Question for Winemakers

When you drink your own wine do you spend all the time judging it and thinking about the technical aspects or do you just ever drink it for the fun of it like the rest of us

Maybe you need a second bottle and then you just dont care about anything anymore !!

I guess you can ask a musician if he or she ever listens to their own music and how they ‘react’ to it. Or if an artist ever looks at their pieces; or if a chef ever eats his or her food and ever ‘just enjoys it’ or analyzes it . . .

The joy for me in winemaking is getting it from grape to bottle - the vineyard dynamics; the picking decisions; the fermentation kinetics; the aromas, the tastes, the textures; sitting back and taking note of the evolution of each wine, each barrel. And the greatest joy is sharing it with others . . .

Now to the OP - I do both. When I drink my own bottle, it brings back the memories of everything that went into making that bottle. I can’t ‘separate myself’ from that. But I really don’t analyze it - it is what it is and I rest easy knowing that I did my best to get it into the bottle and send it on its way.

Cheers.

Just got my '16 pinot in bottle last week. Kind of been patting myself on the back on this one. Came out better than I thought it would. I always think about what may have been done better.

Well said Larry [cheers.gif]

Interesting topic. I’m not a winemaker but I suspect that it would be fun to relive the decisions that you made before bottling the wine as you taste the end product years later. It must help you hone your craft and provide a better frame of reference when you need to make decisions in the vineyard and the cave. Winemakers please chime in!

I don’t often open my own wines to drink by myself. But when I have guests in, I am in the in-between area. I can’t help but analyze what is in the stem, what went on in the making of it, etc. But I look to other people to tell me what their experience is with the wines I produce. What I think really matters very little!

I try to listen and not lead. If I see a review of my wine, I pretty much know what that experience was. If the person or group has a palate that aligns with my wine’s profile or not… I can tell whether they had a bottle that was not representative.

If winemakers were forced to drink only their own products, I bet it would seriously curtail the amount of crappy wine out there.

That is a very interesting comment, Mr. Keller. Would you care to share more of what you are thinking?

The internet never fails to deliver ignorance in spades.

Hey, Bobby! Long time…

I drink ours all the time, it is one of the perks and keeps me in tune with vintages and progress. I try not to judge much and just enjoy as a component of dinner. I get geeky if I have multiple bottles open and can compare/contrast, with the full thought of how peoples tastes differ. Mostly I think about where the wine is lifespan wise so I can talk about it with guests and club members. I’ve always felt that I should be making wines I want to drink so I should be drinking them and enjoying them.

Please explain what was so ignorant about my comment. It wasn’t an insult directed at Merrill, but I can tell that it was assumed to be. I quoted her because her sentence was directly related to the joke I was making. Why did you reply as such? Why did you jump to a conclusion that’s completely wrong? Do you search for threads that you can make incorrect assumptions about and then post surly replies to?

What I was thinking, Ms. Lindquist, is that if the makers of junk like Yellowtail or Bolla were forced to drink the plonk they market, maybe it would be of better quality.

And thank you for asking instead of automatically firing back as if I insulted you. Friends have shared a bottle or two of your Black Cat with me and it’s very good! flirtysmile

I can totally enjoy my own wines, but I don’t always. It’s less personal for me because I really don’t do much in the making - the wines are so much of their place, I’m a spectator in some ways to that.

Both. I am not limited!

Cellar palate just means a winemaker is getting good at his job…

Various points: When drinking wine that I have a stake in,
1/If there is a problem, I think about things we did or did not do and then blame my partner
2/If the wine is good, I take full credit.
3/It should always be remembered that the market makes the wine. John Keller should remember that Merrill makes wine in limited quantities for a limited audience, people crazy about sense of place and willing to spend more than 15 bucks a bottle. The people who make Apothic, Yellowtail or Reunite Lambrusco etc make wine for people who like that kind of wine and there are millions of these people. The owners of these brands can drive fast Italian sports cars and drink Petrus for breakfast.
Some of these people could be easily making pink cranapple cider or chocolate flavored snapple and some of them make all sorts of wine.


But if people stopped buying sweet reds etc then winemakers would stop production.

I remember way back in the day someone asking the singer for Def Leppard if they listened to their own music on the tour bus. He said, yes. I hate Def Leppard, that lesson stuck with me.
Unlike some I take the cellar pallet issue rather seriously, it’s to easy to get comfortable with ones short comings. Over the year’s I developed a switch; I can go into “evaluation” mode or “drink”. I do the same with wines that aren’t mine as well.

I didn’t take it as a direct insult to a particular winemaker as much as it was insulting to the broader profession. I readily admit that it’s entirely possible that I’m wildly off base in my thinking as I’m a consumer and not a producer of wine.
However I have this suspicion that that vast majority of people who pursue a career in winemaking do so because they’re passionate about making wine. Just because not all of it is recognized as great, or fits within your view of what is decent wine, doesn’t mean the winemaker should call it quits. You’re never going to find a bottle of Yellow Tail on my dinner table but I’m also not going out of my way to say that it their winemaker had any level of self awareness, they would quit the business after tasting their own product. I find that type of statement be incredibly insulting and ignorant, especially if you’re not personally making wine. There is plenty of wine out there that I have tasted with the winemaker and not found particularly to my liking yet I cannot imagine telling them that, “if you tried this yourself, you would realize you should quit.” The same goes for art. I may not particularly like something I see but I’m not going out of my way to ask the artist if they’re too blind to recognize their complete lack of talent.

Hey, Merrill! It’s certainly been a minute. Congrats on crushing yet another BD!

There is often an economic consideration that folks here often don’t want to accept. I worked at a small winery for a year or two way back in the early 1990s. The winemaker there may a 2.5%RS muscat that he hated. The issue however is that without that wine, the winery would be out of business. They sold more of that wine than the other 9 wines they made combined and even though the price point was lower, the profit margin was the highest. There was no thought of changing it to something he liked more as the evidence was clear that what he liked wasn’t going to keep them in business.