Sometimes you have to say things twice so that others can get the joke…sometimes even more than twice.

Wow, I find this fascinating.

Wait, did I just say the same thing twice?…

I am re-reading Emile Peynaud, just to confirm that our attitude is not the crazy one.

As my years in the wine biz keep speeding by I keep being told by my own hubris that I know less rather than more…

Incidentally, the event last Wednesday truly was interesting. I will be blogging about it later today. You may disagree with some of my disagreements with your selections, but that’s how it always goes, isn’t it?

“During a meeting with several flavor professionals in New Jersey, I compared a flavor chemist’s ability to break down the structure of a soft drink to the skills of Robert Parker, the wine critic. I was quickly corrected. ‘That’s kind of like hocus-pocus,’ one of them said. ‘Parker may say that a wine has a nutty note or is oaky, but a lot of things can be behind that, and I don’t think he’s matching aspects of the flavor to a chemical compound and going, ‘O.K. this note here, it comes from methyl isobutrate.” And yet controlled experiments show that, no matter what a person’s professional vocabulary or expertise, aromas remain a blur: the average person, with minimal training, can perceive about three or four distinct components in a given aroma; professional flavorists—without leaning on their chemical knowledge of particular types of food—can do no better.”

We shouldn’t be ashamed about the limitations of our own brains. We just have to keep in mind that these tasting notes are often works of creative fiction, and we should push for the use of more chemical analysis in wine aroma taxonomy. Analyzing the compounds that are in the headspace above a wine should yield more reproducible results than a critic (however great) sniffing it.

Now, if these people were trained to identify the chemistry, they might be able to come up with less fruity words and more wine-specific prose…