Tag Archives: wine palates

Winebits 581: Wine humor, Cooper’s Hawk, wine palates

wine humorThis week’s wine news: Even The Onion can’t make wine humor funny, plus Cooper’s Hawk may be for sale and women may not have better palates than men

• Still not funny: The Onion, which can make almost anything funny, can’t do it with wine. A recent effort mostly recycled the cliches that have bored millions for decades, including this: “MYTH: Red wine lowers blood pressure. FACT: It’s probably not great that you’re so eager to justify drinking poison.” The blog has long considered why so much wine humor isn’t funny, but to no avail. One would think that wine offers so many targets that it would make us laugh without any effort. But apparently not. One scholarly paper, without naming wine, does offer an explanation about how humor works, and wine doesn’t really fit into any of them. Could it be that wine is so boring and cliched that wine humor is an oxymoron?

• On the market? Cooper’s Hawk, the Illinois-based winery and restaurant with 25 units in nine states, may be the next target for restaurant conglomerate Darden, which owns Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse. Ron Ruggles of Nation’s Restaurant News reports that the chain fits “quite well with what Darden would ideally seek.” And the 325,000-member wine club and 30 percent annual sales growth probably don’t hurt, either. The Wine Curmudgeon once judged with Cooper’s Hawk founder Tim McEnery at the Indy International, and famously told him the concept didn’t sound like it would be too successful.

• Wine palates: Do women have better palates than man? That has been accepted for as long as I’ve been writing about wine, but one study says it may not be true. Research using wine competition scores says men and women taste wine with equal precision, something that bothered me when I read it. That’s because wine judging isn’t exactly tasting. As one expert says in the story, judging “is not very good sensory [evaluation] …. The sheer number of wines they go through in that time frame is hugely fatiguing. There has been some interesting work that shows that wine judging is very inconsistent.” So more work needs to be done.

Winebits 430: Millennials, glassy-winged sharpshooters, wine palates

Millennials• Damn those young people: The panel discussion was probably terrific, featuring some of the smartest people in wine retailing. But the report of the event highlighted just how bewildering wine drinkers who aren’t Baby Boomers remain to those who sell wine. One of the lines in the story read: Retailers are having a difficult time understanding “the fickle tastes of younger consumers.” Which is winespeak for “Why don’t younger consumers drink the same wine that the Boomers do, and pick those wines by scores like the Boomers do?” Because that’s what the wine business is set up for, and why should it change for the people who buy the wine?

• Bug infestation: The glassy-winged sharpshooter, the scourge of the wine industry, has been found in Sonoma and Napa counties in the heart of California wine country. And while it’s not yet time to panic, any appearance of the sharpshooter and the Pierce’s Disease it transmits means it’s time to be concerned. The sharpshooter injects bacteria into the vine, and the bacteria blocks water from going through the plant, which kills it. Pierce’s can total a vineyard, stripping all the leaves from the wines in almost no time at all. There’s no cure or treatment, and the only preventative is pesticide, which brings its own problems. All this means that Pierce’s is perhaps the worst problem in wine that isn’t phylloxera.

• Cranky and irritable: Those of us who prefer bitter tastes, including apparently some kinds of red wine, are more likely to be sadists. Or so says a recent study from the University of Innsbruck in Austria. Granted that one person is a small sample size, but I am drinking black coffee as I write this, but feel no urge to kick either of my dogs. Still, the researchers say it may be that those who enjoy bitter tastes also tend to show a lack of emotion or empathy and display more anti-social behavior.

Mythmaking and wine palates

wine palates, super tasters

Do you have to be a super taster to enjoy wine?

The latest research seems to confirm the newest trend in wine — that some of us are better at tasting wine than others. The study, conducted by researchers at Penn State and Brock University in Canada, found that the so-called experts can taste subtleties in wine that the rest of us can’t.

This is just another in a long line of studies about wine palates that separate the world into people with various degrees of wine tasting ability. A Yale scientist, Linda Bartoshuk, divides the world into three groups: Super tasters, about 25 percent of the population; tasters, about 50 percent; and non-tasters, about 25 percent. The first group is above average, the second is average, and the third is below average.. Women are a little more than twice as likely to be super tasters as men, according to her work.

The Wine Curmudgeon is not here to argue with the science behind this research. There is little doubt some of us taste wine better than others, just as some of us jump higher or dance better than others. But what does bother me is the assumption too many people take from these studies, and especially from the news reports of these studies — that if you’re not a super taster, you can’t possibly enjoy wine.

I was quite possibly the worst softball player in the world. I couldn’t throw, my swing was slow and powerless, and I ran like a cardboard box. But I loved playing softball, whether it was in gym class or recreational leagues. Yet, by applying the logic that is inherent in so many of these stories about wine tasting ability, I should not only should not have enjoyed softball, but I never should have played it because I was so bad at it.

This is silly, and it’s one of those things that drives me crazy about wine — and goes a long way toward explaining why more of us don’t drink wine. Why bother to drink wine when we’re told only an expert can appreciate its flavors? It’s more or less what this story implies, and I run into it almost every time I talk to wine drinkers about drinking wine.

The first two things most of them do is apologize for not knowing more about wine and for drinking what they assume is crappy wine. Then they ask me how I can possibly taste all the flavors in wine; I must be special or something. (Obviously, they never saw me play softball.)

In other words, they are intimidated by my wine knowledge. That I have been drinking wine regularly for more than 25 years doesn’t make them feel better. Or that I taste almost 500 wines a year. Or that I talk to winemakers and other wine types all the time, asking questions and learning things. The consumer side of the wine business is so screwed up that most wine drinkers don’t see a difference between how I approach wine and how they approach it. That they only buy wine a couple or three times a month at the grocery store isn’t enough to explain why I know more than they do. It must be their fault; they must be flawed in some way.

Their only flaw, as my pal Dave McIntyre has admirably pointed out, is that they don’t pay as much attention as we do. But they have a ready made excuse. They myth, as perpetuated by the experts and their allies in the Winestream Media, is that that they can’t possibly appreciate what they’re drinking.

Or, as a wine drinker named Allison Davis put it so brilliantly last fall: “There is no safe place to really learn about wine. There aren’t any places where you can ask a stupid question. If you ask a question, it’s as if the attitude is, ‘Why don’t you know this already?’ instead of ‘Why would you know this?’ Because wine is so complicated, and there is so much to learn and who has the time to figure all this out?”

So they don’t bother. After all, they don’t have a good enough palate.

One day, perhaps, the wine business will figure out that everyone is entitled to enjoy wine, regardless of palate. Until then, I’ll keep reminding everyone that wine, like softball, can be fun regardless. And who better to know than someone who ran like a cardboard box?

Winebits 156: Wine headaches, wine writing, sweet wine

? No, it’s not the sulfites: Finally, an answer to one of the most dread questions in the wine business: “I get these headaches from red wine, and I’m told they’re from sulfites. Is that true?” No, of course, has always been the answer, and now scientists have a better explanation why (assuming the headache isn’t hangover induced). It’s a substance called glycoproteins, and it looks to be the culprit behind wine headaches, according to a report in the monthly Journal of Proteome Research.

? Wine writers are cranky: No, not shocking news, but it’s part of the third Wine Writers Survey (link opens a PDF), conducted by wine publicist Tom Wark, who runs the top-rated Fermentation blog. The findings are a mixed bag, and I’m not sure the methodology is as rigorous as it could have been, but it’s interesting to read nonetheless. Wark focuses on the blogger vs. traditional media angle, which I’ve never thought was the real point. Rather, the focus should be on professionals — those of us who do it for a living, whether in print or in the cyber-ether — as opposed to those who do it as sidelight. To me, that’s the most interesting comparison, because that’s been the biggest change over the past decade or so. It’s not that technology has changed, but that changing technology has allowed people to write about wine who would not have been able to write about wine before. And, frankly, all those so-called amateurs are what drives so many in the wine business crazy. (And a tip ‘o the Curmudgeon’s fedora to Tom Johnson at Louisville Juice for sending this my way.)

? Sweet wine, better palate? Or so suggests a study conducted in conjunction with the Consumer Wine Awards in Lodi this year. It found that physiology plays a major role in determining wine preferences, and that sweet wine drinkers are often the most sensitive tasters, “shattering” the myth that sweet wine consumers don ?t taste as well as those who love “better” wines. A nicely written piece by my old pal Paul Franson.