Your moment has arrived. Imagine a large cellar, an unidentified red is poured, ‘what do you think of this.’? Even harder is this test. For years the Adelaide daily, The Advertiser, used the new release of Penfolds Grange to randomly stop city strollers and ask them to pass comment on an El cheapo compared to the Grange. Mostly no one had a clue.
Have you heard of wine options games? The Australian version began in Sydney with a group of regular drinkers trying to guess the origin of a masked bottle. The presenter begins with a general question such as the country of origin with two or three options then steadily homes in on the identity by asking the variety, the vintage, the district and enough minutia till the winner is left. If you have a lucky day, it is possible to have no idea and correctly guess your way to being the last person standing.
Identifying the wine or knowing what you are drinking and the quality are the essence of what makes wine endlessly interesting. Parts of these tests are used in professional show judging across Australia and you need to know the consequences.
Consumers judge wine with every purchase though confidence is fragile, and a few disappointing selections has us turning back to what we know. Here are two new Glug wines which you do not know and will expand your tasting horizon, the Glug ‘The Long Shot’ Barossa Valley Primitivo Shiraz 2023 and Kitts Creek Barossa Valley Grenache Mataro Rosé 2023.
In the late 1970s I wished to know more about French Champagne and with a group of staff and friends formed a tasting group. We advanced enough that two staff, Chris Shanahan and Adrian Marsden Smedley competed in Sydney and were awarded respectively the Vin de Champagne Award professional class by the Comité Interprofessionell du Vin de Champagne in 1981 and 1986.
To top off our training it was necessary to line up the best of the best, the Dom Perignon’s, the Bollinger RD’s, Krug and Roederer Crystal-those sorts of wines. So it was one Saturday afternoon in 1986 we assembled to tune up out palates with the luxury styles, and of course boost our contestant.
My wife with her friend poured and arranged the sets of eight glasses while we waited outside, then went shopping. For a tasting at this high level I use dim lighting to reduce clues from colour and ask for calm and silence as we concentrate on what is in the glass.
We moved from glass to glass, then murmuring broke out, ‘silence, you know the rules’, I heard ‘Jesus this is hard’, ‘silence’, yet I was having difficulty seeing the differences. Something had to give. The murmurs grew into rumblings. Tasters began to pass glasses back and forth, ‘my number 2 tastes like your number 4’, ‘does your number 6 taste the same as mine’. I lost control and glasses were being passed back and forth, faster and faster. Chaos had taken over.
Needing light, I opened the blinds to a Champagne disaster. The colour differences showed the tasting sets were not the same for each taster and we had each started with a set of eight identical wines. So, one had all the Krug and another all the Roederer Crystal and with wines being passed back and forth they were all now hopelessly muddled. A mistake by the new pouring helper or a set up!
I took control. We have a small problem which cannot be untangled, just remain calm, exchange glasses and let’s drink them all. I will lead the drinking-once I have identified the Krug. And for the record note. Each of us did see differences in the identical line up, depressing proof that the pre-tasting conditioning can control an outcome.
Now let’s return to the Australian wine judging circuit. There are now 74 annual wine shows and many of the panel will be from the 348 accredited judges. The idea behind shows is to improve the standard of wine in your glass which is called ‘improving the breed’.
Now improving the breed is the belief that winemakers can steadily make better and better wine with each passing vintage. Show judging in turn implies these improvements will be recognised in the show system and so encourage further improvements. Yet what if these claims are not true. No matter what training judges do they are not getting better having reached the limits of human ability some time ago. The same applies to wines as todays Penfolds Granges are not better than those made by Max Schubert.
What instead happens are distortions that reflect the building of a bias. Wine is a social activity and does not remain in a steady state so it changes while other pressures that alter what we drink seemingly grow from nothing. This plays out in our larger society in all manner of activities perhaps best highlighted by the fashion industry.
In Australia we have the curse of cool over warm climates and finesse and elegance over a full-bodied drink. What happens in an option game when you ask, did this wine cost $10, $50 or $150? In the wine business you can distort the story or use pre-conditioning to come up with any result.
Glug likes to make good drinks so try these Fareham Estate Clare Valley Shiraz 2022 and BVWS Barossa Valley Wine Supply Barossa Valley Durif 2020.
So, Drink Widely and Drink Well,
David Farmer
P.S. One last word before I abandon options games. In Canberra in the late 1970s we staged an option games competition with half a dozen teams, and I recall winning the team and individual result. Yet I have never told you what options games taught me. It was this. There is a limit to what you can identify or can know from a taste and then recall, so please ease up.
Your moment has arrived. Imagine a large cellar, an unidentified red is poured, ‘what do you think of this.’? Even harder is this test. For years the Adelaide daily, The Advertiser, used the new release of Penfolds Grange to randomly stop city strollers and ask them to pass comment on an El cheapo compared to the Grange. Mostly no one had a clue.
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