On Wine Scores, Wine Tasting & the Role of Blind Tasting | Michael Schuster | Wine Podcast

for a wine to get a perfect score whatever it would be like five stars 100 points you know 20 points from you what qualities it should have well first of all I think it's a nonsense okay so I can use them I do use them I need to use them as a professional but uh if you were to ask me to um to say whether they really made any sense or not I would say no I'm looking in burgundy and I'm kind of you know that is getting out of my hand with every day you don't mind if you can't own a Royals Royce but you do mind if you can't bring the occasional bottle of dendel aromy Conti exactly [Music] [Applause] exactly hi everybody this is agnesa from no sediment and welcome to no sediment wine podcast today my guest is Michael Schuster who has spent a lifetime teaching and writing about wine Hi how are you hi I'm fine glad to be here it's always lovely to be in Ria I'm very excited to have you yeah well me too I like talking about wine um but before we kind of talk uh uh more specifically about wine and wine tasting uh how did you get into the world of wine yeah I was um this it's quite funny I wasn't interested in white at all I was born born and brought up in Kenya and as far as I knew that there was no wine there and I left Kenya when I was just about 15 and my father died at that time my mother wasn't interested in wine when I went to University and with friends you know we bought um we bought cheap reeling lasy resing and the I can't remember what the Reds were so if you went to a party you brought a bottle of wine but I knew nothing about it and for my 25th birthday in 1973 my mother's brother who was interested in Wine and Food he gave me 25 bottles of wine they weren't particularly fancy there were six bottles of white burgundy six bottles of red burgundy there were generic Village burgundies there were 12 half bottles of muton Cad and um and the bottle of 1970 Pichon Baro and he wrote me a lovely letter with it and he said it's time you learned about this and for the same birthday my closest friend gave me Hugh Johnson's first book on wine and the two together just got me interested and um I was then teaching in a um in near near Peterborough and in Peterborough there was a lovely old wine merchant which doesn't exist anymore called pton and they sold um you know a lot of really quite fancy Bordeaux and a lot of it in half bottles which was great for experimenting I then discovered that I didn't want to I was teaching English and music at the time but I didn't want to spend a lifetime in the school classroom so I came down to London London was a wonderful place to discover wine and I thought well what shall I do I did a I did a tefel course because I thought that'll I can go around the world with that and earn a living that's teaching English as a foreign language and I thought I'll go to Bordeaux and so the uh business where I was I was teaching English to foreign businessmen I told them look I'm going to go and they were very sad to lose me but I had to give three months notice and two weeks before I left the boss called me into his office and he said we've got a job for you in Bordeaux if you'd like that so I mean had I fall on my feet or what and so I went to Bordeaux and um I did the and I I was teaching I taught the uh the toti oil company scientists there were 12 of them I taught them at three different levels four days a week and on the on the Monday I had free and on Saturday mornings and Monday mornings I was doing the um the tasting diploma at the University so that's how I learned about the technical side of wine and about about blind tasting and about my my thresholds of perception and so on and then I came back from after 2 years and went into business with a friend it was a shotgun marriage and it ended in divorce after 3 years but I was a wine merchant for three years and got to know the wine trade and the wine writers because we invited them to come and taste our Wares and when I split up with my partner Alexander uh Alex um my basement became free and I thought well if I can run a wine school then I'll combine teaching with writing and that's what I've been doing ever since and stopped really when um when Co came along all right wow the broad story wow um and I met my wife in my classroom and you're still together yes that's beautiful and she's a great cook I have to uh maybe uh invite myself whenever I'm in London absolutely well you have an invitation you know that yeah and I guys can tell you it's a it's a it's a worthwhile trip for both of you thank you um I have also tasted and judged many wines with you so I know you are amazing wine taster and I wanted to ask you is that something that you specifically trained yourself or was it a talent you know I don't I I don't think tasting is a talent I think we can all be tasters and we have the wear with all and basically it's a question of motivation and of of tasting and putting words with Sensations and deciding how you want to form some sort of a structure which will help you um taste wines practically and rapidly and so on and um because I knew so little about wine and had so little experience I would I would sit down with two or three bottles of the same wine I'd ask my then girlfriend to give them to me blind so I didn't know what the order was in and I would just have a white you know big white sheet of paper and try and find as many differences between them as I could and then see you know for for each of the wines and then open them up and see what those differences were and relate them to the wine and my my teaching is based on comparison I've always tasted in pairs put um comparable wines together to show or not comparable to show differences in style and quality and I think that's the easiest way for people to um to begin to appreciate and understand the differences and you know as Andrew says difference is just you know it's it's what makes wine so interesting and uh you know and fascinating endlessly and you know I'm 75 and I'm still discovering new things I have a wonderful story about a German wine which you can ask me about if you want to talk about blind tasting we cannot say it now no all right well I mean we I can tell you about it now it's very recent um I first of all I don't think blind tasting is uh is the best method of judging wine it's an important and it's a useful method of judging wine but I think that uh you simply can't take into account all the all all the necessaries if you like and it's very easy to misjudge as well what we do in competitions I think is absolutely valid um um because there you are tasting like against like you know what the prices are uh you know what to expect and then you you have half a dozen Wines in front of you or whatever it is 50 as an overall group or something like that and there you can say this for what it is is really good value and that is so useful for the consumer particularly for the consumer who who doesn't actually who who doesn't buy expensive wine you know who wouldn't think of spending more than 2020 um but for the for the person who will spend more than 20 EUR we taste wines that are more expensive and they want to know particularly if I am going to spend that much you know what's really good for that price and from from that point of view it's very useful but um I've long stopped tasting blind at the at the dinner table because I think it's a complete distraction and Fine Wines By the time you find out what it is there's nothing left to enjoy so we don't do it anymore but I was with um Serena Sutliff and David peppercorn for David's 92nd birthday with Monica we were just four around the table a couple of months ago and when we sat down to table and we have lovely food and wine with them and when they come to us um but we don't normally blind taste however there was a white wine um in the glass David had poured it just before we sat down and he said I'd like you to taste that blind and Sera said come on darling we don't do that anymore he said yes but this will be interesting you know just to start with and so Monica and I dipped our noses in and smelt it smelt like reing immediately German reing we tasted it yes German resling but still a um a nice color there was a bit of maturity clearly and we thought this is from a this is got to be from a hot vintage it was dryish it um you know and probably had 13% alcohol or something like that so it wasn't a it wasn't um um a sper or anything like that but we said this probably comes from with this sort of age from A Fine M mature vintage something like 1983 so 83 recing from Germany we can't really go much further than that and David beamed and he said no it's uh it's from Germany but it's not 1983 it's 1893 Tre wow I it's just astonishing and um The Vineyard doesn't exist anymore and it's actually it's not from one of the top uh regions it's from the Rin front you know sort of uh in in front on the river if you like sort of where so much of the uh sort of lipra mil style comes from it was just remarkable wow and wine has this capacity to astonish us for all sorts of reasons and that was one of them that's a really beautiful story but if we Circle back to the wine tastings what is important when you do taste wines like taking notes spitting paying attention to the wine you know the interesting thing when you do the sort of thing that I do is that um you for for practically everything that you taste but of course not not the Lesser wines there becomes a sort of compulsion to make notes it's for two reasons I mean making a note does two things it um first of all it makes you pay attention that's the most important thing if you're in the business of writing about wine you then have a record and you you know you situate it uh even if only mentally but you've got it in writing as well so I sort of make notes compulsively now and um you know that that little book that I've got there from when I started is just interesting to look back at the most important thing is said do I like it you know is it is it giving me pleasure I want it I want it to be a joyful thing or um in one way or another and uh you know I have a hugely Catholic taste I get almost as much pleasure from um a really nice ppol de or a puty shabi or a um you know the German sorry the Austrian uh what's the great priety the runer no yes the gruna Bel ler absolutely or from a a good gruna Bel ler and you know I um I get as much pleasure is that in a different way and a simpler way as I do from tasting a really fine old wine at 30 or 40 years old which is which is astonishing too so pleasure is the most important thing and of course you you think when you do what we do you think how good is this for what it is and that of course relates to the notion of what's typical and typicity and and so on and so forth but yes that but when we and we we drink uh we drink wine every day but we mostly drink simple wines but we're lucky enough to have in the cell because of what I've been doing for so long um lots of fine old wines as well because when I was doing the uh when I was teaching I had to have the basic wines anyway but those you could go out and buy but for the fine wine course I wanted to have mature examples so we needed to buy those in advance and for the master of wine blind tasting I had to have stuff from everywhere and for the some of the more unusual wines you couldn't buy them off the shelf in individual bottles so you had to buy packs of six and so I was still got some of those left so if you come to our house I I say what would you like name a country and you know I'm almost certain I can provide it okay but you just mentioned master of wine tasting and there is a quite famous uh wine tasting book among students of Masters of wine uh done by uh written by Master of wine ning Jackson and it it's called Beyond flavor so and where he focuses on Wine's structure yeah like the tan and acidity you know uh rather Aras and flavors so for you how important are these structur elements in wine versus the uh Aroma and flavors well you know um structure of course is important if if this is a book that's been written for um blind tasters tasting for the master of wine that's absolutely crucial because structure is the first thing that you you look for and of course structure is um is is part of the wine it's say it's like saying you know uh what's what is it what what's important for you to be a human being well to be the way that we are and so of course it's important um and the different structures of course are part of what make the differences in wine so attractive and people like different things some of us like wines which are fresher and have a bit more acidity and are rather lighter others like wines that are Fuller in the case of red wines darker with more tannin and more bite and so on you know there's a huge variety of taste but of course I mean I I I haven't um what's the name of the author Nick Jackson yeah I haven't read Nick's book but it would be interesting to look at but of course I think for uh for blind tasting to to identify I think of course that's absolutely crucial very small like a pocket book like this because it's that's very much part of the um of the identity of a wine and when I when I take notes you know it's funny I think Andrew said in the interview that you did with him the could he could recognize many people's if if he was showing a wine note blind he could probably say who's it was yeah and um my tasting and this comes partly from my training in Bordeaux and partly because I just wanted to be I wanted it to be easy is that um you know of course I I do the smell first but then I do the structure of the wine before I talk about the tastes and the quality and uh you know this is sort of second nature now when I'm doing line tasting for the competition line um that we do together that's different you know you have to be you have to taste much more rapidly and you're not really making notes um certainly not in any detail for you know for people so yeah we all have our ways of thinking about wine and um structure of course is is hugely important for identification because the the amount of alcohol the level of acidity will almost immediately give you some idea of whether it comes from a warmer climate or a cooler climate and that you know that that limits you immediately and then you look at other things such as the you know such as the grape variety and so on so yeah it's an interesting way to look at it of course yeah yeah I always think you know sometimes uh when when we just look blindly on the flavors and you say like you know for red wine I don't know San like red cherries crunchy fruit you know and it can be very repetitive uh and then the structure actually know the structure is much more much more important than that and the there was a stage I think back in the 80s and '90s where wine critics or wine writers used to describe wines um as though the only analogies they had were a um a wheelbarrow full of fruit and and vegetables you know I think also the of course it's important to identify individual flavors and individual characteristics but I you know I make the analogy in my book of this is a little bit like identifying the color in a painting but without saying how they're put together and it's the how they're put together that is that is what really matters and that gives you different harmonies and different proportions and you know brings out different characteristics and so on so structure is hugely important and that's what I do when I start and then I talk about um I don't talk about individual flavors that much I talk about quality in terms of how the wine performs in the mouth and how it tastes after you've swallowed it and that kind of thing yeah and I relate that of course to the greate variety and where it comes from sure you briefly touched about the uh tasting blind I have written here a question why is it important to taste blind but you just said that you don't necessarily think well you know as I I said earlier I think the most important use for tasting blood it has two really useful um reasons for for doing and the first is is is training yourself because then it forces you as I said to look carefully so it's it's crucial for that and uh it's a very useful tool in the wine business uh in the trade for lining up a bunch of wines of the same type at the same price you know so you don't know the producer with whom you may have a particularly good relationship and so on just tasting through them you don't need necessarily to make notes you just say um this boet this Village boet from this year at under 10B we've got a dozen of them here and uh you know three of them are terrible we'd never touch those two of them Stand Out way above the rest and then there's six of them that are sort of in between and then you'll un you'll unmask them and you'll see those two and say hm that one I know that's no surprise but that oh I hadn't come across that before let's go and look at that so it's a very useful tool for that but you know the thing about about blind tasting um when we're trying to assess wines as profession and as the public is we don't drink blind and when we drink wine and I mentioned this too before we started especially if the wine is more than just a very simple wine which of course can give great pleasure is uh it it has all sorts of associations which go beyond just the flavor in the mouth the people that you're with around the table the occasion um the wine itself um how much you like it or don't like it where it fits into uh into the current world and this kind of thing there are all sorts of things you can talk about which is what Andrew does in his book when he talks about wine he he very rarely gives wine notes as such and uh you know so for that reason these are all things that the blind tasting can't take into account and neither can scoring for that matter don't get me onto that at least not for any length of time it's wi scory and actually my next question is a bit bit related um because I've seen it several times that some and and it is actually a similar question I asked also to to Andrew I've seen several times that very highly regarded and well-respected wines in these blind tastings or or judging uh don't do so well yeah and I just wonder why because you know we kind of we we see Krug and we just oh that's amazing wine and then when we like close everything thing and it's just you know naked wine yeah well I I think the point about that is that we we don't taste wine naked you know we need we need to know what it is and uh you mentioned Kota as being an example which was very different from the standard s yeah now the Sans appalation authorities may say that's U that's we can talk about typicity it's more complicated but that's not a good example of s in in a way that's right in in way it's nonsense and uh in a lineup of um stereotypical s say it would stand out as being not part of the norm and therefore perhaps not what what you would consider typical typicity is important and we can come to that because wines have um when people make wines they have um they have different ideals in mind and sometimes these are not exactly what uh what you would expect and you can't take that into account when you blind t if you're blind tasting in big peer groups you have a sort of generic ideal in mind and if um if one or two wines don't fit into that they tend to get marked down but if you knew what they were you would say ah but of course he's trying to do something completely different and you know kotar is a fine example in that and rather less so than today today than in the past um some much more delicate sanos and margos for example in Bordeaux would be marked down especially during the Parker period I have to say I admire Parker as a tter um you know but they didn't they didn't fit the image of uh or they didn't fit the ideal of the moment and so they were marked down whereas if you had them at table and if you were to spend a bit of time with them you know you'd fall in love with them in no time but for different reasons than than you you were falling in love with the blind tasting table but if we touch the topicity uh question a bit so when when when when do we taste or at the moment when we taste the wines in the judging uh how important for you is a typicity do you if it is a typical wine for that specific label it says s would you would you score it down or would you say it's not typical no I would say I would say it's a broad guide guide post if you like but the other thing one has to remember when um when doing these tastings and in the same way as when one's writing is that you always have an audience in mind as so for them it doesn't really matter whether I mean if if you had a cotar for example in the S you would think well this is a bit of an oddball if you recognize it you would mark it very highly but it's not what what you would promote to most people who want a Sans because Sans to them and you know the name is important um when we when we buy fruit we buy an Apple because we want an apple experience we buy a peach because we want a peach experience and when you buy a bottle wine I like this comparon the only guy that you have is the label yeah and if you buy a salair and it takes like tastes like a chardonay from Southern fras you know you're going to be utterly confused and say this is a nonsense so from that point of view typicality or typicity as we call it in uh in wine vocabulary is actually very important but of course it can also be a straight jacket and it's a straight jacket in the hands of the authorities who say there is a we have in mind a typicity for what s a is or what um gr crew Class A Sano is and if that doesn't fit into that then we don't want to give it the appellation and that's that's a sort of nonsense but you know authorities find it much easier to work to rules and rules are they don't like bending them yeah and of course they they have to think a bit if they're bending them they don't like doing that yeah that that's true so for that reason you know typicity is important from that point of view it provides a compass of some kind and without it we'd all be lost that's true but I really like that you said that the comparison with fruit yes that's true that's completely true um so but also when we are tasting wines for judging uh do you keep in mind who will be drinking the wine uh yes absolutely as I said the the audience is uh is is very important when you're talking about a wine under € 10 first of all it won't have as much to say to you but you won't have as much to say about it and um people who are buying wines for under € they just want to know is it you know is it any good if you're looking at Wines which are over €20 and particularly wines which are expensive and this year for the first time in the R Top 100 we tasted wines which were over €1 of course you have hugely different expectations as um you know as of course you need to have because you're paying such a lot of money for them so you want more from them and you judge them much more critically you look at them in more detail you make more detailed notes and so on so yes the the audience is crucial absolutely yeah yeah I just sometimes wonder that we as a wine professionals usually enjoy completely different wines that maybe less engaged wine consumers would no you have to and um you you have to be able to think like the people who um whom you're writing for or or talking to and one of the interesting things for me and it's interesting for all sorts of reasons is that when I had my um on my beginner's course I had an evening with we did German German wines and so we had a sped laser uh we had a cabinet a sped laser and an house laser and um in that line up four I put um a Blue Nun and a Blue Nun of course is a is a very generic wine people are awfully rude about it I think it's you know it's a very well-made wine which appeals to a lot of people and so we would we would taste all of these and I would say and let's say this is a group of 20 or 14 depending on whether was one bottle or two bottle tasting I'd say hands up who liked nine number one best cabinet who liked wine number two best the sh laser who like wine number three best the blue none who like wine number four best the AL laser and uh every time we did this about 60% of the room liked the Blue Nun the best because they were beginners sort of by definition they wanted something that was easy that wasn't demanding that was Supple didn't have a lot of acidity was medium sweet and uh you know these days it's a very clean wine it's a very well-made wine and I think to be rude about it is silly but of course you get Beyond it very quickly so you know if you have those people in the in front of you you talk to them about wine at a at a different level but as they get to know a bit more about vocabulary a little bit more about what to look for and so on you can you know you can take it up a step but you have but you have to have their pallets in mind when you're writing about them and I write for the world of Fine Wine differently for example than I used to write for a um a monthly which came out in the city and where where I knew the sort of price which people were looking to buy at was you know between 15 and 20 but that's above the beginner level I don't know about in uh in rer or in ltia but still in the UK you know the vast majority of wine that is purchased is way under the 10 EUR I'm just getting close now to having to be over that because simply because of inflation yes that that's what most people drink and you know you and I are complete wine nerds and there is a small proportion of people who are not in the business who are who are wine nerds and uh to whom you talk about wine differently and it's an interesting question there Andrew and I just reviewed the 19 the 2019 Bordeaux at four years and uh uh I he tastes with me and um so now does Simon field who's taken on bordo on primer from me and um I think Simon doesn't put any drinking dates I put quite detailed drinking dates which I think about a bit not too hard CU they they're very broad but and I and I mentioned because I just saw this in Andrew's notes almost everything you know he advises that you open instantly and uh and when he read my introduction he said H but you know people these most people these days don't have Sellers and um you know so they don't buy wine to keep but the point is we're writing for the world of Fine Wine magazine and actually a very large number of these people will have Sellers and um you know a sort of definition of fine wine or at least one of the most important defining characteristics of Fine Wine fine wine is that it has the ability to age and to improve over a long time and um you know this this is not a boast it just happens to be the case um last year was 2022 and so as did many of us in the wine business we tried to taste as many 1982's from Bordeaux as we could and I'm lucky still to have a few bottles of 1982 First growths and so Andrew and I um on one occasion a friend of ours has some bottles of latur and I bought a bottle of uh of mut and we just spent an afternoon with those two wines and Andrew wrote it up for the world of fine wine and uh and the point is these were astonishing at 40 years and they've been very good over the over the previous 30 and they were wonderful in barrel and I've still got my Barrel note and so on but I mean they were they were just extraordinary and we you know we decanted them Andrew and I then spent 20 minutes making notes cuz he was going to write it up whilst moniker and our friend enjoyed champagne and but then we sat with the with the decanter at table and um we enjoyed them over the next couple of hours you know just um two bottles between between four of us it it was wonderful and uh you know so that is a very the point is that's a very different audience yes and you need to talk to about you need to talk to them from a different point of view and from from their point of view if you like and and to recognize that that's what they want to know I really like this comparison yes because Andrew also in the interview he told that he he really uh thinks that majority of wine should be drunk young enough to catch the fruit yeah and of course that's that's true because the um the the fruit is there in abundance but what you don't have is the bouquet and what you don't have is the is the mellowness of texture yeah and that's one of the one of the great appeals of f fine mature wine of course not all in inverted commas fine wine matures beautifully but when the best ones do you know it's something which is utterly extraordinary I spent a um a similar evening with with another friend of mine and his wife we were just the four of us this was two weeks ago and um you know we've all got these old rare bottles which we don't want to sell unless we're absolutely forced to but I I said to him when he said what's the next one of these that we'll do because we've done an 82 first growth tracing with him I said but look how about I've got um some bottles of 1990 shave do you have any 89 he saides I've got an 89 I'll go and get it for you and so that went into the cellar and we we had those a couple of weeks ago and the you know it's it's winter so it was dark when they came at halfast 6 and we just sat at the table the only light that was on was the light on the dining room table and I thought afterwards that was a sort of Cocoon of um of friendship of beauty of wonderful food um of discussion around a couple of the most astonishing ing wines and uh you know that's that's at the sort of top end of the fine wine experience and you only have that once or twice a year but it's a memory which nourishes you in a way that makes um makes you understand fine wine and the stupid prices that's I think that's a completely different topic I would want to one day uh tackle but yeah wine is uh becoming more and more expensive that's true fine wine is becoming more and more expensive you know there are many more wealthy people in the world and many more people know about what's best that's it's it's a simple uh supply and demand function yeah yeah I mean I'm I'm looking in burgundy and I'm kind of you know that is getting out of my hand with every day and uh and you don't mind if you can't own a Royals Royce but you do mind if you can't bring the occasional bottle of dendel arom Conti exactly exactly but uh I want to talk a bit about Sor uh but the first question would be about sports course wine scores a wine courses scores the scores sorry sorry I'm going death no my my my pronunciation is wrong um I will try one more time I I want to talk about wine course uh but first uh I'll show that it's scores scores scores that's why I couldn't understand it you pronounced the last s like a zed why scores wine scores that's it then I have understood it so I want to talk about wine scores yes perfect uh for a wine to get a perfect score whatever it would be like five stars 100 points you know 20 points from you what qualities it should have well first of all I think it's a nonsense okay because my next question would be what you think of wine scores in general but you know the and this is one it's one of the of course we all use scores and um we use use them as uh as journalists because that's what uh our readers want to have and it's important for them um but one of the big problems with wine scores is and it's you don't have it with wine medals that's different and we can make the comparison but with wine scores it's very difficult to decide whether there is just one set of figures for the whole world of wine in which case py shaby and pigp de are right down here which is idiotic take um or else you have uh a possible Perfection score of 100 for each wine and that's equally impossible and that's really the problem because um you know a perfect I've mentioned it before because it's one of our regular drinks a perfect puty shab it's just delicious and for the wine maker who's W making it he will say look I taste lots of py shabi I know this is right at the top of the um of what's made I can't do any better it should be getting a 100 points but nobody gives it 100 points and that's really silly and but but it's very difficult to accommodate that flexibility within something that is so precise because it doesn't it doesn't allow for flexibility and that's its huge appeal that it seems to be uh to offer Precision actually where there is no Precision so I mean I have a good sense of the calibration of um you know s sort of from 84 upwards what used to be I don't know exactly what my uh comparisons are but it's around about 14 on the 20 point scale and I know how to use them and I I use them with um uh I use them for me fairly accurately and what's interesting is that every now and again I go back once I've marked a let's say um a 20110 Bordeaux which I tasted in 2014 and I tasted last year and I find my scores are very close so I feel at least I'm reasonably consistent and I know that I I can do the job where it's necessary and it is necessary because for our readers they they they want that so from that point of view it's good and the other thing is you know when this when Parker started this in the in the mid 80s um I think it was much more useful then than it is now partly because it was mainly only used for Bordeaux and it gave not only the people who were drinking Bordeaux a good idea of what was um what was really good what was good and what wasn't as good as As Good As it ought to be but today um um all those wines are much much better than they used to be and the bunching at the top has just become ridiculous so that um for these 2019s there's a there's a big tasting in um in in Sussex I don't go to it because I because I do the tasting with Andrew but um shatow Mania which is a wine I love was getting 95 96 points this just seemed to me absurd this is a first growth score and I mean I tasted it uh with care in you know next to some other santis steps next to kestell and uh montose and and laal Ros and so on and I I scored it a 91 which is a perfectly regular score and that wasn't to to say that what some of these other tasers had put was uh was wrong but it just seems to me it's actually not useful anymore because if you're scoring a a good crew bis at the same level as a top second or a first growth what's it telling you and people don't look um you know all of us say read my notes read my notes don't look up my scores but people don't do that anymore they see the score and they think okay say you know that's 96 97 998 yeah that's worth buying at at Price AES or whatever and the other thing is that um these scores are now used for all sorts of wine all around the world and actually they're sort of meaningless medals on the other hand because if you if you score uh let's take that pigp de P example again if you score that 85 which is a probably a perfectly reasonable score for a good ppol de people will say well actually most of the people who buy that wine are not the least bit interested in scores but what they are interested in is if they see a gold medal there then they'll say m that's got a gold medal or a silver medal that's good and you know that makes a great deal more sense so I just think that the currency of scores is um getting less and less useful but people want certainty you know and the number gives them certainty even even if that certainty is illusory so so you think it's nonsense so I can use them I do use them I need to use them as a professional but uh if you were to ask me to um to say whether they really made any sense or not I would say no they you know I think that Andrew's phrase is that the philosophically untenable yeah absolutely um but from you to get like a gold medal then so what would wine have need to have well for for what it is and of course you judge it for what it is and that's very important and within it within a category the most important thing is that it should just be delicious oh you know and if you if you start from that point of view that's of of course where the consumer starts he wants to unscrew the cap or Draw the cork and say yum yum and so that's the most important thing you know and then you can then you can look at other things and decide is this actually a goal or is it um you know can I think of something more delicious of this type and there may be another one further along and then you then then you categorize like that and decide whether it's a a gold or a silver or whatever it's all it's comparative necessarily implicitly and when we do it at the at the judging bench of course it's uh it's practically comparative as well yeah so Joy is the most important thing yes this is uh Andrew and you keep saying that yeah yeah cuz that's that's the point and you know when when we drink simple wines at the table whether it's a red you know we've got a wonderful Borgo and Rouge at the moment which we buy for under 20 and because people don't recognize it for what it is often it's under it's under1 on offer we just think this is mad and uh my sister who is not in the least bit interested in wine she enjoys that with her husband so we've bought vast quantities of this and you know um passed it on to uh to sisters and friends and so on and uh you know it's uh it's all Grand why but it's just it's a lovely drink yes that's the point so uh I have few more questions left and one is uh do you think wine vocabulary is limiting Us in describing whyne you know wine vocabulary limits you if your wine vocabulary is limited oh and I think it's the duty of um anyone who's seriously trying to communicate a about wine to have a rich vocabulary and we can develop our vocabulary um throughout our lives and this is a I think it's a sort of Duty um but the other thing about wine vocabulary is that you you need it there are two sides to the coin here you need the word to um to recognize the sensation when um you know dogs and children for example we know are super sensitive to um most of what we we won't go into this but most of what we taste is smell and uh there are people who are called super tasters because they they seem to be super sensitive but you're not really a super taster unless you can unless you can communicate that and um and for that you need the words but you also need the words to to notice the sensation and to articulate it and that's a question of training and um so I think your ability to Des describer wi is only as limited as your ability to to imagine and to use words and um you know and I think that's very important and I'm constantly thinking you know about what words I can use and uh in the old days I had a thesaurus which I used to use regularly you know I'd have a word and I'd go to the thesaurus and I can look it up today I have Mariam Webster which has its own thesaurus and is much easier to consult and I use that all the time and it's still and I find it very useful and it enlarges my vocabulary and it help you know when you put into words what you experience then you experience it more closely and with more pleasure and you know if we were to drink a bottle of ground wine between us and neither of us said anything there would be nothing like the same pleasure than there would be when we're talking about it and for that you need words and you know you need words at different levels for different people and different wines and so on so it's hugely important vocabulary but one doesn't talk about wies just in terms of words you talk about them in terms of uh many other things you know associations and points in time and history and friendships and special occasions and blah blah blah and that that has nothing to do with blind tasting another reason why blind tasting is not as good useful as it could be yes um I wanted to talk about uh another one of your passions which is uh if I understand correctly music no and I wanted to ask you do you sometimes uh pair wine with music you know it's a or is it not no it's a it's a very it's a very good question it's an interesting question and uh I think this is quite funny when we were um Andrew and I because Andrew is such a good friend you know we talk about this a lot together but when we were about to taste the 2018 Bordeaux vintage um Andrew looked back at my introduction my on prer introduction he said I see you describe it as vagian so I so I'm listening to Gad demung in preparation um you know there are there are lots of similarities between between wi and music not least they don't have their own language and so we have to we have to borrow u words and phrases from elsewhere which is fine we use words in all sorts of different contexts and and we understand that and it's also an interesting question because uh um 20 years ago now I think or something like that Barry Brothers in London asked me to do an evening of of wine and music and which is what I then did and we had um I think we had half a dozen wines which I'd selected from Barry brothers and um and I put some music with them and we had the wines and I there must have been 30 or 40 of us down in the room and uh I actually brought my own uh my own speakers and um you know audio system CU they had such a poor one no very happy to stick it in yeah and we had wi and music but it's not something I think about very often I think the the parallels that you can draw between them are actually very limited okay okay what about you what do you think uh I have never uh tried to do that but I would really like to to actually participate in that very Brothers Mo and Music Experience I think that would be uh great because I think music can also give you like a lot like it can like add certain emotions and then with those emotions you go towards wine and uh so I think it kind of but it's a it's a very artificial sort of pairing and I mainly chose what I um you know some of my favorite pieces but would which would work with with the wines we had so that I wouldn't be um we wouldn't have been listening to get get to Demar room or SE freed or Beethoven's nin for example with a glass of German reing and you can see why yeah we we we' be listening to B for for that uh you know or string quintet or something like that I have one more question to go but before uh that I wanted to ask you is there something that you wish to talk uh to talk and you and and I just didn't uh ask or is there some some more last thoughts that you would like to well I I brought along one little prop which we've got under here and which sort of um you know says something about what we've been saying so far and this goes back to to 1979 and uh it's uh I've got the the label here I don't know if you want to want to see it a little bit more closely the point about this is just talking about wine and it was a special occasion and it was a special wine but this label is from a magnum this was purchased in I would think round about 1974 we uh we drank for Magnum in 1979 and uh we'll come to that in a moment but this has on it the price this was brought at a um a sort of upmarket grosser in Cambridge here it's got 100 shillings that's £5 and the 100 shillings is crossed out and below it is 80 Shillings that's £44 for a magnum of one of the greatest post-war wines I mean it's just astonishing but I thought and I was in 1979 I was just I was only just beginning to get into wine here's my I don't know if you want to photograph this also with your thing that's um I started a series of notebooks and this is what I would use to to make notes about everything that was in a glass in front of me so that's the second one in 1979 and uh I've got the I've got the note here on this wine I knew it was a special wine I didn't really know how special but for family and friends for a Christmas meal we decided to have three maros which are 1964 1966 and 1953 and if you want to take a photograph of that you you know you can bring the thing up and was just interesting to have and there's the menu inside and I made a special occasion of it and I got the menu inside and I sewed the menu to it and so on but of course the the occasion was lovely and we enjoyed ourselves and I made a very careful note and um it's one of the greatest on I've ever had and I put down here quite super I didn't have much vocabulary then but I put quite superb elegant light very fine and feminine still in good condition this was watered about 26 years um a lovely natural sweetness an exceptional wine a pleasure a privilege and um with an aftertaste that just goes on and on and on an absolutely lovely flavor rich without being at all heavy so smooth and so on and so forth so of course I loved it but the interesting thing about the label is that this situates it at an important point in in history as well 1974 which was when this would have been bought was just after the oil crisis and it was also just after the um the cruise scandal in Bordeaux where wines were being sold by a very well-known name that it's not that they were bad wines or poor wines is it was that they said Bordeaux on the label and the wines didn't come from Bordeaux and that's a completely different story but anyway the market for Bordeaux for both those reasons and for fine wine in general you know just um bottomed and uh for one to be able to buy a magnum of 1953 Margo for £4 is just utterly astonishing and the reason for that is because of where we were at that point in history so it's a point in time it's a family occasion it's a fantastic wine it's a making a note about something so beautiful has situated it in in my memory and uh you know it's part part of my life's nourishment if you like and that's what that's what fine wine is about but it's also just what a bottle of you know basic crisp juicy wi wine is at um when we get back from work so the last question is one is one wine myth you would like to debunk H gosh one M myth uh there are so there are so many but I think sort of usefulness debunk is that wine gets better with age mostly it doesn't I've just come from staying with uh with family in um in Hamburg and we went down this i' I've still got an old cousin my father's first cousin who's now 93 and his brother who is now dead has a Sellar his daughter is looking after the house and she wants to sell it and we hadn't met actually met before but she knew I was a wine wine expert so I was invited down to The Cellar to tell to tell her if there were any Treasures there and uh there must have been about 60 bottles of wine there was not a single treasure amongst them they were all cabinets anded leers from 30 40 50 60 years ago and she doesn't drink wine and I said to her there's you know 99% of this is to throw away just because it's old doesn't mean it's good and most wines are meant are meant to be and to be drunk best young but the interesting thing was there were four bottles of asit laser I said we'll bring three of these bottles up and just draw the cork if we can get it out and see what they have to say one of them was a 1959 speed laser which which smelled lovely actually it still SM smelt a nice reing but it was completely dead and then there was a 1975 umed laser from the Aden attraction and with a um a wine maker called seon I mean there are several seor whom I didn't know so the possibilities here were quite promising and when we drew the cork on that what I said to them was it's um you know what you can certainly say about this is so it's not undrinkable and in fact we had we had it with our meal and one of us added a little bit of spr Spritz and the extraordinary thing was that uh a 50-year-old spit laser should be drinkable at all that was astonishing but mostly wines are to be drunk young you know Andrew says they're to be drunk young even if they're fine but I say they're to be drunk young and you know for most people when you buy it open it drink it within six months that's what they're mainly made for Perfect all right thank you very much thank you for your time and and coming uh here in in this cold and and gray weather that do um I have one small gift I don't I haven't seen you wear anything like this but this is the no sediment logo maybe yeah I think what you do actually is fantastic yeah so it actually suits you very well how's that well thank you it's been great [Music] [Applause] fun

Channel: No Sediment

Views: 2,965

Keywords: wine, wine podcast, No Sediment, No Sediment podacast, wine education, wine tasting, wine blind tasting, wine scores, Michael Schuster, World of Fine Wine, WSET, Master of Wine, Wine books, wine courses, wine expert, sommelier, wine interview, Agnese Gintere, Wine terms, Wine terminology, Wine glossary, wine judging, wine and music, wine stories, wine history, Red wine, White wine, Expensive wine, Sparkling wine, Champagne, Tasting wine

Id: WwBglF4o1fQ

Length: 53min 25sec (3205 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2024