Metal Reviews

i don't know if i've said this here before, but my family operates a wine retail and distribution business.

i don't know anything about wines, but i have made it a point to at least try to learn the business of wines, and more and more i begin to think that the whole fancy wine and spirits industry is a massive, disgusting fraud the likes of which it is hard to even imagine. more than in any other business i've seen, price and quality are heavily correlated in people's minds, and this creates the opportunity for some mind-blowingly ridiculous situations.

i've read a few issues of wine spectator and wine enthusiast and it's nothing short of hilarious sometimes. one thing i've noticed is that almost every red wine tastes of "red fruits". occasionally these fruits are "crushed". i've also seen some outright ridiculous comments: hints of tobacco leaf, leather, molasses, earth, tar, pepper and, i shit you not, cinnamon-butter toast. that's right off the top of my head, if i pick up an issue i'm sure i can find dozens more like this. one of our salesmen describes wines as arrogant, pretentious and affable. i've seen people get described in less human terms.

then i read about these experiments:
- one university experiment in Bordeaux had wine experts taste white wine, and then the same white wine with red food colouring. the so-called experts actually thought the latter was red wine.

- another test in France where participants were asked to taste and describe a wine that was considered shitty, and then a wine that was considered one of the best. predictably, they hated the first and raved for the second, and in the end it was the shitty wine all along!

so-called experts can't even tell the colour of the wine, and we expect them to be able to tell the grapes?!

i believe that experts can actually distinguish wines easily, and even nail down their vintages, grapes and regions, but wine isn't consumed in blind tastings with lable-less bottles and dark glasses, and in for the overwhelming majority of people 90% of the taste of wine comes from expectations and induction. if people have a €50 bottle in front of them, they'll probably expect it to be good, just like the guys who tasted the shitty wine expecting it to be some award-winner, or the guys who tasted red wine in the first experiment i mentioned. then there's induction, which i've seen and done myself. at a wine tasting in college no one could catch the flavour of the wine, until the producer said it was passion fruit, and everyone was "ooh, aah, yes". i started joking around, saying i could taste curry (fucking curry!) and sure enough, a few assholes at my table said "oh yeah i can taste it!". for crying out loud.

in short, 90% of the "wine experience" is made of expectations and induction, while all the professional opinion makers drink on blind tastings, so the vast majority of consumers are paying fortunes for a product that they cannot even begin to understand properly.

sorry for the long rant, it's just all this bullshit i read about and then get to see for myself when i'm at our shop, it's just embarassing. i almost feel bad taking these assholes' money. and when i say wine, i guess i could very well be talking about whiskey, or champagne, or cognac. it's just unbelievable just how pretentious some people can get about fucking fermented grapes.

so, what do you think of this business?

I hear a lot of bad things. You could probably say a lot of it for the malt whiskey business, although since I'm a big fan of single malts and drink very little wine, I'm not really qualified to say. A lot of wines do taste similar to me, where whiskeys don't...

That's really, really interesting to know. So do you think there is a difference between the $6 and the $30 bottles of wine?

trapt: looking back this probably didn't deserve its own topic, but you had to see the assholes that visited the shop today. merge?

EDIT:
98 Cuvée William Deutz, 1999 Brut
Aÿ
Glistening silver-gold hue with fine, pinpoint bubbles. Aromas of freshly baked bread with uplifting peach and sweet cream accents. Rich, layered flavors of clove, ginger, praline, cinnamon and apple butter. A well-structured, multi-flavored, exotic wine that offers a slight mintiness in the lingering finish. $167 / 200 cases imported

i was going to say that you can't make this stuff up, but then i realized that this guy just did.
http://www.thewinenews.com/current/buyline.asp

hell, the most i've ever cared about wine is trolling seven-elevens for 5 year old bottles that haven't gotten sold. and why not for 6-9 dollars a bottle?

My wife is a big fan of wine. I enjoy it also, but I'm more of a beer guy. Anyway, wine tastings are fun. We go to these little hick towns in Nebraska and Iowa and find these small vineyards, its a pretty good time. Its cheap wine for sure, and we don't pretend to know the grapes it was made from. We just enjoy drinking different wines and having a good time. When I buy wine at the store, I stay within $10. I'd like to try a bottle of expensive wine someday, just to compare it with the cheap shit we buy.

I don't know about wines (not liking it) but I can definitely taste the differences between whiskies of different years and countries.

Yeah. I'm inclined to think that, say, Bushmills and Laphroaig have more difference between them than any two wines, but that might be, again, because I'm not an experienced wine drinker.

I wasn't being sarcastic. Who honestly wants bread, peaches and apple butter with a hint of mintiness? That sounds nasty. It's like breakfast after you brush your teeth.

So do people actually walk around and talk like this or is just magazines?

in person i've never heard such extreme descriptions (toast, beef jerky, tobacco leaf) but i have heard many many different fruits. there is a guy at the office who says he's smelled "queijo da serra" (a portuguese cheese from the mountains, a bit.. pungent? lol) and gasoline in wines, though.

texture, i've heard about unctuous, velvety and watery wines, but to be honest some of that can be quite true, and you don't even have to put in your mouth - just stir a glass and see for yourself.

all these BS descriptions aside like i said i think experts can tell grape sorts and even origins of the wine, but then they talk about stuff so subtle that you can't call bullshit on their tasting notes - they can just say that you don't have the mouth for it. and if you don't, then why the fuck would you pay €1.000+ for a bottle?

I like wine that comes in boxes, and I don't care what none of you snooty motherfuckers think of that.

lol. I knew a guy who drank box wine at parties. It made me lol then and makes me lol now.

It is a connoisseur art that epitomises foppishness. Idiocies like that are a byproduct of people with a far too great self esteem trying to pass themselves off as having something to say.

Still, enjoying a good wine with a close friend in an apt atmosphere is one of the better things in life, in my opinion, as long as you don't think too much about what you're drinking. I don't know if you people have the concept of Vivaboxes in your country. Basically it's boxes of different kinds of food, drink, magazines, etc. that are popular as gifts. You have them for wine too, so you get five or six different 25cl bottles and some info about the wines. Fun for an amateur wine taster.

Having a bit of knowledge about which years and vintages to avoid is key.

so i was reading The Wine Advocate issue #182 this afternoon, and noticed a description that shocked me: the reviewer mentioned notes of "lead pencil shavings" in a 2002 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild (i think). seriously, LEAD PENCIL SHAVINGS?

i've been working at the shop again for the past few weeks, drawing up information sheets (analytical information, tasting notes and of course prices ) for the salesmen to take on their calls.

i had the opportunity to read this WSJ article on wine tasting/judging:
http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PU ... 53628.html

and this review from Robert Parker (arguably the biggest name in wine reviewing and whose opinions can considerably affect a wine's price) on a Zind-Humbrecht, i forget which:
Clover, orange blossom, lime, fresh apple, and hazelnut on the nose lead to a silken-textured mouthful of apple accented by citrus oils, toasted hazelnut, and scallop-like saline-sweet mineral savor, with subtle spice from cask and reinforcement of creaminess from the malo-lactic transformation.

if you put clover, orange blossom, lime, fresh apple, and hazelnut in your hands, could you smell them all? AND FROM A GLASS OF WINE? for crying out loud.

2007 Domaine Zind Humbrecht Riesling Brand
Stephen Tanzer's review: Knockout nose of dried pineapple, ripe peach, wet stone and nuts. The palate offers enticing sweetness buffered by brisk flavors of crystallized citrus peel and stone. Densely packed, fruit-driven and long and aromatic on the back end. 92 points

Robert Parker's review: The Zind-Humbrecht 2007 Riesling Brand – from the densely granitic Steinglitz portion of this cru – smells gorgeously of iris, lily-of-the-valley, linden, white peach, and grapefruit. Plush and tenderly palate-saturating, dry-tasting at 10 grams residual sugar, its hints of tart and bitter red currant, grapefruit rind, peach pit, hazelnut, and sage offer dynamic counterpoint with its generosity of fruit and texture, persisting with uncanny tenacity, clarity, lift, and energy as well as mysteriously marine minerality and scallop-like sweet-saline savor. This will be exciting to follow over the next 12-15 years if not longer. 95 points.

so much bullshit and they coincide in exactly 1 aroma (peach).

weird thing is, scores are actually rarely very different between big name raters (Robert Parker, Stephen Tanzer and the Wine Spectator reviewers), which leads me to believe that while aromas can be hard to place properly, good "fundamentals" (balance, acidity and whatnot, whatever they mean) can be consistently found across the so-called best wines, be several different reviewers. the WSJ article points to the contrary but i'd put it down to unqualified judges.

one thing i have to concede to, though, is that often it just doesn't feel right to have, say, Night Train with a nice slab of Kobe beef. and then if you get a nice wine, you want a nice Riedel glass to go with it. and on and on it goes.

I also had the opportunity to read Berry Brothers & Rudd's (a 300+ year-old wine merchant) report on THE FUTURE OF WINE. a nice read from a commercial perspective, just how i like it:
http://www.bbr.com/GB/wine-knowledge/fu ... ine-report?

and my wine dochebagginess jorney of discovery continues!