Promoting appreciation of wine through education © 2024
Don't Be Cowed by the Wine Writers
By Hamilton Mowbray JHU Class of '50
[From Johns Hopkins Magazine, Sept. 1996 - www.jhu.edu/jhumag, reprinted
with permission]
I am anti wine writers. The fellows who put their lives on the line for a buck leave
me as cold as a North Sea mackerel. They prey on the gullibility of untutored and
timid consumers to inflate their own egos, line their pockets, and at the same time
guzzle more wine (all expenses deductible) than they could otherwise afford. With a
stroke of the pen, following a besotted session with 10, 15, or 20 different wines,
they can do more damage to a producer's well-being than a San Francisco
earthquake or an invasion of the Mediterranean fruit fly.
As a former producer myself, I do not speak from pique, because I have received
better treatment at their hands than I probably deserve. I speak on a point of
principle, and that principle is simply this: In matters of taste--and I am speaking of
gustatory experience--there can be no arbiter but one's own true sensory impulses as
they are fed to that marvelous computer, the brain. That computer is uniquely
programmed for each one of us.
What we need, instead of wine writers with their Olympian observations about this
wine or that, is a serious movement to educate the public about the wines of the
world, their basic differences, their healthful and beneficial qualities, and their
general place in the whole scheme of gracious living. What we do not need is
someone who tells us--and I select at random--that a given wine is "intense, rather
forward nosed, displaying touches of mint and eucalyptus; rather arid and grassy on
the palate, yet developing depth and fruit after 30 minutes breathing in the glass."
Nor do we need someone who erects a 100-point scale to judge wines, throws away
the first 50 points, and then makes a big deal about a wine scored as 87 against one
that scores a mere 85, according to him.
Certainly bad wines are made and marketed. The grape is amazingly perceptive
about climatic influences, and the mood it projects in a finished wine tells us a lot
about how it felt during the growing season. A cold, wet summer produces the
"blahs." A temperate, moderately dry summer with good ripening heat toward
autumn does the opposite. Any winemaker can make a good wine then. Despite the
vicissitudes, wine of some sort has to be made every year.
Good winemakers can succeed in making very palatable wines in the worst of years,
only to be damned by a wine writer who has never set foot in a vineyard or a winery,
and has heard that 19XX was a poor vintage. Some of the best wines I have drunk
have been from so-called poor vintages and at give-away prices because bad press
had condemned the year.
Ideally, the only way for a consumer to learn about wines is to drink them. At today's
prices, that can be expensive, but there are ways of sampling and learning about
wines with relatively little dipping into the pocket. Many retail stores will pour
samples on certain specified days. Often they will have the winemaker in the store to
pour, and it's free. The American Wine Society through its regional chapters offers
guidance, education, and sociability in the ways of wine appreciation. And if all else
fails, what's to prevent a group of 10 to 15 congenial people from getting together on
their own to taste several wines that singly they may not wish to purchase?
Don't let the wine writers cow you into submission. Your palate is an expression of
the heterogeneity of your past experience. It is your past experience and belongs to
no one else. It is as personal as your sex life and doubtless connected with it, and
nobody, but nobody, has the right to tell you what to enjoy or how to enjoy it.
Former APL researcher Hamilton Mowbray '50 is a founding member of the
American Wine Society and founding director of the Montbray School of
Wine in Columbia, Maryland, now closed. From 1972 until 1994, he owned
and operated Montbray Wine Cellars in northern Maryland.