Max Hauser wrote:[Incidentally Thomas, I may have visited your winery in the 1980s, if it was near the Finger Lakes and open for drop-in visitors, in which event there's a fair chance I still have notes. My chief memory of surveying the Finger Lakes region was Suzy Knapp imitating the CU "Hotellies" by holding up a glass to the sun and proclaiming, "Legs!" I may also have original clippings of your articles, having been a voracious reader of wine journalism at that time.]
Thomas wrote:Max, / regarding scores, the system was designed in an era when only a scant few expressed much interest in wine...
Here's a reflection on something this reminded me of -- this isn't about Thomas's words, but a general observation. A human habit on joining something with past history (whether an employer, a community, or wine enthusiasm) is that our minds fill in some comfortable tentative model, or intuition, about the activity's history before we joined it. These tentative models -- subject to update as needed -- are unconscious or barely conscious. What's interesting is how often they unknowingly clash with reality in the absence of deliberate research. An example of this was a comment by a young wine merchant in a tasting group some 10 years ago.
I'd mentioned something about the retail wine market around 1982 and this merchant immediately and confidently assured me that very few people in the US had been interested in fine wines in 1982. This shocked me because (1) US metropolitan wine-geek scenes I knew in those days may have been less populous than later but they were thronged enough -- shops and restaurants offering well-attended wine-tasting events for the public, newspapers and magazines carrying wine articles. And (2) knowing hard data from the Wine Institute etc. I was aware of objective measures of US wine habits and how they'd evolved in the 15 years since 1982: Increasing clearly, but not spectacularly. (Aside: Quantitative intuition has been an important part of my career.) Then it struck me: This merchant (then turning 30) had been 14 or 15 years old in 1982. "Very few people interested in fine wines" may have partly or unconsciously reflected his own fine-wine experience of 1982. I've seen the same thing often since, not just about wine. (The "scant few" above triggered this memory but please note I don't connect it so far to this perception phenomenon, because I don't presume to divine Thomas's allusions above. For all I know,
I was 14 or 15 in the days Thomas had in mind!)
Max.
Let's put your "quantitative intuition" to rest, or try to do so.
Admittedly, "scant few" is too vague to make sense, but so is the Internet and I've learned that facts, should they ever be recorded over this medium, usually get shot down by a mass of opinions!
Of course, you took my "scant few" and removed it from my later reference to the baby boomers, which is really the key to what I was saying; our group--yes, I am one of them--can hardly account for scant few.
Anyway, my "scant few" comes from a statistic, that has held almost steady in the U.S. until very, very recently: when RP began his Wine Advocate (circa 1980 or so) fewer than 95% of the wines consumed in this country were of the so-called premium level. It's only been within the past fifteen years that the statistic shifted to fewer than 90%. It may be a little better than that these days, but I doubt it.
Baby boomers were the force behind the growth (helped a little by the 1976 Paris tasting). Boomers had the potential for earning money, plus a lack of savvy in the wine and food sphere--a following waiting to be led if I ever saw one, and a perfect foil for the points scoring system of others who nicely and cleanly gave the "un-savvy" something on which to hang their hopes and taste buds. And it probably is no accident that most of the audience for the system was male, the same audience that follows sports competitions rabidly and by a set of competitive numbers, but I digress into psychology, which is not my domain.
Your retailer may have been young in 1982, but I wasn't so young. I was in that very year studying winemaking and planning my winery. I became not only a winery owner, but after that venture was done in by a variety of forces, not the least being lack of money, I became a distributor sales rep, and then a wine retail shop owner. I tell you this just so you know that I don't make things up--I was there.
Let me say without trepidation of being proven wrong that before 1982 it was a rare thing indeed to see wine shelves as they look today, even in New York City. The Morrells and Sherry Lehmans of the great Metropolis were in the decided retail minority. In 1982, the word, Chardonnay, just got itself going throughout the general public, and, sadly, most of what ultimately hit the streets as Chardonnay was, to my possibly, but doubtfully pedestrian tastes, insipid.
I could go on, but you likely see what I mean, and by now I should have fed enough grist for the opinion market to start firing at me
PS: If you have some clippings of my stuff, burn 'em...they were written by a greenhorn. If you got to taste either my Rieslings or Gewurztraminers, whether or not I sound immodest, they were fantastic--opened the last of them from my library not too long ago. Five straight years of Riesling and two Gew. All except one wine was gracefully aged and marvelously expressive of what I hoped to achieve with them.
There's nothing so magnetic as an aged Riesling.
