This page exists to organize and make available for the world's perusal my tasting notes on wines that I've tried since approximately the fall of 2004. The majority of the wines reviewed here were purchased in grocery stores in or near the University District of Seattle, and appear to be widely available. I've a penchant for Bordeaux and Rieslings, so those styles of wine are disproportionately represented in my tasting notes. I typically consume no more than a bottle of wine a week, though I try to taste as many wines as I can.
The tasting notes themselves are pretty colloquial. I try to communicate my impressions of the wine as best I can, and there's no lack of opinion spared. As I buy wine in hopes of finding tasty wines that go well with my food for about a week, I try to report on the "fridging" capacity of each wine; i.e. how well it ages in the refridgerator under low vacuum. I hope that by reading a tasting note, you'll come to understand, in moderately short order, my complete impression of the wine.
To the Tasting Notes!The wines you'll find reviewed here are higly likely to be available at your local grocery store, as most of my wine purchases are made at my local Safeway and QFC. As I'm not making much money as a grad student, I try to find quality wines at minimal cost. A few times a year, I'll likely try to splurge on a classified growth Bordeaux or other high-end wine. Most of the time, I simply can't afford to do so. Our basement here is only marginally suited to proper aging of wine, so I rarely hold onto bottles for longer than a month (as I write this, there's nothing in the basement). My tastes run toward more complex, subtle, and less fruity wines, and I try to buy things I think I'm going to like.
The best way to decide whether or not a wine is tasty, worthy of consumption, or in any way wonderful is to try it. That said, everyone loves to try to quantify the essence of a wine into a number. Most large-scale wine reviewing enterprises use a 100 point scale, where 80 is mediocre, 90 pretty darned tasty, and 100 nearly unattainable. My system is a little different. My system hinges more on differential measurement. If a wine is better than another wine, it recieves a higher score. If I find that a wine is better than one wine, but not as good as another, I try to interpolate between the two. Hopefully you'll find a few wines among my tasting notes that you've tried, and can then match your own internal scale up with mine.
Also of note: There's a white wine scale and a red wine scale. Just because the white wine scale's center appears to be lower than that of the reds does not mean that a given white is worse than a red with a higher numerical score. The two systems should be judged entirely independently, as reds and whites are kind of different animals anyway.
My formal wine tasting training extends only to a single undergraduate course in wine tasting at Cornell University. Beyond that, I simply write down what I taste in, think of, and enjoy about a wine.
When I peruse the web for wine news and ideas, I tend to start with Neal Martin and Jancis Robinson.