A bad taste in the mouth…

One of the boilerplate functions that wine professionals dance with throughout their careers is the formal, outside-of-the-shop wine tasting event. These are large, highly social functions that are usually held in places in which people host wedding receptions or family reunions. Typically these events are thrown by a major wine distributor, some themed (like “Bulgarian Red: Something for the Vulgarian and the Well-bred”) and some more general. The rooms are set with tables on which each of the producers in the distributor’s stable set out their products to be sampled. Tasting books listing the wines to be tried are available at the entrance to facilitate post-tasting recall and note-taking. In the main room tables are piled high and deep with cheeses, breads, salamis, salads, finger sandwiches as a courtesy to the buyers who may be skipping his or her lunch break to attend, and presumably, to allow those who like to see how certain wines work with certain foods to make such comparisons. These events are always free to those in the trade. Nice work if you can get it, right?

Well, I gotta say, not for this guy (gasp!). I guess that the first few tasting events can be exciting, bumping around in a fancy-schmancy hall with the “movers and shakers” in the industry and some of the world’s most respected winemakers, with lots of free eats and HUNDREDS of wines from the world over to sample. But, as with so many other pursuits that are seemingly inexhaustably pleasurable, for some, the bloom comes off the rose pretty fast.

Let’s start with the “social” aspect. Yes, tastings CAN be wonderful places to meet colleagues to discuss the latest trends and peeves in the wine world, but things rarely work out that way…I liken this aspect of these events to some of the less motivated folks who you might have met in college - the types that were ALWAYS in the study lounge, but were RARELY studying, most of them just chatting up or flirting with anyone that they could corner for 5 minutes. For many present, tastings are just an excuse to leave work for a few hours to provide them their fixes of fake kissing on two cheeks, name dropping, and making fun of this one’s shoes, or that one’s cackling laugh, just like they used do at a high school parties. And clearly with all of these people, the din can reach deafening levels and therefore can become very distracting. And even though formalized “scientific” tastings strictly forbid its wearing, the multiple bodies doused in cologne and perfume can make getting accurate takes on a certain wine’s subtle charms very difficult to achieve…

Too many cooks spoil the soup, and likewise, too many wine buyers spoil the tasting too. Tables manned by representatives of famous wineries or by famous winemakers themselves are often mobbed four bodies deep, usually with at least one plainly sycophantic wine groupie batting his or her eyelashes at the wine “celebrity”. In such cases, it can take 10 or 15 minutes to even get a spalsh of wine in one’s glass to taste. In one particular instance, I had managed to get a bit of a famous red Burgundy to taste which I eagerly sipped, swished, and considered, and when I was ready, I jostled my way to the nearest spit bucket for expectorational purposes. But, as I bent to the silver vessel, a tall gentleman who was clearly more concerned with returning to the conversation with the fetching blond to his left, spit his wine directly on the back of my head. It took all of my self-control not to replace his crustless watercress sandwich with an Italian knuckle sandwich, but I kept my cool.

And likewise, too many WINES spoil the tasting. These “Grand Tastings” are often comprised of literally hundreds of wines from all over the world. Obviously, to the wine lover, this is an “eyes too big for the stomach” scenario, so one is tempted to taste ’til you cants taste no more. But at the same time there is almost no one who would HAVE TO consider tasting the lion’s share of the wines on offer, so unless you go in with a specific agenda and an iron will to stick to it, these events often foster a sort of oenological dissipation. It’s amazing how something that seems like a colossal time saver all too often turns out to be a terrific time WASTER.

And then there are the in the business “cherry pickers”. This sub-species lines up at 10 AM for a tasting that starts at noon. As soon as the doors are opened, they trample each other to get to the table with latest vintage of Steaming Beagle or Dopus Won, get a paltry jigger to swallow (since producers rarely open more than one or two of these sorts of wines), and then race off to the next super elite producer to do the same. So, unless you want to do combat with these vultures, you’re unlikely to get a chance to taste any of these trophy wines (if you ever had a desire to do so in the first place) because these boneheads drink them all up within 10 minutes of the doors being flung open.

When you get right down to it, these tastings are done for the benefit of the DISTRIBUTORS, though the events are always couched as a “wonderful opportunity to explore all that the wine world has to offer under one well-appointed roof” or some other similar drivel. These events allow the distributors to taste scores of people on a single bottle that is most often paid for by the producer him or herself. Under normal circumstances, a salesman might be able to get a day or two of mileage from a bottle that his boss foot the bill for in his sampling budget for that wine. There’s a bit of the “emperor’s new clothes” reasoning at work here…

I realize that this whole phenomenon has precisely ZERO connection with anything that most if not all of you encounter regarding wine on a daily basis, but I thought that revealing some of the inner workings of the wine professional’s world might help the amateur understand not only what makes this a great line of work surely, but one that, like most other professions, has its downsides as well. There can be no doubting in watching the behavior of many people at these events that some in attendence there truly enjoy them, but I think that it’s safe to say that even the most social and wine mad of those reading this piece now, after the umpteenth such gathering, might be ready drown himself in a vat of Vernaccia.

TOM CIOCCO