Whats the history of wine-tasting?
Well, thanks for searching, but…that last link says the wine tasting routine ‘has its roots in history’ but then asks us to ‘imagine’ that this ritual started in 1125. No citations or evidence, so I doubt it’s that old; just a writer’s effort to enliven his basic, modern how-to. What I’m interested in finding is the earliest possible codified list of the steps recommended for a tasting. The Sancho Panza story is great, and the article as a whole was well written and amusing, but it discussed whether there is any objective merit in wine evaluation, and didn’t shed any further light on when the tasting ritual began. Further, it pooh-poohs as “American” the idea that wine evaluation might be inflated with a bit of BS. I recommend as a companion reading and antidote Calvin Trillin’s The Red and the White, in which, says, ‘I concluded that experienced wine drinkers can tell red from white by taste about seventy per cent
Miko: You’ve led me on a merry chase through the untrammeled wilds of the Intarweb. I started by googling History of Wine Tasting. I quickly discerned that someone named Dominique Valentin had given a lecture at UT Dallas in 2001 about, among other things, the history of wine tasting. After a lot of searching later, and a very enjoyable, if digressive stop at Oxford University’s Bacchus Wine Society, I found Valentin’s HTML-ized Powerpoint presentation from that talk online. The money is in slides 13-17, but let me just say that this right here reveals the problem with Powerpoint. Powerpoint delivers a format for the presentation of a pré
ikkyu, fabulous! I will e-mail her. Nice trail-following. My googling of ‘”wine tasting” history’ produced mostly dross for the first ten pages, which is why I came here. Ah, the magic of the search. Here in the US, there’s a deep cultural assumption that you can do anything anyone else can do, if you apply yourself, so it doesn’t seem absurd to attend a couple of tastings, and act as if you’re a trained oenologist. (“I _could’ve_ been one, if I really wanted to, so why shouldn’t I act like one?”) That’s true (and Trillin makes that point in his article). Yet I critique the idea that there’s something typically American, and thus lowbrow, in skepticism about pretensions, because there is also something typically American about aspiring to the trappings of the highest social classes in a defensive attempt to assert personal worth. I’ve never witnessed this devotion to American-style wine tasting (parties, classes, dinner-table grandstanding) in nations with a more ancient culture of win
