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Some time back I was reading a book about wine philosophy, and it made a very valid point about wine tasting and that self-styled clan referred to as ‘wine critics’. The question is whether wine tasting really helped bring the best wines forward, or was it just a way for the elite to look busy and feel important?

I admit that I too would be inclined to go with the latter choice. How difficult can it really be to sip a few wines first thing in the morning and then write something hifalutin and indecipherable about them? I, too, was quite the sceptic, but then I read this article. This is what it mostly said.

A wine, as a tangible thing is an absolute. It is a chemical emulsion with a fixed set of compounds in it. In that sense, the aromas that a wine emits are fixed and dependent on the constituent compounds — this is to say that for a wine to smell like apples, it must contain one of the many esters that make up the smell of apples. So, the basic set of aromas in a wine is not just the function of one man’s command of the English vocabulary combined with a vivid imagination. A wine is a piece of canvass, but not a blank one; it has been painted over by the winemaker and although it may evoke a different personal sentiment in each person who takes it in it still remains an absolute; a stolid and set entity in itself.

So when wine-tasters congregate and start describing a wine they are not shooting arrows in the dark. They are trying to identify that which is already there. It is more a game of scrabble where the letters are given and you try to unscramble them into something meaningful, or Pictionary, where we try and transfer from one sense (visual) onto another (verbal). Given this basic perimeter you should now see how a wine evaluation is not a subjective exercise, when done right that is. If done wrong then prejudice and personal preference take up all the space and there is no room left for judging a wine for how good it is and for what it represents.

All in all, I am here judging at two of the most prestigious wine competitions in the world, the Decanter World Wine Awards and the International Wine Challenge and having spent some time with some of the most amazing critics in the universe, I can assure you this, wine judging is a valid job. Also, it can be quite a hard job, especially when flights after flights of wine keep coming at you.

I was trying to make a point, which I somewhat did, and then somehow obfuscated. Wine can do that. Which is why the first rule of wine judging is this: Spit!