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The Wine You Don't Love Back, Even When You Want To

Posted 07/18/2008 at 09:48 PM by Cathy

There are times when, for different reasons, you really really want to like a wine. Maybe it's your best friend's favorite. Maybe everyone else at the table is raving about it. Maybe it was a gift from your college roommate who's just returned from two months in Bali and wants to share her escapades over this particular bottle.

But – try as you might – the wine just isn't doing it for you.

And you do try. You try it at different times of the day. You try it with food. You try it without food. You try it freshly uncorked. You try it decanted.

You're trying so hard you're even second-guessing yourself. So you consult an impartial panel of tasters who happen to be at your house for a week-end BBQ.

They start saying things like, "It's nice." And, "At first it wasn't that bad." And "I don't love it."

Those are all code phrases for, "Yuck."

As reassuring as it may be to get your impressions ratified this way, it doesn't get you any closer to being on the same page with the person whose opinion about the bottle mattered to you in the first place.

What to do?

Here's a suggestion: try a different vintage. The difference between a 2005 and a 2006, for example, can be huge even when it's the same producer of the same grape from the very same vineyard. What struck you as overly acidic in the 2005 may

Here's an even better suggestion: set up a comparative tasting of the two vintages with the person who brought the wine to you in the first place. Comparative tastings are fun (especially when they're blind tastings), they're the most reliable conversation starters, and you learn an awful lot about the wines and also, by the way, about the person whose opinion about the bottle mattered to you in the first place.

Face-to-face with a wine that just isn't doing it for you? Don't slam the door. Open it wider, zoom out, and see what else there is to see in the neighborhood.

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About the Author

Cathy Huyghe
Cathy Huyghe

Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.

Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.

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