Good Taste Versus Personal Taste
On reputation, scores and the company around the table - and why the wine we admire is not always the wine we want to drink.
One blunt way to define good taste is the confident recognition of the obvious exceptional qualities of certain wines. And it always happens in company, never in isolation.
In that setting, good taste is knowing the value of the cards in your hand. You play them and expect to take the trick - the nod of approval from the room. But what happens if the others at the table are playing a different game altogether, by rules you have not been shown?
A bottle of red Burgundy is opened. The person who brought it tells us it is a very fine example, iconic even, for those in the know. This is a familiar opening move, a way of fishing for anticipatory approval, leading with the highest trump to force the trick. We all do it in the wine trade. It is the verbal equivalent of saying: “Pay attention now, this one matters.” Then everyone takes a mouthful and weighs in. The opinions scatter immediately. Some taste real quality and say so. Some want to like it because they feel they ought to admire what it stands for. Some recognise a technically accomplished wine that simply is not their thing. And some find nothing in it at all that chimes with their sense of taste. Eight people, eight verdicts.
Plenty of things tilt the response before the wine even hits the glass. The mood of the room. The person pouring it and the weight of their endorsement. The appellation, the producer, the name on the label. All the physical and psychological cues that colour a first impression. I would like to think I arrive neutral when someone tells me a wine is great, though hearing it talked up can quietly set up its own resistance, a reflex pushing the other way. What actually moves me, one way or the other, are the smells and flavours and textures in the glass itself. Beyond that I am biased in ways I cannot fully see or account for. Call them pre-existing preferences.
Our personal taste comes out as opinion, shared among friends. Some wines stir us into something close to fervour. Others leave us cold and we cannot honestly pretend otherwise. We are entitled to our reactions, but there is no need to run a wine down at the table, since that only reflects on the person who brought it and the taste of everyone who agreed it was worth opening.
And yet wine taste is also codified. Critics, writers and the trade hand out marks within quasi-official scoring systems, marks that anyone can look up in a few seconds. The implication is that a gold standard exists out there, that a wine carries objective qualities you can total up on a points scale and settle the matter. Whether or not you have tasted the wine yourself, and even when you have, those numbers will shift how you see it. But any tasting is a snapshot in time, nothing more. An authoritative score creates a psychological expectation of quality and value that cannot be a fixed truth. Even within a panel of experienced tasters, opinion shades and shifts from glass to glass.
The best wine, for me, is the one that meets what I want at that particular moment. It is not the sum of its parts laid out for marking, the flavour and texture broken down and added up to a precise number. It is the experience - the easy, unthinking way the liquid goes down, the feelings it stirs, the satisfaction it leaves behind, and all the reasons above and beyond the wine itself that combine to lift the moment.
That is taste. And no scoring sheet has ever caught it.