You Say To-may-to, I Say To-Mah-To

Filed in archive Wine News on October 7, 2007

It happens to me all the time at work: a customer pulls a wine bottle off the shelf and asks, "Is this good?" It's the one question I absolutely dread because, really, how do you answer that? It all depends on your personal definition of "good." The good news is that even expert sommelier sometimes have a difficult time with this. Every person's palate is different, and not everyone is going to always agree.

From The San Jose Mercury News:

I recently judged the Sonoma County Harvest Fair professional wine competition. There were five judges on my panel, and we all had good credentials - three longtime wine writers, a wine educator and an experienced winery marketing person. We could generally agree on the wines that were badly flawed. And it wasn't hard to reach consensus on the really top-notch wines.

But our scores for the more middle-of-the-road wines were wildly divergent. After discussing each wine, we could eventually agree on whether to award a medal and what type. But as Stephen Brook, an English wine writer and author, observed after the first day of judging, "If we were reviewing these wines independently - we'd have maybe 15 percent overlap."

The lesson here: it really is all a matter of person taste. You might love to drink Woodbridge Chardonnay and I might not. I might love Esser Cabernet Sauvignon and you might hate it. To each her own.