This lovely wine’s nose of lavender with a shade of parsnips simply asks to be be sipped to enable you to balance the elegant forestry redwood nose with the delicate weediness of dandelions and stinkweed palate, all brought to your table from, since one year ago, our family-owned winery.
I am positive you have all read something along those lines when seated in a restaurant (when you could go there without a mask, which might have helped in covering the ‘nose’) and preparing to taste the wine the sommelier brought to the table.
Of course, it may not have been quite so caustic or drastic as that which I have composed as an example, but what I have read many times makes me almost want, to use a good old English word, to puke. Descriptions like, “lofty white floral aromas and fragrant minerality on the nose; while on the palate the wine is plush and full-bodied, superbly fruit-forward with generous mixed red berry fruit, mineral and earth tones, integrated sweet oak spice, augmented by sagebrush undertones with gritty tannins, zippy acid and a persistent finish,” (courtesy Vivino.com).
Of course, if you cannot read French, then the information on this back label, of which more later, will not help you establish of what the nose comprises.
There are a few of my friends who can tell the difference between a red and a white, except by colour. And having said that, I’ve lost my wino friends, save those many who don’t care which it is as long as it is a red or a white. Oh, well. I think they know whom I mean. One of them has had many an experience in the past with me, when we were much younger and could drink at least five bottles of Chateauneuf du Pape over a dinner and then be able to find our way back to the hotel. Of course, neither of us could – or would have wanted – to afford even one bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape, but, in days of yore, we were on an expense account.
A ‘nose’, of course, means what the wine smells like, while a ‘palate’ could simply be stated as what the wine tastes like. In fact, to obtain the nose of a Chardonnay, a wine of which I do not like the palate, you have to stick your own nose so far into the glass to get the nose, you may cut the bridge of your nose open, or, at least, bruise it. And that’s the reason I don’t like the wine, the palate of it is, in my opinion, zero, tasteless.
Are you a wine snob? Oh, yes, such people do exist. But not I.
I think at one time in my life some years ago I must have had Wine CoVID-19, for my sense of ‘nose’ and ‘palate’ regarding wines seems to have disappeared. I can smell bacon frying and love the taste of salmon, but as for the nose of any wine and then the mandatory sip to get the palate, I may as well not waste the sommelier’s presentation and time. Oh, I can tell a good Malbec from an awful Malbec, but to tell a Malbec from a Pinot Noir, I would have to concentrate hard and come up with, likely, no decision.
But to get back to the wine snob, he, for I have never come across a she wine snob, always presents the bottle for inspection, I would say shows it, to his guests and announces what it is; he always then makes a show of uncorking the bottle and placing the cork on the table for examination before he decants his wine, or to put it in less snobbish tones, he always pours the wine out of the bottle through muslin or some other filter, but never a coffee filter for a wine snob, into a flagon or carafe. From there, he will ask who would like to taste it. Now, this is where the wine snob shows his snobbish expertise. He will watch you like a hawk to see how you pick up the glass, by the stem or by the bowl; how well do you observe the colour; how you take it to your nose to get the nose; how long you take to nose it; how long do you take to taste the palate; and, finally, how do you replace the glass on the table and mumble, ‘Yeah, that’s fine.’ Of course, you can tell whether he is a wine snob, too, for while you are doing your job, he should be silent, watching you, not making lame jokes with the rest of the table.
Now, if you come to chez moi (that’s a snobbish way of saying, my place), we will usually use my home made wine. No snob here. Unless it’s to use a bottle of wine brought by a guest. But my home made wine is of exquisite quality with a fine nose and noble palate. And, besides, you do not have to go through the rigorous business of being presented with the bottle or nosing or tasting it. No. Because, bottling is a waste of time and as soon as my wine is ready to bottle, I put it back into one of the plastic bags in which the concentrate comes, stick a rubber tap on it and shove it back into a box in which it or some other concentrate came. I call that boxing my wine. No snobbish procedure there. By the way, I get three 7-litre boxes (over 20 litres) out of the one box of concentrate. Works out about $3.50 a litre.
There is one other sign of snobbery, that being the labels. Here is one example:
and here is another:
Let us compare the labels.
Note that the former says it is from Brengman Brothers Estate.
My label says it is from Chateau Melville, and,
elsewhere on the label, at the home of Mel and Beryl.
The former specifically states it is a ‘white wine’, nothing special in other words.
My label states it is a Malbec.
The former says produced in 2016.
My label say this month, August, 2020. But it adds it is a Reserve. Oh, my, that’s almost being snobbish.
I have no idea what is on the back label of the former, but my wine does not have a back label, but simply states that it was made for two particular people, although it is quite likely that others will drink out of the same box. But my label also states that it was made with our own hands and no feet were used in the process.
So, you can see that there is a great deal to say about wine critiquing and, with these words of a wise man I leave you until my next post:
From time to time... 