Progressive Wine Appreciation and Shifting Paradigms

My wine education started pre paleolithic and I can remember with great fondness many blind tastings out of amphoras in Athens with the local geeks. Some great wines and no problem with over oaking.

It's all geek to me!

Like Daniel pointed out, I drank what my father drank. As an infant it started with the occasional dribble from the finger. As an adolescent it was on a Sunday and Thursday, or a holiday (macaroni day at my house), apple cider or cream soda mixed with a little wine. By the time I was in my late teens it was a glass of wine with dinner everyday
My father drank a dry Sicilian red table wine called Segesta, imported by Banfi, made from red grapes of Marsala. At first it came in gallon jugs (I guess it was bottled by the US importer Banfi for the US market) then it came in 3 liter jugs (I guess when this started to occur the producer himself started bottling his own wines). In the late 1980’s early 1990’s the wine received a “favorable” write up from a wine writer on the East Coast of the US. The wine seemed to disappear for awhile but then re-surfaced, this time in magnum bottles with a fancy latching ceramic top enclosure with a rubber gasket. By the mid 1990’s the wine just seemed to disappear. It was at this time, my father and I started making our own wine, getting Zinfandel, Barbera, and Alicanti shipped in from California. It was at the same time while at my local winemaking supply store I noticed a brochure for the American Wine Society (AWS). So I joined. In 1997 I attended a Wine and Food Festival at Split Rock, PA. Attended seminars on winemaking and wine appreciation and I was hooked. By the late 1990’s early 2000’s, got involved with a local chapter of the AWS, and a great group of people, have been attending wine tasting once a month (or sometimes even more frequently) ever since. Annually the AWS has a conference with a schedule that includes both winemaking and wine appreciation seminars. The speakers at these seminars are very knowledgeable and some of them are probably “Students of Hoke”.

Salute

For me it was the same. My parents have always appreciated a nice glass of red wine in the evenings where I took an occasional sip. However, I didn't really like wine until my late teens. Then I started drinking more white wines and moved to the reds later on - I think this is how it is usually works for most.
It was later that I learned how to appreciate red wines - just like my parents. It is fascinating how your taste changes over time. I wonder if I am now at a level that I will stay on or if I will learn to appreciate other wines as I grow older.

Victor, I remember that wine, Segesta!

In my upbringing, the only wine I ever recall was some Mogen-David. And we are definitely not Jewish. I hated it; sticky sweet, with that distinctive whiff of labrusca (only I didn't know it was labrusca at the time).

My family were heavy drinkers----but they were drinking whiskey and moonshine. I had some of that, of course, but it never really appealled to me.

Wasn't until I went to Europe as a teenager that I caught the wine bug. We were in the Frankfort area, and thus I had easy access to some of the greatest vineyards in the world, and freely traipsed through the Rheingau and Nahe and Mosel.

Even after we went back to the then wine wastelands of the US, I managed to keep my interest in wine alive, and eventually, when the boom started in the 1970s, I took a chance and accepted a (I thought probably short term) job in a retail chain. That was over thirty years ago.

My 'progression' wasn't so much a progression as it was a full frontal assault on everything, as I thought it my responsibility to know as much as I could about everything I could for any customer that walked through the door. That's okay: I like learning things, and that was a perfect chance to learn.

Personally, I liked intricacy and nuance over force and bravado, so even though I was selling more Cabernet and Chardonnay (Merlot was unknown then, and Pinot Noir hard to come by), I was enjoying Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, pretty much anything Alsatian, and Burgundy when I could get it. I still like those wines, but am still tasting anything and everything I can.

From my myopic position on the issue, I believe geeks tend to think that they are the center of the wine universe when in fact, they represent a small portion of the number of people who consume wine. With that in mind, I don't see much of a shift from that old wisdom that people start out liking sweet and then gradually grow into what we call dry wine--evidence of this phenomenon continues to rear its head at local wine tasting rooms.

On the more general topic of age and palate, I go along with Daniel's take: the practiced and trained palate likely doesn't weaken at the same pace as the gulpers of the world, and they are the majority.

I am your age, Hoke. I don't know about you, but my palate seems even better than it was when I started consuming wine--when I started, I was untrained. It's the same with food--didn't truly appreciate the nuances of food on the palate until I began to take a deeper interest in the subject and so, I am much better at disseminating what's going on in there than I was 20 or 30 years ago.

And to James, the way I see the problem it's not that Hoke thinks too much; it's that most people don't think enough.

[David M. Bueker]

I believe geeks tend to think that they are the center of the wine universe

What's your point?

I believe geeks tend to think that they are the center of the wine universe

What's your point?

It's all about points, huh?

I believe geeks tend to think that they are the center of the wine universe

What's your point?

It's all about points, huh?

David's been hanging out on ebob too long; he needs points

My point: how geeks view the subject of wine bears little relationship to how the great unwashed masses view it, and that would hold true for assumptions about general consumer taste preferences, etc.

[David M. Bueker]

My point: how geeks view the subject of wine bears little relationship to how the great unwashed masses view it, and that would hold true for assumptions about general consumer taste preferences, etc.

You have a point. 99 more and you can be perfect!

My background started sharing cheap generic Australian "Moselle" and "Hock" with my father at the dinner table in the sixties. The sweeter white wines were most preferred at first; the "Hock" was like battery acid and the reds almost impossible (for me) to stomach. Predictably, after I embarked on an extended bout of self-destructive "teenage rebellion", wine was of a relatively low priority in the seventies, but in 1983, I was introduced by a work colleague to a bottle of Wynns 1976 Coonawarra Cabernet that blew me away. I was now hooked. Immediately, I started my long journey researching, buying, tasting and collecting Australian reds, the everyday standard bigger company reds at first, the super premiums shortly thereafter (Grange, Hill of Grace, John Riddoch etc.), mixed with Australian Riesling, Hunter Valley Semillon and interdispersed with various fortifeds and stickies - quite an eclectic array back then. By the early nineties and having helped form an extremely good small tasting group (with one notable francophile, who took me under his wing) in conjunction with my involvement with a mid-sized wine club, I discovered the joys of what France, Germany and Portugal could produce and my liking for rather big, lumpy Aussie red began to wane. My palate began to mature, I suppose. Since then, and with the extraordinary increase in (global) quality of wine right across the board, I'm still firmly in a 50/50 split between local/imported wine in my moderately-stocked cellar. Way down on Spanish gear, and too few Italian reds, although Barbaresco and Barolo are slowly building. Burgundy is fast driving me insane, firstly, for its frustating and expensive qualitative inconsistencies and, more recently, for its unaffordability. Bordeaux can be wonderful in small doses - there is a "sameness" in red Bordeaux, a homogenity that is a good thing in a way, in that there is, generally, a consistency of quality, flavour and style within the relatively broad parameters of the region and most Chateaux only produce a couple of "blended" wines (a "macro" climat, unlike Burgundy's "micro"-climat). However, like most things, too much of a similar thing tends to promote a lack of interest through sheer repeatability - a bit like my tasting notes. Prices for the higher-rated Chateaux have spiralled totally out of control, here, too. This is in part why I try to hold as diverse and interesting an array of winestyles I enjoy and within my budget. Local wines are fast improving (particularly Chardonnay and Pinot) and if the trend towards big alcoholic numbers subsides, more locals will be in the little black book in future. There are some limitations on what one can source in Australia but luckily we are not handicapped by archaic and demonstrably prohibitionist wine laws and distribution systems other countries must endure. By far, the biggest factor to consider over here at the moment is the atrocious exchange rate. We have gone from almost parity with the US dollar to near 60 cents in a matter of months. It took 25 years to get back up there and two nano-seconds for it to fall back. Amazing times we live in, eh? Anyway, that's my less than profound take on a fascinating subject - thanks to Hoke for the call on this one.

For me it was the same. My parents have always appreciated a nice glass of red wine in the evenings where I took an occasional sip. However, I didn't really like wine until my late teens. Then I started drinking more white wines and moved to the reds later on - I think this is how it is usually works for most.
It was later that I learned how to appreciate red wines - just like my parents. It is fascinating how your taste changes over time. I wonder if I am now at a level that I will stay on or if I will learn to appreciate other wines as I grow older.

My father made his own wine out of elderberries that grew wild near our home in CONN. when I was a small child. He let me taste it and it is a wonder I ever grew to like wine it was so bad.
I made some friends in the 60's who had been raised in Napa and they served Martini, Krug, etc at dinners and I became hooked.

I'm not sure I've made any "progress" in the sense of "a movement toward a goal or to a further or higher stage, " but my tastes have changed (in a non-linear fashion).

I sometimes drank wine in college or after, but didn't especially care. Though I remember thinking it wierd at a restaurant where I hung out when they replaced a Pouilly-Fume with a Pouilly-Fuisse, they seemed so different to me. I didn't drink any wine when homeless (though I knew folks that did, Ernest and Julio's "Port" was the fave). Then later (about 17 years ago) I was at an Easter dinner and the '82 Gloria woke me up. I started paying attention, reading WS and other mags, etc. I'm sure now I'd be horrified at some of the early wines I liked, though I still think those early 90s Beringer KVs were very good wines. I still love Bordeaux (and Cab/Merlot in general), but it's not as prime a focus as it was then. I've decided I'm not as crazy over ZH as I used to be, etc.

I can't speak for others, but I sure know a LOT of people (at all ranges of experience) who "only drink red." They
re missing a lot ( as are the few who only drink white,but they usually claim it's headache related).