Let me start out by noting I am fully aware that articles about tasting wine can easily drift into navel gazing territory. But blind tasting and the wine markers we cling to as educators, writers, and wine buyers and sellers have been top of mind, so excuse a bit of potentially annoying introspection.
The last year or so, I’ve been setting up intense blind tasting flights as a coach for some top sommeliers competing in a global competition. I have also started teaching Diploma level classes for the WSET, which requires teaching students to explain why they’re calling a wine whatever they’re calling it. Prior to that, my most recent bout of extended blind tasting was about six years ago, in 2018, when I was studying for my Advanced exam with the Court of Master Sommeliers. I passed that in 2019 and then quickly segued into wrapping up my WSET Diploma, which involved taking the beastly D3 Still Wines of the World exam. I had taken the class (but skipped the exam) back in 2010, which was my first serious experience with blind tasting and the grids that they’re built on.
If you’re doing the math, this amounts to a serious blind tasting focus in 2010, followed by another eight years later, and the current stint six years after that, which brings me to the present.
Any extended bout of blind tasting requires diving deeply into what we expect a wine from a given grape and region to taste like based on textbooks and accepted notions of typicity. It also forces us to confront the conflicts between these assumptions and the reality of what we’re tasting in the glass. And multiple bouts separated by large gaps of time snap into focus how tastes, technology, and especially the climate have impacted that reality.
So here they are: my very non-scientific—hopefully-not-too-navel-gazey—thoughts on some change playing out in my wine glass.
Champagne: I remember standing in a vineyard, probably in 2016, with a group of buyers as Aurélien Laherte of Laherte Freres talked about the Petit Meslier grape. This was one of the “other” four grapes legally allowed in Champagne but rarely seen. While Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Meunier dominated the landscape, knowing that these other grapes even existed provided excellent trivia fodder. But Aurélien’s interest went beyond scoring wine geek points – he was experimenting with the grape because it held its acidity in a way that would be beneficial in the future phases of climate change. Fast forward less than ten years, and these obscure grapes have been popping up in bottlings across the region.
There’s also been a trend to lower dosage levels, likely driven by a combination of what the wine trade says it wants and weather that allows for riper fruit and more balanced base wines. Wines also seem to be released a bit earlier, with less lees aging. This could be due to cash flow needs or simple style preferences, or a combination of both, but whatever the reason, I’ve tasted a trend in Champagnes entering the market with less autolytic character – less brioche and buttered toast than sourdough and Carr’s water biscuit cracker. As other regions increasingly release top tier cuvées with extended lees contact, it’s very easy to confuse a stellar Corpinnat or Cava with a bottle of Champagne.
Beaujolais: During my 2018/2019 round of blind tasting, I was struck by how ripe and rich so many Beaujolais bottlings were, especially those from the top vineyards in Morgon such as Côte du Py or Corcelette. More than a few of my tasting companions regularly called them modern-ish style Syrah from Northern Rhône villages such as St.-Joseph or Crozes-Hermitage due to their mix of black fruit, savory spice, and a touch of brawny warmth. A few years later, I was struck by how many producers seemed to be tottering between the extremes of picking early in an attempt to preserve traditional bright cherry fruit or letting the grapes run with the sun. The former seemed pale, thin and reedy. The latter were pushing alcohol levels more closely associated with Napa Valley Cabernet. Based on my most recent round of tastings, the region seems to have settled into more of a middle ground with the bright, juicy, cherry-fruited wines of my memory shifting to something more dark-fruited, ripe and powerful.
Northern Rhône Syrah: Where, oh where has the black pepper gone! This was once the clear, definitive marker for red wines from this region. The textbooks still say it’s so, but I regularly find myself in front of class of WSET students explaining that what they’re tasting is the aromatic green peppercorn spice of stem inclusion, not the black pepper rotundone that comes from Syrah grapes grown at their cool climate limits. When do you finally give up looking for something that never seems to be there? I think the time might be now.
Grenache: When working for Wine Australia, we were quick to describe Grenache as warm climate Pinot Noir. Yes, it was good marketing-speak for a warm, sun-soaked country, but it was also true. Picked for aromatics and delicacy rather than power and ripeness, Grenache could offer up glorious, swoon-worthy levels of perfumed complexity. And more than once I’ve heard very good tasters call a Grenache a warm-climate Pinot Noir. I won’t say the days of ripe, high octane, kisch-y Grenache are gone, but this perfumed style does seem to be taking over the world, or at least Spain. It’s the dominant style in new-wave regions like the Gredos, but even in Priorat, despite my best attempts to find it, that dark, uber-concentrated, gobs-of-fruit style seems to be hiding under a pile of slatey Llicorella soil.
Torrontes: Long gone are the days when Torrontes could be easily spotted by it’s notes of almost-wilted yellow flowers and soapy perfume. (Does that sound like I don’t like Torrontes? I don’t mean it that way! I might be one of the few wine industry people on the planet that actually liked the style – and not just because it was easy to spot blind.) Since my first tastes of the grape in the early 2000s, cooler sites and a firm handle on how the grape ripens and when to pick it have toned it’s florid opulence way, way down. Tasted blind, it’s essentially unrecognizable to anyone stuck in an old textbook.
Riesling: A tell-tale sign of Australian Riesling used to be a waft of so-called “petrol” notes at a very early age. I’ll spare you the chemistry lesson, and simplify the story (wine chemists, please don’t come at me!) The aroma is related to a compound called TDN and its accumulation in Riesling grapes is related to sun exposure, among other things. Australia has loads of sun, so its Riesling grapes accumulate loads of TDN…or at least they did until the country’s viticulturalists developed a better understanding of what it was happening and how to reduce it. So now, Aussie Rieslings show much less petrol—if any—when young, but as blind tasters, we’re still looking for it. It could be my vivid wine imagination (and my just-enough-to-be-dangerous understanding of wine chemistry), but I’ve started to notice hints of petrol in very young Germany Rieslings, perhaps due to the increasing levels of sunshine they’re getting. It almost brings my WSET students to tears when I tell them, no, it’s not an aged Riesling just because you smell petrol.
Could it be that some of the wine tasting grid’s last immutable truths are no longer true? If we’re letting the wines do the talking, then that seems to be very much what they’re saying.