What Are You Looking At?


After a while, they all start to look the same . . .

Ah, another installment in the ongoing series on how to taste wine. Finally, we're going to talk about what to look for when you taste wine. We base our judging system on a variation of the UC Davis 20-point scale. It breaks wine down into evaluation categories. Interestingly, the judging system was invented to help commercial wineries grade bulk wines for transfer between different winemaking facilities. I've read this a hundred times, but nobody has ever satisfactorily explained what the purpose of these transfers were: wine swapping between one winemaking division that ran out of Chardonnay and another that had excess? One winery that couldn't sell Petit Sirah swapping it to another for Riesling? It's a funny old mystery. Still, you can see why they needed a good grading system: individuals had to have a common language to describe and judge wine from separate locations, and a way to accurately convey that information between them. Here are the ten categories for evaluation:

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All White Now

99 bottles of wine on the wall . . .

It's been a white week at Chaos Cellars, and for a change it's all been good, from the familiar to the interesting to the exotic.

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Here Comes the Judging


Order in the court! Fine, I'll have a glass of Fino and a tapas plate, please.

Okay, on the topic of wine judging we've covered human senses and the uses of sensory evaluation, the human brain and interpretation errors, and olfaction and gustation. Just about the only thing we haven't covered is judging wine. The first step is how to taste. Sure, that's easy: pour it in your mouth and swallow, right? Not so fast, my little wine sponges! Analytical tasting breaks down into three separate actions: look, smell and taste. Seems simple, but there are procedures that increase your ability to observe, and the amount of information you can gather.

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Weekly Wined Up

Did you drink these unaided? Why no, I had the assistance of a bottle of Champagne!

This last week I had a few meals that were suited for a nice glass of wine, so I opened seven bottles, but I only managed to enjoy 5-1/2. That's not a bad ratio around my house, mind-you. I buy quite a lot of wine on spec, and some of it is suitable only for sousing out the drains. My current biggest complaint is the teeth-grindingly stupid trend to wines with too much fruit, sugar, oak and alcohol. If I want a drink with 18 or 20% alcohol I'll mix a cocktail. If I want a glass of wine, I want something under 13%. If I want sugar, I'll drink Port, not Chardonnay and if I want plywood, I'll build a rec room, not pull a cork. Sheesh!

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Smell and Taste

I can't believe he had that much wine in his nose

Continuing on our series about sensory evaluation and tasting wine. First we talked about human senses and then about how your brain interprets (or in some cases, misinterprets) those sensations and now today we'll talk about how tastes and smells get from your glass, through your senses to your brain.

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This Is Your Brain On Wine

I know what's on your mind, but it's not what you think it is

Braiinsss, Braiinss! The favorite snack-food of zombies, the human brain was thought by the Greeks to be an unimportant sort of heat exchanger for cooling the blood. Now we're all much smarter and know that brains are where we do our thinking. But while cogitating is one thing, interpreting the senses is wholly another.

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My Dog Has No Nose

So much wine, so little time to judge

One of my favorite jokes is a stupid kids jape:

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Happy Saint Bacchus Day!

Bacchus, by Caravaggio, courtesy Uffizi gallery

Ah, the wearin' o' the green. Like so many of our festivals, it's a wonderfully mixed-up bunch of silliness and forgotten traditions rolled into a party. The thing I'm most amused by is the amazing coincidence that March 16th and 17th were originally the time of the Bacchanalia, where ancient Romans partied like it was 999 BCE. According to Wikipedia (and hey, if it's on the internets, it's true!)

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MIA

Yes, that is the worst photoshop you've ever seen.

They keep me because I'm pretty, not talented.

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Meet the Tim, Take Two

Is that a Cheval Blanc in your pocket, or are you thirsty to see me?

Whew! It has been a busy weekend/week for Technical Services. My lecture at the Fermenter's Guild conference was a bunch of fun, if a bit intense (sorry for the technical jargon everyone!). I think not a few people were surprised to find out that under objective judging standards a glass of water scored more points on the UC Davis rating scale than a bottle of wine costing fourteen bucks!

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Preaching to the Fermented

Is the logo half-full, or half-empty?

This weekend is the annual Fermenter's Guild of British Columbia conference/meeting/shindig. It's being held at the fabulous River Rock Resort and Casino in Richmond BC, home of airports, car dealerships and my cousin (hi, Dick!)

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What's That Smell?

The trick is unfolding it without getting sprayed


Oo-oo that smell,
can't you smell that smell?

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Dance With the One What Brung Ya

One fish, to eat, red wine, white meat?

I was thinking the other day of the old rules for wine, and wine and food. Seems like wisdom needs a patina to excuse it (old sayings and old rules are treated more reverently than newfangled notions, most of the time) or a bit of distance to give it gravitas (wisdom from far-off lands, like Chinese mysticism or Pagan Gnosticism have their flare-ups as hip and cool thought-systems quite regularly). Most people never question the idea that red goes with meat, white with fish, champagne for everything, and save the Port for Stilton and cigars.

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