Tasting Notes

Oh, and just for the record.

Tasting notes can
a) be fun to read (at least when Chris writes them)
b) provide useful information as to the style of a wine
c) provide useful information as to where a wine is in its evolution
d) be a useful memory tool for wine you yourself have tried
e) even give some idea of whether you'll enjoy the wine yourself if you have some idea of the palate of the person writing them
f) help fill up the screen on wine boards

So let's hear it for the tasting note (TN)! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hoooraaaay!!!
 
originally posted by Joe Dressner:
Personally, I take notes whenever I taste wines and I find this useful for my memory. But I don't confuse my tasting notes for the wine. The tasting notes are only approximations.

Wow. Speaking of hokus-pokus.

This is all a red herring anyway. Who the hell posts TNs? I thought we moved on to the CWD anyway.

Lastly, I think the tasting note proposes some sort of hokus-pokus expertise as a substitute for listening to and understanding the wine. It is part of the culture of specialists and experts (I am a guy with two oncologists) which seeks to mystify the natural world.

What a very bourgeois take on it. Bravo. Your Derrida-quoting college adviser would be proud. SUNY-Buffalo, what a place.
 

"In the end, no civilization whose central religious mystery is eating the flesh and drinking the blood of its god is ever going to think that food is marginal. When eating and drinking are performed in the Mass, they are the equivalence that defines and anchors all forms of figural equation; they are the real, of which metaphor is, in the end, a metaphor.

Those metaphors take me back to the language of wine-tasting and to the man on the train; they also take me back to one of my own principal scholarly topics, which is metamorphosis. Nature and culture--that is, earth and sun on the one hand, winemaker and technology on the other--enter into the grape by whatever mysterious process and emerge, also enigmatically, as experience-become-language. Those transformations, one vegetal and the other human, have their equivalent in another pair of miraculous changes: first, fermentation, and second, drunkenness. And it is more than an equivalence, since it is the production of alcohol that concentrates and volatilizes wine's constituent origins, whereas it is the altering of the rational mind that gives rise to the metaphoric imagination.

With the eucharist as our model, it is no longer so clear that paintings like the Farnesina frescoes or the Isenheim Altarpiece fulfill the real conditions of art while food exists at the declassified margins. It is not just that Raphael and Grunewald happen to be creating their work in the context of eating and drinking. Rather the feast, whether hedonistic, sacral, or both, is the authentic and total experience for which frescoes and painted panels form a kind of stage set or after-the-fact representation."
 
originally posted by Putnam Weekley:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_1_66/ai_54668877

"In the end, no civilization whose central religious mystery is eating the flesh and drinking the blood of its god is ever going to think that food is marginal. When eating and drinking are performed in the Mass, they are the equivalence that defines and anchors all forms of figural equation; they are the real, of which metaphor is, in the end, a metaphor.

Those metaphors take me back to the language of wine-tasting and to the man on the train; they also take me back to one of my own principal scholarly topics, which is metamorphosis. Nature and culture--that is, earth and sun on the one hand, winemaker and technology on the other--enter into the grape by whatever mysterious process and emerge, also enigmatically, as experience-become-language. Those transformations, one vegetal and the other human, have their equivalent in another pair of miraculous changes: first, fermentation, and second, drunkenness. And it is more than an equivalence, since it is the production of alcohol that concentrates and volatilizes wine's constituent origins, whereas it is the altering of the rational mind that gives rise to the metaphoric imagination.

With the eucharist as our model, it is no longer so clear that paintings like the Farnesina frescoes or the Isenheim Altarpiece fulfill the real conditions of art while food exists at the declassified margins. It is not just that Raphael and Grunewald happen to be creating their work in the context of eating and drinking. Rather the feast, whether hedonistic, sacral, or both, is the authentic and total experience for which frescoes and painted panels form a kind of stage set or after-the-fact representation."

Amen, brother!
 
originally posted by Rahsaan:
originally posted by Bwood:
One question is whether there a better jumping off point for discussion of wine.

That is my view. They provide a snapshot, which can be useful, and they provoke discussion, which is the purpose of these fora. Plus, they can be entertaining in the right hands.

Silly rabbit, don't you know we must seek a quasi-mystical and harmonious mind-meld with the noble souls and their noble soils and noble theories and noble ways of life before we are entitled to communicate about what we're drinking? How else can you effectively put a sanctimonious partisan slant on what's in your glass?

Tsk, tsk. Kids today.
 
originally posted by Chris Coad:
How else can you effectively put a sanctimonious partisan slant on what's in your glass?

Chris, Chris, Chris; the paths to sanctimony are myriad.
Best, Jim
 
originally posted by Florida Jim:
originally posted by Chris Coad:
How else can you effectively put a sanctimonious partisan slant on what's in your glass?

Chris, Chris, Chris; the paths to sanctimony are myriad.
Best, Jim

You know, I couldn't agree more. And Dressner has apparently walked them all.
 
originally posted by Chris Coad:
originally posted by Rahsaan:
originally posted by Bwood:
One question is whether there a better jumping off point for discussion of wine.

That is my view. They provide a snapshot, which can be useful, and they provoke discussion, which is the purpose of these fora. Plus, they can be entertaining in the right hands.

Silly rabbit, don't you know we must seek a quasi-mystical and harmonious mind-meld with the noble souls and their noble soils and noble theories and noble ways of life before we are entitled to communicate about what we're drinking? How else can you effectively put a sanctimonious partisan slant on what's in your glass?

Tsk, tsk. Kids today.
Should be: quasi wabbit...
 
originally posted by Steve Edmunds:
originally posted by Chris Coad:
originally posted by Rahsaan:
originally posted by Bwood:
One question is whether there a better jumping off point for discussion of wine.

That is my view. They provide a snapshot, which can be useful, and they provoke discussion, which is the purpose of these fora. Plus, they can be entertaining in the right hands.

Silly rabbit, don't you know we must seek a quasi-mystical and harmonious mind-meld with the noble souls and their noble soils and noble theories and noble ways of life before we are entitled to communicate about what we're drinking? How else can you effectively put a sanctimonious partisan slant on what's in your glass?

Tsk, tsk. Kids today.
Should be: quasi wabbit...

Yeah, that would have been better. I've just been cutting-and-pasting from the last time we did this, maybe I should spice things up a bit and do some updating.
 
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