Comments on Besotted Ramblings and Other Drivel: Expression and Comprehension

This is a cool Blog- makes great reading indeed,an...

2008-04-28T06:50:15.444+02:00

This is a cool Blog- makes great reading indeed,and leaves me drooling at the thought of some of the wines reviewed.
To help you and your subscribers, look at this directory of winemakers making great wines from the Aude,Languedoc
http://www.aude-vie.com
Happy Hunting
Miki x

Great post, this has me having all sorts of obscur...

2008-04-25T03:55:46.775+02:00

Great post, this has me having all sorts of obscure thoughts about wine.

You're right to note the distinction between technical qualities and qualities of character. The wine press, and people in the business of buying/selling wine often place too much emphasis on technical quality while giving hand-waving lip service to a wine's character.

The reason for this is parsimony. In a market full of individual products the consumer requires some way of narrowing the field down to a few interesting examples. Ratings, tasting notes and all the rest of it are great tools.

Character, on the other hand, is a complicated issue. As you point out, it may not even fit into any neat system at all. What's needed is experience - experience of the people, of the land and soil, experience of the culture and history of the wine. How does one express this? By singing poetry on mountaintops? Or by saying nothing at all, with the understanding that character cannot be explained, but shown?

I haven't the foggiest. It probably comes down to personal style, but also to the purposes one is pursuing when tasting and expressing the results. When I taste with my professional hat on, I tend to think about technical aspects, but when I'm drinking with friends over a meal, well, that's another matter.

I'm not much a poet, so when I find a great wine that I think has character (emphasis on 'think.' Steve is right about the difficulty in understanding terroir - I'm tasting as blind as anyone else) I try to get it into a glass and in front of someone.

I have been thinking about terroir from a similar ...

2008-04-25T03:22:32.393+02:00

I have been thinking about terroir from a similar perspective recently. It would take a great deal of time and effort to gain a deep understanding of a specific terroir. If, for example, I wanted to "know" the Charmes vineyard in Meursault I figure I'd have to experience at least five different vintages and a similar number of producers, not just once but over several years of the wines' evolution. That's, like, 5 x 5 x 5 wines, or 125 bottles, something that I'm afraid will never happen. And that's for a single vineyard. I wish I could taste with an expert whenever I wanted to.

brooklynguy,That is indeed Bernard Baudry, upholdi...

2008-04-24T13:23:24.523+02:00

brooklynguy,
That is indeed Bernard Baudry, upholding the old-fashioned oral tradition with Patricio and me in the vineyard of Les Grézeaux.

robert,
I agree with you -- for me, the expression of terroir (which is a conjunction of both man and place) is the only thing that gives wine meaning. A wine devoid of this expression, devoid of quality of character, is no more interesting than a glass of orange juice.

Thank you so much for the post. You raise many int...

2008-04-23T21:51:52.706+02:00

Thank you so much for the post.
You raise many interesting questions.
The notion of sterility could be pushed further. There are many experiences in life today that are sterile--and by sterile I mean that they are essentially discrete and do not transfer from one to the next.
Drinking a 100-point wine devoid of terroir expression is a fine example of an experience that is isolated, generates nothing and leads no place. Would you be able even to recall it? Perfect but amnestic? Is it still meaningful?
What makes wine any different from the numerous other experiences that, in a memorable phrase by F Scott Fitzgerald, are mere co-efficients of the leisure of the literate rich? I would say, character.
I had lunch with--and was introduced to--Peter Wasserman a couple days ago, where he made the point that there were already too many wines being made in Burgundy that were incomplete due to the excessively small size of vineyards. Our notions of terroir (in Burgundy) were being undermined by too much fracturing of the land. By implication, he was arguing that terroir is indeed a social construct.

Very well articulated Peter. Very much enjoyed rea...

2008-04-23T17:34:38.741+02:00

Very well articulated Peter. Very much enjoyed reading this post. I will now have to hunt down the Michael Schuster article...

Is that Bernard Baudry on the left in that photo?

2008-04-23T17:07:48.351+02:00

Is that Bernard Baudry on the left in that photo?