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Invitation to a Winetasting

Many of us are familiar with the Friday night wine tasting scene at the local wineshop, or, if we've ventured to vineyards in wine country here or abroad, with the basic tasting room set-up with its bar, bottles, glasses, and the bucket or barrel tucked discreetly into the corner for spitting. In France, however, there is a kind of tasting that the public never sees, official tastings which take place some months to some years after the harvest and whose purpose is to ensure that what is in the bottle lives up to the label. French wines are divided into four>appellation d'origine controll�e), VDQS (wines denominated of superior quality), VDP (wines of a distinct region), and VDT (table wines). Each classification has separate and different rules that dictate, among other things, the way vines in a given parcel are trained, how many vines are planted per hectare, the actual grape varieties and their proportion in the final blend, the maximum allowed yield, whether or not irrigation is permitted, and the quality and location of the vines themselves.

Yves Jouffreau-Hermann of Clos de Gamot, one of the winemakers I had been writing about for the previous two years, invited me one late winter day to go along with him to the Maison de Vin, the regional administrative offices of the appellation of Cahors, to attend one such d�gustation d'agr�ment. He invited me because he thought it would interest me and because he had taken it upon himself to ensure that my education in the French ways of wine was as complete and varied as possible, particularly if I were going to write a book about it. The jury is generally made up of winemakers, wine wholesalers, an enologist or two, and a few of the local officials; today's group was going to taste five ros�s, two dry whites, and one sweet white, all of whose makers hoped to be able to put "Vin de Pays du Lot" on their labels, and thus get two to three times more euros per liter than otherwise.

By 10a.m. most of the members were milling about outside the tasting room, gossiping and trading news about the previous harvest and how the new wine was coming along. Here, by the way, if you're picturing some quaint 18th century stone building with old wooden floors and smoke-blackened beams, you can give it up right now. The Maison de Vin is one of those unfortunate blocky, stucco-covered 1970s abominations, all concrete and steel, with all the charm of a hospital, an antiseptic place where, glancing about into offices and rooms, my first impressions was that I might as well have been in a state welfare office or tax department, so little was wine in any form in evidence.

Monsieur X, who was the ringmaster of the day's ceremonies, finally arrived with the key and let us in to one of the oddest spaces I have ever seen. The room was sixty feet on a side, entirely open, with a modest platform at one end. The rest of the room was taken up by what looked like library carrels in rows, basically wooden desks with walls on the left and right but, in front, not a wall but a wide railing whose purpose was a mystery to me. Monsieur X invoked the gravity of the day's events, handed out scoring sheets, and the jury, some 15 strong, each took a seat at one of the carrels, as did I.

Earlier, on the drive in, Yves had explained that he and his wife, Martine, volunteered every year to participate because they thought it was important - important to stay in touch with their fellow winemakers and what they were doing, important to maintain the quality of the wines of their appellation. Even so, it was burdensome. The jury didn't just gather, taste, grade, and leave. No, before the first sip was gargled and spat, the two had gone through six half-day workshops that began with an examination of the physiological and behavioral bases of wine tasting, its techniques and methodology, and ended with test tastings at which benchmarks for the various criteria had been set. Test tastings? Benchmarks?

"Well, take acidity, especially in a white wine." Yves said. "When is a white wine flabby - lacking acid, and when is it sour, with too much acid?" Essentially, and here I am simplifying to an extraordinary degree what is a subtle and complex process, they had tasted together samples of wine manipulated in various ways to sketch out rough benchmarks for the various descriptors of how the wine looked ( la vue - its appearance), smelled (le nez - the nose), and tasted (la bouche - in the mouth). For acidity, a sample might have either naturally lacked acid (confirmed by testing) to fix the low end, and then been doctored with increasing amounts of citric acid to establish the upper end. The descriptors within each category can describe things quite obvious - the color of a ros� should not be orange but some shade of pink, and definitely not red. They can also be maddeningly opaque: the four descriptors for a ros� under "Nez"are intensity, cleanness, finesse, and complexity, and ros�s are the least complex wines to judge!

We sat, each in a carrel, each carrel outfitted with, to the left, a miniature stainless steel sink whose faucet was controlled with a foot pedal, to the right a translucent light panel whose illumination helped us judge the color of a wine. Corks began to pop, and, from my place in the back row, I then heard the first notes of a what became a chorus of clinks, the gentle scrape of wineglasses being swirled on the stainless steel of the tabletop, the distinctive whooshes, gargles, and spitting as the room began to taste en masse, the whole punctuated with the periodic susurrus of various sinks going off and on, throats being cleared, and the muted words of tasters talking to themselves.

I was just wondering if I should stand up and ask for some wine when a disembodied hand appeared at the front of my carrel and slid a bottle labeled only with a numbered tag along the front rail. I poured a sample, then slid the bottle to the right, where another disembodied hand reached for it. We were tasting the ros�s first. I looked at my tasting form, my fiche technique,which asked me to rate first the appearance of the wine on a scale of 0 to 5 in two subcategories of intensity and orange-ness. Intensity. Hmmm. The wine was very pale pink, so I gave it a 2, acceptable. Orange-ness? Yves had told me that an orange tinge in a ros� is a sign that it is already beginning to oxidize, the constituents that give it its color already coming apart and falling out of the wine. In other words, the orange is a sign of a poorly made wine. This ros� had no hint of orange about it, so I gave it a 4. And then the next bottle appeared. I glanced down at my fiche, noting that I had four more evaluations to make under Nez, and a further seven under Bouche.I skipped to the next sample, quickly pouring, swirling, and then sniffing.

Intensity, cleanness, finesse, and complexity. I could handle that. I stuck by nose in the glass and inhaled. Yaggh! Now, here's a thing about tasting new - five months old-wine. It stinks. Literally. Many of the leftover chemical constituents of fermentation do not have a pleasant odor. Given sufficient time, they disappear all together, and the ordinary consumer has no idea the lovely buttery/vanilla notes of their chard were once masked by the unforgettable pong of a teenage boy's gym socks. Yves again: "You have to taste past the stink, Michael. The odor of fermentation, that sits on top of the wine, but you can still perceive what else the wine has to offer." He was right, of course, and when I went on to taste this sample, it confirmed what my nose had been telling me. This wine had a fault, a rankness in the nose and mouth that signaled something had gone wrong during its making. I failed it down the line.

By this time, I had passed on two more bottles without even trying to taste them, deciding to concentrate on the Bouche descriptors in the next sample, a white. Intensity, acidity, fruit/floral, bitterness, richness, persistence of the alcohol, and something called franchise, which I never did figure out. I swirled and smelled, took a sip, spat, sipped and swallowed, passed on the next two bottles untasted, and set to work. Okay, right off, this was a very light wine, both in color and body and richness. After an initial burst of fruit in the mouth, it just sat there. Not enough acidity. It had a sugary quality rather than a sweetness I could tie to any flavor (vanilla has sweetness, for example, as do all the jam fruits), and, being so light and flaccid, there was no persistence of taste, or alcohol, on the back end. Failed.

I had just begun to take up the last sample when, as if on cue, everyone else rose and handed in their sheets, then gathered in small groups to discuss their scores. Of the eight wines we had tasted, four failed. Bummer. That meant their makers would have to sell them, probably in bulk, as vin de table, for pennies a liter. They were not worth the cost of the label, bottle, and cork.

I related my amazement at the speed with which the others had tasted, the whole event having taken less than fifteen minutes from start to finish. "It is a thing of first impressions, Michael." Yves' wife, Martine, advised. "You shouldn't think about it too much, just react to what is in the glass." She is right, I'm sure, but I'm still thinking about it�.

Posted by Michael at October 4, 2005

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