Blind the Back Label

originally posted by Thor: First off, the disclaimer: Oleana is my least favorite of the often-hyped restaurants in the Boston area, and I've never had a successful meal there. I realize I'm in the minority opinion on this one, though. I wish you better luck.
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Sorry to hear that. It seemed the most 'interesting' of the hyped restaurants (especially since my in-laws are flying over from Germany so straight-forward classic food is something they have plenty of at home). And I thought it had near universal appeal. But I guess nothing is universal!

Second, I thought I covered this in my "if you're moving to Boston" emails a year or so ago. No?
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Yes, was just checking. Sounds like quite a mess so I'm sure we'll do just fine with buying off the list. And maybe my father in-law will take pity on me and pony up for something nice.
 
originally posted by Levi Dalton: Is there a recognizable "house palate"? If not, why do people recommend buying the back label?

These are the questions involved.
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I think you already know the answers to these questions. But there are clearly broad house palates. I.E. Dressner/Rosenthal/Lynch vs. Kacher.

But perhaps even more importantly these 'boutique' importers all represent carefully chosen wines that are generally all good quality compared to the higher-volume swill that comes in from other importers. Hence for the average customer sifting through the average hit-and-miss (but mostly miss) wine shop, these back labels can be instructive.
 
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
That is actually my question/fundamental reasoning behind the idea of such a tasting. It would be interesting to know, if one tasted a Lynch imported Barolo or a Dressner imported Barolo blind, could one tell it had been chosen by that respective importer? Or not? Is there a recognizable "house palate"? If not, why do people recommend buying the back label?

These are the questions involved.
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This is so meta.
 
Is there a recognizable "house palate"? If not, why do people recommend buying the back label?
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But do you really question the practice in a less narrow sense than importers who are occasionally fighting over the same producers? If someone at one of your tables asked, "hey, I really liked this Occhipinti frappato, where can I get more wines like this?" and you didn't have time to provide a long list of specific wine-by-wine recommendations, what might you do? You might send them to Chambers. You might send them to Ten Bells for more research. You might tell them to look for Dressner on the importer strip. You might tell them to look for French wines whose labels don't look like the result of month-long focus groups at pricey design houses. (That's mostly Coad-bait, by the way.)

What wouldn't you do? You wouldn't tell them to shop at Big Bob's Barrique Barn. You wouldn't recommend the by-the-glass options at Morton's. You wouldn't talk up Eric Solomon or Robert Kacher. You wouldn't suggest they stick to wines with cute animals on the label.

Do you really question whether or not you're giving them better advice by the former set of questions than the latter? You're not offering guarantees, you're not even making qualitative judgments, you're just offering a way to help them cut into the house edge. Anything helps, right? And really, a marginal improvement in blind odds is really all that the advice, in tastevin-wielding Lendl or in columnar form, is promising.

As I said, I'm all in favor of the test, which I think could have interesting results. But I don't know of anyone -- though I could have missed someone -- who's suggested that one could taste Lynch vs. Rosenthal vs. Dressner and see clear differentiation in quite the same way that one could taste Jenny & Franois vs. Solomon and see that differentiation. If you're going to conduct the test, at least give the tasters a fair shake shot.
 
I recall that Scott had something like this setup at Discovery for the big 5th anniversary bash (a table of Dressner, a table of J+F, a table of Skurnik, a table of Rosenthal, a table of Polaner).
 
originally posted by Thor:
Is there a recognizable "house palate"? If not, why do people recommend buying the back label?
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But do you really question the practice in a less narrow sense than importers who are occasionally fighting over the same producers? If someone at one of your tables asked, "hey, I really liked this Occhipinti frappato, where can I get more wines like this?" and you didn't have time to provide a long list of specific wine-by-wine recommendations, what might you do? You might send them to Chambers. You might send them to Ten Bells for more research. You might tell them to look for Dressner on the importer strip. You might tell them to look for French wines whose labels don't look like the result of month-long focus groups at pricey design houses. (That's mostly Coad-bait, by the way.)

What wouldn't you do? You wouldn't tell them to shop at Big Bob's Barrique Barn. You wouldn't recommend the by-the-glass options at Morton's. You wouldn't talk up Eric Solomon or Robert Kacher. You wouldn't suggest they stick to wines with cute animals on the label.

Do you really question whether or not you're giving them better advice by the former set of questions than the latter? You're not offering guarantees, you're not even making qualitative judgments, you're just offering a way to help them cut into the house edge. Anything helps, right? And really, a marginal improvement in blind odds is really all that the advice, in tastevin-wielding Lendl or in columnar form, is promising.

As I said, I'm all in favor of the test, which I think could have interesting results. But I don't know of anyone -- though I could have missed someone -- who's suggested that one could taste Lynch vs. Rosenthal vs. Dressner and see clear differentiation in quite the same way that one could taste Jenny & Franois vs. Solomon and see that differentiation. If you're going to conduct the test, at least give the tasters a fair shake shot.
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Sure, sure. I just mentioned certain importers because they have more currency in my own thoughts. The tasting wouldn't need to be one certain set or another.

Actually, this whole thought process started over a bottle of Occhipinti Frappato. There was an importer here for dinner last evening. He was drinking the Frappato, and he told me a story about how someone had blind tasted a bunch of wines from the same grape variety and origin of place, and the taster had said "I don't know who the producer is, but I am positive, absolutely sure, who the importer is (who was the importer in front of me)" and the taster was right. I am sort of curious how often that would hold true. Is there a cogent and identifiable palate behind (how many?) importer selections?
 
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
Actually, this whole thought process started over a bottle of Occhipinti Frappato. There was an importer here for dinner last evening. He was drinking the Frappato, and he told me a story about how someone had blind tasted a bunch of wines from the same grape variety and origin of place, and the taster had said "I don't know who the producer is, but I am positive, absolutely sure, who the importer is (who was the importer in front of me)" and the taster was right. I am sort of curious how often that would hold true. Is there a cogent and identifiable palate behind (how many?) importer selections?
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In some areas, I'd say yes. Germany for one - I've always felt the Terry Theise and Mosel Wine Merchant portfolios lean in fairly different directions stylistically (have found Theise's selections often favouring sweeter wines, whereas most of the MWM wines I've seen tend to lean towards the trocken/halbtrocken styles).
 
My passing notion is that the worse importers might be easier to identify. I don't know what they're like lately, but Kacher's Burgundies used to be pretty identifiable, and lots of Solomon's stuff has a strong family resemblance.

I have a harder time drawing a straight line through Donati to Baudry, or from Coche through Breton.
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
I recall that Scott had something like this setup at Discovery for the big 5th anniversary bash (a table of Dressner, a table of J+F, a table of Skurnik, a table of Rosenthal, a table of Polaner).
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we used this format for all our 'kick ass tastings'. generally 5 importers, 5 -7 bottles per importer. i never thought of it, however, as a way to contrast or compare the portfolios. it was simply the easiest was to organize that number of wines...

having said that, over the years a number of customers learned and commented about the fact that when they bought a bottle with the rosenthal/dressner label on the back they were always happy. for me, the buy the back label idea is simply saying that if one was to buy a wine from one of a few select importers then one would have a high percentage chance of being happy.

in addition, its easy. a beginner, armed with the names of certain importers, can go to any wine store or restaurant and ask, "what wines do you have from _________?"

while i find that there are certainly general house styles, i don't know if i would be confident enough to get too specific.
 
There are also two different reasons to write the "back label" article, as has been somewhat tangentially noted here. One is to select for style, where applicable. The other is to select for selection, under the assumption -- and maybe that's all it is, but my experience suggests otherwise -- that certain importers, of whatever house style or lack thereof, are more reliable sources of superior-quality wines than others. That's useful to know no matter what stylistic camp(s) one tents in.
 
originally posted by Thor:
There are also two different reasons to write the "back label" article, as has been somewhat tangentially noted here. One is to select for style, where applicable. The other is to select for selection, under the assumption -- and maybe that's all it is, but my experience suggests otherwise -- that certain importers, of whatever house style or lack thereof, are more reliable sources of superior-quality wines than others. That's useful to know no matter what stylistic camp(s) one tents in.
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Sure, but you can kind of group up the importers known as a rule for higher quality wines and focus on the stylistic issue, if you so desire.
 
Yes, of course. I wasn't really addressing your tasting idea, merely pointing out that style isn't the only motivator of the type of column you're referencing.
 
If you brought the importers themselves into a room and served them their own imports blind, would they recognize which is whose? Or which is theirs, at least? Consistently? The very notion of a house style seems to presuppose that, so one would expect that they would. But I wonder.

Kermit and Rosenthal's wonderful books claim that it's only about the wine, but it's clear that chemistry with the producer and other circumstantial factors affect to some extent the decision of who to import. It's not only taste.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Kermit and Rosenthal's wonderful books claim that it's only about the wine, but it's clear that chemistry with the producer and other circumstantial factors affect to some extent the decision of who to import. It's not only taste.
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This is very clear when you talk to importers about why they have severed relations with a particular producer or why they have not taken a particular producer on. Sometimes quality issues are involved, but very often it is due to issues unrelated to quality.

But I still don't see how one can posit a house style with Kermit representing such a diverse array of, say, Meursault producers, or Rosenthal representing Cuilleron (which he admits doesn't fit in his portfolio).
 
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
originally posted by Claude Kolm:
I'm having trouble with this house style thing. Can someone tell me how to distinguish Lynch's house style in the Bourgueils he imports from Dressner's?

Also, which Meursaults represent Lynch's house style -- Ente and Coche-Dury or Jobard and Cherisey? Or Roulot? Same for Cornas -- Allemand or Verset or Clape? (Or maybe Juge, whose wines Lynch briefly imported in the early 1980s?)
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That is actually my question/fundamental reasoning behind the idea of such a tasting. It would be interesting to know, if one tasted a Lynch imported Barolo or a Dressner imported Barolo blind, could one tell it had been chosen by that respective importer? Or not? Is there a recognizable "house palate"?
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These are the same lines along which I was thinking. For example, a blind tasting of three different importers' Moulin-a-Vents, the same three importers' Chateauneuf-du-Papes, and the same three importers' Macons. Then everyone tries to group the correct Moulin-a-Vent, Chateauneuf and Macon together. The question of "which Moulin-a-Vent" still vexes, but you get the idea. I would imagine it would only work for the larger appellations, where a plethora of choices allows the importer to come closer to their ideals.
 
originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
originally posted by Claude Kolm:
I'm having trouble with this house style thing. Can someone tell me how to distinguish Lynch's house style in the Bourgueils he imports from Dressner's?

Also, which Meursaults represent Lynch's house style -- Ente and Coche-Dury or Jobard and Cherisey? Or Roulot? Same for Cornas -- Allemand or Verset or Clape? (Or maybe Juge, whose wines Lynch briefly imported in the early 1980s?)
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That is actually my question/fundamental reasoning behind the idea of such a tasting. It would be interesting to know, if one tasted a Lynch imported Barolo or a Dressner imported Barolo blind, could one tell it had been chosen by that respective importer? Or not? Is there a recognizable "house palate"?
Click to expand...

These are the same lines along which I was thinking. For example, a blind tasting of three different importers' Moulin-a-Vents, the same three importers' Chateauneuf-du-Papes, and the same three importers' Macons. Then everyone tries to group the correct Moulin-a-Vent, Chateauneuf and Macon together. The question of "which Moulin-a-Vent" still vexes, but you get the idea. I would imagine it would only work for the larger appellations, where a plethora of choices allows the importer to come closer to their ideals.
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I think the problem with such a tasting is that you can have variations of terroir that can be very tricky, especially if you are using large appellations such as C9 or Mcon. In fact, for that reason, I would suggest the smallest, most uniform appellations possible.

There can be house styles -- Kacher whom people mentioned above, and I think between Theise and Wiest, there is a difference. There is a significant number of producers and wines that could be in Terry's portfolio but not Rudi's and vice-versa, but still, there is also a large number of producers that could be in either's.
 
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