I initiated a discussion on the LinkedIn Group Wine Reviews asking if it is better for wine writers and bloggers to taste wine or drink wine. There are several comments supporting each position. The idea for this question came from Eric Asimov’s Saturday Keynote address at the 2011 Wine Bloggers Conference in Charlottesville, Virginia. Eric presented an analogy: someone who taste wines is like a person that counts visiting a state when he only landed at an airport and transferred to another plane. Someone who drinks wines is a like a person who flies into an airport in a new state and takes a few days to explore the sites.

Tom Lewis, commenting on the discussion, didn’t care for that analogy. Tom believes that tasting wines is like a traveler that visits a city for a day or weekend with a guidebook and several pages of Internet research. This person hits the main spots but doesn’t linger. Tom wrote that wine drinkers are like visitors to a city for a week or month with no guidebook or agenda. They are spending time in the city discovering if they like it or not. Given enough think time, other analogies could surface on the differences between tasting wines and drinking wines.

Most commenters agreed that when wine is placed in the context of food and friends, the drinking experience is exceptional. One has an experience that is not duplicated by merely tasting wines. Kathy and I are in a position to do both tasting and drinking wines. Often when tasting I think of the foods that would pair well with the wine. When drinking I still go through the steps of a structured tasting, however mental notes are replacing written notes on a napkin. Which is better? Both the activity of tasting and drinking have advantages and disadvantages. It may be dependent on the situation. For dinner, I expect to be drinking wines. When visiting and interviewing winemakers and owners, at three wineries a day, I taste the wines. Both activities add to my wine knowledge.

Cheers,
Terry