Just quietly, i find it pretty awesome.
Add cheese to this relationship, and it's a pretty sensual menage a trois. Sometimes it's just some light flirting of flavours, and at other times it's a series of orgasms stemming from the personal compatibilities of all involved. Flavour relationships that can lead you into hedonistic trists or simply leave you with a bad taste in your mouth and a vow to never go there again.
One thing that intrigues me as much as it amuses me, is the propensity for people to wax lyrical and exacerbate the snobbery associated with wine. Critics, protocols, reviews, varietals, glass swirling, weird slurping noises ... it's equally mysterious and prohibitive to most. But why should/do these rituals intimidate the average quaffer?
The two things i want to consider in this blog entry are : 1. the language used in the wine world and 2. price snobbery.
Let's start with 1. the language. Here's a line from a review of the wine i'm currently imbibing (d'Arenberg High Trellis Sauvignon) :
"Projects aromas of chocolate, licorice and blackberries. Complex flavour profile on the palate- it has sweet black currants, spices and licorice and is well padded with ripe, chewy tannins!"
Really?! I just thought it tasted yummy. Is all this necessary? How much did they smoke before writing that? "Chewy tannins" ? It's a liquid! Why does it have to have a "flavour profile" instead of just tasting like this that and the other? Clearly this is leaning towards unnecessary verbosity, rather like my blog entries.
All that said though, i have to agree with most of what is said in those 2 sentences ... it really is "padded with ripe chewy tannins". I'm a long way from attaining the descriptive and interpretive eloquence to elucidate on what's in my glass and frankly have no desire to get there. I just enjoy trying to understand why what i'm drinking tastes like it does, so i can find more tipples that appeal to my senses.
It's in that pursuit of some kind of quality that you can fall into the trap of being coerced into paying top dollar for a bottle of plonk with the assumption that the price increase is proportional to the quality. Personal experience tells me that a $12 bottle of wine can appeal to your palette equally as much as something 3 times the price.
One of the most well known and pricey Australian wines of renown is Penfold's Grange Hermitage. Regularly going for over $500, it's like an original pressing of Dark Side of the Moon. Although i'm going to have to give up that metaphor ASAP, because i'm not sure how well it will susatin throughout my diatribe.
So anyway, price snobbery ... or something. I don't really need to do more than to point you to this article here (go on, at least read the first 2 paragraphs). So the bottom line is , you can over spend $400-500 more then necessary on a wine to spark up the love life of the tastebuds
From that article we see that those who are paid to think and talk about wine find "the Grange very, very impressive, but there are many wines at a fraction of the price that outperform and out-finesse it.''
James Halliday annually rates wine, and does using price categories. Wines in the sub $25 division easily rank with those 2-3 times the price.
So it's clear as mud that there's enjoyable wines in all price brackers ... but i still feel dirty buying the cheapest of wines ... why?! Fucks me. Probably because a lot of them are shit. But, there are some gems out there you'll get enough change from a $20 from to spend on a good feed .. and if that involves cheese, then that's even better.
So ... in summary ... the Wordsworth's of Wine more often that not have valid points about what constitutes the romance and passionate embrace with certain wines ... but any notions that the clouded intellectualism of wine review language equates to an education and career aligned with higher incomes and therefore the accessibility to certain wines (that usually score above 90 points) and might preclude the average drinker to gain access to the sensual delights of a well crafted wine is essentially a load of bollox.
By the way this evening's cheese was Cheshire ... i've decided it's essentially the the fetta of the UK .
PPS: the block i was eating from didn't quite look like this at all.
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