To my dear readers: I know I’ve gone off the grid for a couple of months or so. I haven’t wanted to stay away but, like you, I’m subject to that dumb allocation of ‘you only get 24 hours a day’ rule. If I could have managed to stretch it or bend that unforgiving mandate somehow, I would have been posting on this blog a lot more and I wouldn’t be feeling so execrable about being away for so long.

For more than two months Monday through Friday, I have tasted, scored, and written tasting notes for 30 wines each evening. I did not taste wine on weekends or around the holidays to give my palate a break but nonetheless I have managed to get through over 1500 wines, a formidable task to say the least and the photos above and below illustrate how much my kitchen has been torn up. You’re the first to know - I’ve been engaged with this activity for the soon to be up-and-coming company, Better Wine Guide.

Although I can’t yet reveal all the details, Better Wine Guide is unlike anything that exists in this world so far and I believe it will contribute deeply to the discovery and enjoyment of wine for millions of people. Just in case you haven’t come to know me by now, that’s really what I’m about. If I could, I would make it my mission to turn everyone on to great wine because most often the people that say they don’t like wine are people that have never had good wine. And what are the chances of finding good wine when you’re in a store and swimming in a sea of bottles? The fact is that most people buy a wine based on how the label looks, which is definitely not an indicator of quality.

The experience of blind tasting thirty wines each evening is jarring physically and humbling cerebrally. Each morning I carried 30 bottles of wine into the kitchen and put the whites in the refrigerator to cool, leaving the reds on the counter. I wanted to taste these wines based on how most people will taste them, a white from the fridge and a red at room temperature, no matter what that happened to be. Even if serving temperatures were incorrect (and they were), it’s the real world.

At about 4:30 each afternoon, my stellar Tasting Assistant Deanna showed up. Her job probably wasn’t real great now that I think about it but she did it without fail or complaint. She dragged all the white wines out of the refrigerator and sorted them by varietal from presumably lightest to heaviest, entered in all of the wine label information into our database, put each bottle in a numbered brown bag that corresponded to the tasting order of wines that day, and returned them to the refrigerator. Each day typically consisted of 15 whites and 15 reds with sparkling and rosés included. She then sorted the reds and entered all of the information into the database, bagged them in numbered bags and set them up. Deanna would let me know when she was far enough ahead of me to begin tasting for the day but everything was in a numbered bag by then.

When I walked in to begin my daily tasting episode, she was opening and pouring white wine into the glasses, having about eight or ten glasses poured already. I picked up number one and took it to my tasting area with a computer set up. The computer had the database already opened but the screen was set so I couldn’t see any details about the wine. The only functions I could perform consisted virtually of entering a score and writing my notes. After tasting each evening, I had hours of running the dishwasher (no soap or heat) to clean the glasses and dry them by hand each night. I finished usually by 10:00 or 10:30 PM; the wine glasses I used are fantastic and have held up beyond belief.

I am always excited to find something good and even more so, something great. And I always feel bad about trashing a winery or giving low scores – as if I could make great wine? But I know what great wine tastes like and having no experience as a winemaker I found it challenging to be harshly judgmental. But I got over it and put the judgment thing into perspective. If I made lousy wine and I was the only one to drink it, who cares? But if I’m trying to sell it to the public (with a great label created by genius designers and marketers) and I know it sucks, well that’s another matter entirely. And ultimately, that’s the case with probably most wineries that are trying to sell ‘dumpster wine’ to us wine drinkers and they don’t deserve good scores but they do deserve to be uncovered. Like I said, I got over it.

Wow! Throughout this tasting experience, which is far from over, I have to say what really came into my consciousness (in a very deep way) was the concept of terroir. Terroir (pronounced tehr-WAH) is a French term that expresses a sense of place and typicity and is what makes a wine unique based on grape varietal characteristics, weather, microclimate, soil, sun, terrain, rain and exposure to all of the aforementioned. There are certainly descriptors that define wines from different regions and even from different vineyards within a few yards of each other, especially in France. Throughout this tasting experience the lack of terroir came front and center, as I tasted so many wines that are similar. These wines lacked character or expression because it has all been squeezed out of the winemaker’s equation by some enormous corporation in order to be competitive in the market. Sad. And I pounded them for it because ‘sameness’ is not anything good in wine – distinctiveness is.

As I wrote earlier, this is an eye-opening experience and I feel much better rounded because of it. There were good wines, and great wines too and I was surprised by quite a few wineries that I would not have imagined as making good wine, which gives reason to tasting wine blind. I have biases about wine because admittedly I tend to be a wine snob in the traditional sense, but I have to say that I’m impressed with a surprisingly large number of wines I would have never considered to be of quality. Surprise, in fact, is the word of the day on this subject. I really have to tell you that there has never in the history of the planet been more really good wine available at every price point. Yes, there’s some plonk out there and with so many wines available (some experts believe that 200,000 labels are available worldwide at any given time and that it is a conservative number) there’s a lot of it. Regardless, there really is a tremendous amount of drinkable wines (like for an everyday wine) and a pretty good amount of very good wines, and of course a handful of really incredible wines.

Although there is no end in sight to this assignment, I must say that I feel very lucky to have had the experience of tasting wine critically. It smacks down old prejudices, opens new doors for me, and ultimately humbles me to know that there are so many great wines out there. In the end, would I trade good Bordeaux for a good Yellow Tail? I’ll answer the question but if you know me at all, you probably already know my answer.

David Boyer

Photos: Sad, unusable kitchen. Take out anyone?