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

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (944)	12/1/2009 1:22:38 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1277

Actually, I trust myself most of all, but I am far more fallible with young wines. It is difficult to see greatness when you are tasting jammy delicious in concentrated fruit. Frankly, I think the only one that one can trust in the end is yourself. With WS, it isn't a question of one reviewer, but many, so one has to be very careful to note who wrote a particular review and develop a sense of whether one thinks the same way. Pretty much any reviewer I have ever followed I end up agreeing with some parts and disagreeing with others and thus often unsure when it comes to any one review as to whether I can trust the interpretation or not. If by "fallible" you mean that you are unsure about aging potential, that certainly isn't the easiest skill to develop, particularly if one is talking about more than a couple of years. I think the best route there is to trust the maker over the reviewer. Try some older wines from a maker you like and see how they hold up. You may still get fooled if the maker has changed techniques somewhere along the line, but I think it is the best guide I have found. It is pretty much mandatory for me and barrel tasting since I have had too much experience of tasting something delicious from the barrel only to find it oaked to death by the time it gets to the bottle. And, watch out for those delicious jammy young wines ... a great many of them lose their fruit with time and it turns out there is nothing left. I was very surprised to find that Rafenelli, whose young zins are delicious, is a wine to drink early because it fades quite young. I find this too, but less so, with Ridge Zins, while I have had Swan zin from 1969 which was still lovely. Balance is key.