I am going to go on with the relationship between the bottle and the taster. As I have already written, the wine in the bottle is a passive element. There is no scale, no differentiation, it is pure matter, and we recognise it through our activity. It is clear that depending on the grape, vintage, method of manufacture, the wine is different every time, but knowledge about it is not in wine. It is in us. We need to know what’s squealing in such grass if only to describe it.
If I am not aware of the grape used, or know nothing about the history of cultivation, and the conditions of fermentation, I will not be able to describe it by tasting. As one Facebook reader rightly stated in a comment, I should prepare my ability for tasting, that is, learn everything to interpret the taste correctly. Jesse Pinkman in Albuquerque will, perhaps, not recognise the qualities of Pomerol (still, I have nothing against Jesse Pinkman), just as the connoisseur of Bordeaux wine will spit out the plonk, which Jessie likes to sip with his mates.
In no way will it help to realise that on some scale such a bottle got 98 points because I would have to refer to all the bottles drunk in my life and compare them in a more extensive collection, and this is merely impossible. Such 98 points can strengthen my confidence, the subjective feeling I have developed in myself towards the person who rated the bottle so much. One thing is sure, judging the wine in the bottle, the person I’ve also been trusting referred to trust, this time for his nose and memory, although again this has nothing to do with objectivity.
All this we base on a kind of agreement, as who prefers, trust, but the accurate scale exists dynamically within ourselves and translates only into the fact that something we like or not. And the fact that this preference suits us, not others, each time is due to many variables. Of course, you can indicate the variables that are continually appearing, and here it is appropriate to quote the preparation of the taster related to knowledge, culture, experience, refinement. Still, there is also a handful of those that we can not even predict. On the very aspirations to live in happiness at a higher level of assessment, it is not possible to create patterns.
I’d better go back to the scale of Robert Parker Jr, which has nothing to do with taste, and which is strongly related to the wine market in America at that time. I will continue with it in the next text, as well as with many other consequences of scaling the taste.
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