Cheers wine lovers! Another exciting week of wine exploration is under way, and I'm looking forward to sharing some useful and hopefully entertaining stuff with all of you! My vision is that most of the regular posts on The Grapes of Rand will continue to feature profiles of producers from around the world, as well as stimulating news and tidbits of knowledge about biodynamic, organic, and sustainable vineyard and winemaking practices. But today I just want to give you all a bit of insight into how I approach wine tasting, so as you watch the videos and read my reviews you'll have a better feel for where I'm coming from. If you have watched my videos you have probably figured out that my opinion of a wine can change quite a bit form the first dip of the nose into the glass to my final summation. What you don't know is that I will often come back to the same bottle of wine the following day just to see how it has developed with air. I do this because this process of change, even if sometimes for worse, excites me. This living, breathing, mercurial, often elusive quality is one of the things that for me makes wine the sublime beverage it is. This is probably one of the reasons I am drawn to minimally manipulated organic and biodynamic wines which, in my estimation, do a much better job than conventionally produced wines of displaying a wide range of characteristics imparted by unique soil and climatic conditions, and continue a much more dynamic, healthy, and less degenerative development even after they have been exposed to air.
With this in mind I suppose you could classify my wine tasting approach as progressive. I rarely rely on first impressions as I form an overall opinion of a wine. I may get very excited initially about the first waft of aroma drawn from the glass, but this will inevitably be moderated by how the wine progresses as I continue to smell and taste. Some I suppose would argue that in wine analysis first impressions are generally the most accurate because they reveal the most dominant characteristics, but this is not how most people drink wine. In the real world wines are generally enjoyed slowly over an extended period of time, so that how a wine changes both in real chemical terms and in terms of perception over time should be taken into account.
Enough with the theorizing! Let's get down to the nitty gritty. First of all, why do I assign a score to wines? The answer to this is very simple. Scores are simply a way for me to easily put a wine in a general category in relation to other wines I have tasted. It is also a simplified way for me to archive my impressions of a wine for all you wine lovers out there in Winedom for future reference. I will be the first to acknowledge that scoring wines is a very subjective exercise, but it is still the easiest way for me to communicate the perceived quality of a wine in relation to others.
One thing I want to make clear about my scoring system is that when I assign a score on a 100 point scale it is not in any way arbitrary. I am really converting a score from my own sixteen point scale, which ranges from five to twenty, to a system that is more familiar to most people, and would correspond more nearly to scores we might see assigned by other wine reviewers.
So, this is how it works: I assign a score between 1 and 4 to each of four attributes. These attributes are Aroma, Taste, Structure, and Finish. Rather than adding the scores for each of these attributes and combining them with an additional score for the overall impression of the wine, as is often done, I weight each of the four attributes according to what I believe to be their importance in the overall profile of a wine, multiply that weight by the assigned score, add the weighted scores for each attribute, and then divide that number by four for the final score. If you are confused, relax, I will give and example below.
But first a few words about what the scale of 1 to 4 actually represents. These are simply numerical values assigned to four levels of quality.
1. Good with basic development, complexity and pleasure
2. Excellent with greater development, complexity and pleasure
3. Memorable with heightened development, complexity and pleasure
4. Transcendent with extraordinary development, complexity and pleasure
Now a word about how each attribute is weighted. I assign the greatest weight (8) to the Taste, or how the wine translates once I put it in my mouth. I am sure that many would argue that the nose or aroma is a wine's most important attribute, but I do not share this view. As much as I am sometimes entranced and even transported by the aromas wafting form a great glass of wine, I am even more intrigued when a wine continues to elicit pleasure and emotion as it enters and rolls around my mouth; when a wine continues to change and develop and offer new nuances on the palate, and as it potentially combines with food with which it might be paired. I can't count the number of times I have been disappointed when a wine promises a beautiful complexity on the nose, only to fall apart once it enters my mouth. The aroma, not far behind taste is weighted with the second highest multiplier (6), the structure (the wine's overall balance of tannin, minerality and/or acidity) is multiplied by 4, and the finish is multiplied by 2.
So here is an example to illustrate how it all comes together:
Rand's Riesling
Raw Score Multiplier Weighted Score
Aroma: 2 x (6) = 12
Taste: 3 x (8) = 24
Structure: 3 x (4) = 12
Finish: 2 x (2) = 4
Total Score: 52/4 = 13 (lowest score possible 5, highest possible 20)
(would convert to roughly 91 out of 100)
Note that the lowest score I will ever assign a wine is 5, which converted to a 100 point scale approximates to about 80. The reason for this is that I am really not interested in scoring a wine that is so deficient in any one of the four attributes that it does not offer at least a basic level of pleasure. There are too many really good wines out there these days to waste our time on stuff that is uninteresting or flawed.
Well, I think I have said about all I ever will on this topic, at least on this blog. I would think that of anything I will ever post, this would invite comments, disagreements, questions, pontification, maybe even consternation. If so, so much the better...bring it on!
'Til next time, keep it natural, and keep it interesting!
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