Tasting Notes: Describing Wines

Admittedly, I am not a wine affectionado. I want to be, but I know nothing about wine. So how do I start learning about wine without spending hundreds of dollars on bottles of liquid that may or may not taste like rubbing alcohol?

The only way I've found are:
1- To rely on friends' opinions. This is usually the best approach, since friends' opinions are least likely to contain any bias. But it can be difficult to find the wine they recommend. At least it is for me, when most of my friends live somewhere other than Minneapolis.
2- To rely on experts in magazines. This is the approach I use most often. And these guys know what they're talking about right?

Well, according to an article entitled "Faking It"in the March edition of Forbes Life, a famous winemaker admitted during a blind taste testing that, "he couldn't tell which [wines] were his...and he doubted his colleagues could consistently identify their wines among a bunch of others either." That bit of information is extremely reassuring to me. I might be able to tell a good Chardonnay from a bad one, but I don't have to sweat it if two good Chardonnays taste the same. Okay great.

What I have noticed on my own is that, although the adjectives used to describe a wine are laughable, amount of adjectives adjectives used seem to be correlate with how good the wine tastes. It's also important for these adjectives to be specific, and a description with many adjectives tends to be more specific. Take this one for example:



2004 Bodega Norton Reserva Malbec
From the winemaker - Intense red colour with purple hints. Round and velvety, ripe black fruits, violets, species and tobacco. Long and complex finish.

Travel guy says - See? The description is vague at best. What kind of taste is "round"? It doesn't say what fruits, it just says "ripe black fruits". It doesn't say what kind of finish, but hey, it's long and complex.

Well, if you couldn't guess already, this wine sucks. It tastes like a red wine I can get on a first class domestic flight on NWA - which means it already tastes like vinegar. It starts this way, it ends this way, but after you initially taste it, the teases with a slightly smooth taste, but it trails back into mediocrity quite quickly.

Some might say I'm just crabby after my vacation because I'm back in snowy Minneapolis...

Google Shopping result: $15; I bought this wine at Costco for about the same price. When shopping at Costco, I often use the "if it's at Costco, it must be good" heuristic because I don't like to think when grocery shopping. This was one of those rare occurrences where that assumption was wrong...