Grape Juice

Mas Des Bressades Cuvée Excellence 2005 (Costières de Nîmes)

Posted on 13. Aug, 2007 by Erin in Tasting

Andrew Barrow from Spittoon must’ve known we could never resist a challenge when he sent out an email asking bloggers to follow the lead of Château Petrogasm and post our next tasting note in a purely visual format. So here you have it.

I applaud creativity and originally as a rule, as long as it doesn’t compromise the goal of the endeavour, which I take, in this case, to be to inform readers as to the characteristics of the wine being reviewed. My enjoyment of Petrogasm’s method is one of appreciative distance; interesting, different, but, like other forms of review, not always lending itself to natural expression.

Let’s face it, eighteen nose and palate descriptors, strung off like a set of malfunctioning Christmas lights, is neither overly helpful in establishing a sense of uniqueness, nor does it do much to shed the erroneously snobbish air that the wine world has so neatly crafted over the decades. In the same vein however, visual studies, though thought-provoking, leave just as much, if not more, to the interpretation of a reader who may be seeking out nothing more than a clear, concise grasp of what a particular wine is all about. What does it mean if a wine is represented by a broken television, or a canister of baby wipes? Will I like it? Does it taste like cleanser? Am I wasting my money?

That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy it. I’m a subscriber to Petrogasm’s feed, an avid reader, and I look forward to new postings much the same as I do a good book of logic puzzles (because I’m a dork like that). My initial take on them was that they were just as pretentious as precisely scripted tasting notes, and a bit of self-indulgent art for art’s sake. Truthfully I still feel that way to an extent, but have learned to enjoy them as a bit of wine-oriented mental pampering. These reviews may, on the surface, appear to be frivolous and non-sensical, but half the fun is trying to figure out what on earth the poster was trying to get across by filtering the image through your own models of conceptualization and understanding. The very subjectivity of the exercise isn’t appropriate, in my opinion, for the average joe who Googled a wine name in the hopes of finding further information, and for that reason alone, Grape Juice will never be a visual-only wine blog.

That being said, we recognize the value of diversity and may, from time to time, pop up a pictoral review, a podcast, a video, a limerick, or some other departure from the norm of text ad nauseum. I would rather take inspiration not from Château Petrogasm, the masters of visual reviews, but from Beau at Basic Juice, who over the years has posted reviews in an astounding array of forms. Always entertaining, always informative, and always allowing for a brillliant mix of reader interpretation and guided understanding. Pretention-free, somewhat anti-establishment, often irreverant, but still cohesive in his representations. You walk away from reading one of his posts with an appreciation of not only the wine, but the passion and ingenuity that went into its enjoyment.