Is the wine poor or is it me?

Why do people suddenly seriously dislike a wine they have long loved?I watch patterns emerging in the comments posted on our website and have been puzzled.

We taste our wines regularly. Were we to find a sudden drop in quality we would not buy the wine in the first place or de-list and send it back if something developed later. Except it never does. Well, I can't remember when it last did. We buy well and only from good people.

So … explain how people will post a comment: "really disappointed in the new vintage … terrible, etc.”

Two reasons occur:
1) Cork taint. Firstly … I very much support the continued use of corks in wine bottles. Have planted cork trees myself. Please don't accuse me of wanting to make Portuguese birds homeless. But … because cork trees take 40 years to mature and in the last forty years the number of wine bottles needing corks has soared exponentially, cork supply is stretched and quality is not always what it should be. This bedevils us.

Unless you taste a lot it is very difficult to spot most cork taint. Generally, people think a cork tainted wine is just a poor wine. A corked wine doesn't have to taste of cork. It can just taste not very good.

I guess we just have to live with this. Is it what the great André Simon meant when he famously but enigmatically said "There are no great wines; only great bottles of wine"?

But it would be good if we could get more people to think: "well, it might just be this bottle, might just be cork. Try another, Laithwaites Wine will refund me anyway."

2) The other reason is trickier to explain. Its something I was taught in a Wine Tasting course I attended at Bordeaux University (in the 60's before I started my business) given by a now legendary man; Professor Emile Peynaud.

Prof Peynaud besides heading Bordeaux's Station Oenologique at the University was the first Great Wine Consultant, the first in a long line of Great Men who seem able to bestow greatness upon a wine anywhere in the world – or at least most bottles of it! – by merely passing magisterially through the cellars.

I mention this in order to emphasise this man's immense authority … and that he was the least likely of men to preach heresy.

But he taught his class this:
"If you find a wine that you would expect to be good, to be not very good, the fault is most likely not in the wine but in you." Note that: "most likely it’s you."

The sons and daughters of all the Great and Good in wine all attended Peynaud's classes. He taught them all to be very, very wary of their senses of taste and smell. In humans these senses are very poor and SO easily overridden by what is heard and seen. So very easily!

"I don't like this", says the person next to you and you are very likely to agree. Not because you are any kind of doormat. Just because a stronger sense always trumps a weaker one.

For serious wine tasting, professional tasters (who are not immune themselves to outside influence) taste in isolation in little cubicles.

And emotions. You're having a bad day, you dislike the person offering this wine, you are never going to enjoy it. Conversely, the wine of a good friend always tastes better.

A wine drunk with friends on a terrace by the Med one balmy evening tastes much better than that same wine on a wet Monday morning in the Reading office. Something we all learn to be wary of in this business. And the origin of much of 'this is a wine that doesn't travel' nonsense.

Above all, your taste and smell are affected by your health. Under the weather? Off colour? Hung over? Run down? Exhausted? A stiff drink may well help, but your taste faculties are not likely to be at their best. The wine is not 'off'. You are.

All this came from a man who I repeat was no maverick, but by some distance the leading wine academic of his age.

Peynaud proved his theories with little tests. The simplest – which I have gleefully tried out many times on my own staff (it always works) – is to offer people a wine and ask their views. Then offer them another wine and ask for comparisons and preference. When all have had their say you tell them both glasses contained the same wine. Such fun. No-one ever gets that right (unless forewarned).

Really calms down any who think they have an infallible palate (and the Prof's classes were full of people who KNEW God had given them exceptional taste buds!)

You assessed wines with the Prof, he always insisted on triangular tastings; three glasses, two with the same wine. Fail to spot the identical wines, your views were not counted.

All this made me very wary indeed of rushing to conclusions on wines. I think I owe the Prof and my Peynaud-taught mentors in the trade a very great debt indeed. Taste slowly, quietly and alone if possible. Something seems odd? It could be you. Try again tomorrow. It may all be different.