Going Seasonal On Your A**

In my line of work, informing you about wine I hope you will buy, I write a lot of prose. Most of it is boilerplate stuff; somewhere between 100 and 350 words highlighting what I find exciting and relevant about a particular wine in the hopes you will relate. I don't find the writing hard and I am rarely forced to write about something I am not genuinely passionate about. Marginally harder is writing longer themes that require more general remarks by way of introduction. Conventionally these remarks are prefaced by some reference something to which the reader and the writer both can relate, in my experience, more than anything, the damned seasons. If I see one more wine write-up that begins 'There's finally a fall chill in the air and we are more and more reaching for heartier red wines,' or 'Spring is in the air so a young man's fancy turns to Rose,' I think I'll barf....or, at very least, hit that delete key hard. I mean, I like the seasons as much as the next guy (I actually miss having four real ones like in Japan and Back East) and relish their changes, but if you ever catch me writing about them like that, call me on it!

Importer Kermit Lynch is still my benchmark for wine writing. Talk about selling the 'sizzle' of wine: Kermit's simple, understated and prosaic prose always puts me right there next to him, eating freshly harvested mussels and swilling Cassis Blanc at a beachfront cafe in Marsailles or rummaging through dusty old magnums of Miguoa with the Peyrauds in their cellar in Bandol. It's never about an individual wine so much as it is about what it might be like experiencing that moment in wine. I think this sort of writing most closely taps into my own emotional relationship with the product. I love the romance of wine and when a wine actually fulfills the promise of that romance, I love the wine! Alas, Kermit isn't writing for his newsletter as much these days as the blossoming renaissance of his original career in music seems to be taking center stage and, though he has a stupendous, highly committed staff doing the buying, writing and selling, in this age of Facebook, Twitter and immediate gratification, even the KLWM newsletter seems to have lost its innocence.

Parenthetically, this is a topic with which we find ourselves struggling at PRIMA. How do we stay relevant and fresh in an era where simply having knowledge, passion and commitment are not enough? We've always prided ourselves in our ability to discover interesting and unique wines and articulate our passion for them with integrity and verve, but how do we make that stand out amid the endless background static and constant pulses of wine blurbage shot out by all sorts of newly minted, self-anointed experts that assaults the average consumer every day? If you think you have an answer, let me know!

And while I am on the subject of wine writing, let me take a minute to comment about writers using the clinical 100-point scale to evaluate wine. My basic premise is, and stop me if you've heard this before, that it is futile, if not downright misleading, to attempt to so irrevocably quantify the essentially unquantifiable. I am a sports guy, and as a practicing sports guy, I appreciate statistics. I could calculate batting averages at 8 years old and when sports pundits break down baseball and football games by using numbers to quantify the chances of, say, a guy getting a hit in a particular situation, I get that. And that approach, twenty years ago, made sense to me with wine as well. I felt that knowing a wine's alcohol, pH and TA helped me understand a wine better, but I realized at a certain point, that other than helping me anticipate what a wine might 'feel' like, it didn't help me understand how it actually tasted and if I would even like it or not. And a 'score' didn't mean squat.

It's important for me to remember that tasting wine is ephemeral; what's in the glass is only a snapshot of its existence at that moment and even if you could draw quantifiable data from it, that data would be valid only as long as the exact conditions under which that wine was tasted could be replicated. The factors that affect one's actual impressions of a bottle of wine are almost too many to mention, the most obvious being the wine's current physical state as well as the taster's own. Giving a wine a numerical score is like trying to create a career's worth of statistics based on one or two at-bats!

Case in point: The other morning I was packing a case of 2007 Cotes du Rhone purchased by a customer in Las Vegas. He had ordered the wine three months or so ago but we held the box here until things cooled off by him a bit. I wondered how that wine, long sold out and un-re-tasted here, would show differently than it did in earlier in the summer if I were to steal one from Ed's case (I resisted) and, in fact, how it was going to show for Ed once he opened it in Nevada, hundreds of miles away, in the desert, in his own personal environment. So, supposing I had scored that wine back in June, maybe an 88. Or was it 89? Is it still an 88 today? Has it graduated to 90 or even 91? And next year? And the year after? Can we take its temperature somehow without opening it? Uh oh.....the Cotes du Rhone is only 86 today. Better drink it all up! But in the wine world, those points matter. No one wants an 88, but give the same wine a 90 (a difference of 2 points, mind you) and watch it jump.

Critics that attach absolute scores to bottles of wine are creating artificial expectations. The recent issue of Robert Parker's very fine Wine Advocate is a case in point. An astounding number of 2007 Chateauneuf du Papes scored 100 points. Tough to improve on that score, ain't it?! And good for them. To a wine, they are at the top of the Southern Rhone quality pyramid. But what of the poor Clos des Papes, by all accounts an incredible wine? It mustered a mere 99+. What did it do wrong? Was the label scuffed? I mean what's a wine to do to get a perfect score around here? Forever it will have live down the fact that it somehow failed where those others didn't. By the way, Mr. Parker and his team do an incredible job with their remarkably well written and consistent tasting notes and I think if you want to get to 'know' a wine, it is far more valuable to read them than to skip to the end and use that number as gospel.

Perfection in wine, to me, has nothing to do with a score: it's drinking that right wine at the right time. Damn, I can't tell you how many times I've had a 'small' wine that showed 'big' because it was opened at the perfect conflux of time and space. That's where the transcendence occurs. And that's what the traditional wine merchant does for you! We say 'this, my friend, may be the perfect wine for you someday. It will take your evening from the merely ordinary to something elevated and sublime.' Go forth and enjoy.

And fuck the score.