Reading About Wine Online

This is a strange topic for a post. If you're reading this, you came to read about wine online. But, since this is something I do frequently, I thought I'd write about it.

The simple fact is that just like many other places on the internet, the proverbial wine section has a lot of crap to it. You do remember what came out of it when Yogi Berra and his good friend Abe Lincoln has a conversation about the internet, don't you? If you missed that conversation, Honest Abe told Yogi not to believe everything he reads on the internet and Yogi replied that he undeerstood that half of it is true, half of it is false, and the other half is made up.

They must have been reading the wine articles. And, frankly, some of it comes from people who are alleged to have expertise in the area. Other interesting tidbits come from self-proclaimed experts.

When you do read online, particularly if you are going to make a buying or drinking decision based on what you find on the internet, it's really important to know how to parse through it to filter the juice from the seeds and the stems.

Group reviews of a wine by actual people who drink wine can be helpful. Consider that if 200 wine drinkers each taste a wine and on average, they think it's really good, that might be more useful for us than one review by one expert whose tastes might not match ours. 

Beware. One popular app praises its highest rated wines meaning that the app's users who have tasted and reviewd this wine have given them the highest scores on average. Leet's consider the flaw. MPC (short for a specific label of mass-produced Chardonnay) sells for $5 a bottle. People who drink it tend to like it. But, what they are looking for in a wine is not the same as what someone who loves white Burgundy is looking for. And, they are likely not as discriminating. So, that this wine averages 4.4 stars out of 5 is not the same as saying that a particular Puligny Montrachet whose drinkers on average are serious wine snobs is scored on average 4.4 out of 5 stars.

Then, there are the people who just flat out make stuff up. I read one just this morning while I was eating breakfast. This was perhaps the most ludicrous claim I have heard, but we can use it to illustrate the Abe/Yogi theory.

Suppose you open a bottle and it is corked. You know, the wine has too much TCA or 2-4-6 trichloroanizole and you get that putrid, musty, rancid smell upon opening the bottle.

Well, this genius has a solution. Take the cork and wash it. Yes, with soap and warm water. Let the cork dry some until it is just a bit moist and jam it back into the bottle as far as it will go. Then, put the bottle upside down in a container (unspecified) and put the container with the bottle upside down in it into the refrigerator for one day. The claim is that by absorbing the clean moistness from the cork at cool temperatures, the corkage (yes, this genius said corkage which is actually the fee you pay to have a bottle of wine that you brought to the restaurant served to you in lieu of ordering one of theirs) will go away.

So, be careful. Remember that in Yogi's world of wine, there are three halves to things on the internet and two out three are bad.