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Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Variability of wines

I've often wondered about the way different bottles from the same batch, tank, cask - whatever - how they vary. Of course, we do not have a professionally-designed wine cellar... we have a what we call a basement. Certainly that's a part of the equation.

Unlike The Vancouver Sun's Robert Parker-wannabe wine critic, who uses a scale of 86 to 90 in evaluating his picks, we use a 1 to 5 scale, with an occasional bottle rating a "6". So it's interesting to a look back at how we've rated a wine like Kettle Valley 2002 Rock Oven Red - a Cabernet-Shiraz blend - and see that the 6 bottles that we've opened over the past 18 months have rated as high as "5" and as low as "3".

On our simple scale, "1" means not potable. "3" is okay, but not worth the price (or "quaffable but hardly transcendent",) and "5" means one of the best.

I hate to say it, but the 4.5-5 grades were awarded in the first half of those 18 months, and since then it has been 3 to 4. I hope this isn't a trend, because we still have 3 bottles left. According to my database.

Hello? Anybody out there?

1 Comments:

Blogger Linda said...

Having seen your "basement," Lorne, I think it's better than most -- certainly when it comes to temperature control.

My guess is that Kettle Valley, like most everyone else, is tinkering with their wines to make them drinkable earlier. I'm not keen on that process, but I understand the motivation.

7:18 p.m.  

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