Corked brain

I resisted the urge to entitle this post Jesus Christ! At the least tacky, at the worst an affront to the eyes of God. Since we are heading to Westchester to devour a two pound steak at Flames tonight, without Bordeaux, because the entire pranzo is put on by my wife’s boss who is Italian (I know there are Italians who order Bordeaux, I just have never seen it), we decided to upgrade our normal Friday night cru bourgeois to 5th Growth level. First a 2001 Lynch Bages. Corked. Then a second 2001 Lynch Bages. Corked. Then a 1999 Lynch Bages. Corked. I was afraid my brain was getting corked when I finally selected something other than Lynch Bages, and that no matter what I opened next might seem corked. Anyway, I pulled a 2001 Ducru-Beaucaillou, and it wasn’t corked. It’s been a while since I uncorked a Ducru and my wife, Lynn, was confounded by the first sniff. “What is it?” She asked. Being told, she said she should have known, noting that nothing says magic like Ducru, even in an average year. When we drink it, it is definitely our favorite property.

I have been talking about the respective perceptions of the two brain hemispheres on this forum lately, as I have become more acutely aware of the differences. If you close the right eye (crossing to the left brain) of an unfortunate bloke whose corpus callosum connection between the two brain hemispheres has been severed to prevent seizures, and show him a picture of a wagon, he can reproduce it in a drawing. Then if you take the paper he drew on away and ask him what he saw and drew, he has no idea. That is because the right brain can’t talk or reason or think. It just knows. And it is there that a beautiful wine like Ducru thrives. The right brain doesn’t say “magic,” like I said; the left brain tries to explain what the right brain saw and magic is just the best limited answer.

I won’t describe a wine to anyone anymore because by describing it I distort its experience, which must stay in the right brain to be as true as it can be, using the word true as the best surrogate I can summon. But I can tell you that I am enjoying Bordeaux even more now that I stopped trying to make it rational.

Covert wrote:
I won’t describe a wine to anyone anymore because by describing it I distort its experience, which must stay in the right brain to be as true as it can be, using the word true as the best surrogate I can summon. But I can tell you that I am enjoying Bordeaux even more now that I stopped trying to make it rational.

When my wife and I are having wine I sometimes ask her to describe the wine or guess the grape. Her response is always, "Leave me alone....I just want to enjoy the wine!" She never wants to get "geeky" about wine like I tend to do...she's probably right.

Drew

Covert wrote:
I won’t describe a wine to anyone anymore because by describing it I distort its experience, which must stay in the right brain to be as true as it can be, using the word true as the best surrogate I can summon. But I can tell you that I am enjoying Bordeaux even more now that I stopped trying to make it rational.

When my wife and I are having wine I sometimes ask her to describe the wine or guess the grape. Her response is always, "Leave me alone....I just want to enjoy the wine!" She never wants to get "geeky" about wine like I tend to do...she's probably right.

Drew

Drew, your wife sounds like a delightfully balanced wine drinking companion: she stands up like a man for her feminine approach to enjoyment. What seems to work best for me is, while I am in a rational frame of mind, to cram my head full of facts and information about a bottle to be approached – its history, owners, appellation and property characteristics, vineyard and winery philosophy and practices, particulars of the vintage, etcetera, and then when actually drinking the wine, to put all of that out of my conscious mind and just try to be with it.

Covert

In a similar vein, I try to distiguish between tasting and drinking/enjoying. Tasting can be interesting in an intellectual way, and in deciding what to buy, but it is a menas to an end - the enjoyent of a bottle with good company and a meal.

[Jenise]

Without considering which side of the brain was doing what, we have long since noted the difference between logically and clinically identifying the scents and flavors of wine on the one hand, and on the other hand describing how that wine makes you feel. Your wheelhouse being what it is, I once pointed it out to you as the difference between noting that a girl has red hair, green eyes, and good legs and the actual experience of attraction, the kind that would instead cause you to note "she was so beautiful, so rare a thing, that I wanted to scoop her into my arms and...."

For me the best reviews, like Mike Malinoski's, address both. That difference is why I so love reading tasting notes here, and why I use Cellar Tracker for wine referrals at least as often than I consult professional critics.