Let’s say hello to a good old friend as we pull the cor … er, unscrew the cap on a bottle of Laurel Glen’s California “REDS,” a great-value favorite that I’ve been following since 1994.

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Yes, 95-98 percent of all wine is meant to be consumed within the first year. But if you’re morphing into a “collector” with over 50 bottles, you need to consider decent wine storage.

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If there’s one thing that Twitter is good for, it’s having meta conversations quietly in a room full of people talking about something else. Yesterday I posted Gerald Asher’s keynote speech to the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers. Towards the end of that speech he said something which sparked a conversation between a few of us attendees on Twitter.

He made the statement: “I’m not very sympathetic to the world of wine criticism. It’s not like music criticism, or any of the arts” in response to my question about whether he distinguished wine writing and wine criticism.

The resulting silent conversation on Twitter was great (if I do say so myself) and reminded me of a little 21st Century virtual version of the group interviews/discussions that Harper’s Monthly occasionally publishes, where they get a bunch of really interesting people in a room and get them to talk about some topic.

Now I don’t pretend that the players involved here represent luminaries of any kind, nor do I entirely know whether you’ll find the conversation as interesting as I did, but I went to the effort of extracting it from Twitter and cleaning it up a bit for your reading pleasure.

For your reference, the primary folks involved are myself; Howard Goldberg, a wine writer for the New York Times; and Bruce Schoenfeld, the food and wine columnist for Travel and Leisure Magazine. We are joined partway through the conversation by Lenn Thompson, fellow wine blogger at the New York Cork Report, and Amy Cleary, blogger and marketing director at U.C. Press, chimes in at one point as well.

Enjoy.

Howard G. Goldberg: I disagree with Gerald. Wine criticism and music criticism, addressing flowing, elusive, unreproducible phenomena, are parallel.

Alder Yarrow: I also disagree with Gerald, on that point. I think there are strong parallels between wine criticism and art criticism

Howard G. Goldberg: I’ve shared that idea but stumbled on a key element: You can return to the changeless artwork to say more. But never the wine.

Alder Yarrow: Well put, but I think they share a unique challenge: translating a wordless emotional experience into words, insufficiently

Bruce Schoenfeld: And also, art plays a vastly different role in life than wine, don’t you think? Though they share elements.

Howard G. Goldberg: Exactly. There’s an art of winemaking. The result can be artful. But wine itself is not art.

Alder Yarrow: Absolutely, wine is not art. Wine becomes part of our bodies, it is food. Art is always outside us.

Bruce Schoenfeld: But 99% of wines are just something to drink. No greater ambition is sought. All art is ambitious.

Alder Yarrow: Hmm, not sure I fully agree with the point about ambition.

Bruce Schoenfeld: Art is attempting to do/say something. Most wines are made like most bread is made. Just a food.

Bruce Schoenfeld: I agree w/ Alder. Art is outside us. Wine is something we ingest, and think about or not.

Howard G. Goldberg: Agreed, Bruce, just a food. But I feel that some vintners strive to make philosophical statements.

Lenn Thompson: Don’t agree that all art fits the “attempts to do/say something” characterization.

Alder Yarrow: Some kinds of art can simply be about evoking something, some pleasure. Not narrative.

Lenn Thompson: I think that truly great art (as with wine) does get inside us, moves us.

Howard G. Goldberg: I find that great wine moves me considerably. Any critic who has a prostate feels that way.

Bruce Schoenfeld: But the artist aspires to evoke the pleasure. It’s purposeful. That distinguishes art from nature.

Lenn Thompson: Winemaking is purposeful. It doesn’t happen on its own. Purpose varies of course.

Alder Yarrow: Agreed. Intention may distinguish art from nature, but it doesn’t distinguish art from wine.

Bruce Schoenfeld: It does! Art is an attempt to create emotion + can be judged by that standard. Most wine can’t.

Lenn Thompson: Right, Alder. Wine is not nature.

Howard G. Goldberg: “Wine is not nature” is a position likely to invite a hand grenade from “natural-wine” champions.

Lenn Thompson: All wine creates an emotion.

Amy Cleary: Really? All wine? I’d say good or even interesting wine. But not all.

Bruce Schoenfeld: NOT all wine creates an emotion in most people. Very few do. And that’s just fine with them.

Alder Yarrow: But the critics job is to perceive things that many consumers don’t notice, right?

Bruce Schoenfeld: A wine WRITER’s job is to use wine to tell stories + stories to explain wine. Not sure what a wine critic does.

Howard G. Goldberg: Critics can’t know fully what consumers notice or don’t. Their duty is to discover what they haven’t noticed.

Bruce Schoenfeld: In art, yes. But in wine, I’d say that isn’t the critic’s job. Which circles me back around to my 1st comment.

* * *

How about continuing the conversation. What do you think?

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This week I’m living in two worlds. Not by choice mind you, but mostly because I can’t leave the day job fully behind, ever. But most of my brain is here in Napa at the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers. This morning we began the symposium in earnest with two keynote sessions (”Why have one when you can have two,” said director Jim Gordon?) one from author and magazine editor Dominique Browning, and the other from wine writer Gerald Asher.

I’m going to share my notes from Asher’s remarks first, mostly because they touch on the ongoing discussion that surrounds Eric Asimov’s most recent column and my response to it.

Gerald Asher is without question one of America’s foremost wine writers, and one of the best wine writers in the English language. The wine columnist for Gourmet Magazine for almost 30 years, Gerald Asher was writing about wine before many of today’s current crop of wine writers (and bloggers) were out of diapers. His writings, in particular the compilation called The Pleasures of Wine (which you can buy here, or read a bunch of online for free here) taught me a lot about what was possible when it comes to writing about wine, and continues to inspire me.

Here is my usual “pseudo transcript” of his remarks. Not being a court stenographer, I have condensed slightly, and omitted (and missed) various bits. You can be sure that any part that sounds inelegant and stumbling is my fault, not the speaker’s.

* * *

Good morning. I’m delighted to be here, but I look around at wonder that all of you people want hear what I have to say.

I started to write about wine stemming from my professional activity. While at university, I started working at a wine shop in the evenings. It was so easy. Take the money, hand them the bottle. It was a simple way of getting into the wine business. The owner of this little shop liked to go home and have dinner with his family, so put up a notice that he needed help. I was a student, it was easy.

One of the things I didn’t notice at first was that this little area of London had a very busy business of its own. It was called Shepherds Market, but there were mostly “shepherdesses” plying their trade. They were our best customers. At that time meat was still rationed, and I still remember, one of these ladies coming in to buy her little half bottle and saying that without the meat, “this is what gives us strength.”

There was a point I remember where the shop owner came in one day quite agitated, saying “they’ve changed the vintage on the beaujolais and they’ve given me no warning. ” He said that people were going to be upset, coming in looking for the ‘47 when all we’ve got is the ‘49. He told me that it was my job to convince them that the ‘49 was just as good. “If you have to give people a free sample, you can.” he said, “but you’ll need to explain this.”

And so he said that I had better taste the wines. He opened a half bottle of the 49 and one of the 47, and said “I want you to taste these two to explain that this one is as good and maybe better than the one before.” They both tasted pretty good and pretty much the same to me. He was satisfied I got the message, and my career was born.

It was glorious. In that moment, tasting from one glass to another, and handing out the half bottles was… [Asher smiles with delight] well, I remember one large Spanish shepherdess telling me, “young man, when you want a free sample, you just tell me.”

From there I went into the business properly. I went to classes and eventually I was sent off to work with vintners in Spain, Germany, and France. Then I came back and started a mail order wine business. Selling by mail order, you have to write about the wines, and so I began.

Eventually I came to NY to work with Austin Nichols. I knew the editor of Gourmet, and out of the blue she asked if I would write a column, three or four times a year. I said “what about?” She said “you decide.” Fortunately, because I was continuing to work in the trade, I was constantly in touch with people, constantly out in the wine world.

I only started putting my experiences into any kind of shape, after a couple of years, when I had an editor asking me what I was going to write about in the future. Until then it was just whatever I came up with.

When I did get into the habit of doing a column on a specific subject, as opposed to my random experiences, I couldn’t just write a long chatty letter to a friend with digressions. That was a beginning of a manner of working that stayed with me for a long time.

Here’s how I would work. If the article was about Alsace, I would go through all the tasting notes I had made over time. One of the benefits of being long in the tooth is that you’ve got plenty of material. You go back over tasting notes, books you’ve read, contacts in that place, phone numbers, get yourself assembled, organized. Then once you have everything together, you think about the angle for the story and backed up by who to get in touch with, the quote you’re going to get, a reference from a book.

References are wonderful. People have been writing on wine for a long time, but even if what they wrote in 1863 is no longer interesting or relevant, you’ll be surprised at how one little thing compared to today gives great depth to any story.

I always made sure to assemble more information than I needed. You must have real knowledge about what you’re writing about. You can’t wing it. Statistics were things I collected. If you say sales of Sylvaner have gone down, and you have a statistic to back that up, you can say it convincingly. I’ve always been surprised at the sloppiness of writers about all topics — if you know even a little sometimes you can tell just how little the writer knows himself.

Make sure what you’re saying is accurate. That was my way of doing it — start a folder, put it together, then start my conversation.

Writing is a conversation, to me. The best kind. You can’t get interrupted.

But even if you’re not getting interrupted, you have to hold someone’s attention. Information must not only be accurate, but in a digestible form. It also has to be entertaining. So you start your story, and you throw in a little digression here or there. The little digressions you give can relieve the whole thing, give some background and relief and humor. I say humor but not silliness. There is a big difference.

Remember that the person you’re writing to is educated, intelligent, and grown up. They don’t expect you to talk down to them or be condescending, just because you know something about wine and they don’t.

You’re metaphorically looking your reader in the eye. I give the same advice that Ms. Browning mentioned just before. When you write something, stand up and read it out loud. And if you don’t have someone who has the patience to listen to you, you be the listener.

One thing I don’t think that we have enough of in wine writing is the use of cause and effect. Whatever wine tastes like, whatever you’re going to do with it, it is as it is for a reason.

There’s a lot of talk about terroir, and that can become technical, but if you’re telling someone to drink Vouvray, it’s not enough to say it’s a pleasant white wine, it’s a bit sweet a bit dry and so on.

You have to link it to where it comes from. It’s not about a dissertation, but you need to understand why a wine tastes as it does. Why? You must know what the effect of the conditions of its origin. Where the wine came from, why it is as it is, and why it tastes as it does.

When writing about how it tastes, you want to avoid confusing the subjective things about wine with the objective things about wine. My fingertips curl when I read tasting notes. Boring stuff.

The first thing about your tasting note, is the note reminding you of that wine. When you’re tasting professionally, give yourself the obvious things. Bright acidity, tannins that are raw, those objective things. Then you need a hook that will bring that wine back to you wholesale. If I wrote hints of that, peaches, truffles, there’s no way in which I’m gong to reconstruct in my own wine. And certainly I’m not going to convey to someone else who’s reading it the complete picture of the wine. It’s such BS, it’s ridiculous.

When you taste a wine, there’s usually something that really stands out to you. Certain wines have a finish of grapefruit. Or some other thing distinctive about that wine. That’s the hook you must write down. Maybe it’s not the predominate feature, but what it does is call back to your mind that wine. At that point you can write something about it.

People want to know: are they likely to enjoy it and what was its principle characteristic. This is difficult.

I woke up this morning and spent some time on The New York Times. I went looking for news of the revolutions, but then couldn’t help myself and went over to the wine section where Eric Asimov had a wonderful article about tasting notes. In it he writes that the more specific a description of a wine, the more useless it is. He then goes on to dig himself quite a hole.

But his basic point is sound. Forget the fruit bowl, it’s enough to say the wine has fresh fruit, don’t go further than that.

I thought, if you have the patience, I was going to read a couple of short things, from my own writing. I find it easier to demonstrate what I mean about taste and terroir.

I wrote this piece because as I look through some of the work that was given to me for discussing with some of you here, I realize something I must convey. One of the things that I reminded myself I must make clear, is that distinguishing between objective accounts of the wine and the subjective, one should never say, this wine tastes of …. It’s rather about making clear that you are being subjective. Say, that a wine puts you in the mind of this or that. Never that the wine tastes like something. Otherwise someone is going to open the wine and say “Hell, where are the truffles I was promised?”

Despite this background I have given you, you must help people understand that wine is a pleasure.

When I came to New York, there were all these bright winemakers out of Davis that were let loose on the innocent public. They knew how to pick up a glass, analyze the wine, pick it to pieces. They would set up a glass with acid, tannin, then taste all these things, and then say you could taste the wine because you knew so much about acid and tannin.

No one explained that like looking at a picture, you taste the wine and you like it or not. The best wine, the wine you really love, you pick it up, and enjoy it. The second time you pick it up you say “Jesus, this is good.” But over time the wine is registering with you.

Our job is getting people to the stage that they pick it up and enjoy it. Not analyze it. Wine tasting is for professionals. Those that have to pick the right cask of Chinon and sell it.

You want both the subjective and objective. You want solid bits of objective info, but you are sharing the experience of it, and I think that most writing is doing that.

* * *

At this point the floor was opened for questions.

QUESTION: Given that you were in the business, how did you balance that with your writing and how you would encounter people and their wines?

ASHER: One of the difficulties of being in the trade and writing is that there has to be this very clear distinction between the two. On the one hand with my work, I spent most of the time traveling. I was in various countries selecting and buying wines. That gave me the feel for it all. That fed me and brought me up to date and that gave me the bedrock, but I did not write about those specific wines.

I once wrote a piece about a property in the Beaujolais. It stood out. This was a property that put Beaujolais on the map. I used it as the core of what I was writing, and we imported a little, and I never heard the end of it. It would have seemed crazy to not include them in a piece about the Beaujolais. But boy did I get rapped over the knuckles for it. I never did that again.

QUESTION: Do you see a difference between wine writing and wine criticism? What is it?

ASHER: I don’t know what qualifies anyone to be a wine critic. The only people that look at wine with analysis, they do it academically. That is fine.

With us we look at wine and whether we like it, and the more experience we have, the more we can figure out why.

Sometimes wine is ONLY subjective. I want to be careful what I say, which I don’t usually. I think that the ratings and and what the whole thing has done has had a good effect in getting people interested in wine and getting people to know that they don’t have to learn anything in order to enjoy wine. It’s a good effect in that sense. But it’s had an appalling effect on wine. It’s only now that we’re coming out of this phase of over oaked, heavy, over-ripe, wines.

You know if you’re a small winery, it’s difficult not to look at those ratings and think that it’s the golden ring. I’m not sympathetic to the world of wine criticism. It’s not like music criticism, or the arts.

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Eric Asimov, wine writer for the New York Times, and I agree on a lot of things, but we have quite divergent opinions about a subject that is near and dear to Eric’s heart: tasting notes. Actually, tasting notes aren’t near and dear to Eric’s heart, rather, the opposite is true. He is a big proponent for the elimination, or at the very least a complete reformation, of tasting notes as a vehicle for communication about wine.

Eric’s point of view, which we have discussed over many bottles of wine, comes down to the fact that he feels the strings of adjectives, increasingly precise and obscure, do more to intimidate consumers than they do to help. He would say, and I would agree, that one of the main problems in American wine culture, if there is such a thing, is that people are intimidated by wine, and believe that in order to appreciate it, they need to learn to be able to pick out all the different nuanced flavors that show up in the professional tasting notes of critics.

Eric sees tasting notes as a culprit in the creation of a culture that makes people scared to explore and enjoy wine, for fear of doing something stupid or not understanding it because they don’t happen to taste the cigar box and blackcurrants that the critic does.

But I don’t agree. I’m with Eric all the way up until he suggests that tasting notes are part of the problem, and then I vehemently disagree.

Today, Eric penned some more thoughts on the subject of wine tasting notes, with a thought experiment that involved getting rid of all descriptors of how a wine tastes in favor of one of two words: sweet or savory.

Eric writes: “A brief depiction of the salient overall features of a wine, like its weight, texture and the broad nature of its aromas and flavors, can be far more helpful in determining whether you will like that bottle than a thousand points of detail. In fact, consumers could be helped immeasurably if the entire lexicon of wine descriptors were boiled down to two words: sweet or savory.”

He continues: “It seemed to me that almost every wine can be placed in one category or the other. By sweet, I don’t mean wines with residual sugar, though they would certainly be included. I mean wines with sweet flavors, whether they come from fruitiness or some other manifestation of wine chemistry. By savory I mean wines with predominant flavors not of fruit but of herbs, minerals, spices and such.”

Now, I don’t believe that Eric truly believes that it would be possible to reduce the primary description of wine to one of these two words. In fact, after playing with the idea a bit in his column, he admits that “…perhaps that’s going too far. I’ll leave it to you to decide. The point of this exercise, after all, is not so much to label every wine as one or the other, as it is to suggest a different, simpler way of thinking about these wines. And, perhaps, to help people make their own discoveries.”

I completely understand the idea of trying to both capture a wine’s essence without going overboard with a lexicon of fruit, and to push people to discover what they like and what they don’t, but I think instead of simplicity, Eric has gotten overly reductive.

I’m not against the theory of simplification. By day I work in the world of design where people pay my company to help them simplify the complex for their customers.

But trying to replace most tasting notes with just two words is quite problematic.

For starters, trying to capture all fruity flavors under the “sweet” banner would never work. Trying to reclaim a word that is already very well understood by everyone and relates to how sugary something tastes, not the general class of flavors it contains, is a losing proposition.

Whenever I think about Eric’s position on tasting notes I struggle with the fact that he’s suggesting that as wine writers, we DO need to convey the experience of tasting the wine, but he’s suggesting that we DON’T need to tell people what it tastes like.

Walking down the logical progression of Eric’s argument, I always end up at a place where the only real way to avoid producing the kind of anxiety that he objects to would be to eliminate tasting notes all together. Without that, then we’re in a morass where we’re going to be forever fighting over the relative evils of “alpine strawberry” versus “red berries” versus “fruity.”

Wines do taste like certain things, dammit! I delight in showing a complete wine novice a classic Gewurztraminer for the first time, putting their nose in the glass, and hearing them say “Oh my god, it smells like roses!” The fact that you can experience so many flavors and aromas of the world from simple fermented grape juice is one of the most magical aspects of wine, and trying to capture all of that magic with two primary words just doesn’t cut it as far as I’m concerned.

Not to mention the fact that (as Eric admits) many wines have combinations of both his “sweet” and “savory” characteristics. So where does that leave us?

I think we need to step back and look at why tasting notes exist in the first place.

Tasting notes exist to try to convey to a reader what the author might have experienced when drinking a wine. Why? Because readers are looking for recommendations on what to drink, or to entertain themselves through vicarious appreciation for an experience, or both.

Like most targeted communication, the success of any tasting note can only be judged by the reader, and I would suggest the criteria for that success might be comprised of the following:

1. Is the reader able to imagine themselves tasting/experiencing the wine based on the note in a way that they can judge whether they WANT to taste this wine, given the chance? If one of the purposes of the note is to convey the experience of the taster, does it actually do that in a way that moves the reader to understand that experience by proxy? If you’ll forgive the high-low comparison, tasting notes are not unlike poems in that their job is to evoke an emotional state as much as it is to communicate something specific.

2. Is the reader able to perceive the critic’s assessment of the quality of the wine. That is, can the reader tell whether the critic thinks that this is a good wine or not? When I look at the kinds of notes that Eric sometimes writes in the style he believes achieves his goals, I am often left wondering whether he liked the wine or not, and whether he thinks it is merely ok, great, or fantastic.

3. Is the reader able to use this tasting note to help them distinguish between this wine and others of the same type that the critic may have tasted, and understand what makes it different from the others, either in taste, quality, or otherwise? Even when provided singly in isolation, tasting notes exist in the context of other notes — other notes written by that critic, other notes out there in the world, and readers’ own collections of memories of wines they have had. Part of the job of the tasting note is to provide fodder for people to make judgements or distinctions. As in “Ah, so that Syrah sounds different from this other one — they both have flavors of blackberry, but this one has flavors of bacon fat, while that one tastes of wet granite.” That is a meaningful difference I think to many people, but one that is difficult to capture in a highly constrained lexicon like the one that Eric suggests.

Now, do some tasting notes go over the top into realms of complete inanity? Yes, of course. But I tend to be quite forgiving of that (partially, no doubt, because I can be guilty of it myself). Yes, I’ve never smelled what crushed seashells smell like, but you know, I could imagine what that might smell like, and so if Robert Parker or someone else wants to use it as a descriptor, I’m fine with it, in the same way that I’m fine with an outlandish metaphor in a poem. The fact that it’s beyond my experience doesn’t matter all that much as long as I can understand it.

Some tasters use quite obscure fruits and vegetables in their notes, or words that most people might not know. One of my favorites is “petrichor,” a phenomenally useful word that describes one of the world’s great smells: the smell of the pavement just after it rains.

While I know the whole world doesn’t delight in learning new words like that as I do, I also don’t think that using it or other words are making wine less approachable to the interested public.

I wish Eric would concentrate less on the adjectives that wine writers use, and more on the overall quality of their work. Tasting notes do far less damage that boring, insufferable wine writing. Of course, Eric might point out that a lot of wine writing has been reduced to simply tasting notes only, and he’ll get no argument from me about that being a major problem.

The tasting note is only the tiniest, and one might argue, least important, bit of what I think it takes to explain a wine in a meaningful way. Stories make wine meaningful, and memorable. As long as we’re telling great stories about wine, what harm can there be in taking a sentence or two to describe what we think a wine tastes like?

So, what do you think? Tasting notes: good or evil?

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More than 1,200 wine ratings this month include Southern Rhône, Red Burgundies and West Coast Pinot Noirs.

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Literally thousands of wine enthusiasts who blog about the fruit of the vine. Google “wine blog” and get back 127 million results. … Who wants to read them all?

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Much to-do has been made over the past week or two of Robert Parker’s handing over his responsibilities for reviewing California wines at The Wine Advocate. By handing the mantle to Antonio Galloni, he further reduced his influence in the world of wine, and increased the focus on (and speculation about) the growing responsibilities of his staff of contributors.

Amidst speculation as to whether anyone can step in to fill the void that may be left by the waning power of Robert Parker, many are increasingly paying attention to the activities of James Suckling, who recently left the Wine Spectator to strike out on his own. Suckling quickly created his own subscription-based web site that he is populating with blogs, tasting notes, and videos.

This week Suckling made moves that suggest he may be even more ambitious than the theatrical trailer for his eponymous site might have suggested, with the appointment of former Beastie Boys front-man Mike D as a member of his wine blogging staff. As reported by web site Hip Hop DX, his first blog post hinted at some of the diversity he may bring to Suckling’s enterprise, as he reviewed a half bottle of “red Burgundy” he drank at a fancy Asian restaurant in New York, calling it “surprisingly ready to rock — ripe fruits, earthy notes, even a little bit of refined funk. Elegant and restrained with well-balanced tension. 93 points.”

Whether future reviews will include any of D’s masterful rhymes remains to be seen.

Speculation is rife at Suckling’s strategy for filling out his own staff of contributors. Largely based on the videos he is making available to his subscribers, each featuring the owners or winemakers of the world’s greatest and most expensive wines, many suggest that Suckling may be populating his site with the voices of the world’s most highly paid entertainers, at least those that aren’t already winemakers in their own right, such as Suckling’s friend, heavy metal rocker Maynard James Keenan.

In a world where the best wines, at least those that deserve 100 points from James Suckling, are increasingly thousands of dollars out of the reach of ordinary consumers, having a staff of celebrity wine reviewers is undoubtedly a sound strategy. The unique combination of leisure time, existing private cellars filled with expensive wine, monstrous egos, and built in followings of raving fans will surely ensure Suckling can corner the market on the world’s most exclusive bottlings while generating exponential growth in his reader base.

Any bets on who’s next? I’ve got my money on blind tenor Andreas Bocelli, who Suckling undoubtedly knows thanks to his (rightfully) proud promotion of his daughter’s rising career as an opera singer. Bocelli has everything going for him, not the least of which is the fact that as a blind guy who sings, his palate has got to be great, right?

Read the full story.

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