German Catalog 2006 USE THIS ONE.qxp - Michael Skurnik Wines

6
Continuing New Approach to Tasting Notes
At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo
a radical decentering. Beauty, according to
[Simone] Weil, requires us ‘to give up our imaginary
position as the center . . .’ What happens, happens to
our bodies. When we come upon beautiful things . . .
they act like small tears in the surface of the world that
pull us through to some vaster space . . . or they lift us
. . . letting the ground rotate beneath us several inches,
so that when we land, we find we are standing in a
different relation to the world than we were a moment
before. It is not that we cease to stand at the center of
the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease
to stand even at the center of our own world. We willingly
cede ground to the thing that stands before us.
-Elaine Scarry
A friend of mine sent me this funny bit of verse:
Introduction to Poetry
I asked them to take a poem
and hold it to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out
or walk inside a poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch
I want them to water ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the authors name on the shore
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with a rope
and torture a confession out of it
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means
It’s kinda funny if you substitute the word “wine”
for the word “poem.” Try it.
A tasting note can be two things, either a depiction
of how it was to taste (or drink) the wine, perhaps including
how it tasted, or a mere dissection of flavors. The latter
strikes me as useless, unless it’s attached to a specific
purpose such as giving you some clue about what to buy.
Otherwise, sorry; I don’t want to read your tasting notes.
I don’t like reading my own. Think about it: to what purpose
are you going to put descriptions-of-flavors? On
March 13th at 10:35am a certain wine tasted to a certain
person like candied yak spleens dipped in sorghum.
What’s the value of this information? Will the wine smell
and taste identically to you, weeks months or years later?
Put another way, if I’m trying to describe Scheurebe
to you, which is the more useful description? 1)
Scheurebe has flavors of red and blackcurrant, sage,
pink grapefruit, passion-fruit (when very ripe), or . . . 2)
Scheurebe tastes like Riesling would taste, if Riesling
were a transvestite? Well sure, both of course, but what if
you could only have one, and what if you needed to
make someone curious?
One thing I find utterly impossible is writing notes
for intensely sweet concentrated young wines. Even my
beloved Eisweins reduce me to an inarticulate funk. How
does anyone manage it? How do you distinguish among
fifteen TBAs, all of which taste more or less like whiteraisin
and fig liqueur? I find it hard enough to select
among them, let alone to froth and spume over them. I
key off of clarity and form, and hope you won’t notice if
my notes are mumbly.
I know you sometimes use me to discern what you
want to buy, and believe me I want to be helpful. But do
you really buy wine because it tastes “like boysenberrys
and pork-snouts?” Wouldn’t you rather know the wine
“danced like Gandhi would have had there been discos
in Calcutta?” Well it’s what I’d rather tell you, so get over
it. That, or I’ll take my cue from shampoo bottles, and if
I like a wine just write, “Open, drink, repeat.”
I used to care a great deal about writing tasting notes
as much for my own writer’s ego as for the actual wines. I
searched for ever-more esoteric associations so you would
be impressed with my palate. I strove for pretty language
so you’d think I was a good writer. Sometimes I actually
wrote well, and sometimes the wine actually did taste like
“polyvinyl siding in direct sunlight on a Fall day with an