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

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Is all taste equally valid?
Sure it is! There’s a feel-good, all-American
democratic answer for you. One man’s opinion’s as
good as another’s and all that. It is self-evidently the
right answer to the question.
It’s the question that’s bogus.
One evening at the ballgame I had the good fortune
to sit next to one of the advance scouts who
attend every game, gathering intel on the players. It
was a slow night, and I asked if he could “think out
loud” for me, tell me what he saw. And what he saw
was an entirely different ballgame from the one I
saw. I sat in admiration of his trained eye.
Similarly, if I take my car to the mechanic he
hears different things in the engine’s hum than I do.
A piano tuner hears minute tonal variances to which
I am effectively deaf. A massage therapist discerns
muscle tensions of which I’m not consciously aware.
All these are examples of expertise we take for
granted. And yet if someone asserts expertise in
wine, we are promptly suspicious; we sniff for snobbism,
we get defensive and put up our dukes — and
I have always wondered why.
Wine writers such as my friend Jennifer Rosen
feel a degree of responsibility to “demystify” wine,
to make it accessible to everyman. That way, they
reason, more people will drink it and the world will
be improved. Other wine writers want to reassure
you there are no “rules” and that you should always
drink what you like; reasonable advice on the face of
it. If you like drinking young Barolo with a dozen
raw oysters I won’t stop you (though I’ll shudder to
think what’s going on inside your mouth). If you like
a beer with five sardines steeped in it for 20 minutes,
go on and drink it that way. No one wants to keep
you from the consequences of your perverse taste.
No one denies your “right” to it.
Some of us, however, like to call things by their
proper names. Not from snobbism, sadism or any
other ism, but because it helps to order the world of
experience. It fends off the chaos.
I had a conversation on an airplane recently,
with a cellist in her 20s. We talked about music, naturally,
and it became clear to me her tastes were
wider than my own. (I’m an ossified old geez in his
early 50s.) I remarked upon her ecumenical listening
habits. “Well,” she said, “don’t you think one should
search for the virtues in everything?” Much as I
wished to say yes, to do so would have been false.
Instead I said: “No, I think you should seek the good
in everything; that’s where you are in your life. But
what I need to do is identify that which annoys or
wounds me, and avoid it.”
Stuart Pigott once wrote: “We should . . . start
making wines with balance, elegance and originality
sound so astonishing that our readers feel they’ve
just got to try them,” and this of course is true. A critic
must stand for something; otherwise he is merely
pusillanimous. And so our first task is to find the
good and praise it. But any time we take a stand FOR
something, we imply the thing’s shadow, i.e. the
thing we love suggests, ineluctably, the thing we
don’t love. And we cannot shrink from naming both
things, especially not for fear of wounding the delicate
sensibilities of the philistines (who, by the way,
are both robustly insensitive and also have no scruples
about insulting us with labels such as “snob”,
“elitist” et.al.).
God knows we’d prefer to be everyone’s best
friend, and we feel humane and generous telling
anyone with unformed (or simply atrocious) taste
that his taste is as good as anyone else’s. But it’s a lie
we tell so that we can feel noble, and furthermore it
is unfair to the recipient, who, if he’s being patron-