Someone I follow on social media recently said she hoped that, one day, an article on Sherry would not begin with a reference to their grandmother and a thimbleful of Andalucia's finest. Which is a fair call because, as a wine-writing trope, it's something of a refrain. So here goes.
The first time I tasted a glass of Fino Sherry, I felt as if someone had been sick in my mouth.
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Perhaps I had been foiled by the nose? I was expecting something sweet, nutty, mouthcoatingly oleaginous. Instead, I got all the palate weight of Bay of Cadiz seawater; the puckering sensation one feels when watching, in slow motion, the horn of a prize bull pierce the pink-clad thigh of a toreador and toss him about like a drunk in an industrial tumble drier – that same pucker, except in the mouth; and the vibrant acidity associated with the juice of a car battery (let's say it's a Seat Toledo, just to flog the metaphor) on ice with a squeeze of lemon.
It's a relatively vivid recollection. But my problem with it now – or at least my problem admitting to it – is that, these days, I love the stuff. I can't get enough of it. In fact, it didn't take long to become a convert. Manzanilla, Fino, Oloroso, Palo Cortado – bring it on. What I have to square, however, is that, at the time of my first tasting, my reaction was legitimate: I thought it was gross. I would have barely deigned to score it, were I rating wines back then. It would have been an honest (for me) 12/20.
But within a year or two, I had grown to love it. Solid 17 and even 18 out of 20 (or hitting the 90s if you're on the 100-point scale). The thing is: the wine hadn't changed but I had.
Changing tastes
This isn't a piece about Sherry really, it's about how our own palates develop, mature and change over time. That time can be years, it can be hours. It's a test you can try yourself. Taste and rate three completely random bottles in the morning. Then go back to them over a three or four-hour period around dinner and see, before it's time to turn in, whether you agree with your morning self. The rankings might still correspond, but the reasoning behind them might have changed. We change our feelings all the time; over a day; over weeks; over years.
Part of it is maturity (on the taster's part, not the wine). You can learn the hard way that a particular wine in a tasting lineup might get great marks but take it home for dinner and you'll revise that judgement when you can't face two glasses in a row. Part of it is just that, as individuals, our tastes change over time.
This is why, I think, I'm always skeptical when people say they can find the perfect wine to match my taste. Which taste? What if my taste changes? What if I prefer to be challenged, not comforted, in my drinking experience? Which me are you pairing it to? It's like answering those personality tests: do you want an answer that reflects my will or my reality? Do you want me to tell you how I'd want to behave versus how I'd most likely behave – I can't pull those apart abstractly? Is it possible I can even be coerced into liking something despite my initial reservations?
Which brings me to Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. I was a relatively big Hendrix fan when I bought this (it was a tape) and I struggled with it. A three-minute, well-crafted '60s rock song is not the same as a late-'60s extended jam. Hendrix's guitar sounds like it's being piped through squelchy mud at everyone's feet (due in no small part the effects pedals) and although I was a budding guitarist, I struggled with the extended noodling. It took time and a lot of listens (several weeks which, for a teenager, is an age) before I grew to love it. I still love it.
Maybe it was the same with Sherry. Had a constant stream of Finos, Manzanillas, Palo Cortados and Olorosos convinced me that actually, yes, this was one of the greatest wines in the world? The point's somewhat moot: whether it was conditioning or not, I had come to love Sherry.
Fixed points
The problem is that tasting and rating wine assumes one fixed point: the taster. But the taster isn't infallible. A wine rating consists of two unmoored points coinciding at the time of a wine tasting: the wine at that time and the taster at that time. You could make an argument that, in fairness, each tasting score should be accompanied by the number of minutes the taster spent on assessing the wine. But what then? Sure, a "95 points/two minutes" is less meaningful than a "92 points/30 minutes" but wouldn't a "90 points/six hours" remove the individuality of the craft of wine rating, removing all peaks and troughs of assessment, creating a small window of scores, presumably somewhere between 85 and 92 points for all wines ever made?
And while this is a piece about the pitfalls of scoring, or of matching wines to people, or of our own constantly evolving palate, or tastes, it's also a piece about how much one can or should trust oneself. My initial reaction to Sherry versus my later love of the stuff – both are me, albeit at different points in time. The example is extreme but even now, which me is tasting the wine before me and is the judgement I am about to pronounce fair on the wine in the context of me 30 minutes, two hours, five weeks, or 12 months from that moment?
Surely even famous wine tasters have or had evolving tastes? Or do they come, factory fresh, out-of-the-box-ready, immutable in taste and judgement, ready to pronounce scores on any wine you care to shove under their infallible conk? Most importantly, do they have the unwavering confidence in their own palate that they might not revise their opinion tomorrow? Do you not feel the same?
Rather than a wine score having two numbers – one of the score, one of the time spent on the score – the second number should really be the confidence (again out of 100) in the score. But that would be 100 every time, wouldn't it?
