News, Notes and Dusty Bottle Items Reconciliation Edition

July 23 2010

News, Notes and Dusty Bottle Items – Reconciliation Edition

Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of a wine glass …

Managing “The Conversation”

I have an appreciation for couples who share their wine enthusiasm. My wife Lindsay enjoys wine, but is far removed from having enough interest to be considered a wine enthusiast. My interest in wine is, largely, an individual pursuit.

Because of the gulf that can be created by passionate interests that aren’t shared in a relationship, there are situations that need occasional massaging. The act of buying wine when you have a basement full of wine is one situation that requires careful explanation. Spending a significant amount of time writing about wine, sometimes in lieu of time spent together, is another landmine that requires careful and persistent navigation.

Now, I’d be lying if said there hasn’t been a conversation in which my perspective was different than Lindsay’s perspective about how I prioritized my free time around the good grape.

In her view, there’s a sense of, “Why do you spend so much time doing something for strangers, when you could be doing something with your wife.”

It’s a rational argument, unless you’re consumed with the victory of creating something from nothing, a blank page that is soon filled with 800 words that mean something. Men are from Mars and Woman are from Venus was written for a reason.

However, recent research distills the notion of conflict in a relationship into as tidy of a bundle as possible.

Dr. Keith Sanford, a professor at Baylor University conducted a research study, created a conflict assessment and determined that there are two primary issues when there is a disagreement in a relationship. According to Sanford, it all boils down to a “Perceived threat” – that one’s partner is being hostile, critical, blaming or controlling. And, “Perceived neglect” which is a perception that one’s partner is failing to make a desired contribution, commitment or investment in the relationship.

Within the realm of wine, wine writing and time spent, the biggest contributor to relationship strife has to be “Perceived threat” – as in, spending too much time with mistress wine.

Something tells me that armed with this knowledge I’m going to be more diligent going forward about taking the dog for a walk together and making sure the trash is never so full that you have to do the double arm compactor.

Another Noun to Lose its Meaning

The word “transparency” is one of those words that has transcended meaning and moved into nothingness cliché. Another word quickly traversing the same path is, “artisanal.”

A recent, lengthy piece in Details magazine discusses the cultural phenomena of “artisanal” products.

While overall, the piece is mostly a frothy first-person narrative absent much in the form of a takeaway, there was one excerpt that jumped out at me. Quoting the article:

”… We’re all agents of the artisanal movement now—call us authentivores, hungry for backstory, intrigued by provenance, hooked on the high of ever more specialized knowledge, and willing to spend to get it.”

It’s a good observation. And, it’s an observation that the boutique portion of the wine industry is well-poised to continue to capitalize on – “artisanal” for the wine industry isn’t marketing schtick to back into, it’s the reality. “Artisanal” as a word may lose its meaning, but it will be replaced by something else that really just boils down to finding an audience and telling a story.

Supertasters, So What?

In May, fueled by a “Supertaster” test released by Cornell University, there was a mini-spike online in discussion about the phenomenon of being a “Supertaster.” Tim Hanni has a test and multiple other online resources have a test, as well. They all vary slightly in form.

Related to wine, however, who cares? It really means nothing at all.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is the nature of wine reviews and palates. It seems to me that one persistent argument about the 100 point systems, critics and such is the advice to find a critic who aligns with your palate.

Well, that’s good and simple on the surface, but aside from third-party definition of Robert Parker, Jr., I’m not sure that any critic has a stated palate definition, nor would they want to. It would require them to indicate bias, and objectivity is sacrosanct to the art of being a wine critic.

I know my preference is generally cool climate. I like food-friendly New World wines, fruit forward, but with depth, structure and an acidic backbone. I enjoy New Zealand and northern Rhone wines, as well. Yet, most mainstream critics would rather be caught dead then focusing in on a stylistic preference.

Even Parker bristles against such categorizations of his palate preferences.

Going forward, however, with the explosion of wine reviews online and what that means as wine criticism becomes more democratized, yet chaotic, I think a scenario of having a wine critic, any type of wine critic, quantify their palate and palate preferences by some independent, objective means is going to occur. Think of it like a fingerprint, or a passport of sorts—validating security credentials as a credible measure for their reviews.

Having a palate tested and then quantified by bias as a known reference marker for wine reviews then becomes an important criteria for credibility that can then be augmented by embedded knowledge and wisdom – how much does a wine critic know about wine, separate from the validity of their palate profile – that then begins to separate the wheat from the chaff in an increasingly confusing world of wine criticism.

The wine world might not be ready for a quantifying benchmark in the realm of the subjective, but neither is it ready to spin into the chaos, the trajectory it’s headed with the online wine world increasingly complementing mainstream media.

Something is needed to make sense of it all.