> I didn't put her down. SHE said she was very dissatisfied with her
> experience. I explained why.

Uh... you said, "It sounds like you have no clue as to what you are
doing.". Then you said, "You have NO CLUE as to what you are doing."
You followed that with "How...charmingly naive...." after which you
started shouting at her in all caps, ending with "DO YOU UNDERSTAND?"

In some circles that would be taken as a put down.

>>You trust the seller's "tasting" over yours?
>
> Yes. I have no confidence that I can judge a wine apart from food.

You might find that if you do both for a while, you will learn how to
associate what you taste (alone) in a wine with what it will taste like
with food. For example, a wine that is very tannic will probably not
taste all that "good" by itself. However, upon tasting it by itself, I
will note that it is tannic. This tells me that it probably wants some
big food to go with it - a steak for example. A wine that is not tannic
is likely to pair well with something lighter, like duck or lamb.

Similarly, if I taste a chardonnay by itself, no matter what it tastes
=like=, I can taste oak (or not), butter (or not), and these are clues
to me as to what they might pair with.

The more I do it, the better I get. You can too, if you can get over
the idea that doing so somehow betrays the idea that wine is meant for food.

> But a trailer of a film is not like tasting a wine without a meal. The
> trailer is something made of the parts of the film; the wine is exactly
> the same, in different circumstances.

The analogy can work if you consider that each individual scene is
exactly the same, but in different circumstances. The classic example
is that a smile can be made into a leer by pairing it with an
appropriate prior scene.

> Despite deacdes of reading about and drinking wine, I cannot fathom
> wine review language, other than 'dry', "highly extracted", 'raisiny',
> and 'elegant'.

Neither can I. And I don't understand some of your words, though some
of the words that don't resonate with you are in fact meaningful to me.
Earthy, for example. Perhaps it's because the wines I've had have
been different (from each other) in that respect, and the wines that you
have had have mostly been similar in that respect, so it never came out
of the background for you. But that doesn't make the use of the words
we =do= know into snobbery, or the betrayal of wine's essential nature
with food.

> Sicilian and southern Italian wines, which are so
> vastly different, confuse reviewers, who downgrade and
> dismiss them because they are so different.

So don't listen to them. That doesn't make =your= (or my) tasting of
wines into a bad thing.

> Feel free to ask me about Italian wines, any time.

I asked about Tocai Friulano. But talking about wine isn't the same as
drinking it. I'm looking forward to opening that bottle, perhaps with
eggplant as you suggested, perhaps with scallops, with which I suspect
it would also do nicely. I'll get four tries at it.

Jose
--
"Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can't see where
it keeps its brain." (chapter 10 of book 3 - Harry Potter).
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