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Pastimes : Wine You Can Enjoy @ Under $20 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jrhana who wrote (664)	3/30/2008 5:41:04 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1277

Yeah, well, some people can and some people can't and some people pretend they can, but can't and in the best of circumstances none of us really know what the other means by any of it. There is a lot of point in doing some systematic tasting because one can learn a lot and that can not only add to enjoyment, but it can help one to identify the wines that will be more enjoyable. But, one has to do a lot of tasting with another person before one really can come to any kind of shared vocabulary. Bottom line, not only don't we have any well-defined vocabulary for tastes and smells, but there is a huge amount of variation in the way people taste and smell. E.g., there is one guy whom I was in a tasting group with for ten years, probably about nine meetings a year on average, so a lot of structured tasting together. Overall, he and I probably had the closest tastes out of anyone in the group, but there were certainly places where we were dramatically different. One of these was that he was hypersensitive to any sulfur component whereas to me the sulfur has to get pretty noticeable before I will focus on it. There was also some other compound that produced a "barnyardy" sort of component to the wine ... not bret ... and if that compound was in the wine he absolutely couldn't stand it, but I would tend to like it. And, mind you, there are a bunch of other things that were in the same flavor family where we would agree and both of us would tend to like it. But, there was this one that came off very fecal to him, but was pleasant complexity to me. And we were the close ones! With others, you could hardly tell we were drinking the same wine!