“Are you tasting enough?” A friend and fellow wine buyer asked me last week.
“No” is always the answer. One cannot taste enough with this job, even in the best of times, and these are hardly those. At the turn of the century, when I started buying wine for a restaurant in Manhattan, I attended my first of countless portfolio tastings, this one for Polaner Imports at the Puck Building on Houston Street. The room was enormous, with floor-to-ceiling red velvet curtains lining the hundred- year-old brick walls. Among the stately white columns, were dozens of tables lined with uncorked bottles, and on the far side of each table was an importer, distributor, or winemaker, there to pour and provide information about the wines. To the side of every table was a bucket. My work was cut out for me.

Since that day, I’ve replayed this scene dozens of times each year, in various venues, and with different actors. There are snooty somms and smarmy salespeople, as well as the familiar faces of fellow buyers, and often, legendary winemakers, some like fishes out of water, far from their vineyards. My role is always the same: the earnest and inquisitive taster, attempting to sample, spit, and humbly assess as much wine as possible without getting too intoxicated. Breakfast helps, as does water, and public transportation is a must. Cities like New York and San Francisco can feature several such tastings in a single day, and I would plan my train route efficiently to maximize attendance.

Twenty years of trade tastings – sampling and asking questions - make up the bulk of my wine education, and I am grateful for these opportunities, but there will never be a time when I have tasted enough. Vintage variation and new producers guarantee a changing market, and the events of the last year have left us winos disconnected from our wares, and from one another. Throughout the last year, we’ve requested sample bottles, received splashes in glasses at the shop door, and tasted from ball jars, sanitized, refilled and labeled by diligent salespeople, but I look forward to the day when again we will congregate, swirling and spitting en masse, immersed in our milieu. ‘Til then we taste apart.

Cheers,
Max