Taste Like A Pro - Wine Quality, The Degree Of Excellence...

Reproduced from Year 3, Issue #13 of Spirito di Vino Asia...

Our readers noticed that we score wines on a 100 points scale.  In this column, we aim to clarify the criterions used in our evaluations and provide them with keys to increase their confidence when buying wine.  Here, we focus on Quality.

Read More

Weekly Practice Tasting Red Burgundy - A Lesson In Quality Levels...

These days, I am a little obsessed with assessment of quality.  Not so much in terms of good/better/best per se but more in terms of regional/villages/1er cru/grand cru.  Some will say it is pretty much the same, but in an exam situation like the WSET or the MW, we are often asked to position the wine "within context of origin", in other words not only to justify how good is the wine among its peers, but also to position it within a certain quality segment of that region where it comes from.

In fact, the whole point of assessing wine for quality within the context of the WSET Systematic Approach should be to establish value but also to ascertain whether the wine is correctly positioned within the "quality segments" of its region of origin.  Sometimes, one can find some pretty good deals of wines classified "basic" but with a quality much higher than normally found within the category.

Read More

Wine Quality...Just Like Going On A "Hot" Date...

Wine "quality".... Such an elusive concept!  

Wine Critics, magazines, competitions, you name it, earn their living by making us beleive that wine is so complicated that we absolutely need their advice and scores otherwise we could not possibly enjoy it.

What a pity.  Because in the end, wine is really about pleasure.  And EVERYONE knows what give them pleasure.

And so, the analogy that wine quality is like going on a "hot" date...

Read More