To put it more bluntly: Enough with the vertical tastings. Enough with the hairsplitting. Enough with the “Can-you-top-this?” blowout wine dinners where more wines are served than anyone could humanly consume or even enjoy.
it’s probably also time for many of us to make wine a little less exceptional—in every sense—and a bit more about life itself.
I am very much into wine for pleasure, and I can’t play at the highest levels. While I’m not going to stop seeking out wines that speak to me, I am frequently happiest with a really great $25 bottle rather than a mediocre or even “quite good” $75 bottle. I do like “tastings” for educational purposes, but I dislike it when it is a big event and moves so fast that you can’t learn anything from it, which seems to happen with the best wines sometimes, unfortunately!
This is exactly why I like the local group here (trying to get Tryba in, but he keeps rebuking!)…no one in our group tries to one up the other guy and everyone is more than generous for the sake of letting others try what they have. So many times I have asked to buy a bottle from someone and rather than sell it to me they just bring it to the next thing to share.
I love wine, and I love wine people!
I like all types of tastings and have fun at most. I can’t high-roll but sometimes its nice to source something and play. I mostly drink under $25 wines at home. And I largely agree with his sentiment but the proselytizing by some wine writers gets to be a bit much. Can’t people enjoy wine how ever they seek to without getting their finger pointed at them by someone who knows better?
I enjoy sharing my moments with those who demonstrate a proclivity for X-Game factor entertainment through wine guzzling, usually between the $15 - $50 range.
Fair enough. That article spoke to me on a personal (as opposed to philosophical) level. When I see notes from a huge tasting, I can appreciate that it was enjoyable to others, but it always seems so overwhelming to me. So many wines, so much food, so much noise. I do enjoy the occasional tasting room visit, but the ultimate wine experience, for me, is often described by folks like Florida Jim Cowan or Dick Krueger-- it’s one bottle of wine, a lovely meal at home, and my spouse’s company. I know I’d learn more if I tasted a lot of wines at once, but I just don’t care about speeding up that process.
I do like it when T-Bone’s got wine in the car and the police show up, though.
I like variety in many things. I’ve come to enjoy that in wine as well. While I wouldn’t want to attend the massive tastings very often they can be a lot of fun and informative in their own way. But with my feet up tonight, some light food and a laptop the 2nd half of my Alary Cairanne is also another way I insist on enjoying wine. The dinner with 10 friends Friday will be awesome also.
I always enjoyed Matt’s contributions to WS since I began subscribing, and this cemented him as my favorite. Besides the title of your thread being my favorite line from “Weird Science”, I also think the title of your thread deserves consideration for a board slogan.
Steve and I actually watched Weird Science a few months ago, but I didn’t recognize that line! Unfortunately, if people really did “just drink it”, it would be awfully quiet around here
Jazz club scene, helps is you say it in the voice of the company the boys are holding court with:
Wyatt: Excuse me sir, what’s this?
Jazz Guy: Drink it!
I think the sentiment of Just Drink It says more about getting the stuffiness out of wine, or to bastardize a quote from another move: You’re putting the wine on a pedestal…
On the one hand, I’ve been lucky enough to try some truly epic wines at their peak maturity. On the other, I’m really looking forward to a modest glass of Cotes de Ventoux after I leave work in a few minutes. I like that I can enjoy both the sublime and the mundane.
I can’t read the article but there’s no doubt that huge amounts of great wine are wasted by piling them all together and opening at the same time. To me the best wine dinners are with one wine at the most per course-I’ve got very odd reactions from enthusiasts when opening more than one bottle of the same wine rather than as many different ones as possible but there’s no doubt that it’s a more gastronomic and desirable procedure. I see the need to avoid comparison at all costs for maximum enjoyment.
I read those sorts of writeups on certain bulletin boards [and receive them in email from certain auction houses] - what do they call themselves? “Big Lumber”? - and I just shake my head.
Guys sitting down and drinking like 25 X $1000 bottles of wine in one setting - I just don’t get it - I’ve heard that in a lot of those megatastings, people literally run to the bathroom to vomit.
For average folks, any single one of those bottles would be the wine experience of a lifetime - the sort of thing that a normal person might open at 4PM in the afternoon and try to coax through to midnight [if not for two or three days thereafter].
I dunno - maybe the rich really are different.
But I remember hearing that Stuart Piggott had said that he would never again review a wine unless he had had the chance to follow the evolution of at least one full bottle of it [i.e. no more speedtastings], and that’s an ethic which has a great deal of appeal to me as I get further into this hobby.
PS: Although once I did get a chance to taste La Mouline, courtesy of one of the “Big Lumber” fellows, so I guess I shouldn’t get too sanctimonious here.
For me, wine is something to be enjoyed with friends and loved ones. Wine tastings of many kinds can be educational and are still useful to me in that vein, insofar as they can help me purchase wines for my own pleasure. The events which serve only to allow the tasters to boast of what they’ve tasted or as some sort of a best wine contest leave me cold but to each his or her own.