Some oak okay...or not??

originally posted by SFJoe:
originally posted by Morgan Harris:

I don't think it's productive to say to them, "Oh, wow, you're drinking absolute crap wine. What terrible taste you have."
No, but it was a pretty good idea to say to Serge Batard a few years back, "Dude, the new oak thing on the Muscadet, pack it in. Give it up. A for effort, D for execution. Swing and a miss. Give it up."

Having opinions is not the same thing as being a snob.

And you could have had the same conversation with Ostertag about riesling. And it would have been fully righteous.

Or, you could be David Schildknecht telling Mosel winemakers that kabinett is not a dirty word, that there is an audience for those wines. No "snobbery" involved. But real, informed opinions from consumers who know something about the wines.

And if people really like Yellow Tail with their Cheeze Whiz on SunChips, let them have at it, but informed opinions are different from urges or preferences.

When you narrow the focus in that way I can wholeheartedly agree with you.
 
I think we all agree that we shouldn't hang or lock up people who make or drink oak monsters, overextracted fruit bombs, or crappy commercial swill.

Likewise, we shouldn't hang or lock up people who say that such people are ignoramuses or philistines.

Morgan's question about how to turn on people who might like to expand their horizons to those things is a valid rhetorical one, and he's right that the high school music hipster approach of 'the bleeding edge is awesome and everything else is shit and you're a bad person if you like the shit' is problematic. But it's a different question than we started with.

Since all sentences could have "I think that" or "I beleive that" added to the beginning about them, those words can in general be omitted, including in disputes about taste. Trivial and uninformative. Perhaps it's a social signifier that you're not willing to come to blows for these particular beliefs.

Most wines aged in oak barrels or using oak staves would be better off with less new oak, less oak, and/or no oak at all. Virtually all wines aged with oak chips would be better off without them.
 
I agree that thinking about how to persuade or how persuasion occurs is fruitful. I wonder how, in Joe's examples, the persuasion actually worked. I doubt it amounted to "Like, dude, lose the oak."

I don't agree that we should eliminate saying "I think" and "I believe." In ordinary language, such phrases, when added, express that one holds the belief with less certainty, which is, a) added information and b)always a good thing.
 
I agree that there is a substantial subset of usage in which adding those qualifiers expresses less certainty. That is extra information and so my 'uninformative' clause was wrong.

I disagree strenuously that less certainty is always a good thing, depending a little on what you mean by the word. (I know philosophers who use it to mean 'knowing that you know' and argue that it is impossible, for example. But I take it to mean something like confidence that the subset of one's own opinions about which one is certain are in the ballpark of true and/or actionable.)

I mostly teach working and middle class students. While the cohort I spent time with at, say, the University of Chicago probably needed less overall certainty, and while perhaps the Tea Partiers could use less of it as well, the young adults I teach now need a lot more of it. I would probably say something similar for most of the middle-class adult Americans I know right now as well. In the current environment, a lack of certainty about particular issues - aided and abetted by our mass media and the majority of our academic caste alike - helps serve the Man's need to keep the rest of us down.

Decoupling practical from epistemic certainty adds additional wrinkles to the argument, etc., but anyway congratulations on successfully baiting me again, and sorry for the thread drift.
 
Among non-geeks I encounter two personality profiles.

The first is a person who, upon being offered a recommendation hears a criticism. This person is only persuaded by making them taste better wines.

The second is a person who is happy to try something new, and will often express themselves truly (liked it, didn't like it)... and not change his buying habits.

Thus, nowadays, I offer better wine to people but I no longer exhort. I am not a catalyst. They will come to it, if they come to it, when they come to it.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
originally posted by .sasha:
originally posted by Peter Creasey:
originally posted by SFJoe: Dujac is my secret shame.

Joe, I have occasionally wondered if Dujac has experienced any fall out from its wine growing practices with oak.

. . . . . . . Pete

Less and less every year.
By coincidence, an offer just arrived in my mail for their 2009s. At ~$250 per for the 1ers, my interest has become purely hypothetical.

You are saying that since they are using less new oak, the price should go down accordingly?
 
originally posted by Steven Spielmann:
I agree that there is a substantial subset of usage in which adding those qualifiers expresses less certainty. That is extra information and so my 'uninformative' clause was wrong.

I disagree strenuously that less certainty is always a good thing, depending a little on what you mean by the word. (I know philosophers who use it to mean 'knowing that you know' and argue that it is impossible, for example. But I take it to mean something like confidence that the subset of one's own opinions about which one is certain are in the ballpark of true and/or actionable.)

I mostly teach working and middle class students. While the cohort I spent time with at, say, the University of Chicago probably needed less overall certainty, and while perhaps the Tea Partiers could use less of it as well, the young adults I teach now need a lot more of it. I would probably say something similar for most of the middle-class adult Americans I know right now as well. In the current environment, a lack of certainty about particular issues - aided and abetted by our mass media and the majority of our academic caste alike - helps serve the Man's need to keep the rest of us down.

Decoupling practical from epistemic certainty adds additional wrinkles to the argument, etc., but anyway congratulations on successfully baiting me again, and sorry for the thread drift.

I'm not quite sure I understand your position. You are obviously right that feeling sure is different from having warrant for that feeling. One can feel sure based on little evidence or none at all. So if there is a justification for feeling sure other than the strength of one's warrants, it would be the pragmatic one of defeating one's opponents with the surge of one's certainty. Even if this worked, I don't think it would be a desirable way of sorting out conflicts. And I don't think it works. As a Victorianist, I am sometimes downright Victorian and agree with T.H. Huxley that claiming a certainty that exceeds one's warrants is intellectual dishonesty.
 
originally posted by Jay Miller:
re oak and evil - Despite everything I still like Roty.

Well, not in 1997.

Interesting, Jay. In my limited exposure to Roty, I've found the wines to be overly tannic and rather uncharming. Perhaps I haven't had a representative sample.

Mark Lipton
 
What SFJoe said.

Though I have fond memories of a 1999 Marsannay that Jayson Cohen opened on release. But the Gevreys require a fair amount of age.
 
originally posted by Jay Miller:
What SFJoe said.

Though I have fond memories of a 1999 Marsannay that Jayson Cohen opened on release. But the Gevreys require a fair amount of age.

OK. My experiences mostly concern his '88 Mazis, which after 16 years was still not very giving.

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Jay Miller:
What SFJoe said.

Though I have fond memories of a 1999 Marsannay that Jayson Cohen opened on release. But the Gevreys require a fair amount of age.

OK. My experiences mostly concern his '88 Mazis, which after 16 years was still not very giving.

Mark Lipton

Too young. Jay, the '97 Bourgogne Rouge was pretty good a few years ago. It's an odd line-up, but there's something quite likeable about the wines.
 
originally posted by Yixin:
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Jay Miller:
What SFJoe said.

Though I have fond memories of a 1999 Marsannay that Jayson Cohen opened on release. But the Gevreys require a fair amount of age.

OK. My experiences mostly concern his '88 Mazis, which after 16 years was still not very giving.

Mark Lipton

Too young. Jay, the '97 Bourgogne Rouge was pretty good a few years ago. It's an odd line-up, but there's something quite likeable about the wines.

Admittedly I haven't had any in over 7 years so I wasn't following my own advice.
 
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