You. True!

The vineyards can have the ultimate soil, drainage and weather — the taste of terroir up to here. The winemaker can be skilled like none other. The owner, handsome, with a lot of bucks. The winery, inevitably, can be state-of-the art, or even beyond into another state! The oak in which the wine ages is French, mais oui. But only you can make the wine taste good — or not.

Anyone who really knows about the physiology of taste knows this, but doesn’t like to write about it, because it makes wine words (or anything you taste for that matter) sound like the mysterious word mumbo-jumbo in which many wine writers willingly wallow. You know — hints of ripe Asian moon fruit peel framed by sub-tones of toasted Nepalese pecan and graced by whatever. 

Let’s discuss this amorphous idea of taste swings in more concrete terms. First case: let’s take a nice, easy going Italian white wine. You first tasted this wine in Italy on a beautiful spring day after a great night’s sleep. The restaurant had a view to die for. The food was so good you don’t want the meal to end. You are madly in love with the person across the table and that person loves you madly back. How does the wine taste? How about — “Oh — my — God! Is this good, or what?” You dutifully write this wine down, but you lose the piece of paper somewhere between the restaurant and home.

Before you get carried away, here is the second case scenario. You actually didn’t lose the name of that wine. You just purchased a bottle and now you have that very same wine on your kitchen counter. Wait!  This morning’s mail had a note from the IRS that you owe a large tax bill plus assorted penalties. Your wife went out to play bridge with her dentist, who happens to be very handsome. You suspect that he may be about to trump your queen. There is a hole in the roof and what is left in the fridge for your supper is some cold meat that has a green cast to it. You open the wine and take a sip. How does the wine taste? Yuck! How could you have been so deceived?

Before you slit your wrist here is a third scenario. You are an important wine judge. This morning, you will be tasting 40 Italian wines “blind.” One of them is that is that nice bottle you had in Italy on that beautiful spring day. You have 20 seconds to sip, judge, write up tasting notes and move on to the next wine. That wine you so loved and then so detested, you now score a middle of the road 85 points. How can this possibly happen?

There is no doubt that taste can be considerably affected by the time you taste a wine, the mood you’re in, with whom you taste it, what you are eating with it and how you feel, in general. Got a cold? Forget wine. In a rush, why bother? The wine that costs $12 at your wine discounter is $60 on the list. Pass.

The point is what may be moon fruit overtones at one tasting may be lychee nuts the next time or, even worse, prune nuts. That is why, in my not humble opinion, all this chat about wine and food pairings is so much wine bunko. There is so much going on that affects the taste of a wine, for better or worse. 

It reminded me of a superb essay on “not rushing” wine enjoyment by an English wine writer, Andrew Jefford in Decanter Magazine. Jefford use as an analogy two recordings made by the utterly brilliant and idiosyncratic pianist, the late Glenn Gould.  The first recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations took 38 breathless minutes and launched Gould’s career.  At the end of his too-short life, Gould made another recording of the variations; this time he took 51 minutes — a big difference in musical terms.

Gould noted that in the intervening years, he had “discovered slowness — a kind of autumnal repose.” Jefford commented that the opening aria of the second recording “inches forward with an almost anti-gravitational, feather-blown slowness; its sweet, measured perfection is spun out with the immaculate caution of a spider walking a web.”

What has this to do with wine enjoyment — plenty. Wine can be an ever-changing activity, which involves refining one’s taste and most of all, allowing the time to fully enjoy a wine. Get beyond the oak nuances, the Asian moon fruit, and quick; let’s give it a score. Not only should you drink good wine with good food, but also with good friends. And why rush this wonderful experience. Savor the moment.  Now watch that wine improve.

Ed Schwartz has been drinking wine for years and is wine editor of the Nob Hill Gazette, a Bay Area lifestyle publication.