The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture by Michael Steinberger Read Free Book Online Page B

allow people to have wine shipped to them from out-of-state retailers. The direct shipping issue is a sad commentary on the state of American politics—for one thing, it underscores how irredeemably corrupt our campaign finance system is—and a source of endless frustration to wine enthusiasts.
    These archaic laws have inhibited the growth of online wine buying, but there is still something to be said for the pleasure of browsing and buying in an actual store as opposed to a virtual one. When you’re in a brick-and-mortar store, however, there is something you need to check the moment you set foot inside, before you even peruse the selection: Is the temperature relatively cool, or is the heat blasting? If the store is noticeably warm, you should perform an immediate about-face and leave. It doesn’t matter how good the inventory is if the wines are not properly stored. I don’t care if you see a bottle of 1945 Mouton Rothschild being offered for $200—if the shop is warm, head for the door (and if they’re selling ’45 Mouton at that price, it’s probably a counterfeit bottle anyway). A cellar should be kept at around 55 degrees Fahrenheit, and while a store doesn’t need to be quite that cold, it certainly needs to be on the cooler side, and the bottles should be cool to the touch. One other piece of advice: as the saying goes, it pays to shop around, at least to the extent that you can, given our onerous shipping laws. There are sometimes significant price discrepancies between one store and the next, and you can save yourself a few dollars here and there by comparing prices. The best way to do that: use Wine-Searcher.com. It is a great service and can help you find bargains or at least avoid forking over more money than you need to spend.
    S HOULD Y OU U SE “P ROFESSIONAL” W INE R ATINGS?
    I don’t agree with people who contend that all rating scales are irredeemably flawed or who believe that comparative evaluations are somehow antithetical to the culture of wine. Since the beginning of wine, people have been making comparative assessments: I like wine X more than I like wine Y. The 1855 rankings in Bordeaux and the classification system in Burgundy are rooted in such judgments. It is human nature to compare and contrast, and frankly, it is part of the pleasure of wine. I think ratings are an inevitable aspect of wine appreciation, and I certainly haven’t been able to resist the urge to keep score; I use letter grades instead of numbers, but it still amounts to scorekeeping.
    However, the 100-point scale, popularized by Parker and used by the Wine Spectator and other publications, is a farce. It gives a pseudo-objective gloss to what is an almost wholly subjective exercise. I think that unless a critic can, tasting blind, reproduce the same results over and over, he or she has no business assigning a specific score to a wine—and I’m reasonably certain no one can do that. Wines show sufficient variability from bottle to bottle, and the human palate is sufficiently fickle, that that kind of consistency is just not possible. Some years ago, David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times , in an otherwise adulatory profile of Parker, tried to test the famed critic’s consistency by having him blind-taste and score a group of wines twice over consecutive days. Parker wouldn’t do it, telling Shaw, “I’ve got everything to lose and nothing to gain.” Give him 100 points for candor. In an interview with a Florida newspaper in 2007, Parker made another surprisingly frank admission that ought to have been the death knell of the 100-point scale. “I really think probably the only difference between a 96-, 97-, 98-, 99-, and 100-point wine,” he said, “is really the emotion of the moment.”
    That comment didn’t sink the 100-point approach, but the scale may be dying now for another reason: grade inflation. Nowadays critics have