No More Blind Tasting of One Long Island Winery

I got an interesting email yesterday from my contact for one prominent Long Island winery. The winery's owner has decided that it will no longer be sending samples to me, or any member of the press, for review.

From now on, he'd wants all wine tastings/reviews to be conducted at the winery, with him present.

This winery isn't the only one that doesn't do samples...but the others are small, low-production wineries that sell out of their wines to their wine clubs regardless of any press coverage. This new member of the "no samples" club isn't one of these artisanal producers -- not by a long shot.

I'll still cover the winery, and I'm trying to schedule a tasting with said owner...but I won't be doing any straight wine reviews based on it. I do all of my true reviews in my home in a controlled environment.

I taste wines right out of the bottle, often blind against at least one other similar blend/varietal...then with appropriate food...then again later after some time decanted. And, in the case of white wines, I try to taste them at a variety of temperatures. I like to give you, my readers, a full picture of a wine...not a review based on a couple minutes at a winery with an owner/winemaker telling me what I should be tasting.

Comments

[Bill]

Hmmmm. I wonder what he's afraid of...

[R. Olsen-Harbich]

It's literally impossible to be impartial when you're tasting at a winery. For one, you have all the aromatic interferance from the production area, as well as the tasting room. When you seriously want to taste wine for blending purposes or other reasons, you have to get them out of the production area in order to judge them correctly.
The influence and pressure of the ownership/winemaker can also be quite accute, making impartial observation impossible. Any tasting evaluation done at a winery is suspect IMO - so kudos to you for not giving in.