Let’s assume that you’re going wine tasting with another person, someone whose taste in wine you respect. You’re fond of that person, maybe that person is your partner in life. Most of the time you agree about the quality of the wine you drink, but on occasion in a winery’s tasting room, you disagree.
Now as friends and lovers, you probably don’t need advice from Power Tasting about how to disagree amiably. But there are some aspects of disagreements that are unique to wine tasting. Disagreements can be learning experiences for all those involved.
- Is the wine bad? We’re not talking about the relative quality of the wine the two of you might be tasting. We’re suggesting that a wine may have turned or is corked. Corked wine, in particular, is a common problem, more so than is generally recognized, although it seems it occurs in fewer bottles in recent years. One may recognize the problem and the other not, so that might be the first question to consider if one of you is immediately turned off by a sip of wine because you feel that wine is corked.
- What if one of you likes a wine, and the other doesn’t. This is where respect for the other’s taste comes into play. It may simply be a stylistic difference. One likes oaky, buttery California Chardonnays. The other prefers classic French Chablis, made from the same grape but tasting very different. The best idea is to recognize the underlying difference in a particular wine, while recognizing that there are some unoaked Chardonnays from California and some very fruity Chablis from Burgundy.
- What does it taste like? You both lift a glass of, say, Zinfandel. One tastes cherries when sipping it. The other is sure that the dominant flavor is dark chocolate. It’s amazing how suggestions alter perceptions. All of a sudden, when they mention their impressions, the cherries come through to one and the chocolate to the other. You both realize that what you smell is chocolate-covered cherries. Now, that’s a bit of an exaggeration but the point is valid. Consider what the other is smelling and tasting and your senses may begin to respond in the same way.
- What does the winemaker say? One of the niceties of wine is that you can often read the winemaker’s opinion about aromas and tastes on the back of a bottle. (You can also find other people’s opinions on some restaurants’ lists and in critics’ commentary. But we’re talking about what you can do in a tasting room.) To be honest, we often find some of those comments to be ridiculous. Every time we read about road tar or pencil shavings, we grimace. But if one of you tastes plums and the other doesn’t, the winemaker can be a tie-breaker.
- De gustibus non disputandem est. The ancient Romans had it right: There’s no arguing taste. And it may be that one person is actually incapable of tasting what the other does. For example, the smell of white pepper is a known characteristic of Syrah. But according to Decanter magazine, more than 20% of the population don’t have the taste receptors to detect the chemical that imparts that peppery taste.
As we have said before, disagreements about wine tasting are often a learning experience which we should take advantage of.