What's the history of wine-tasting?

January 31, 2005 9:09 AM

OenoFilter: When/where/how did the practice of wine tasting begin? More specific question inside.

By 'wine tasting', I of course don't mean the invention, enjoyment, or appreciation of wine in itself. What I'm curious about is the development of the protocol for 'wine tasting' as it's often taught at wineries and in formal courses on wine. The specific series of behaviors that you're encouraged to follow (viewing the color, the chewing thing, the swishing, etc.) -- who codified these? What are some of the earliest references to 'proper' wine tasting technique? Could it be that there has been an attempt to mystify something that is really rather simple -- paying attention to the taste of good wine?

I should disclose that I'm asking because a friend has recently fallen for the whole wine scene, and has taken the tasting behavior to a rather ridiculous and tiresome extreme - making a grand show of going through this process with every bottle I serve, from the $8 Chileans on up. I'm wondering how recent a phenomenon this series of rather affected behaviors is. I believe that it's possible to truly enjoy and appreciate the finer things in life without grandstanding.

posted by Miko to food & drink (20 comments total)

Interesting question. I imagine that a lot of it grew out of the French appellation laws of the 19th(?) century. These laws codified what would qualify as acceptable output from various regions of France. French wines are labelled by region, not grape varietal, and vintners are allowed to (somewhat) alter the mix of grapes each year to achieve as much uniformity of taste as possible.

For this reason, you can almost always tell what region of France a given wine is from solely by taste, but it's possible for one California producer's pinot noir to taste more like a zin.
posted by mkultra at 9:30 AM on January 31, 2005

I seem to remember someone telling me that originally, wine tasting ( and cork checking) was done to insure that it was not poisoned...as that was a popular way to off a ruler. At first, someone was selected to "taste" the wine...if they survived, then the wine was good. Later, a toast became the way to check the wine...sort of " If I die, so will you" ... A click of the goblets became a symbol of trust. I may be wrong, But I trusted whoever told me this years ago.
posted by lobstah at 9:31 AM on January 31, 2005

It's a holdover from the times when wines weren't sulfited, but rather the wines were alive in the bottle and could go bad - turn to vinegar; dissolve a rotting cork; nasty things like that. The various phases of inspection were simply to assure oneself that the wine was fit to drink.

As far as turning it into a hoity-toity ritual, I don't know, but I'm betting on Louis XIV-era France.
posted by ikkyu2 at 9:32 AM on January 31, 2005

There are a lot of urban myths about the poisoning part. I do know that the opening ritual -- the cork-sniffing, and the initial taste of a new bottle -- come not from fears of poisoning, but from a tavern owner's desire to prove that he wasn't swindling. In the 18th and 19th centuries a good way for an unscrupulous tavern keeper to make a buck was to pour cheap wine into an empty bottle bearing the label of a better wine. The cork ritual is a good-faith gesture meant to show that this is the first time that bottle has been opened. The initial tasting as done in restaurants today is just to test that the wine isn't off (smells like feet, highly alcoholic note, vinegary). It is just to ensure drinkability; it's not meant as an opportunity to judge the wine. I'm down with all that, and those are more service rituals anyway.

My question is more about the "sip, swish, spit" process of wine evaluation and appreciation. The intellectualization of wine tasting. When and where did that first appear?
posted by Miko at 9:40 AM on January 31, 2005

Also (just to clean up that topic) why ikkyu said, and a bad bottle is sometimes indicated by a bad (rotten, crumbly) cork. I've served literally thousands of bottles and found exactly four bad ones. It still happens, but rarely.
posted by Miko at 9:42 AM on January 31, 2005

Funny you should ask!

From the linked article:
Sancho Panza fancied himself a wine connoisseur of rare ability. Challenged on his claim to have a ‘great natural instinct in judging wines’, he assured a sceptic that you ‘have only to let me smell one and I can tell positively its country, its kind, its flavour and soundness, the changes it will undergo and everything that appertains to a wine’.

I don't know about the ritual, per se, but the act itself sure has been around for a while....
posted by Floydd at 11:00 AM on January 31, 2005

More: Imagine it's the year 1125, and your Medieval host offers you seven year-old home-made wine stored in the cellar, a hole in the ground. You're not going to sling that wine/poison into your mouth heedlessly: you're going to approach it with caution.

Sounds sensible to me.
posted by Floydd at 11:07 AM on January 31, 2005

Well, thanks for searching, but...that last link says the wine tasting routine 'has its roots in history' but then asks us to 'imagine' that this ritual started in 1125. No citations or evidence, so I doubt it's that old; just a writer's effort to enliven his basic, modern how-to. What I'm interested in finding is the earliest possible codified list of the steps recommended for a tasting.

The Sancho Panza story is great, and the article as a whole was well written and amusing, but it discussed whether there is any objective merit in wine evaluation, and didn't shed any further light on when the tasting ritual began.

Further, it pooh-poohs as "American" the idea that wine evaluation might be inflated with a bit of BS. I recommend as a companion reading and antidote Calvin Trillin's The Red and the White, in which, says, 'I concluded that experienced wine drinkers can tell red from white by taste about seventy per cent of the time, as long as the test is being administered by someone who isn't interested in trying to fool them'. (70% -- that was a C when I was in high school). Anyhow, I do accept that some wine is better than other wine, and that wines do differ from one another in interesting ways. I'm just want to know when people began to create this scaffolding by which to evaluate it.
posted by Miko at 11:52 AM on January 31, 2005

Miko, Calvin Trillin is a humorist. That's like citing Dave Barry as an authority.

As for your friend, cut him some slack (I'm assuming he's a he because that's typically male behavior). It's natural to go overboard when you first get into wine (or anything that has similar mystique); I was probably annoying after my own first few tastings. He'll get over it, and you might learn something by listening to him. Just don't dismiss it all as bullshit because some people get silly about it.
posted by languagehat at 3:19 PM on January 31, 2005

Basically, the credibility of any ritual like that is directly proportional to the person's ability to really discriminate--in other words, if you've got a world-class sense of taste and smell, then they're totally legitimate. If you've got a better-than-average ability to parse out those elements, then you're being a bit pretentious. If you've got an average nose, and you're going through all that, then you're an ass.

For the most part, those rituals evolved in the wineries themselves, where the talented men and women who blend and cultivate the wines use them to craft each year's product, and to track previous years' bottles and see how they age. These folks have a sense of taste and smell like a parfumier...it's like the olfactory equivalent of perfect pitch. The smelling, the chewing, the swishing--those all have specific functions, when you know what you're doing, and if you can distinguish incredibly fine variations of flavor and bouquet. It's not pretentious when you're doing it as part of your job.

As an aside, I once got to know the guy who ran a champagnerie in Reims. He explained that every year, he got grapes from over 128 different crus, which are the tiny little grape-growing regions within the area. For each cru, they took three different pressings, each of which tasted different, so he really had 384 different types of raw grape juice to choose from, and they were all different with every year's harvest.

The amazing thing was that he was actually a small, mid-level producer, so he wasn't creating unique vintages or anything--every year, he would taste all new 384 pressings, and he would choose a different combination, in different proportions, to end up with something that would taste the _same_ every year, out of the bottle, _after_ it had been fermented. Unbelievable. Sure, he had a PhD in "Oenology", but he also had an unimaginably acute and refined olfactory capability.

Another friend of mine ended up becoming a pretty well-established chef, and had a similarly refined palate. He would always duck away discreetly with a glass of wine or a dish if he really wanted to drink it in...that always struck me as a pretty honest way to go about it. He didn't really want to be distracted by an audience, and he didn't want to show off--he just wanted an opportunity to really focus on the flavors and tastes of a wine or a sauce, which involved a good amount of sniffing, swishing, smacking, etc. He would either quietly turn around a bit and hunch over, or just move off to another room or a hallway. A lot of times, people didn't even notice, which I think is probably the hallmark of someone who's doing it for all the right reasons.
posted by LairBob at 6:10 PM on January 31, 2005

_{[Disclaimer: I've got a deviated septum, and a definitely sub-par sense of smell, so I'm not laying claim to any special capabilities myself on this front...]}
posted by LairBob at 6:11 PM on January 31, 2005

Languagehat, ugh. Gimme a break.

you might learn something by listening to him

Actually, I already know quite a bit about food and wine. Let me repeat once more, I fully accept that there really are chemical compounds to be detected, compared, and enjoyed in wine. All I'm looking for here and now -- the question I want to answer -- is the earliest written reference we have to a codified, system of steps recommended for tasting wine.

Miko, Calvin Trillin is a humorist. That's like citing Dave Barry as an authority.

I've read just abouteverything Calvin Trillin has written. He began his writing career by becoming an accomplished news reporter, and has since become not only a humorist but also a novelist, poet, political commentator, and respected travel and food writer. The article I posted, though written in a light and gently mocking style, is a serious examination of the legitimate question of whether wine experts can differentiate whites from reds in a blind taste test. It is possible to be humorous and accurate at once. When Dave Barry starts displaying the strong reportorial skills, elegant narrative structure, and earns literary and journalistic reputation of Trillin, then I'll cite him. In the meantime, he can cool his heels in Parade magazine.

And if you knew the guy Im talking about, you wouldn't cut him any slack, either. I included the mention only to create some clarity about why I was asking; but I'm starting to regret it, since it's been so distracting.

LairBob -- again, I agree that careful tasting is legitimate. Good story. I like your theory that it originated with vintners. But when and how did it become de rigeur for the pretentious dilettante yuppie? That's what I'm after.
posted by Miko at 7:10 PM on January 31, 2005

Well, if you're looking for the transition to yuppie poseurs, I think that the real boom is almost certainly driven by the growth of high-end commercial wineries in California. The California vineyards realized pretty quickly that they had to cultivate a sense of connoisseurship if they were going to establish a sizable US market for themselves, and they started aggressively promoting a lot of this stuff in their tastings years ago..."Come learn how the real vintners do it! Become an expert, with all the trappings!"

Here in the US, there's a deep cultural assumption that you can do anything anyone else can do, if you apply yourself, so it doesn't seem absurd to attend a couple of tastings, and act as if you're a trained oenologist. ("I _could've_ been one, if I really wanted to, so why shouldn't I act like one?")

That core confidence is at the root of a lot of what's genuinely great about the US, but it also leads to a lot of posing and strutting--Bobos who are showy, opinionated pedants about their sports cars they could never fix, the books they could never write, the movies they could never make, and the wines they could never pick out blind in a tasting.
posted by LairBob at 7:24 PM on January 31, 2005

Well, contrary to the "it's just pretension" there is some purpose in tasting wine even if you don't have the great nose. Basically, it is just tasting what you are drinking instead of just guzzling it down.

Specifically, even an average person can taste the various overt flavors. Yeah, you might not be able to recognize the X year type of Y from maker Z, but you can tell that a particular wine has strong oaking or bitterness or more sweet than most of its type or ... etc.

Part of those wine tasting classes or winery tours is to teach you the vocabulary that is used. There are categories of tastes and flavors usually arranged in a wheel (used by professionals and studied and refined by academics and others). You start with general flavor or aroma categories. These are pretty broad, like fruity or herby. Then, within that, the taste or smell is refined. For fruity it might be citrus or berry. And THEN further things within that! For herby, it might end up has fresh or dried and then things like bell pepper or hay/straw. There are myriad categories and academics (oenologists and such) argue over the right way to categorize tastes and smells.

A regular guy can almost certainly distinguish fruity from herby, and likely the "middle" sub-categories (i.e. citrus vs berry). These are useful distinctions. I personally like fruity wines in general and especially the more berry tasting ones. I loathe other flavors like the taste in chardonnays usually described as buttery.

Now, the different flavors are said to come out at different points in tasting: initial, in the mouth, aftertaste, aroma, etc. And a wine might strongly exhibit different flavors at different points. The swishing and smelling and such is to allow one to smell that stuff and label it.

Sure Joe Schmoe won't be able to label each stage as well as a professional, but he'll figure out general categories. This is helpful when picking out a wine by description (assuming the description was made by somehow who uses the terminology). If you see a wine described as oaky and you have some clue what oaky tastes like and you don't like strong oak tastes, then you aren't going to buy a wine described as "strongly oaky"!

Now, I will agree the guy who goes thru the whole rigamorole and insists on sharing the results with everyone is a fool (I won't even comment on how silly he is if he claims to be able to identify vintages and whatnot). But a guy, who when offered a glass of wine, takes the time to smell it and take the first few sips carefully just is just tasting what he is drinking. This guy isn't going to share his thoughts unless you ask him and I wouldn't consider it pretentious. And he is going to do it commensurate with his experience and ability.

Take my husband and I. I tend to just take a couple sips (maybe without sniffing) just to figure out overt taste descriptions. My husband, who makes wine, will smell it, swirl in the glass (to see the legs), taste it, swish it, etc. (but not spit it -- that's a waste of good wine!) But he knows a lot more of the words, knows the chemical and common names for many tastes/aromas, reads this stuff all the time, .... but still doesn't generally impose his judgement on anyone.
posted by R343L at 8:58 PM on January 31, 2005

Well, sure, R343L...I don't think anyone here is saying that there's not a lot of legitimate reasons to pay attention to the flavors and smells that make up a good wine. Certainly anyone can enjoy a nice wine, and it's great idea to pay attention while you're doing it, and to build up your "vocabulary" of tastes and smells.

There is, though, a whole commercial enterprise that's sprung up in creating shallow pedants--a market of folks who can flatter themselves into spending a lot more money on wine than they really can appreciate. That's what we're all complaining about here.
posted by LairBob at 9:10 PM on January 31, 2005

Fine then...it just came off as "all those pretentious fools". And since I fit in that class of people .... :)

But I'll agree that there are a lot of useless snobs. We're in a blind-tasting wine group in north SF bay. Most people are somewhat inexperienced, but everyone wants to be experts ... and I think a lot of them are falling for the "expensive wine is good wine trap". When we "did" merlots, my husband and I (who don't really like merlot much) brought what would be considered a "good" wine and a "crap" wine (a Charles Shaw aka Two Buck Chuck). And, in the blind tasting we did (~12 wines total), the Charles Shaw was #2 (don't think the "good" brand we brought even had anyone voting for it...) This is not to say that these people were snobs, just that the cheap wines can be as good as the pricey ones. (And my french co-worker thinks any bottle over 6 bucks is way to expensive...)
posted by R343L at 9:50 PM on January 31, 2005

Miko: You've led me on a merry chase through the untrammeled wilds of the Intarweb.

I started by googling History of Wine Tasting. I quickly discerned that someone named Dominique Valentin had given a lecture at UT Dallas in 2001 about, among other things, the history of wine tasting.

After a lot of searching later, and a very enjoyable, if digressive stop at Oxford University's Bacchus Wine Society, I found Valentin's HTML-ized Powerpoint presentation from that talk online.

The money is in slides 13-17, but let me just say that this right here reveals the problem with Powerpoint. Powerpoint delivers a format for the presentation of a précis of information. I don't want a précis of information. I want the information itself, dammit.

Eventually I found Dr. Valentin's CV, complete with a photograph. She looks smart, as befits the Professor of Tasting and Smelling at the University of Burgundy.

Her email address is at the bottom. You want to email her and ask her for a good reference about the history of the tasting ritual; or shall I?
posted by ikkyu2 at 10:29 PM on January 31, 2005

ikkyu, fabulous! I will e-mail her. Nice trail-following. My googling of '"wine tasting" history' produced mostly dross for the first ten pages, which is why I came here. Ah, the magic of the search.

Here in the US, there's a deep cultural assumption that you can do anything anyone else can do, if you apply yourself, so it doesn't seem absurd to attend a couple of tastings, and act as if you're a trained oenologist. ("I _could've_ been one, if I really wanted to, so why shouldn't I act like one?")

That's true (and Trillin makes that point in his article). Yet I critique the idea that there's something typically American, and thus lowbrow, in skepticism about pretensions, because there is also something typically American about aspiring to the trappings of the highest social classes in a defensive attempt to assert personal worth. I've never witnessed this devotion to American-style wine tasting (parties, classes, dinner-table grandstanding) in nations with a more ancient culture of wine-drinking, where wine is a comfortable part of daily life. Yet in America it is often used to tag superior social status.

As a historian, I believe in examining the roots of behaviors like this to see what they might tell us about the culture that has adopted them. The wine-tasting mystique (and again I mean the full-throttle, by-the-book song-and-dance, not just carefully sipping and paying attention) is interesting to me because:

1) There was a time within living memory that virtually no one outside the wine profession did this;

2) In recent years, it has become a commonly observable behavior among people who are not vintners or gourmands, and do not otherwise show much gustatory awareness;

3) It is associated with money and sophistication, and is thus perceived, at least among some, as a desirable behavior to display.

LairBob's suggestion that the California vintners 70s and 80s did much to popularize this phenomenon sounds viable. The era in which those wineries really established their quality, the 70s and 80s, coincided with a wealth shift in the US, and with the maturing of the baby boomers. A perfect time for what would be perceived as an adult, moneyed, sophisticated hobby to catch hold.

I'm expecting to find causes beyond the existence of wine itself for this ritual to have become popular. The reason I suspect that there's more to it is that wine is in no way unique. The nuanced flavors of wine owe their existence to two things: first, the grapes themselves, whose flavors vary with varietal, terroir, cultivation, and climate; and second, the chemical process of fermentation, which results in a multiplicity of new chemical structures, giving a rainbowed layering of flavor. Great. So wine really is complex, and there's a lot there to be tasted, if you'd like to be a connoisseur. No arguments there.

But -- and here's were wine behavior is unique and interesting -- the same complexity and nuance is found in many fine foods that have undergone processes which give them the same wide range of chemical compounds. Other fermented beverages such as beer and whisky, chocolate, cheeses, and, particularly, coffee, are excellent examples. All of these foods, tasted in variety and compared against one another, will yield up the same interest to the palate as will wine.

Fine coffee is an excellent example, because as with wine, much depends on region, varietal, and terroir. Then, the processing (aging followed by varying degrees of roasting) creates amazing variety in coffee. Finally, coffee roasters, like vintners, create blends which balance and combine the subtle flavors of several roastings. Coffee experts (my sister-in-law is one) evaluate the merits of various coffees by having what's called a 'cupping', or coffee tasting. In a cupping, each coffee is carefully observed both in the bean, and then brewed, and is evaluated for roast color, flavor profile, and body. All of which is absolutely worthwhile.

Yet, as much as modern Americans like to think of themselves as coffee aficionados, you don't find cupping behavior at the corner Starbucks. Folks aren't insisting the coffee be served in a white cup for proper color observation, nor are they aspirating coffee from their spoons while blocking their nasal cavities to let the flavors bloom. Nor do I often observe people eating chocolate with the deliberate attention of a chocolate tasting. Yet the flavors are there! So why should we find wine-tasting behavior at the corner bistro? If it's really based on flavor appreciation, why should wine be unique? Why not taste everything as a gourmand would?

This is why it's doubtful to me that wine appreciation and wine tasting behavior are motivated solely by the qualities of wine itself. Other foods and beverages are equally complex, but don't enjoy the perceived value of wine. Perhaps, as R343L asserts, it's because wine is mixed up in many people's minds with costliness. Again, this is in error; a good coffee runs $12-$14 a pound, and good chocolate -- just in the bar as an ingredient -- is easily worth $20 a pound or more, while a good wine can be found very cheaply.

And as LairBob's story reminded me, I have seen chefs' knees buckle over a good demi-glace or a fresh ahi sashimi. I myself have a nose I'm very proud of, which can dissect ingredients in a sauce with remarkable accuracy and allow me to re-create the flavors at home -- and of course to enjoy wine as well as other foods. Flavor is everywhere. It's always easy to enjoy and pay attention to. And I have found that the more truly educated a person is about taste, the more down-to-earth they are about the appreciation and enjoyment of it. They are comfortable with their understanding. So it's a bit silly when someone adopts the Byzantine behavior of a connoisseur of a single product, while remaining seemingly indifferent to all of the other flavors around him. Especially when it fits a general pattern of affecting the supposed habits of the wealthy.
posted by Miko at 6:51 AM on February 1, 2005

Just an aside...

That Dr. Valentin is one fascinatin' lady! Such cool research.
posted by Miko at 7:03 AM on February 1, 2005

Actually, I already know quite a bit about food and wine... I myself have a nose I'm very proud of...

And you're asking me to give you a break? Well, keep enjoying yourself. But yeah, you probably shouldn't have mentioned your friend if you didn't want anybody to talk about him. And if I'd known you were such an expert I certainly wouldn't have dared poke my nose (which I'm pretty humble about) in here.
posted by languagehat at 7:55 PM on February 1, 2005