On reviewing again, after a brief sabbatical
Getting my chops back as a taster isn’t hard at all. It’s like bicycle riding: once you know how to do it, you can take some time off and then get right back on and go places.
As I wrote yesterday, I’m going be reviewing wines here on my blog, after 1-1/2 years off. But it’s not like I ever stopped tasting. I reviewed Jackson Family Wines for the winery newsletter, and—let’s face it—I didn’t exactly stop drinking! I found myself instinctively reviewing and rating every bottle that I came across. Old habits die hard.
The question sometimes comes up with wine critics, Can’t you just drink wine without analyzing it? Well, no. I mean, anyone who purports to think more than the average Joe about wine probably gets analytical about it. The one question I can never get away from is, What is this wine’s quality? Is it super-duper? Is it average? Does it suck? I think we all do that, those of us in the industry. We make value judgments.
That doesn’t mean that every time I have a new wine, I’m writing a little mini-review in my head. But there is a form of thought, consideration and judgment that wouldn’t be very hard for me to put into words, if that was my wont. Nor does it mean that I can’t enjoy a wine that’s average. I can. I’ve known people in my life who wouldn’t have been caught dead drinking anything less than a First Growth or Grand Cru. I felt (and feel) sorry for them. Snobs. But then, I also feel sorry for folks who only drink plonk, and claim that there’s no difference between wines anyway, so why spend a fortune when you can get the same thing for eight bucks? That’s not true. I wonder if they say the same thing about automobiles, or stereo systems, or clothing?
So here I am, getting back into the reviewing business. But I’m not going to let it to be like it was at Wine Enthusiast, when I often felt like a prisoner in a cage made of wine bottles. So much wine coming in, more and more everyday, and you have to taste and review every single one of them. It cuts into your social life, I can tell you that, and becomes a tedium. I doubt if some of the more famous critics, who taste scores if not hundreds of wines a day, will ‘fess up to that. But it does. I don’t think I ever let the tedium get in the way of my reviews, though; and it’s also true that alcohol stimulates me, so that even when I’m tired, wine perks me up. There were days when I felt like I couldn’t face another flight, so tired was I; but as soon as I jumped into it, my fatigue went away, and the sheer intellectual and physical challenge stimulated my body and mind and allowed me to perform. Going to the gym can be that like: every serious gym rat knows that, on those days when you feel like your dogs are draggin’, if you can get to the gym you have the best workouts.
I have no expectations about where this reviewing thing is headed. I’m playing around with the idea of charging a reviewing fee; there’s a lot of work involved in wine tasting (picking up boxes at the UPS Store, breaking down the cartons, dealing with the Styrofoam, washing and recycling the bottles only begins to describe it), and after all, I have bills to pay, like everyone else. It doesn’t seem to me that charging for reviewing would “taint” my reviews, but I’ll leave it to my readers to decide if they think it does. (Troll alert: I don’t care what you think.) I mean, if a steveheimoff.com review has potential value to wineries, then I’d think the least they would want to do is sustain me at a fair price. Right?
Steve,
“. . . there’s a lot of work involved in wine tasting . . .”
A continuing mystery to me is how you reviewed wines while at Wine Enthusiast.
Did you taste them single-blind (having someone brown paper bag them) to anonymize their identity?
Did you taste in narrowly-defined flights by single grape variety, single vintage, single appellation? (“Apples to apples” comparison.)
How many times, and over how much elapsed time did you discretely sample them?
Seeking some historical context here from Charlie, et. al.: Did Jerry Mead charge for wine reviews? How was that practice received by the wine press and the wineries?
Bob