at tastings and press events. Now, I appreciate these events for what they are for providing a means to educate my palate – but to be honest, I never really understand or appreciate wine unless I’m sitting down drinking it with a meal or just sipping it during good conversation. You know, like most people do when they actually drink the wine we write about.
Now, this leads me, somewhat as a digression I suppose, into the Ideology of Quality. When I received these samples for the B.C. wine tasting, I also received marketing materials. Here is a common theme in the marketing materials:
• This winery was founded on passion and love for the vine.
• We believe in putting the best efforts into our vines and wines.
• We believe these are some of the best wines of the type in the world!
• Look at all the awards we’ve won!
In addition to these common themes, some more specific brands of the Ideology of Quality are:
• We believe in minimal intervention.
• We let the fruit speak for itself.
• We use extremely low yields.
• We want the land to speak through in our wines.
• We use the most advanced techniques possible to produce authentic high quality wines.
• Look at all the awards we’ve won!
Here are a few things I know. “Minimal intervention” is a near meaningless phrase in itself. What is minimal? Wine making IS intervention in nature. Minimal is meaningless. What matters are the particular choices you make when you grow, harvest, and vinify grapes. It’s not a question of no interference and much interference, it is a question of your philosophy of production – of your approach to creation and the process of human interaction with nature. Ya, so that’s meaningless and yet it’s used on consumers all the time.
“We let the fruit speak for itself”. Wha? Ok, but you also crush it, and stick it in vats and use yeast to ferment the crushed grapes into an alcoholic beverage, and you probably add sulphur and oak, etc. And yet, these words are commonly spoken to the average wine buyer or winery visitor. Again, it doesn’t really mean anything.
Passion for the vine. Ok, that’s great. But, this phrase is now a cliché, which means it is devoid of particular meaning. If you want to use the word passion and wine together, you better tell me what you mean by passion.
I can’t even go on with this list because it is so frustrating. What happened to quiet confidence. Since when have marketers and marketing lingo infected the wine world to such an extent that everyone is afraid to be distinct from each other? We might stand out!? But, what if no one likes us? I just had a flash back of my first high school dance.
So, this ideology of quality seems to promote the ideal that “minimal intervention”, “passion”, “low-yields”, etc. are markers of quality. But there is very little discussion of philosophical and human motivations beyond “passion”. I begin to suspect the sincerity of these sorts of proclamations when I learn that recently no wineries in B.C. expressed an interest in learning from an expert on biodynamics from France who was willing to come into the province and share his knowledge – not a single winery.
I’m suspect of a winery that can’t express itself any more effectively than “we just try to make the best wine possible.” Since, in the end, what is possible and what is to be hoped for are intricately entwined – and the last time I checked hope is a fairly multivalent concept and one that, in any effective way, cannot arise from hubris. It is integrity and humility that produce the most effective hope, and the most diverse possibilities.
So how do all these ideas link together? One simple phrase: the Ideology of Quality. Whether via a wine writer, marketer, or winery itself, the wine world seems afraid to deviate from a standard vocabulary and semantics for expressing wine quality (points-based rating systems are another culprit here). Instead, true expression is captured by other interests, by biases, by marketing, by the desire to fit in and sell wine. Of course, underlying all this is a most fundamental human instinct: survival.
So much of the wine world seems to be caught up in its own survival. Unsuccessful writers dine on Kraft Dinner each night while the successful ones try to protect their interests (and massive cellars of free wine) and avoid that dilemma by folding their personality and expertise into a pre-formed model. Once you’ve breached that inner circle, it’s like a pack instinct to keep out all pretenders to the throne.
Wineries? Well, they’re scared shitless that they’ll never make back their initial investments. Others are doing very well and are simply trying to diversify and spread their brand. But, they seem afraid that if they go off-message they might jeopardize the basis for their success. I am no stranger to these feelings – that is what it is like to have a career and try to survive in the business world.
But, what gets lost in this giant race is distinct and particular expression: real thoughts about wine, effective criticism, small producers who either don’t understand the game or simply don’t want to join it. There must be a better environment within which one of the world’s most profound agricultural products can be explored, loved, and discovered. We are all far too concerned with our own survival and the ideology of quality to actually and humbly discover how to best entwine ourselves with the ‘natural’ world through wine. We are part of that ‘natural’ process – but we are vacating this meaning from ourselves with each puff piece, marketing blurb, and cliché.
So, while I plan on continuing writing profiles on B.C. wineries for the sake of the industry and the small guy, I have to come out and say that I still have tremendous difficulty saying that B.C. wine is at the same level as the great wines of the world, of all types from weekday meal wines to wines for 50th wedding anniversaries. B.C., with the exception of a very few producers, is still too caught up in the Ideology of Quality to actualize its potential. Right now it is just trying to “make the best wine possible” – but it has homogenized the hope that gives meaning to possibility. Until wineries take that next step and are bold enough both to have their own voice and beliefs, but also humble enough to listen and learn from others, we will languish where so much of the world’s wine languishes – in mediocrity.
Social Media, Social Process and the Content Delivery Dilemma
Posted by Shea in Musings, Wine Marketing on February 2nd, 2010
In this article I want to talk about something that is not just limited to the wine industry, but that will become an important factor for all businesses engaged in social media. This is: how are we to effectively engage in a technology that’s visibility is beginning to exceed its maturity. How are we to see through the morass of information to understand the underlying phenomenon that we are dealing with. And, most importantly, how can we predict what all of this new technology will mean in the future.
A common analogy to describe the creation and adoption of new technologies is known as the “hype cycle”, developed by the Garner Group. It looks something like this:
One of the big critiques of this model is that it hypothesizes a static cause-effect relationship between the creation of technology and its adoption. There are many examples, such as fuel cells, of technology that has never been adopted into the mainstream. Jim Bullock at the 2003 Aye Conference hypothesized that technology adoption actually derives from the confluence of two vectors: 1. the social process, and 2. the delivery process. The social process is about people and their expectations whereas the delivery process is about the availability of the technology itself. Most technologies rely on other technologies to be successful, just as, for instance, social media relies not just on computing, but also on portable computing and, increasingly, smart phones.
The dilemma I want to talk about in this article relates to the first vector of technology adoption hypothesized by Mr. Bullock: the social process. This relies on a few presuppositions.
Firstly, these days it is cheap to get content to people. The costs of entry are minimal with electronic publishing, whether in a blog, via twitter, facebook or other social media services, being mostly free. Second, there are two basic kinds of social networks: open networks and closed networks. Open networks do not limit access by filtering individuals based on specific interests or commonalities. Twitter is the de facto example of an open network. Closed networks limit access by focusing on commonalities or interest. Facebook is the most important example of this, but also consider social media sites that focus on wine, like Cork’d, which are explicitly designed to facilitate dialogue amongst a select group of people.
Here’s my thesis: the differentiation between content delivery in open and closed networks is about the social process. Closed networks provide a clear set of tools that guide user’s expectations, and provide them with an easily digestible means to connect and share content. No one is confused about the purpose of Facebook: upon signing up the website asks you to enter your email address to find your friends.
Open networks, on the other hand, provide a limited set of tools to guide the user. Twitter does not build in expectations into its functionality, but instead relies on the user to figure out how to use it and how to interact with others. Twitter requires a more sustained effort to understand than a service like Facebook, which is why so many businesses fail to utilize twitter effectively.
Now, when considering the differing social expectations created by Facebook and Twitter one can notice the fundamental impact these expectations have on the nature of content delivery in these two networks. Facebook, while setting expectations firmly and clearly, limits the diversity of its content delivery to what people expect to read and hear from their friends. Hence, advertising on Facebook is of the traditional non-interactive sort. Intrusive advertising, no matter how well targeted it is, is a necessary consequence of Facebook’s closed nature. People put up with this advertising because the Facebook network has reached such a critical mass that, to put it in economic terms, the costs of not participating are far higher for most people than the costs of viewing intrusive advertising.
Twitter does not operate this way. Because expectations are diffuse and unclear, twitter effectively has no rules for managing content delivery. Even if, over time, we begin to see Twitter using intrusive advertising, this is not the real future of content delivery on open networks. Instead, open networks such as Twitter’s true power is in allowing more diffuse and less intrusive content delivery for businesses. Twitter’s weakness is in scoping and channeling content into easily understandable chunks and in providing guidance for its users.
Thus, if we return to the “hype curve” above, it is only possible to understand social media’s place on this curve if we divide it into social process and delivery process. Right now, the delivery process is peaking, and, may in fact actually be maturing. As newspapers die, content becomes easier and easier to produce to such an extent that almost everyone knows how to and does produce content online, thus making the delivery process nearly ubiquitous.
On the other hand, the social process has yet to mature as fully as the delivery process. Social and personal expectations about social media are not cohesive. Additionally, the delivery processes have fragmented the social processes to such an extent that many Facebook users simply don’t understand or don’t find a use for services such as Twitter and many Twitter junkies are tired and bored of Facebook and its limitations.
If the “hype curve” is at all accurate in relation to social media, then it is only accurate if we increase the number of data points and the number of axes on which to plot the development of the technology. Thus, social media is not just about visibility and maturity; it is also about social expectations, the lost third axis. By plotting along these three axes we can get a better image of the future of social media.
My first thesis that the differentiation between content delivery in open and closed networks is about the social process leads me to the prediction that the future of social media will merge the guidance element of closed networks with the diffusion element of open networks. I believe that Foursquare is an early attempt to achieve this combination of factors, but that its interactive capabilities need to be enhanced.
Thus, the content delivery dilemma in social media is not about the cost of delivery any more. Rather, the dilemma is about the method of delivery. Content is so easy and cheap to produce that users need interfaces that guide them through the sheer volume of material and provide them with guideposts on not just how to manage content, but, more importantly, how to produce it.
A mature understanding of the social process that underlies the development of social media will allow a visionary firm to go beyond traditional monetization and intrusive advertising. In the future, the most successful networks will figure out how to leverage word of mouth marketing within a model of content guidance and signposting within an open network. This will allow for word of mouth marketing to become more important and more targeted than traditional marketing. It will also converge the benefits of visibility with the benefits of social expectations. It is only then that social media will reach the first stages of its maturity.
The Question of Minerality: Art or Science?
Recently a group of geologists at an Oregon wine tasting made the claim that any taste of minerals in a wine does not come from the minerals in the soil. Given many individuals’ obssession with soil types and mineral levels when thinking about flavours in wine, this comes as a controversial assault.
As reported by the Associated Press:
The geologists say wines may vary in levels of dissolved minerals, but those variations aren’t related to the levels in vineyard soil.
And they say the concentration of minerals in wine is below the threshold of human taste and smell.
(you can read the full article here).
Cherries and Clay, another Vancouver wine and food blog, suggested that “there must be some connection there [between soil minerals and flavour] which isn’t fully understood.” And, while commenting on that post I realized that I had a fair amount to say about this topic.
Generally, I trust the scientists when it comes to answering scientific questions. However, what is more interesting to me is how we use metaphor to think about sensual experiences. As much as wine is a pleasure-based commodity, it also seems to have a unique ability to conjure up in many the desire to be metaphorical and to experience the aesthetic beyond just deciding what is ‘good’.
Thinking about the relation of the taste of minerals to the content of the soil to me is more about how we use wine as a vessel through which to explore our relation to the objects around us. This can be based on many philosophies. For example, the biodynamic philosophy has a very particular sense of a human’s relationship to external objects, and tends to prioritize a certain concept of the ‘natural’ above others. This, to me, is one approach that gives rise to the desire to express the nature of the soil and its mineral content in one’s thoughts about a wine.
We all know the hedonist philosophy that drives many of the big publications. This approach cares less about idolizing a certain concept of nature and more about a certain notion of pleasure. The metaphors such people use to describe wine thus move more towards the opulent and towards excessive use of flavour descriptors and superlatives.
Some others (including, I’m sure, many scientists) may see wine as an enigmatic expression of natural processes. Such a philosophy might see the ‘minerality’ question somewhat like a fascinating puzzle about how complex natural processes are.
Others might care more about the human capacity for technology, for augmenting natural processes and creating products that derive from that interaction. Such people may care more about ‘minerality’ as an end-point in a process of augmentation and manipulation.
The question of ‘minerality’ is really a smaller version of larger questions about expressing the experience of wine drinking. Wine drinkers aren’t drawn to wine for scientific reasons, and scientific explanations of flavour (which in wine drinking has become almost entirely metaphorical) are an insufficient means for understanding the basis of so many people’s interest in fermented grapes. Rather, the whole ‘minerality’ debate hinges more on philosophy and aesthetics than on science because they better reflect the basic starting point for most people’s wine experiences. Keeping this in mind will help to focus the discussion on how people are actually talking about and therefore experiencing wine.
Wine From a Rubber Teat
Ok, I saw this over at Dr. Vino’s wine blog and had to post something here. The full story is here. For those who don’t want to click the links, basically there is a fondue restaurant in France that serves wine in baby bottles. This model is being brought over to New York City for a new restaurant concept there at “La Cave des Fondus”. I mostly had to comment on this because I have actually been to the French version of this – way back in 2001 when I was living in England.
To get into the establishment one merely had to walk down a few steps and seat oneself at a picnic bench style table. When I went there with my friend I had just finished a full day of walking the city and needed sustenance badly. For anyone who has been to Paris, getting real sustenance at a reasonable price can be quite difficult. This place was cheap, so it fit the bill. Three things went wrong:
1. I didn’t realize how disgusting it is to get all your calories for a day of walking from melted cheese and stale bread cubes.
2. About 5 minutes after my friend and I sat down, a group of about 20 insanely raucus Italian tourists walked in. I am not stuck up about people having fun nor do I like silent restaurants. But these people were screaming at the top of their lungs, so much so that the restaurant owner had to ask them to be quite at least 5 times.
3. The wine came served in baby bottles.
I don’t know about you, but drinking wine from a rubber teat was not my idea of a healthy way to consume liquids. Although Freud may have been proud to see a literalization of regression, I couldn’t help thinking about how many other mouths had sucked on that particular teat.
Now, seven years later, I found out that someone thought this was such a good idea that they should bring it to New York City. I know that NYC has a reputation for new and strange experiments, but unless the proprietors also offer diapers and bonnets at the door, I’m not quite sure how this makes any sense. I also just found out there was a reason for this strange French practice: namely that the French only tax wine served in glasses, so serving it in baby bottles avoids the tax and adds a nice touch of French irony. In America the only irony in “La Cave des Fondus” is that its ‘hommage’ to a Paris institution is an un-ironic restaurant where Americans can act like babies. And, that, my friends is how irony becomes parody.
A Question of Price
A lot of those getting into wine wonder if price and quality have any correlation. I, too, have wondered this. So, I decided to periodically check my ratings in relation to price and see what I came up with. I thought the data may be interesting to readers, so here it is:
Percentage of Wines Rated Excellent or Higher
May – 08
$20 and under: 0%
$20-$30: 20%
$30-$40: 40%
$40-$60: 45%
$60+: 85%
UPDATE – SEPT 08
$20 and under: 0%
$20-$30: 12%
$30-$40: 33%
$40-$60: 49%
$60+: 73%
So it seems that, at least for me and based on my subjective ratings (which includes my general knowledge of the wine’s price), price doesn’t guarantee quality, but it suggests it. I think this is only true with careful selection as I think the decrease in quality at the $60+ price point over the two periods was due to exploration. As soon as you explore, the risk you won’t like a wine increases. But, then again, if you don’t explore, you can’t find out what you like! Also interesting is that the biggest jumps in quality of the bottle seemed to occur when moving from the $20-$30 category to the $30-$40 category, with 20% or over jumps in the number of Excellent ratings over both periods, and from the $40-$60 category to the $60+ category, with between a 24% and 40% jump in the number of Excellent ratings. What does this say? Maybe it’s worth it to push up slighty over the $30 level if you want something a bit more special. But there is less difference when the price goes above $40 until you reach the stratospheric $60+ level.
The Strange World of the Internet
So Joe has tagged me with the following meme:
Seems like fun, plus I can’t buck a trend, so here it goes:
Song #1: Dizzy Gillespie and Arturo Sandoval – Wheatleigh Hall. A great piece from a lesser known album called To a Finland Station. In my opinion, this song, and the cd it is on marks one of the greatest trumpet duet moments of all time!
Song #2: McCoy Tyner – Enlightenment Suite – Crazy crazy jazz that awakens the soul. Pretty phenomenal stuff.
Song #3: Uri Cane Ensemble – Goldberg Variations – If you think that Bach is cool, you MUST check out this great collection of variations from one of NYC’s greatest avant garde musicians.
Song #4: Vampire Weekend – Oxford Comma – pretty simple, but catchy poppy goodness.
Song #5: MGMT – Kids – I like the retro-80’s synth sound with a modern edge.
Song #6: Rachmaninov – Elegy – a little known piece, but stunningly beautiful. One my all-time favourites.
Song #7: Martha Argerich playing the Bourree from Bach’s English Suite no. 2 on her Live from the Concergebouw cd – no one plays Bach like this.
Wine, the Aesthetic Experience, and a Bottle of Erath Vineyards Oregon Pinot Noir
This post has been ruminating about the withering vestiges of my exam and paper riddled mind for a few weeks, and the time has come to expunge these inkling thoughts upon the world. Two recent, but disparate, experiences provided the impetus for writing on this subject. First was a debate I read on the merits or demerits of high alcohol wines and the effect that high levels of alcohol have on the flavour and quality of a wine. This debate has been trudging its way through the wine world for some time now, especially with announcements by California heavyweights Adam Tolmach (of Ojai) and Randy Dunn (of Dunn vineyards) that high levels of alcohol were ruining Californian wine and that they were subsequently going to revamp their wine making style, which had previously catered to the taste of American wine media. Now, this debate I read focused on two distinct perspectives. One, voiced by Vinography author Alder Yarrow, argued that high levels of alcohol were not inherently bad, but the impact of such levels on quality was rather a matter of perspective. Alder had recourse to neuroscience as propounding the view that sensual experiences are only factual on the base level of neuro-chemical responses and that our perceptions of these responses were largely contextual, relying on memory, emotion, etc.
The second perspective, voiced by many of Alder’s critics, argued that high levels of alcohol created inherent characteristics in wine that were objectively detectable by trained palates. These inherent characteristics had sustained and repeated impact on the sensuous experience of a wine. This disagreement hinged on a debate over the nature of fact-based truth in aesthetic experience. Does wine have objective characteristics that determine the possible scope of one’s aesthetic experience of that wine? Or, are wine’s factual characteristics largely irrelevant to its aesthetic experience, with the perceiver bringing its subjective judgement to the table?
Before I attempt an answer to this question I would submit your attention to a slight digression. A few nights ago I had the occasion to watch a fascinating film directed by Carlos Saura. The film, called Blood Wedding, was a flamenco adaptation of a Lorca play filmed in the early 1980’s. I have never seen dance put to film in such an excruciatingly beautiful manner. As part of this experience I was sipping on a glass (or several) of the 2006 Erath Pinot Noir, an old world earthy and fungal Pinot with very pretty notes of ripe cherry. “This doesn’t have tremendous depth,” I thought, “but it does offer great value for the price.” I incidentally noted a probable rating of very good+ and the cost of $33.
Yet, with a somewhat indistinguishable grin I knew that this wine was also more than that. As part of my experience with the film it added a layer of intensity and intoxication at the level of art before me. As the flamenco dancers glided through syncopated rhythms and quick cuts between feet, faces, and limbs, a flavourful red liquid somehow helped bridge the gap between me and the performers, offering a kind of gateway into the aesthetic experience of the film.
Returning to the original question, I am forced to ask whether either perspective has it right. I take the distinction between objective fact and truth quite seriously, and I doubt that any serious scientist would conflate these two distinct realms. So, each wine does have unique objective factual elements. Each wine has a chemical structure and a factual relationship between chemical elements. However, these objective elements become fused with the aesthetic experience as soon as their aromas skirt under my nose and their flavours tumble into my mouth. And, as I am inclined to German philosophy, an aesthetic experience according to Kant is a combination of both this objective moment and this subjective movement towards the object of experience.
Rather than thinking of wine as a normal object of perception that we interpret using our reason and our mental faculties, if wine is an aesthetic object it comes to us as much as we come to it. Our experience of wine relies on its formal and objective characteristics that guide our judgement. However, our experience is not solely one of determinative reason. It is also, mainly, one of reflection on what we are experiencing. Reflective judgment, rather than determinative judgment, rises from the notions that an object stimulates in our minds rather than from the conceptual data that we bring to the object. Memories, emotions, hints of something ‘more’ than what we can express – each of these forms part of the experience.
So I can sit down and drink a bottle of Oregon Pinot, describe its flavours and give it a rating. However, that same bottle can become part of my experience of a flamenco film that is objectively, inherently, unrelated to the wine. Both of these experiences inform what wine brings to our lives, and I find that debates about the relative merits of total subjective perception versus definable objective characteristics often misses the nature of the very experience they try to describe.
Thoughts on Wine Tasting
I was just reading a very interesting posting on wine ratings and reviews over at vinicultured and felt the need to say a little something on the topic.
Wine reviews and tasting notes are a strange thing. When made by “experts” they create the pretense of objectivity and support the idea that one person’s taste should dictate another’s. I think this fundamentally misses what makes wine so great. Wine is not about winning, about ranking (there is enough of that in law school already), or about evaluative comparisons. Wine, at least for me, is about the sensuous expression of our inner life mediated by the nature of the grapes and the crafting of the wine by the winemaker. Writing a tasting note is, thus, more about trying to express the inexpressible and it is this attempt that is most indicative of what makes wine so great.
I always thought it was interesting that the sense of smell is so closely linked to memory and is perhaps more evocative of distant reminiscences than any other sense. That is probably why we rely on metaphor and memory so much when writing wine tasting notes. I think this brings wine to a level beyond just alcohol – it is evocative of our past, our memories, thoughts about life, etc. It is a wonderful sensuous expression of our intellectual life that should never be reduced to some sort of ranking system of objectification. Otherwise, what’s the point?
My Wine and Beer Philosophy
Posted by Shea in Introduction to My Philosophy of Wine, Musings on December 3rd, 2007
I figured my first post should impart a basic sense of where I’m coming from and how I go about evaluating things like wine and beer.
I’m a law student here in BC (hence the bad pun in naming this blog) and I basically love wine and beer. My passion for these delights developed over the years, but really started getting intense after taking a trip to the US a few years ago for a conference only to come home with a Shafer Merlot and a Duckhorn Merlot, both from Napa Valley. I had never had anything that came close to the quality of these wines and it really set my already fledgling passion into full throttle. Now my appetite is only restricted by my budget 
.
What I really love about wine is the combination of visceral and intellectual experiences. I find beer a little less intellectual, but a lot of fun. I also love the ‘madeness’ of good beer and wine; I’m not talking about the mass produced stuff, but the basic principle that a wine or a beer is an expression of the individual(s) who made it, crafted it. Now, I know there are purists in wine who believe in the territoriality of wine – its epxression of the specific characteristics of terroir. However, for me this only really comes to life when I visit the vineyards themselves. It is only then that I feel I truly understand the ideas of soil, rock and minerals. While this greatly enhances the experience of drinking these beverages, one is usually confined to drinking bottles from far away places. This has its own pleasure, and I think it is the imaginative experience that rounds out the whole package nicely. It’s always great to read about a region and look at maps when drinking a particularly fantastic bottle. On the other hand, it’s also great to just sip and enjoy.
The final peg to my philosophy is that pretentiousness ruins the experience. However, the question remains: what do I mean by pretentiousness? Essentially I am talking about the posturing and inevitable ‘class’ dimension to wine (beer far less so, although ‘fancy’ beer runs into this problem too). American commercialism, as brought forth by the likes of Robert Parker and the Wine Spectator, is really, despite what they think, only another form of pretentiousness. That said, commercial wine reviewers still pick good bottles. So basically I try to run a middle path – mitigate both the elitism of the upper class association with wine and the massification of commercialism (the idea that one human’s taste can dictate the price of a bottle). In the end I try to come out with something personal and meaningful. Cheers!
As a final note, here is my basic rating scale:
No good
Fair
Good
Good+
Very Good
Very Good+
Excellent
Excellent+
