Judgment at Geyserville

The distinguished panel before tasting

How different is it to taste and review wine with a group of people rather than to sit alone and quietly rate them? I find that it’s drastically different, and that it’s a subject rarely written about. (Like just about every damned stupid thing I write about on HoseMaster of Wine™.) Are the reviews of a single wine writer who evaluates wine on his own, in the privacy (or emptiness) of his own mind, more valuable than the reviews of a group of wine experts who taste and talk about each wine they rate? If you look at who wields all the power in the wine world these days, it seems the single reviewer is far more valued. The Wine Advocate and Wine Spectator still have the most clout when it comes to wine sales, at least in the United States, and their reviews are done by individuals.

Yet we all profess that wine, more than any other alcoholic beverage, is a social drink. I may occasionally drink wine alone, but when I do, I certainly don’t drink the best wines. I think this is true of most wine lovers. When you share wine with others who love wine, or simply others whom you love, it’s a very different experience. It’s obvious why that is—wine appreciation is subjective. Every beginning wine jackass will tell you that. But instead of celebrating its subjectivity, we try our damnedest to make it objective. Assign it a number, proclaim it Double Gold, slap a badge on it, make a notch for it in our wines-I’ve-had-sex-with bedpost. We preach subjectivity, but our insecurity leads us to pretend objectivity.

Even when I write my much-loathed Wine Essays, I’m influenced greatly by the astuteness of my wife’s palate. She’s a keen judge of wine, and, in many ways, she’s a lot less invested in it, which brings more candor to her opinions. I’ve always tried to see the good in every wine, tried to hear what it has to say, questioned myself when I didn’t like a wine—what am I missing? I think my wife is simply less burdened, and can forthrightly say what’s on her mind. And say it in a thoughtful and insightful manner. Her opinion carries great weight with me, and certainly influences, and often changes, my opinions. Does that make my opinions more or less valuable? Well, hard to see how they could be less valuable, but you get the point.

When you taste wine alone, and taste them by the thousands, I don’t care who you are, it’s boring. Smelling, swirling, tasting, taking notes, spitting, assigning a number…over and over and over. And with only that one scary and insecure voice in your head to listen to. Wine critics are not superhuman, or without human frailty. If anything, they’re more fragile than the rest of us, filled with all sorts of whims and quirks, agendas and insecurities. This is not to insult them, though I do plenty of that, but simply to put their job and what they bring to it into perspective. Like Gods, we assign them omniscience when they are actually simply indefatigable. We believe them to have superior palates, when they actually have merely superior imaginations and vocabularies. What the best critics have is passion, knowledge, experience, and a capacity for communication. What they can’t ever have is objective or perfect judgment. They’ll humbly agree with that, then in the next breath tell you what you should be drinking.

Of course, neither can a panel of judges have objective or perfect judgment. But it’s a joy to sit and taste wines with a group of very qualified wine lovers. Andy Perdue, who runs the indispensable Great Northwest Wines website and is wine critic for the Seattle Times, offered me the opportunity to sit and taste a dozen Cabernet Sauvignons along with him, Mike Dunne, Dan Berger, and Ellen Landis, back in January of this year. They are writing about the tasting from their perspectives, and here I am doing the same from mine. Ellen has published her extensive notes on each wine already. Mike published his thoughts yesterday in the Sacramento Bee (which, due to some dread and mysterious disease, has suffered : collapse). Andy’s column should appear soon (and it has appeared--go here), and Dan has said he will write about the tasting in his worthwhile email publication Vintage Experiences. We’ll beat this dead horse until it’s Elmer’s.

Andy’s concept was to taste Cabernets from Washington against Cabernets from Napa Valley and Sonoma County. Andy brought four wines from Horse Heaven Hills, speaking of dead horses, Mike Dunne brought four from Napa Valley, while Dan Berger brought four from Sonoma County, three of which bore the Alexander Valley appellation. We tasted (at the terrific Diavola Restaurant in Geyserville, a must stop if you’re visiting the area), discussed and awarded each wine a medal, in the manner of most wine competitions. All five of us judge in a lot of competitions around the country, even around the world, so it’s a comfortable and familiar way to give some kind of shape to the results.

It would be presumptuous to give any kind of validity to the results of our group endeavor. For the most part, it was just fun. These are opinionated, articulate, thoughtful, slightly wacky folks. Hell, they invited the HoseMaster, which speaks volumes. I won’t bore you with tasting notes. I’m perfectly capable of boring you without them. But I’ll share some random thoughts with you, all of which are generally useless.

I am of the opinion that often the best, most interesting, wines in a tasting like this land in the middle of the final rankings. The most polished and least offensive wines drift to the top, often engendering the least discussion and disagreement. I’m not convinced that makes them the best wines. In fact, I think it only makes them the safest wines. Or, from another perspective, it makes them the wines that show themselves the easiest and quickest. I think I am more attracted to wines that make a slow striptease of it, showing one seductive layer after another, but only after some coaxing, and probably a bunch of money. I’ve learned this from years of experience. Some of it with wine. I’m rarely wildly passionate about the highest ranking wines. It’s the ones in mid-pack that usually enthrall me.

Two wines emerged on top, the Jordan 2010 Alexander Valley and the Kendall-Jackson 2010 Grand Reserve Sonoma County. This surprised all of us, especially when we found out that Mike had included some Napa Valley heavy hitters—Montelena, Corison “Kronos,”  Smith-Madrone “Cook’s Flat,” and Antinori’s Antica. I liked both the Jordan and the K-J. So Sonoma County came out on top, at least on paper. The judges’ decisions are final, after all.

Were those the most interesting, most compelling, most discussed wines? Not to my recollection. I was especially fond of the wine that ranked somewhere in the middle—Double Canyon 2010 Horse Heaven Hills. I’d never heard of the winery, but I loved the wine. It had just a touch of herbs, sage I thought, which I adore in Cabernet, and it was silky and elegant. I kept going back to it, a sure sign a wine is compelling. Though you often don’t vote for it as your favorite, the wine that has the least left in the glass at the end of a tasting is certainly the one that was most fascinating to you.

Corison’s famed “Kronos” bottling also finished in the middle of the rankings. I used the word “simple” for it in my notes. That’s certainly wrong, and, frankly, embarrassing. But that’s the danger of tasting but a few sips of any wine. It’s the equivalent of speed dating. You really don’t want to run your life by shallow evaluations. When the tasting was finished and we ordered dinner, it was the “Kronos” that I reached for. I never picked up the top two wines. The "Kronos" is a brilliant wine, a wine that outclasses its judges. And will end up being a trophy wine in anyone's wine cellar.

So what do we gather from this Judgment at Geyserville? In a word, squat. I learned a lot from tasting with such a grand bunch of talented wine folk, but our results were only mildly interesting. Like I have to tell you that.

Ever ask yourself what would have happened if the Judgment of Paris in 1976 had been overwhelmingly won by the French wines? It certainly could have happened that way. Maybe they should have gone Best Out of Three. There’s no doubt the results of that famous tasting changed California’s wine future forever. Would that have been the case if it had been a single wine critic passing judgment? Did the fact that it was an all-French panel make the results more valid? I’d say no to both questions. Did it prove California wines are better, or as good as, their French counterparts? Of course not. It didn’t prove much at all; and but for the presence of one reporter, it would have been as lost to history as our first Judgment at Geyserville most certainly will be. The Judgment of Paris proved only the power of the press, not the superiority of the wines. What did our little Geyserville tasting prove? We like to drink wine in the company of our peers, and eat pizza. Not necessarily in that order.

The more distinguished panel after tasting