Study Strategies: Evaluating Wine Quality

For more than one reason, my first-ever IMW trip, taken in 2015, a year after I graduated as a Master of Wine, came as quite a shock. The first was the sheer bewildering pace of the thing: eight days, three Australian states, 11 wine regions, and God only knows how many wines. By the end of the week, most of us were reeling—all but the eldest member of the group, a spry 80-something year old, who finished the trip off by dancing us all into the ground after a last dinner at an Adelaide wine bar.

The second reason I was taken aback was more fundamental. By the time I returned home, my newly acquired certainties about wine assessment had been shaken to the core. As we climbed back onto the coach after our very first winery visit, the group began to discuss the cuvées we’d just tasted. The range of opinions expressed by the 40 or so MWs ran from high praise to an excoriating assessment that suggested that the wines were borderline faulty. It wasn’t a one-off, either—these polarized opinions became a hallmark of the trip.

The reason I was so surprised by this diversity of viewpoints is that, like anyone who’s been through some form of professional wine training, I’d been taught to assess quality in a way I had come to think of as being objective. When you sit the IMW’s blind tasting papers, you’re required to argue eloquently about the quality of a high proportion of the 36 featured wines. Take the 2021 exam, for instance. Across the three papers, 26.5% of the total marks were awarded to questions that asked candidates to comment on the quality of the samples in their glasses. There’s no two ways about it—if you can’t spot a great wine (or a mediocre one) in the glass, and back up your assessment with a solid, evidence-based argument, you can’t pass the exam.

Nevertheless, my Aussie experience caused me to question the underlying principles of quality assessment. Is it really possible to be objective when judging wine quality? Or are we all in thrall to our own personal preferences? And, if it is possible to be objective, what are the factors that help to keep an evaluation free from subjective bias?

Turning my own wine education clock back a few years to the start of my MW journey, I can remember being trained to analyze quality based on the BLIC acronym. BLIC stands for Balance, Length, Intensity, and Complexity, and as a rule of thumb, it creates a decent foundation for an objective assessment of a wine. BLIC seems to work most of the time—at least in the context of sitting a blind tasting exam, where you must make up your mind not only about where the wine comes from, but also whether your Burgundian Chardonnay is a mere Bourgogne AOP or one from a village appellation, a premier cru, or a grand cru. Candidates who pass the MW tasting exam are those who can perform this kind of assessment with enough consistency and confidence to convince the examiners that they merit the prized initials.

Length and Intensity

At closer consideration, however, it’s clear that there are potential inconsistencies in the basic template of BLIC. It’s fairly easy, for instance, for tasters to agree on the length of a wine’s finish. If you’re in any doubt, you can start a slow count once you’ve spat the wine out to quantify the amount of time it takes for the flavor to disappear. There’s even a unit of measurement, a caudalie, which can be used to express a wine’s length, with one caudalie equal to one second.

Rating a wine’s intensity, however, is a trickier proposal. On the one hand, it’s certainly true that a well-made wine from low-yielding vineyards (generally but not always signifiers of quality) will have more depth of fruit on the palate than a generic entry-level wine. On the other hand, a brash, ripe New World Cabinet Sauvignon will usually have more immediate impact than a Bordeaux cru classé, however good the latter might be. This is where notions of typicity come into play. As we become more skilled as tasters, we tend to hedge our rating of fruit intensity with caveats about the origin of the wine (or likely origin if we’re tasting blind). I could also refer you back to those caudalies—no matter how restrained a wine’s fruit, quality will usually win out on the finish.

The Complexities of Complexity

You can be reasonably objective about complexity, though, right? Well, yes—and no. First, you need to reach consensus about what it is that lends a wine complexity. Sommeliers often place a lot of emphasis on precise and extensive listings of the layers of aromas and flavors present in a wine, while MW students, although they take note of these characters, tend to geek out on winemaking techniques that add flavors or, in some cases, textural complexity. Perhaps because questions in the exams often ask about winemaking (based on evidence from the glass), MW candidates tend to look closely at things like the quality and type of oak. We notice when tannin extraction has been gentle or harsh, and picking up evidence of the use of techniques like bâtonnage becomes second nature.

We can all usually find agreement on the presence of complex tertiary characters in a wine, but the kind of complexity derived from minerality is a minefield of disagreements. The first issue is whether minerality exists (perhaps surprisingly for a term that’s so widely used, there’s little consensus on the issue), and if it does (and is not just an artifact of high levels of acidity), what causes it. Terroir is, of course, the glib answer, but why does slate, for instance, appear to impart minerality to some wines and not others? And do we all experience and describe minerality in the same way? Apparently not, at least if an IMW tasting I attended a while back is any evidence. A roomful of experienced tasters was asked to comment on whether a flight of wines showed minerality, and if so, how they would describe that minerality. Was it, for example, stony, chalky, slatey, or steely (or any of the other descriptors usually applied in the context of minerality)? I’m sure by now that you’ll have guessed the punchline here. Not only did tasters often fail to agree about whether each of the wines had any kind of mineral character, but when they did agree that it was present, many of them disagreed about the nature of that minerality.

And it turns out that we all have different abilities to pick up on a wide range of flavor molecules. I love rotundone, a chemical that gives cool-climate Syrah its distinctive peppery character, but one in five people are unable to pick up on the presence of the molecule. For these people, there’s a layer of flavor in Syrah that will be forever absent, compromising a wine’s perceived complexity—and for rotundone in Syrah, read pretty much any of the aromas conjured up in a complex wine’s bouquet.

To further muddy the waters, some producers (conventional as well as natural) favor the inclusion of a touch of funk in their wines to add layers of flavors that go beyond the simply fruity. Oxidative and reductive characters, volatile acidity, and Brett can be incorporated into a wine (although seldom all at once) in the name of complexity. But individual tolerance levels of these elements vary as widely from taster to taster as does the capacity to detect rotundone, begging the question as to where exactly the dividing line between complexing funk and downright fault lies.

Untangling the Scales of Balance

When I teach my students about balance, I ask them to look at the density of fruit on the palate and argue about how well this is balanced by structural elements: acidity, alcohol, and, if present, residual sugar and tannins. When all these components work in harmony together, a wine usually has a quality of effortlessness about it. That grace and poise is, for me, the quintessential hallmark of a high-quality wine.

But, as ever, the more closely you look at balance, the more difficult it becomes to tie it in tightly with quality in a neat, mathematically precise argument. Take a young grand cru red Burgundy, for instance. The fruit on the front of the palate of a young high-quality wine can often be quite reticent. Instead, the most prominent elements of these wines are often tannin—there to allow the wine to age gracefully—and oak, which often takes a few years to integrate fully. In short, it’s all too easy to confuse a gawky teenage wine of high quality with an extracted, over-oaked wine that has been clumsily made. The key here is to look for the fruit to emerge, like a peacock’s tail, on the finish. If it’s present, you can project the wine a few years into the future and see that this concentration of fruit will allow the oak and tannins to integrate over time.

Any assessment of balance is also highly vulnerable to personal preferences. Take acidity, for example. It’s not uncommon for wine lovers to describe themselves as “acid geeks,” but it usually takes time for a taste for high-acidity wines to develop. Those new to wine typically show a marked preference for bottles that have relatively moderate acidity and lots of ripe fruit—and it’s no accident that many entry-level wines carry a trace of sweetness. In short, our taste for acidity in wine often changes as we gain experience as tasters.

After negotiating the hurdle of acidity, sugar, tannin, and alcohol must be considered. It turns out that our genetic makeup may predispose us to have different tolerance levels for these structural elements, and this in turn may affect our perception of balance. We’re all familiar with the concept of the supertaster, which sounds like it might be a great thing to be if you’re in the wine business. Sadly, the greater the number of taste receptors on your tongue (the hallmark of a supertaster) the more likely it is that wine will taste unpleasantly bitter, due to your greater sensitivity to tannins and alcohol. Sweetness, on the other hand, will be far more appealing. Wine appraisal becomes trickier if you’re super sensitive to these key structural elements. But being a supertaster is just one end of a spectrum, and our assessment of balance in wine may depend in part on the density of taste receptors on our tongues, a characteristic affected by our genetic inheritance.

Cultural Preferences

In some parts of the world, quality isn’t even a matter of taste but is determined instead by use of oak or the amount of time a wine is aged prior to bottling. This may strike some tasters as odd, but it’s important to recognize that the characteristics we value in wines are determined, in part, by our cultural background. I’ve judged at plenty of international competitions where—as the token foreign judge at the table—I’ve had lively debates with my fellow panelists about whether a wine is over-oaked and on the way out (my take) or merely shows the lavish winemaking and mature character that they’ve learned to expect from a top wine.

Nevertheless, unless you are going to argue that Masters of Wine and Master Sommeliers achieve their qualifications through luck alone—straining probability to its breaking point—you must accept that the best tasters are able to put their personal preferences to one side and analyze the contents of their glasses dispassionately. And until someone comes along with a better, more objective plan, the only lens through which this can be achieved—albeit one that is hedged about with caveats and the need for self-awareness—is BLIC.