Davos of Wine- my impressions

WINE TALK
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In all honesty, I initially poster this on Squires but since I am transitioning over to WB, I’ll put it here too:

Just returned from Europe, with the primary purpose being to attend the DAVOS of wine at Lake Como. When I attend meetings in my own profession, I am fully immersed as a participant/player, but at DAVOS, my (psychologist) wife and I could take a step back and view this meeting for what it really was.

  1. The passions of the people we met there are rarely seen in America. This may be partly due to linguistics, but I’m sure there’s more to it than that. This was truly a meeting of the finest personalities in the world (and I mean WORLD) of wine and I doubt there has ever been such an assemblage before.

  2. François Mauss has a genuine love for many different things that life can offer. Staying up till 3-4 AM drinking wine, singing, and then ready before 8 AM the next day for more. His passion for life emanated in the well-orchestrated manner in which this symposium was put together.

  3. I was pleased to see that many of the participants agreed with one of the theses of my lecture, which was that, due to the fact that taste and smell sensory information projects to emotional/memory parts of the brain, rather than the cognitive/language regions, it is very difficult and unreliable to express the sensory responses to a wine with numbers or words. Trying to describe a wine with words is like trying to describe a massage. Michel Bettane agreed with me that the ideal wine taster would be a telepath. Several of the wine tasters agreed with me that a more developed, codified system is needed to permit meaningful communication about wine. I’d be interested in hearing any ideas out there concerning this task.

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P.,

Thanks for the welcome and comments. This seems like a happier place than another BB I will be now spending less time on.

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Philip:

I enjoyed your comments both here and over at the Squires Board.
Re: the above… can you flesh this out a little bit? What kind of a system do you envision? What would be the intended purpose of such a system, and who do you think would be using it?

There have been attempts at this in the past, among wine educators, wine researchers, etc.
One of the most successful to date (at least in terms of how widespread its use has become) is the Aroma Wheel developed by Dr. Noble at UCD. But that is a deconstructionist, production-oriented approach, of little use to those outside the world of enol-vit research. Noting that a wine has an aromatic profile of blueberry, wet dog, and smoke doesn’t real get you far in the real world.

While looking favorably upon a fresh approach to developing a workable system, I think it important to acknowledge the obvious concern that such attempts run the risk of restricting the ways in which we can talk about wine. The result is that the discussion of wine becomes overtly clinical, with possible negative consequences.

Cheers,