I wanted to ask you more experienced wine fanatics if you’ve ever had the experience of tasting a wine and it made you realize that you should reconsider your opinions on previous wines. Has this ever happened to you? If it has, do you go back and reconsider your previous opinion? Would you re-rate or rescore the wine in hindsight? Or do you simply leave as is and score the newer wine as much lower in comparison? I ask because I’m in the situation now where I’m thinking of doing exactly that.
I’m asking because I had a wee bit of a shock 3 hours ago. I stopped by the LCBO flagship Summerhill store in TO and deliberately sought out a high-priced pair of red wines to compare to my recent Niagara experiences with celebrity wines. I chose the $30 The Foundry 05 Shiraz from South Africa and the $45 The Ridge 06 Cabernet Merlot from California.
The Shiraz was very strong but woefully out of sync to me, with strong plum and spice flavor up front suddenly giving way to overwhelming oak wood flavour and bitter tannin that completely wiped out the fruit flavor. Unbalanced to say the least.
But the real shock to me was that the Cabernet Merlot, while decent, was pretty much equal to than the much lower priced celebrity Dan Aykroyd cabernet sauvignon, Mike Weir Cabernet Merlot and Wayne Gretzky cabernet shiraz wines I had just this past Saturday. I could not in all honesty rate it higher, that’s for sure. And I literally mean shock, the woman serving at the tasting bar actually stopped what she was doing to ask me if I was okay when she saw the look on my face.
For a pair of wines wine charging as much as twice as much as the above, I was expecting, well, twice the wine! Instead I got pretty much the same in the cab merlot and much worse in the shiraz.
At first, I was wondering if these two wines just weren’t that great. Then the thought occurred to me: what if the more affordably priced celebrity wines were actually way better than I gave them credit for and I just couldn’t recognize it with my young palate? What if they were actually as good as the much more expensive wines I just had and I was being unfair to them when I said that Berserkers wouldn’t enjoy them?
Have these thoughts ever occurred to you? Have you ever gone back and rated a wine higher after tasting another later on? Should I be rating the celebrity wines higher? Or just scoring the pricier wines lower? Any thoughts would be appreciated, as always. Cheers.
I’d advise you to keep tasting until you find the sweet spot for what appeals to you. Ignore scoring. You mentioned in another post that you liked a Syrah you tasted. Syrah/Shiraz has many expressions from all over the world. I think one could taste Syrah for six months alone before it becomes repetitive. I think this is true of most, if not all table wines.
Taste taste taste and then taste some more- are you someone who looks for pure fruit? Acid and tannin balancing the fruit? Minerality? Something else? Something very important to remember, just because something appeals to a lot of people does not mean it needs to appeal to you.
Case in point, fellow board member loves Cayuse Syrah, and I mean loves it. I think it is nothing special. I love Oregon Pinot Noir, he refers to it lovingly as swill. Are either of us right or wrong? Nope. We drank the wines, figured out what we liked and made buying and drinking decisions from there.
You seem to have great enthusiasm for this. Get out there and taste and have fun!
Lesson 1: Price does not correlate with how much you will enjoy the wine.
My response to your query: Don’t revise history.
Some aside:
Some wines may show better in a tasting than others only to be completely terrible when you have them at your dinner table or in another context. This is a feature of our palates and how they can be influenced by the environment we taste wine in. If you are super-analytic, you will drive yourself crazy trying to create a universal ordered ranking of all wines you can remember experiencing. If it is useful for you to make a note like “enjoyed this more than the wine I had last week”, that’s fine. Don’t try to make all of the points you assign somehow correctly show which wines you liked better or worse than others. There’s not enough room on the points scale to create a big enough ordering to fit all of the wines you’re going to drink in your explorations.
Be careful comparing things that aren’t from the same genre. A Cab/Shiraz is going to have a different fruit profile than a Cab/Merlot and it doesn’t surprise me that you enjoyed one more than the other. While it is not an apples to oranges comparison, it is a tangerine to blood orange comparison, which will likely lead you to a skewed assessment of absolute qualities of the two wines you are comparing.
What is this “The Ridge” Cabernet-Merlot you paid $45 for? Could not find any info on it. I don’t think that the highly regarded Ridge Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains markets anything as “Cabernet-Merlot”. There seems to be a “The Ridge” winery in Australia, but you said California. I think you probably paid waaaay too much for that bottle.
In any case, you can’t make generalizations about an entire region’s wine quality with one single bottle of wine. Additionally, you admittedly have a very young palate – I wonder why you feel that you are qualified to shout out to the world that these Celebrity Canadian Wines are great bargains compared to Aussie and Cali wines. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but you come off sounding kind of foolish with this post, given the level of sophistication found here on WB.
No real need to be rude and call someone foolish, is there? Great way to run off new members. In fact, based at least on post counts he has contributed here more than you have (as well as I). Give tran a break. Its an honest question and he wants to pick some brains, not be ridiculed.
Tran, I have definitely revised my thoughts and score, and welcome a good revision, especially after some good introspection, cathartic experiences, or just good ol’ fashioned learning curve.
I find that I am always reconsidering opinions, but that only come with additional input. We are constantly trying to broaden our experience. You can’t just say that an initial impression is set in stone. Even after you become familiar with your tastes, likes, and dislikes there will still be surprises and at some point maybe even a drastic change in likes and dislikes. So I say it is always relative and subject to change and reordering.
Concerning scores, which I personally don’t use, I can only see a reason to rescore if you use them as a buying guide for yourself. Some of us are both blessed and cursed with vivid memory ability. That is not the case for most folks. If the score is a memory guide, I guess there is value in constantly recalibrating the score. The problem with that is that as you move away from the actual tasting it harder and harder to believe that rescoring will actually been accurate.
I think has been more muddy than clear, but I hope it helps.
It sounds to me like you were assuming that a higher price on your two latest purchases automatically means better wine. You’ve learned a valuable lesson: pricier does not automatically mean better.
Applying that to your scoring, it sounds to me like you need to grade the $30 and $45 dollar bottles down, not raise the scores on the others. Just because these bottles cost more doesn’t mean they deserve a high score.
Also, if you choose to score wines, I would not change your scores on the wines you rated before. It will be valuable, years later, to be able to look back and see what you really thought of certain wines at the time. It will teach you neat things about how your palate has changed, and perhaps interesting things about how consistent you are despite the changes over the years.
Hopefully the posts on this board will help you find better wines than you did this time. Good luck!
I do occasionally get a bit taken in by a mid-week “every day” wine that generally fits my flavor profile preferences (as in “wow, this is really quite good…”), only to get re-educated on the weekend. On the weekend, I’ll open up something with a similar general flavor profile, perhaps a bit more special, pricy (or heaven forbid more highly scored by the media), and often find a level of complexity and nuance that I didn’t encounter in the mid-week wines. That doesn’t really change the satisfaction I received earlier in the week, but it does serve to recalibrate.
Tran – In my opinion, one of the lessons learned in this experience is that making wines compete against each other is often a good way to ensure that you enjoy none of them. I’d be willing to bet you would have enjoyed each of them more had you taken a slightly different approach. Try to approach each wine as a mystery to be unraveled, to be enjoyed for its own merits with its own story to tell and which can perform better for you if you set it up correctly and give it its best chance to succeed.
You might think about pairing; which kinds of dishes might complement each wine best? Which occasion? For example, one wine might strike you as a nice one to have with pizza on a Tuesday Night, another might be one to feature in a more special saturday night dinner, another might be the type that is best enjoyed on its own apart from a meal. One might be better with steak, another with lamb, etc. etc.
I agree with the poster who said to go out and taste, taste, taste, but try to give some commitment to each wine and be present for each one, discover anything and everything each wine might have to give.
I also agree with the poster who said if you give a score to a wine, do it for yourself, but if you were seeking my advice, I would caution you to avoid thinking in terms of always drinking the winner based on points. There are occasions for the 88 point wine and occasions for the 98 point wine. Wine is part of the occasion. Set it up right and enjoy more wine on more occasions.
This happens to me as well, though I actually DON’T tend to “recalibrate” when I drink my nicer wines–if anything it reinforces how good wine can be even if relatively “unspecial”, particularly when you find (as you describe it) wines that fit your flavor profile or hit your sweet spot…In fact, I very often find that some of these mid-week wines actually outperform (at LEAST relative to expectation) many wines that are SUPPOSED TO BE “superstars”, but that in reality are simply heavy and annoying to try to enjoy. On the other hand, a 2000 Usseglio Mon Aieul the other night was everything (and more) than it’s cracked up to be…
I have no problem “rating” a $20-$30 “midweek wine” whatever I think it deserves based purely on my own experience, knowing full well that it might not be an “extraordinary” wine, at least vis a vis the entire universe of great wines…
Thanks for the thoughts, advice and the character defense guys!
In all seriousness, to address what Paul is saying, first off all he is more than entitled to slag my postings as much as I am entitled to slag “celebrity” wines which I did in previous posts. As I’m learning fast, anyone with a thin skin – be they winemaker, critic or Berserker – who can’t take it as well as dish it out had better quit wine cold turkey, stop being a part of this board and start drinking .
It was not my intention at all, but I see what Paul is saying about it looking like I was giving thinly veiled credit to those wines I mentioned them by name. Perhaps it wouldn’t have come across that way if I’d left the names out, but I put them in because I specifically commented rather harshly on those ones in my previous TNs, so I used them as reference. Sorry if it came across as some kind of product placement. Again, not the intention at all.
Regarding the now mysterious The Ridge Cabernet Merlot from California: I can assure everyone 100% that the wine is definitely a 2006 Cabernet Merlot as per the label. Paul has definitely placed a doubt in my head about the word “The” being a part of the brand, though. I also can’'t find any information on it,even on the LCBO’s own website, oddly enough. I’ll make it a point to drop by the LCBO again tomorrow to verify for everyone what exactly we’re dealing with here. I don’t care to look more like a newb than I already do, but if I made any kind of mistake I’ll own up to it.
And yes, as a couple of people here have pointed out, I was very much expecting pricer wine to be better wine and have obviously learned otherwise. I gather this is one of the first lessons learned by a newborn Berserker that stays with him for the rest of his life.
Wine mystery solved, no need for a Blackberry photo, it is definitely a Ridge Vineyards wine. To be precise, the label reads exactly: Ridge 2006 California Santa Cruz Mountains Estate. It identifies the blend in small type at the bottom of the label as Cabernet Sauvignon 56%, Merlot 42% and Petite Verdot 2%.
Oddly, you cannot find this wine listed on the Ridge Vineyards website in their wine section at all and just Googling obvious terms such as Ridge Cabernet Merlot or Ridge Santa Cruz Mountains won’t bring this up. I had to use the entire term to finally get a PDF of the wine label from their website. Not sure why it’s so hard to get info on it via the Internet, but this wine definitely exists.
I will post my TNs but will definitely keep the editorializing out of it. That’s what this whole thread was for.
while i agree with others that higher price does not equate to a higher enjoyment factor with any certainty, the relationship is even more uncertain when it comes to the LCBO stock. I often find more expensive wine is made to be cellared, and the LCBO generally has only the recent released vintage, which are not showing well.
to your question, generally i focus on what i am drinking so no. however, on occasion i have liked a wine, purchased and cellared for a while, and not cared for the aging, so wondered why i liked it before.
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
.![[drinkers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/82916bed5ad74ac8470bc04089d9758b0c80c9fa.gif "drinkers"){kind=small}
