I’m currently posting articles here about wine appreciation in the middle of this pandemic when apparently online wine sales are booming, and everyone has a golden opportunity to learn, understand and appreciate some of the finer things about wine, especially tasting and collecting. Not all of the articles are my own; I read magazines, journals and other blogs often written by professionals. Some are journalists, some are wine judges, some are winemakers, some are even scientists …… but they/we all have one thing in common ….. a passion for our hobby …. wine collecting. So, we like sharing what we know, sometimes it’s a wine worth buying, sometimes it’s a good vineyard to visit, often it’s information about wine types and classifications, and occasionally it’s about the chemistry of all things wine! I try to collect articles of interest, if you like them please tell me. If you don’t like them …. also tell me. And … if there’s something you’d like to see or know I’ll try and find it for you.
Here’s an intro to a recent article from WineAnorak, Jamie Goode, about the FIVE things we SHOULD all know:
1. Great tasters are made and not born.
This is good news! It’s so egalitarian. Some of the great wine critics would like you to believe that they have a special gift. That their powers of discrimination are so finely wrought. That they see things in wine that normal mortals struggle to. It’s not the case. Professor Barry Smith says this: ‘Experts and social drinkers are no different in terms of their perceptual discriminative capacities. The difference is that novices don’t know they can do it, and don’t have confidence they can do it.’ So what does it take to turn a social drinker into an expert? ‘They have to put in the training,’ says Barry. ‘It really isn’t the case that [experts] have excellent perceptual sensory powers.’ He asserts that anyone with a normally functioning sensory system could potentially become a wine expert.
Should you join a wine club? 
Finding a winemaker you trust 
International Malbec Day as Argentina becomes my new “Burgundy”! 
The Two Doctors 
I feel like that unnamed art “critic”: I don’t know much about wine but I know what I like. Thanks to you, I’m learning a bit more about what I like.
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Or …. what you might like if you tried different grapes, countries, regions, winemakers. Do you stick with Californian?
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