A Matter of Taste

By Chris Bearman

My friend Scott and I decided to do some mid-week wine tasting. I had just submitted a report which had taken months of long days and several weekends to complete on time and Scott had just finished a gruelling series of consecutive night-shifts that morning. Scott came around to my apartment in the Bay Area, brushed off my concerns about his fatigue and whisked us off into the Santa Cruz Mountains in his classic MG convertible car, leaving behind the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley below.

It was a very pleasant early Summer morning and the air in the mountains was clear and bright as we wound up twisting lanes through the dense Redwood trees of the Santa Cruz Mountains wine region. The Santa Cruz Mountains Wine Region stretches between San Francisco and Monterey Bay and overlooks San Francisco Bay on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. It is a region of coastal mountains with sloped vineyards set amongst forests of redwood trees. The altitude, the terrain, the presence of trees, wind patterns, fog, sun exposure, and different soil types, all influence the grapes, forming numerous

microclimates in the mountains. Generally, the area specialises in pinot noir and chardonnay, but cabernet sauvignon and zinfandel also do well in some places. There is an important history of winemaking in the area. Paul Masson planted his vineyards and battled through Prohibition here, and two of the wineries (Ridge and David Bruce) placed in the famous Judgement of Paris wine event, that build California’s reputation for quality wine in the 1970s.

Our destination was Burrell School winery, which is housed in a lovely old red painted schoolhouse that dates from 1890. Dave Moulton, the owner and winemaker uses the school theme extensively in his marketing. There are “Back to School” wine tasting dinners, the newsletter is called “School News,” and the aim of the winery is to “Produce wines at the Head of the Class.” The wines themselves are given various school related names, such as “Old School,” “Magne Cum Laude,” and “Field Trip”. As we sat on the terrace overlooking the vineyards with the canyons and ridges of the Santa Cruz Mountains beyond, I reflected on the names of the wines. Names like “Teacher’s Pet,” “Extra Credit” and “Spring Break” might imply a style of wine that was simple, young and immature. While the whites and rose wines had a freshness and vivaciousness to them, none of them were particularly childish. In fact, some of the reds were quite mature and sophisticated, with deep rich fruit and robust tannins. Dave is clearly having a bit of fun with the school metaphor, but we do describe wine in all kinds of odd ways.

In many wineries you can buy a wine tasting guide, which has a list of descriptors for different grape varieties. There are the usual fruit descriptors, however, the list also includes some very surprising things, such as feral, meaty, mushroom, saddle leather, pencil shavings and wet dog. James May in the popular TV show Oz and James, described a wine like the “Sweat of Someone You Like” and barnyard is a flavour often discussed as a characteristic of some French wines. These tastes can indicate a bad wine made in unclean conditions, but not necessarily, and many people like these flavours as providing a nuanced range of flavours and a more complex interesting wine.

Taste is highly individual. “Nul gustum disputandum est” or as my old Grandmother used to say “There is no accounting for taste.” I can attest to this myself having once had one of the local delicacies in the beautiful French village of Chablis. The dish was a salad topped with a very ripe soft cheese and andouillette (a local sausage made from intestines). When the waiter proudly brought out the food an awful funky smell drifted across the table and I looked at the nearby drain wondering if there was a problem. As we took our first bites conversation with my partner, which had started off in very lively fashion over a fabulous bottle of Chablis wine, ran into a brick wall. The French expression “Pue la merde” (which interestingly is also sometimes used to describe wines) came vividly to mind as I retched slightly, while trying not to let my lunch partner see. The waiter full of enthusiasm for the local dish bounced over and asked how we liked the food. As I sat wondering how to answer without offending our likeable host, my lunch partner intervened with “thank you the wine is delicious and the food is full of flavour.”

While the flavours of the wine are clearly important, wine is not just about the bottom-up tastes that we get from the glass. Taste is as much about the top-down influence of what we bring to the glass. Flavours in wine are notoriously fickle. They can appear and disappear depending on what other people in the room can taste. If someone says they can taste green apples in a Sauvignon Blanc, then everyone else will be able to as well. This is not just

about social desirability, but the suggestion of a flavour in wine will genuinely influence what people can taste. More generally how you are feeling will influence how you perceive the wine. If you are happy, having a good time and like the people in the tasting room then you will be much more likely to think the wine is great. This is something that wine marketers have long known and why at some wineries you can’t just go and have a glass of wine. You have to have “a wine experience”

Some of the ways we talk about wine are more about this top down influence, creating a particular mental picture to understand the wine. XX from Hound at Foot winery in the Riverland of South Australia, likes to describe her wines as something to drink in an old armchair next to a roaring fire in an old stone castle with rain pelting against the window and a hound asleep on the rug in front of the fire. I’ve described wines in the past as “like Grandad’s old smoking jacket,” “a hot day at the swimming pool wine” and in one case with a wine I didn’t much care for as like “Walking past a pub and being sworn at by a big fat man in an old string vest.”

Wine, perhaps more than any other drink is subject to discussion and conjecture, encouraged by numerous excellent books and websites. It is an endlessly fascinating topic driven by a multitude of differences in the product that relate to differences in grape, vineyard location, soil composition, wine making techniques and even the amount of air that the wine has been exposed to. Wine itself of course also facilitates discussion and the word symposium, which in our modern language means a collection of presentations at a conference, was originally a wine drinking party with lively debate in Ancient Greece. In this context it is perhaps natural to have lots of different ways of thinking and talking about wine. Some ways of thinking about wine may genuinely help one to understand more about wine, others may be simple marketing ploys, and some may be totally obvious (like describing a wine as tasting like red fruit). The important thing though is that while wine is often a shared experience (and we can taste things in wine that other people suggest), our approach to wine should be our own built from our own library of experiences of tasting lots of different types and styles of wine.

As Scott and I emerged from the cool dark interior of the winery, into the warm sunshine of a beautiful California day, the blue sky contrasting perfectly with the early summer greenery of the vineyards we both felt a sense of elation, like the feeling of freedom of schoolkids at the start of the summer holidays. We had enjoyed a very convivial tasting of some excellent wines and as we zipped through the fresh air of the Santa Cruz Mountains in Scott’s open top sports car heading for the next winery to build our library of wine experiences I felt that it was really all just a matter of taste.

© Chris Bearman (2025). Wine Rambler Magazine.