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(D. Gerasimatos) wrote:

>> Last Wednesday we tasted 45 Bordeaux from 2001 and 2002. 9 of
>> them - exactly 20% - were corked, from heavily to almost
>> indiscernible. The latter was the case for Léoville Las Cases
>> 2001, scoring 90 for the first, 94 for the second bottle.

> How do you manage to taste 45 wines and retain any information
> about them? Is this an art which must be practiced or is it
> genetic?

It's my job, and all I can say is: practice, practice, practice.

We started at 5pm with 28 Austrian Weinviertel wines (25 whites:
13 grüner veltliner, 5 rieslings, 2 chards, 2 sauvignons, 3 other
whites, 3 reds) to proceed to 45 clarets, tasted in roughly
ascending order of price, from EUR 6,60 (Malesan Bordeaux) to EUR
80 (LLC). Finished at 9pm. And, of course, I sit, taste, write TNs
into my laptop, the other tasters delivering descriptors from time
to time. We taste in flights of four.

This was a rather small tasting, in fact. When we do our annual
~1500 wines roundup, we usually do 200 wines a day. Needless to
says that this is very hard work, but it's possible.

What we do in our tasting panels (between three and five members),
is to agree immediately upon the score we attribute a given wine.
If it's excellent, we award a score (usually 91 or higher) and put
it aside for an open final tasting of the best 10 to 15 percent of
the wines. This final round is rather fast and serves very well to
evaluate the top wines against each other.

M.