Leigh Knowles would have loved the your comments–straight from the prismatic luminescence school of art appreciation.

Steve–

Love the Roger Voss quote. It is one thing to be a free thinker unbounded by convention. The world needs more of those. But wine has convention, as stuffy as that sounds, and in order to understand when and how to think outside of the box (convention), one first has to understand the box. That is the way the knowledge and wisdom grow.

If a winery wants to make oxidized, dry GWZ at 17% alcohol, that is its business. And if some people like it, that is theirs. But, both the making and the appreciation have nothing to do with knowledge, and as the result, those wines, just like Marcassin and Martinelli Chardonnays may or may not be great but they often have no reference to common knowledge.

You often get messages here from Randy whose love of lower alcohol, minimally oaked wines is pretty clear. Whether one likes those wines or not, Randy knows where convention lies and chooses to make wines with his own take on it.

Criticism includes an artistic element–creativity–but it’s core function differs fundamentally. It scrutinizes the art object rather than the reality as interpreted by the artist. Yet to do this s/he must have a good grasp of that reality in order to evaluate how the artist has shed new light on the outside reference. Or if no reference is meant or occurs, s/he must have the sensibility to appreciate or not how the artist has used the materials of the given art form in a novel and pleasing way, unlike Picasso, in my view, who was a genius promoter.