I am a great lover of wines but I’ve never had much time for the wine-tasting and collecting game. For me, wine is for drinking and enjoying. Taste is, after all, so subjective.
I’ve never been too interested in the scores, points or awards received by various wines or vineyards. I can never remember what are supposed to be the really good years for various wines and I even have trouble remembering the names of many wines that I really like. Perhaps I’m drinking a little too much? Rather than rely on the scores handed out by various Sunday newspapers I trust my local wine seller, who I have been patronising for over a decade, to make sound recommendations and he has never given me a duff recommendation.
Now he is a man who totally buys in to the whole slurp-spit and describe routine. He uses all of the flowery descriptive language used by wine aficionados like ‘aggressive’, ‘racy’ or ‘fat’. I am sometimes a little scornful of these terms, preferring references that I can more easily understand like ’sweet’, ‘fruity’ or ‘honeyed’. For me, these are more apt, descriptive terms that give an indication of what a wine actually tastes like. Terms like ‘focused’, when applied to a wine, don’t tell me what the wine tastes like.
Myself and a few other lucky neighbours were recently lucky enough to be invited to one of is popular wine tasting evenings where we were guided by his expertise, tasting around 24 French wines. We were instructed in what to look out for on the bottle labels, how to pour the wine, the best wine glasses for different types of wines and, of course, how to slurp-spit and then describe the wine.
It was a fun-packed evening, particularly when people began to stop spitting, choosing to swallow instead. I learned lots of interesting facts about various
French Vineyards, the struggles some are having with the effects of climate change and the uncertainty over their future. I also learned that I have been using all the wrong glasses and that I need at least a set of glasses for white wine and another set for red wine. I was even told off for using huge brandy glasses (my favourite due to their high capacity).
During the course of the evening a huge range of terms were used to describe the wines that we tasted. A few memorable descriptions were:
‘The aroma of a wet dog and taste of soggy cardboard’.
‘A flabby wine with a hint of Geranium and an Oxo aftertaste’
‘A lively wine with a harsh, astringent flavour that might work well as a sink unblocker’.
I am so glad that I have a trusted vintner for a friend and that he continues to provide me with some fantastic wines, even though I can’t remember their names. Happy drinking.
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