D and I shared a bottle of wine in front of some really mindless shows on Animal Planet the other night, and while a very relaxing night it got me thinking about context. First, just because two things are successful in their own context does not mean that the combination of those two things will be exponentially successful. This is a common mistake that people in business or creative development make which have resulted in amazing failures like Crystal Pepsi, the XFL, and Harley Davidson perfume. I know, who doesn't like purity, cola, cheerleaders, football, motorcycles, and smelling nice? Context matters people. What got me thinking along this line was some brilliant producers creative meeting in which they stated 'Shows about little people are popular, and animal rescue shows are popular. How about a show about little people who rescue animals?' And somehow this got green lighted all the way along a creative team, all making big bucks I'm sure, and ended up on my t.v. I like little people shows, and I love rescue dogs (I'm sitting with one now) but there is no compelling context to put them together.This leads me to the wine we were drinking. It was a wine that D and I had tasted before, and I have even given a fairly high score here on this site. When I had tasted/rated the wine it was at the end of a long day of tasting (I was totally sober, that is NOT what I'm saying and I will never rate a wine when I am not). As we drank through the bottle this particular evening however I noticed a few things that I was not thrilled about. The wine was a little bit hot, and had a little too much oak influence for me (lots of oak spice and coffee on the end). I realized that while I still really like the wine, and would still recommend it, I might have given it a slightly lower score if I had originally encountered it in this particular context.
All of this to say that when reading other people's reviews of wine it is important to always understand that you can't tell the entire context in which these wines were tasted. This wine, on a tired palette, offered lots of fruit, lots of flavor, and really stood out. I also have no idea how long the bottle in the tasting room had been open. Under different circumstances, in a different setting, I had a different experience with the wine. My tasting notes were very consistent from taste to taste, but there were things I noticed in one context that I did not see in the first. This highlighted to me, in a very concrete way, why a consumer must always remember to take wine ratings as a general guideline, and drink what you like, when you like it.
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