Wine Tastings Are Ruining Your Life

Spring has come to New York: apartment dwellers are hauling air conditioners out of their closets, lilacs are in flower, hot dog carts are rolling out again, and so are the spit buckets. It’s tasting season in the city, and who doesn’t enjoy a wine tasting? As it turns out, more than a few of us. Let me back up. Like probably every wine obsessive, I’m thrilled to be asked. There’re winemakers and bloggers to ogle, acquaintances to greet, hummus to slather on Melba toast. And, of course, bottles to sample. What’s more, a small, focused tasting can be a uniquely useful way to learn and think about wine. The typical situation, however, tends to be an encounter with an importer’s entire portfolio or even a regional free-for-all, which likely means a banquet hall jammed with catering tables, crudités, salespeople, buyers, beverage directors and several hundred things to taste. No matter how excited I get about the wines being poured, I seem to end up with an unwelcome 3PM buzz and precious few notes. After about a dozen pours, my numb, purple tongue becomes incapable of making sense of hardly anything, while my nose lags close behind. The carnival atmosphere doesn’t help. At a recent tasting of Becky Wasserman’s incomparable lineup of burgundies, two attendees lunged for the same bucket as I did at the same instant, and I came within a millisecond of spraying a mouthful of Pommard all over the back of someone’s immaculately shaved head. Good thing I didn’t, because Mr. Clean looked like he could’ve taken me.

Am I really bellyaching about getting to drink for free? And why should you care? Because to a significant extent, these types of events determine which wines end up on store shelves and restaurant lists, not to mention which receive the highest scores (from writers inclined not only to drink their wine, but to give it grades.) Buyers base at least some of their purchasing decisions on large tastings, a strategy that inevitably skews their inventories, and your choices, toward the oaky, viscous and alcoholic. “The palette gets tired easily, because it can only handle so much acid and tannin,” says Christopher Bender, wine director at Mas (Farmhouse) in downtown Manhattan. “In these setting, I find that it’s not the subtle, well-balanced wines that stand out, but those that are over-the-top and dominating—the ones that are over-extracted, over-oaked or both.” When I pour myself a wine that I enjoyed at a mega-tasting in a quieter context, I, too, am surprised at how heavy and generically oaky some of them turn out to be. Conversely, bottles that I know and love can come off tasting lackluster and thin at these events, lost among the pituitary cases.

For a look at this tendency at its most insidious, open a mainstream wine magazine and flip to the back. Recently, while waiting for my dentist to come up for air during an arduous root canal, I paged through Wine Spectator’s Top 100 Wines issue. It was nice to see an oxidative white Rioja from López de Heredia make the list, at number 90, but it nested there among industrial Columbia Valley Cabernets and Shirazes from Barossa; it was like going to an award show and watching Celine Dion and the Jonas Brothers share a stage with Ornette Coleman. While it may be fatuous to ask how professional tasters can exude enthusiasm for such antipodal beverages (seeing as it leads across the thorny terrain of esthetic subjectivity toward the perplexing question of what wine should be), at least part of the explanation has to do with the way they taste. Matt Kramer, a Spectator contributor and one of the smartest writers on wine, calls the skewing of the palate that occurs at large tastings the “low-cut dress syndrome.” He writes: “If you have the chance, over time, to taste the wines scored most highly by the mega-validators across a wide array of grape varieties and vintages, you will discover that all of the highest-scoring wines are large-scale, intense, deeply colored (if red), rich wines that almost always are noticeably oaky (which always makes a wine more accessible, as well as familiar tasting).” He adds: “I can say quite frankly that this phenomenon happens to me repeatedly when I engage in large-scale tastings. No matter how aware I am of the low-cut dress syndrome, the fact is when faced with a large array of wines at one sitting, you cannot help to impose some order, some hierarchy, upon the chaos of competing tastes.” By “mega-validators” Kramer means Robert Parker Jr. and the Wine Spectator, whose scores continue to move tankers of inventory and affect prices. The most unfortunate consequence of the low-cut dress syndrome, Kramer concludes, has been the emergence of a contemporary wine esthetic built around it:  “If a winemaker wishes to achieve market success or critical acclamation (the two are, of course, intertwined), he or she will have to create some version of a low-cut dress wine.”

More and more mega-tastings are taking place in the city; this week’s calendar says there are six on Tuesday alone. So what’s a habitual drinker to do? “Be a lamp unto yourself,” the Buddha said, a piece of advice that applies almost as trenchantly to wine as it does to meditation. Siddartha was advocating distrusting experts and learning from the laboratory of your own experience; I like to think that he might have looked kindly upon drinking rather than tasting, and doing so mindfully, with intent. Only when savored does a wine give up its nuances: the way it reveals itself over time, how it interacts with a meal, whether it lingers on the palate, or in the mind. For getting to know a bottle, Judy Garland had it right when she tapped her Beaujolais-colored heels together—there’s no place like home. Everything else is vinous theater.

Photo by Savio Soares. P.S. Yep, that’s Andrea Calek in the photo, with his Viognier juice from the Ardèche. Nothing to do with this column, I just enjoy looking at him.