Maureen Moroney
I recently had the privilege of attending the International Cold Climate Wine Competition (ICCWC) as a judge. The competition was organized by the Minnesota Grape Growers Association and the University of Minnesota, and featured more than 300 wines from cold-climate varieties, plus 24 judges and numerous hard-working volunteers.
Earlier in my wine-world career, the idea of serving as a judge at a wine competition would have seemed inconceivable to me. Now I have three under my belt, and I don’t find it at all uncomfortable or stressful.
Flight of wines for 2019 ICCWC Governor’s Cup consideration
Imposter Syndrome vs. Arrogance
The people we serve through our work at the Institute have an established presence in the world of wine, whether as growers, winemakers, retailers, or consumers. Still, a fair number of the calls and emails we get are from extremely capable wine industry professionals who really just need to talk themselves through something they already have a good handle on.
When I have those conversations with people, I am almost always reminded that in winemaking, where every case is different, two things are usually true:
1. There are no simple, concrete answers that apply all the time across the board.
2. As a winemaker, you have a deeper understanding of your own wines than anyone else does.
And those two truths usually lead to two more:
Because of #1, it’s understandable to second-guess yourself.
Because of #2, your instinct at navigating most winemaking questions is incredibly valuable.
However, our palates are both highly complex and highly variable, and they can also be fallible. Even when we feel confident in our abilities, we should avoid becoming complacent and remember that we can always continue to grow and improve.
Which brings me to the opposite problem we sometimes run into: Winemakers who are unable to acknowledge any room for improvement in their wines or their production practices, and are uninterested in seeking out new information or constructive feedback. The wine industry, as a whole, unfortunately has a reputation for snobbery and big egos, whether it deserves it or not. While we may often think of that in a service context (e.g., the snooty sommelier), sometimes that arrogance also extends to winemakers. It can become a problem when the commonly observed (and totally normal) “house palate” is combined with a stubborn refusal to do anything to challenge or expand it.
So how do you learn to trust yourself and be confident in your abilities, without risking developing a big head and feeling infallible?
Getting more confident in my palate
I practiced and got better.
That’s it. The end.
OK, that’s the short version. The longer (but not any more truthful) version is that I started out learning to recognize general categories (fruit, spice, floral, etc.) and gradually learned to narrow down to specifics. It’s important to keep in mind that general categories are always valid; sometimes there truly isn’t any flavor that stands out so clearly it can be named down to the exact origin of the vanilla bean that matches what you’re sensing. Sometimes a wine’s aroma really is just an abstract mixture, and all you can do is describe it that way.
That said, it is possible and important to build up a mental bank of associations to draw upon. And it needs to be both expanded and refreshed on a regular basis. I’m going to say it again because it bears repeating: The more you practice, the easier it gets.
The aroma wheel can be really useful to both trigger a sense-memory and to help narrow down from broad categories to more specific descriptors. However, it can also be limiting, if you end up feeling either dependent on it or boxed in by it. It’s a good starting place, but getting to a point where you’re able to place things mentally within your own sensory catalogue based on your own experience, without relying on external prompts, will help you reach the next level in your tasting abilities.
Use whatever tools are helpful, both to communicate your perception to others, and to help you record and retain your own impressions. Most of the time, this takes the form of standard tasting notes describing color, aroma, flavor, texture, and so on. But it can also include visual diagrams of taste perception, or metaphorical or other figurative language (such as a wine that reminds you of flannel pajamas vs. wine like satin pajamas). Maybe even ideas about good food pairings or ideal settings for enjoying the wine, or preference ranking against other wines of a similar style. The best way to record your thoughts is the one that captures and communicates them most clearly and accurately.
Don’t use obscure terms for the sake of sounding edgy. It doesn’t accomplish anything (other than making you seem pretentious). But don’t be afraid to use them if they fit exactly what you’re trying to describe better than anything else does.
Scoring criteria for ICCWC, using the word “austerity,” which my colleagues make fun of me for using!
For example, I worked with a wonderful winemaker who had an annoying habit of using “blood orange” as a descriptor. I would roll my eyes (mentally, at least) every time. That is, until I actually bought a blood orange and tasted it. It turns out that blood oranges do have a distinct flavor from other oranges. So while using “orange” as a descriptor wouldn’t have been inaccurate, using “blood orange” still conveyed the idea (for people like me who didn’t know the difference) with an added layer of precision (for those who do know the difference).
In our Intensive Tasting Proficiency Training workshops, we often emphasize the aromas of cassis (black currant) and lychee because they are very common, very specific wine aroma descriptors that most US consumers have not had much chance to encounter in daily life. It would be possible to get close to describing them using other terms or combinations of terms, but no approximate substitute is as good as the thing itself. The flavor of sumac berries falls into this category for me. Many wines, including some Marquettes, have a tart red fruit note that for a long time I couldn’t put my finger on. I would sometimes use descriptors like cranberry or rhubarb, but those weren’t quite right. If I had looked back at my notes and read “cranberry,” it wouldn’t evoke the same sense memory that reading “sumac” would; that is, it wouldn’t actually match what I’d tasted and wouldn’t do as good a job of capturing the experience of the wine.
Sumac in Chanhassen, MN
Apart from building your skill in tasting, building your confidence in talking about what you taste may be a different matter, but they can go hand-in-hand. I used to take highly detailed notes, and then keep them completely to myself in group tasting environments. Speaking up can take practice, too. The first step is realizing that no two tasters will agree, so if your notes don’t match another person’s, that’s totally OK and doesn’t mean that either one of you is wrong. For me, it took repeated exposure to a setting with colleagues who respected and valued my input. If speaking up is a challenge for you, I would suggest that you avoid tasting with people who have no interest in what you have to say, but seek out those who have equally interesting perspectives to contribute. Then take the tasting seriously, but not yourselves.
The more tasting you do, the better you will get at it and the more confident you will become; at the same time, you will also widen your experience and combat the tendency to believe your own wines are the best and most perfect wines in the world.
Bruising my ego, and how it makes me better
After I’d made major progress in getting confident in my palate, I attended a more advanced tasting workshop to fine-tune my skills. I don’t remember the exact details, but there was an exercise that went something like this: We were given six wines of the same variety (but tasting blind beyond that), with a range of expressions and styles. We were instructed to take as detailed notes as possible. We took a break, then tasted the same six wines again, blind, in a different order. The goal was to match them up to the first set, based on our notes/memory. That was a quick way to find out how reliable and descriptive my notes really were. It turns out that they weren’t nearly as useful as I thought. If I had done a good job of accurately and precisely describing the wines, I should have been able to match what I wrote in my notes to what I tasted in my glass. I think I got maybe one or two right.
Another thing that keeps me on my toes is learning about cold-hardy hybrid varieties that, until a few years ago, I’d never even heard of. Even now, there are quite a few varieties I’ve only had the opportunity to taste once or twice (or not at all). Not having a sensory context or any set expectations for a wine makes you rely heavily on the mental library of flavors you have built. Unfamiliarity forces you to flex your sensory muscles.
The most important thing to keep in mind when it comes to strengthening your palate also goes for winemaking (and maybe life in general): Embrace the fact that learning and improving is a never-ending process.
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Judging wine competitions: Trusting my palate, but knowing it’s imperfect
One of the challenges of judging at competitions like is that the other judges in your group may have vastly different opinions about any given wine, and maybe even different approaches to judging in general. I quickly discovered that my fellow judges on my panel at the ICCWC were generally much harsher than I was (and, I believe, harsher than those on the other panels as well). Sometimes our notes lined up closely, and other times we tasted very different things in the wines. Even when we perceived the same flavors, we often disagreed about whether they were positive or negative!
This brings me to a major criticism of wine competitions: It is the luck of the draw whether a given wine will be tasted by a generous or a stingy panel of judges. For example, imagine a pair of wines where, if tasted side-by-side by the same person, nine out of ten tasters would rate Wine A more highly than Wine B. Those two wines could go to competition, and Wine A could get tasted by a pickier panel of judges and get a Silver while Wine B could be tasted by a more forgiving panel of judges and receive a Gold. Bummer for Wine A, but that’s luck sometimes.
Where this gets even messier, though, is when Wine A doesn’t make it into a Best-of-Class round because it didn’t receive a Gold from a harsher panel, but Wine B does make it into a more advanced round of judging because it did receive a Gold from a more generous panel. In other words, sometimes wines that probably should be considered in the later rounds, when compared to the others in those rounds, don’t make it that far.
The upside is that the wines that do win the top awards truly deserve all the praise and accolades they receive. They wouldn’t make it that far if they weren’t good wines. Most importantly, when the full group of judges gets together to vote, the wine that’s ultimately picked as the top choice is guaranteed to be something the whole group considers worthy of winning top honors. So be proud of any medals or awards your wines have received, but don’t be discouraged by the ones they don’t receive, and don’t let it keep you from trying again next year.