Judgment Day
By Matt Kramer
From Wine Spectator magazine, October 31, 2005 issue

It's a question that seemingly won't go away: How can anyone taste 50 or 100 wines in one sitting and actually do a good job at it?

I've lost count of the number of winery owners and winemakers who have insisted that it cannot be done. (Rarely are they producers who have received high scores, however.) These critics point to the undeniable fact that palate fatigue and/or habituation sets in quite soon. The cutoff point varies with whatever study is cited (if any), but the usual number is around a dozen wines.

I am not a taster who, as part of my daily work, regularly sifts through 100 or so wines in a single tasting. I've done it, on more than a few occasions in fact. But it's not my beat, as it were. So I don't feel the least bit defensive in discussing the matter.

Let me be straightforward: Tasting 100 wines in a day can be done. And done well. Granted, it depends on the wine. Tasting 100 Mosel Rieslings is tough on the gums (all that acidity), but it's actually pretty easy compared with, say, tasting 100 Barolos. I've tasted that many Barolos in one go and I'm here to testify that it's brutal.

But what's so often missing in this sometimes volatile issue is the critical element of judgment. You see, what the naysayers forget is that such studies are designed to test the consistency of a taster's acuity, not his or her capacity for evaluation.

Palate fatigue is really a red herring. Yes, it exists. And every good taster knows it. Sometimes you step aside and refresh yourself, as you would on a long day's drive. Sometimes you power past it, attempting to compensate for your limitations.

Also, there are many ways to judge a wine. The simplest is the Coliseum approach—thumbs up or thumbs down. Believe me, you can rip through 50 or 100 wines that way in short order.

But if your professional requirement is jotting down detailed tasting notes on each wine, no matter how banal, things slow considerably. Ironically, it's these very tasting notes that give a misleading impression about the essentialness of palate acuity.

Today's tasting notes emphasize an "I Spy" approach: I spy apples, I spy toasted oak, I spy coconut, and so on. So a reader can be forgiven for thinking that the ability to nail these elements is the most important aspect of wine tasting. It's not.

Journalists write tasting notes plumped with flavor descriptors because they need to convey to readers what the wines taste like. But it's the taster's conclusions that matter. (This is why scores are so powerful, by the way. Scores are an instantly and intuitively grasped summation of a taster's conclusions.)

Consistency in tasting is not about an unerring ability to identify flavors, like a retriever fetching a stick, producing the exact same results every time. Real consistency is about the values you bring to the wine. It's not the answers you get from the wine, courtesy of your acuity, but rather, the questions you ask of it.

Good tasters know what to ask, and they're not easily diverted. This is the difference between mere competence and insight. A competent taster knows the basics, e.g., that this wine is a good Cabernet or Chardonnay.

Insightful tasting occurs when you know enough to ask different, more demanding questions. An insightful taster asks a Stags Leap District Cabernet to be dense, rich, velvety and offer whiffs of dark chocolate and black currant. A different question would be asked of a Howell Mountain Cabernet. It should have harder tannins, a dusty note and a texture that allows the wine to go down almost like water.

Insightful tasting takes a lot of study. Lazy tasters ask the same questions of all wines, expecting, say, a Barolo to somehow comply with the same inquiry appropriate to a Bordeaux.

Also, there's an element of emotional affinity. Insightful tasting is more than technical ability. It requires an identification with the grape or region under investigation. An expert on Renaissance art only rarely teases out insights from a work of, say, Abstract Expressionism. This is why someone may be a great Cabernet taster but a lousy judge of Pinot Noir. So whenever you read someone's wine notes, set aside whether they tasted one wine or a hundred. The real issue is whether we think they're asking the right questions. And whether they ask those questions consistently.

It's a matter of a sustained sensibility. Because what matters is the final dish you get, not the sharpness of the chef's knife.

Source: http://www.winespectator.com/Wine/Archives/Show_Article/0,1275,5228,00.html