Again, ask questions about the wines you are drinking and about the wines you might want to drink. You will learn a lot that way.
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No Claude, but when I think of great movies I cannot leave out Duck Soup.
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30 y/o and understand the feeling of intimidation. Dining alone at Le Bernardin, triathlon and book clubs are all intimidating but all worth it. Recently had dinner at @Nick_Christie house w/ @John_Davila and they gave me some incredible advice about building my collection and offered some awesome travel stories. Putting yourself out there is always worth it!
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Suggesting here based on what I learned I could have adhered to when I started to get interested, is simply to read up on everyone and everything they talk about here, use winesearcher to research pricing and sourcing, and try for yourself FIRST. It took me a while but at some point, I pmâd the persons that posted about an offline in my locality, and from then on I have my offline friends to blame for my thwarted palate 
!
Nothing like actually tasting for yourself and having generous and enjoyable offline mates with trustworthy palates to help with invaluable information, as you develop your own wine preferences.
Over time youâd, hopefully, bump up your income that will help, in the likely event that your wine preferences increase with costs. It did so in my case
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Thanks for the kind words, Howard!
Prices today are not what they used to be, but neither is overall quality. Even in legendary older vintages, there were lots of poor wines and the proportion of bad ones is much smaller than before. Lesser-known or lesser-rated wines are much better than many top wines were 40 years ago. In Bordeaux, for example, 2016 (or 2020) is an absolute gold mine: wines like Lafon-Rochet, Marquis de Terme, Desmirail or PĂ©desclaux can be found for less than what some more prestigious names cost at release in 2000 or 2005, and for me, theyâre actually better. Also, thanks to improvements in winemaking, they can already be enjoyed right now.
Itâs a great time to get into wine and WB provides valuable insight and help. Yes, I know that some contributors can be a bit intimidating and know-all, but that has always been the case. I didnât take part in wine forums and the like until 2000 or so, and for a long while I felt much more comfortable, ironically, writing in French on a French forum. When I finally plucked up the courage to give my opinion on the Squires/Parker BB, it took a bit of time to get past the flak I got from some loudmouths, mostly the Parker Praetorian Guard. My recollection is that they were much more intimidating than anyone here, but thatâs maybe my crappy memory talking. Anyway, once I did it was a lot of fun and very useful.
As for posting tasting notes, yes, thatâs not easy at first - I felt like a fraud and an imposter - but then I realised that everyone does (well, apart from the loudmouths maybe), and the only way we can all get insight from each other is by giving our opinions. We donât have to agree, and thank goodness we donât, because the days of one opinion ruling all the rings is long gone and rightly so. There is no such thing as ârightâ or âwrongâ about perception of a wineâs taste. But as long as we disagree respectfully, thatâs great.
Also, even we old fogies are still learning about wine today - every year I get introduced to new wines by people half my age. So there really is no need for anyone to feel overawed by anything anyone says here.
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It is really great to see that this thread lives on and that it has a struck a cord with many. I think we underestimate the amount of lurkers here. I ran into someone in London last night who I met 15 years ago when he was in his mid 20s and just starting a career as a lawyer. He mentioned how influential it was for him to taste and discuss wines with me. It actually changed the course of his career and now he has a very successful club and restaurant business that is all focused on wine.
I think one of the best things about this Board is to meet others IRL and to be able to taste widely! I am doing a rieslingstudy in Kingston NY with Leon Michels from El Michels Affair in a couple of weeks. I will be digging very deep in my cellar with a focus on the wines of Keller (I change up the focus for each event).
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As I said before, if someone is a lurker and somewhat of a beginner, it is better to start posting here by asking questions than by pretending to have expertise you do not have. People like Robert and others will respond eagerly and helpfully to people looking to learn. On the other hand, it is easy to spot fakes and just not pay attention to them.
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Yes, of course I agree with the general thrust of these comments, as everyone has their own valid taste perceptions. The trick is whether they can accurately convey those perceptions through writing. That is not easy, especially when burdened by all the wine jargon that is often misused.
Itâs also important to be humble and not over interpret oneâs taste perceptions. I think most people here would agree that the majority of CT notes are useless noise, because people make wild proclamations about wine beyond their ability to accurately convey information.
And that is also where the ITB folks sometimes clash with those of us who are amateurs. The boards can be great places for discussion and generating interest, but it can cut both ways. An overly-confident negative proclamation about a wine based on a small taste, or one bottle, or someone who mistreated the bottle/didnât understand it, can have outsized influence on this (admittedly limited) market, while being unreliable âinformationâ.
None of this is to say that newcomers should not join with vigor!
But all of us should be humble.
It got really rough there at the end. There were a couple of junkyard dogs that would sick on you rather abruptly. I donât know if they were pay participants or if it just organically happen that way, but it got miserable very quickly over there.
Thanks for the interesting points!
I think when people start writing notes, itâs hard to avoid some jargon - itâs difficult enough as it is to dare to express oneself in public. Youâre right that not everyone has the same communication skills, but if you donât try you donât improve and Iâd like to encourage people to try.
Staying humble is really important, I agree. The older and more experienced one gets, the harder it is for some to understand that no, they arenât pros and that thereâs a reason people agree to pay for someone elseâs opinion, even in todayâs flooded information market.
Of course some people do cross the line when being overly critical or enthusiastic about a wine, (Iâve probably done it myself!) but it quickly becomes apparent to others that they have, and I donât think anyone here apart from those ITB (and even then) has the clout to affect the market.
But I do think more opinions are needed, not less, and personally I value younger peopleâs input, however it is expressed. Going against the grain is how we evolve. Back in the days of eBob, it was not always easy to politely disagree with any assessment by His Bobness, but little by little peopleâs tastes changed and wine styles evolved to where they are now. Of course, like on eBob, a few dissident voices on WB will change nothing by themselves, but if they get us discussing, so much the better, as long as those voices express themselves politely - and, as you rightly say, humbly!
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I suppose. Iâve also noticed a tendency where younger/newer folks (observed it in myself) are either more ignorant or more motivated to display their prowess, so they make overly-confident proclamations in their TNs based on tiny tastes, or start proclaiming drinking windows further out than theyâve been drinking wine. Whereas sometimes with experience one does get more humble, realizing how much one doesnât knowâŠ
For me, itâs less about being âoverlyâ critical. Nobody can take away someoneâs enthusiastic like/dislike for a wine.
My point was that I do think people can be âwrongâ when writing TNs. Perhaps because they only had a small taste, at a dinner, or inbetween other wines, or maybe theyâre new and didnât have the context to evaluate the wine, or the wine was showing atypically, or the words they use convey things that are not what they experienced, etc etc.
This is not to say that new/young people shouldnât participate, or that we shouldnât share our perceptions out of fear. But that we should be humble when trying to describe wines.
And maybe we donât move massive markets, but a few buying decisions here and there do get moved by these boards. And I remember angry emails from Dressner in my early days, complaining about my TNs on his wines. Perhaps Iâm still traumatized!
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Remember @MackSâŠ
Buy memories, not plates! Not even the cool hand painted ones with different fish on them, theyâll just sit in a cupboard.
Trust me!
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Julian, as is often true, I really relate to the point you are making.
A lot of people think talking in jargon makes them sound more sophisticated. I found out a long time ago that talking in jargon makes one sound like a newby. I was a tax attorney and over time I figured out that it was the people unsure of themselves who spoke in jargon. The really good attorneys spoke in English and not in jargon. It really is a skill that has to be learned and one I tried to learn during my career.
Now after years of this, it really sticks out to me when someone speaks in jargon - Doctors, writers of wine notes, whatever. Based on what I tried to learn in my work life, to me this marks a person as someone who does not really understand the subject matter.
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Iâm so sous bois over that!!!
Just what I expect from litigators. 
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Of course, one should not discount, but should admire, those young-newer 'uns that are able to blind-guess wines (producers, vintage, etc.) in multi-bottles tastings-dinners.
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This seems to be quite prevalent in the US. I donât think thereâs nothing wrong in using foreign terms if one wants to avoid unnecessary repetition. However, it rubs me the wrong way when people just pick up some foreign terms and start using the wrong way.
Some pet peeves of mine:
Tirage - this means drawing off wine from the barrel or tank. Liqueur de tirage is the mixture of wine, sugar and yeast that is added to the wine when it is (drawn from tanks and) bottled in order to produce the secondary fermentation in sparkling wines. I guess some people thought at some point that liqueur de tirage means âliqueur for the agingâ so they started to produce aged sparkling wines named somethng like âExtended Tirageâ which, to me, sounds like the wine is drawn off the barrels or tanks in a very slowly manner, not a wine that is aged on the lees for an extended period.
CĂ©page - this means âgrape varietyâ, not a blend. I really irks me when people say something like âthe cĂ©page of ChĂąteauneuf-du-Pape is Grenache, Syrah and MourvĂ©dreâ. To me, that sounds like âthe grape variety of CdP is G, S and Mâ. I guess this confusion mustâve come from French wine brochures or internet shops where you can see a table where one row might say âcĂ©pageâ or âcĂ©page(s)â and then a list of grape varieties after that. But for some reason American winos seem to think cĂ©page translates to âblendâ.
If one wants to say âblendâ in French using the term cĂ©page, the term is âencĂ©pagementâ. Not so cool and compact anymore, huh? I wish people would stick to the term âblendâ.
Lots of other similar examples out there, but these came to my mind first!
So, yes, when people use terms like these, I also think that it makes them look more like newbies rather than people who know what they are talking about.
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I definitely remember feeling a bit put off in earlier stages of my wine and whisky appreciation by people who flippantly use acronyms for everything (whisky culture is next level cringe in this regard). I get why people do it⊠heck, I know that I do it a good amount, but it can certainly feel like a gatekeeping of the enjoyment and understanding. We donât want to write out the names of these crazy long Burgundies ALL the time, and in an echo chamber some might know what you mean by VCC⊠or DDC (other than one notorious Berserker who knows more about wine than I ever will 
). But in terms of helping spread the love and knowledge of wine, it can be a turn off to not know that a plot in a sub-region of a sub-region goes by the acronym XYZ, and you have to come out of the woodwork announcing your lack of knowledge to figure it out.
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If only there was some sort of tool where you could look things upâŠ
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Trying to google the tool, but canât find. Help?
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