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In this video, I share some of the odd things about the wine industry that only wine lovers will understand.
**SUGGESTED VIDEOS:
What Makes FINE WINE…Fine? (With Wine Pros Andrew Jefford & Aigars Nords): https://youtu.be/TQuf7Ave0Wk
Staying OBJECTIVE in Wine Tasting & Judging | Andrew Jefford | Wine Podcast: https://youtu.be/XmSrrvZ1TCo
**LET’S CONNECT:
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TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nosediment
**CONTENTS OF THIS VIDEO:
0:00 5 Things Only True Wine Lovers Understand
0:48 Spitting Out Wine
2:12 How Wine Lovers Describe Wine
3:57 Caring Over Wine’s Origins
5:54 The Obsession Wine Blind Tasting
7:41 The Nerdy Wine Conversations
#winetasting #wineeducation #wine
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26 Comments
You are spot on again with your interesting perspective on these five topics. I'm a wine geek so I love this stuff. Benoît Tarlant pointed out in your recent interview that the grower is actually part of terroir . There are more and more great wine growers using regenerative viticultural practices to produce better grapes for better wine. Yup, terroir. Please keep the nerdy stuff coming.🤓
As a fellow wine lover I know Agnese 🎉 is the best sommelier for me always ❤ 🍷🍾🥂🍷
Excellent points ! Indeed, this hobby has some quirks but all hobbies do…. Well done !
Terroir gets a bit out of hand when people chuck every factor in to the mix. Yes, there are a million factors that can make the wine distinct, including the wine maker, maybe where they grew up, why not what they had for breakfast?! It’s not all that helpful to explain terroir in the end apart from one which has a strong explanatory factor for both distinctiveness and location but is largely ignored: the micro-biome of the vineyard and the winery. Once you explore products such as craft beer, where the understanding of yeast strains on not just the brewing process, but flavour it becomes fairly obvious: ‘terroir’ wines are almost always spontaneous or ‘wild ferment’. This means the local yeasts, carried on the grape skins from the field and those present in the winery impart significant character to the wines being made, and they are indeed high local. One field will likely have a different micro-biome of yeast strains from one nearby but share some regional characteristic. This I believe is actual ‘terroir’.
If I’m tasting twenty wines, I spit. But most of the time I’m just having dinner, so I actually drink the wine.
Well, Agnes, I was going to say that if you were ever in Eastern Tennessee, you should drop by and attend one of the famous wine dinner parties that my wife and I host. But now I hesitate, because we frequently serve several bottles of wine in opaque bags. One favorite trick of mine is to serve a very high end wine, a mid-range wine, and then the cheapest grocery store crap I can find. I once served Opus One in one bag and Two Buck Chuck in a second bag! Alas, my friends all gravitated toward the Opus. Another is to serve the same grape from different parts of the world. Shiraz/Syrah from the Rhone, from Australia, and from California. The Wine Reveal is always the fun part!
And yes, I once stumped an actual Master Sommelier with a bottle of Charbono.
I consider myself a wine person, but sometimes when wine nerds swirl the wine around in the glass and say things like “I detect pamplemousse with a hint of bubble wrap and day old horse fart” I can’t help but roll my eyes. I was at Isole E Olena a few weeks back and one of “those” people showed up. Even the guy running the tour thought he was a total knob.
to be honest… I cannot spit. I completely understand why it’s wise to do it, I know it since decades – something in my mind forbids me to do it… I believe it’s a (maybe misled) respect for the effort of those who made the wine; some people worked hard to make this fine wine – and I should spit it out? I can’t do it…
Thanks, as always Agnese … I spit … but, I always swallow a little so I can take a deep breath through my mouth and exhale through my nose to get a complete smell/taste. But, I never taste 10 wines in a sitting 😳
Blind tasting has an obvious place in Wine shows. However, for me, part of the process of learning to identify and recall varieties, regions, styles, methods and producers is to visually associate the label in front of me as I am tasting the wine. Next: if words are consistently used as descriptors, eventually the word may be recognised as the dimension or quality being described. Individuals may perceive textures and chemical odour components differently, but can recognise them if consistently labelled. So, after a while ‘silky mouth feel’ becomes a marker which may indicate Pinot Noir, and ‘petrol nose’ may indicate an aged Riesling, even if one does not routinely suck on silk or sniff petrol. 7:46
Regarding blind tasting: whiskey. In the whiskey world blind tasting is emphasized and done just as much as with wine.
In my opinion, blind tasting absolutely has its place (evaluating quality), but that place is in the very small minority of times that you're drinking wine. It's really only useful for evaluating the quality of several similar wines as objectively as possible, and how often does anyone who doesn't taste wine for a living do that?
My wife and I just spent seven weeks traveling through Northern Italy and France, drinking at least a bottle, and often two bottles of wine a day — no spitting!
We did a blind, twenty producer tasting of the 2023 Barbarescos and did not spit — we dumped — they all sucked! 2023 is a bad vintage for Barbaresco. I am also a past member of the Commaderie de Bordeaux, and all our dinners were blind. I found it very educational, although we did know the general area where the wines were coming from. While I experienced an occasional surprise, prices In Bordeaux do make a difference. Ormes de Paz will never be better than Latour!
Yes, terroir is a thing, but even more so, and especially in Europe, vintage variation is a thing as well — see above.
My number one descriptor is “Good Juice.” Chewy, underbrush, bright, flinty… that is about as far as my vocabulary goes. I defer to masters of the wine universe like you!
My partner always gravitates to those Sauvignon blancs that have a "Green Appley" character 😉 I have long considered serious wine drinkers to be the only ones really concerned & fussy about wine temperature. I find myself constantly discussing the importance of temperature and the effect of oxidation.
totally agree with you on not drinking the wine blind(there's certainly a place and a time for this) but the obsession over this is getting out of hand here(most people who compete in blind tasting competition actually learn very little doing it this way i have noticed).
I loved this video ❤ love the philosophical side of wine 🍷
Please find another word for intoxicated 😊. Use some synonym.
One more thing about Terroir. You mentioned almost every part of the terroir except one-the winemaker. One of your guests from Champagne talked about that in one of your recent podcasts and this impressed me a lot.
A lot of casual wine drinkers get wine snobs and wine nerds/geeks confused and sometimes its hard to tell them what the difference is. I have been guilty of being a wine snob in the past, but now try to be more open minded and nuanced both in my views and discussions. I now try to get my friends and family members to drink more adventurously and get outside their comfort zone, but I save the seriously geeky deep dive convos pppfor fellow wine nerds. I believe that blind tasting is for professional wine competitions, but not for wine education or enjoyment; as there is a unwritten rule that you have to "get it right", which is well nigh impossible, even for MS and MW people. Great video and thanks for sharing.
I don't work in the wine industry, thank God, and I never, ever, spit. It's all going down the right way to bring on the full Bacchus. I'm a true wine lover and couldn't care less about blind tasting for myself. I enjoy watching reviewers do it though. Geeky talk is something all fellow enthusiasts enjoy. Ever been to a comic convention? Ever had a heated discussion about the greatest Toscanini recording of Beethoven's 5th symphony? It's all good fun
I love the use of tasting notes but wine notes are fairly straight forward compared to notes used to describe whisky and rum. I include two reviews from the wonderful Serge Valentin as great examples:
Longrow 14 yo (46%, OB, +/- 2010) Five stars A fairly recent vatting of sherry and bourbon casks. Colour: straw. Nose: a huge and very typical both buttery and sooty profile at first nosing, with many sour notes that will please all lovers of, well, sourness. Cider apples, dry cider, baby vomit (let me insist, not a Hell’s Angel’s), yoghurt, lemon juice, brine, pickles, ‘the old coal stove’, hessian, oysters… It’s probably one of the most extreme recent Longrows I’ve had. Not extreme in its power but extreme in its profile. Oh, and packs of wet dogs (I’m sorry, dogs). After 15 minutes: mead all over the place, amazing! Mouth: beautiful attack, peaty, medicinal, sweeter and rounder than on the nose, with some crystallised tangerines, kumquats, green tea, soot, ashes, brine and, well, more ashes. Cigar tobacco. Beautiful indeed. Finish: long, briny and smoky. Smoked anchovies? Elvers? Comments: I hate to write this but it’s probably no malt whisky for beginners.
Caroni 12 yo 2000/2012 (50%, Velier) Four stars and a half 2000 was the last vintage at Caroni. This baby was entirely aged in Trinidad, then shipped to Scotland for bottling. I like the old label a lot. Colour: full gold. Nose: starts fairly smoky, with some toasted bread, gingerbread and then there's more spicy oak, cedar wood, cinnamon, touches of beef stock, Grand-Marnier… It's not that heavy and globally rather elegant. After a few minutes, there's also a little tar coming through. Natural rubber. With water: perfect! Great smokiness, then moss, fern and fresh mint. Soot. Mouth (neat): rich, coating, sweet, toasted and ridden with dried fruits. Bananas flambéed, Corinthian raisins, molasses, dark pipe tobacco… In the background, that very unusual smokiness again. Eucalyptus wood fire? With water: gets a little easier, sweeter and rounder. The oak comes out more as well, as (almost) always. Finish: long, mentholated, phenolic. I love this style.
Terroir is more than that. Also includes human practices and culture. More than soil, climate etc… ❤ easier to talk about if I could post a picture. Often too many focus on just the soil part….
Hello, I consider myself an obsessive person, for me it is an obsession. And now I take great care not to tire people out with wine terms, but when I meet with my wine friends it is my world, every day I learn more.
I always consider it wasteful to spit wine, but I couldn't drink 10 wines in a sitting due to palate fatigue even if I spit. Maybe if I were studying to be a master of wine, I'd improve, but especially with similar wines, I can taste about 6 in 1 sitting without forgetting anything. I also get more (both enjoyment and assessment) slowly drinking a whole bottle with food vs a tasting portion. I wonder how many scores would change if wines were tasted this way – something concentrated and aggressive otherwise can outscore something subtle and beautiful.
Very very, recognizable. I often say "liniair" acidity.
Big difference between wine snobs and wine experts no? Seems like the former category outnumber the latter too and I really do think that category of people should blind taste more. And not only selections of exclusive wines but also with more affordable mass produced labels mixed in, because its often a humbling experience. If you cant tell the 15 euro supermarket Syrah apart from the rare 100 Euro one, are you supposed to be happy about that? Or sad?
I tryied to spit in the Wine South America, in Bento Gonçalves once… But it was a delicious moments with my friends, I just did it with bad ones. And it was a great day.
Always love your content and this episode follows suit. I never spit, never drink blind (unless it’s for simple fun) I don’t work in the industry so I’m there to drink and enjoy. And btw off topic the Bowie shirt with the jacket…LOVE IT!!