I Like Wine
I do.
I am no "expert" on it though. I don't drink wine very often, and then usually with a meal.
I can't be bothered with too much of the airy-fairy nonsense though about "noses" and "finishes". I know wine is like anything else on sale. It has to be reviewed to help you choose it; but as a food it depends heavily on your own tastes, so comments about sparkle, sweetness or dryness are fair enough.
Nor would I bother with the mystique of bottles of absurdly-priced antique wine past its best before the French Revolution - even if I was rich enough and daft enough to afford it. The stuff was made to be drunk, not left in cobwebby cellars for evermore - that's a waste and insult to its makers, not an investment in any real sense!
After all, cheese and wine are only gone-off milk and grape-juice left to mature for a year or so. Either you like wine or you don't, either you detect "notes of" dandelion, toffee or eucalyptus or you don't!
Reviews of real, or cask-conditioned, ales (the beverages the Americans call "craft beers" but still made in modern breweries anyway) are going a bit the same way. I like such beers, but I'd be hard pressed to compare them with anything else or detect "notes" based purely on the reviewer's own sense of taste.
Still, it does happen. One I tried recently was quite caramel-like (deeply-roasted malt?), and some of the light "Summer" beers can be distinctly citrus-y. One ale I found had a very orangey flavour. Beers' flavours come from the malt and the hops, so perhaps some hop hybrids contain natural chemicals also found in citrus fruits?
On another occasion, I enjoyed a single-malt Scotch (I don't know which but I don't think it was a liqueur) with a very distinct vanilla-like flavour. There is one well-known islands whisky whose Gaelic name I'm afraid I forget, that is an acquired taste thanks to a strong iodine flavour from roasting the barley in seaweed smoke.
Cheers!
I am no "expert" on it though. I don't drink wine very often, and then usually with a meal.
I can't be bothered with too much of the airy-fairy nonsense though about "noses" and "finishes". I know wine is like anything else on sale. It has to be reviewed to help you choose it; but as a food it depends heavily on your own tastes, so comments about sparkle, sweetness or dryness are fair enough.
Nor would I bother with the mystique of bottles of absurdly-priced antique wine past its best before the French Revolution - even if I was rich enough and daft enough to afford it. The stuff was made to be drunk, not left in cobwebby cellars for evermore - that's a waste and insult to its makers, not an investment in any real sense!
After all, cheese and wine are only gone-off milk and grape-juice left to mature for a year or so. Either you like wine or you don't, either you detect "notes of" dandelion, toffee or eucalyptus or you don't!
Reviews of real, or cask-conditioned, ales (the beverages the Americans call "craft beers" but still made in modern breweries anyway) are going a bit the same way. I like such beers, but I'd be hard pressed to compare them with anything else or detect "notes" based purely on the reviewer's own sense of taste.
Still, it does happen. One I tried recently was quite caramel-like (deeply-roasted malt?), and some of the light "Summer" beers can be distinctly citrus-y. One ale I found had a very orangey flavour. Beers' flavours come from the malt and the hops, so perhaps some hop hybrids contain natural chemicals also found in citrus fruits?
On another occasion, I enjoyed a single-malt Scotch (I don't know which but I don't think it was a liqueur) with a very distinct vanilla-like flavour. There is one well-known islands whisky whose Gaelic name I'm afraid I forget, that is an acquired taste thanks to a strong iodine flavour from roasting the barley in seaweed smoke.
Cheers!
