Kevin Drum asks a question about which I’ve long wondered:
If you had two or three experts taste the same wine, would they all agree on what the various flavor components were? Or would one of them claim it tasted of peanut butter and elderberries while the other detected hints of shoe polish and rainbow trout?
Stephen Bainbridge gives a rather lengthy response, my favorite part of which is,
I aspire to true wine snobbery, which according to Leonard Bernstein’s classic text The Official Guide to Wine Snobbery requires the use of jargon: “Just as tennis fanatics talk of topspin lobs and compare Addidas to Nike, so must the wine snob cultivate his own exclusivity.”
Personally, my wine description scale tends to be rather bimodal: Good/not good, sweet/not sweet, and the like.
