Water cooler summit.
December 26th, 2008
At the water cooler.
We’re all busy. Participation in on-line communities like Twitter and the OWC is often a brief respite from the hectic pace of the day. Certainly, platforms like these can do much for professional and social networking.
However, I wonder if they are capable of providing forums for constructive work and development of ideas and projects. I can’t help but wonder if the way people use and interact on these platforms can result in landmark achievements.
This all comes as a conversation about the faults of numerical ratings on the OWC is experiencing a revival.
There are many people with different perspectives, experiences, knowledge and understanding of wine as well as of sensation and perception creating various ways to assess, rate or recommend wines.
Many take a populist approach, creating platforms where consumers can give their own rankings. This is so American in nature. It gives everyone a voice while disregarding experts. It embraces the individualist notions inherent to the American identity. It also seems to be a universal theme in this country these days: The proletariat is railing against the excesses and arrogance of the bourgeois.
Still, I want to find ways to bridge divides and not deepen them.
So, as a result of the recent resurgence of talk on the aforementioned OWC thread, I created a group whose purpose is to find some common language of wine that will allow all, neophyte or expert, to communicate more clearly the essence of a given wine.
My hopes are that this group will look for ways to consistently describe aroma and flavor intensities, astringency and duration of finish – among other things. This effort requires a good-faith meeting of the minds that will look at not only what the average wine drinker can smell or taste (or what they prefer) but the nitty-gritty of sensory physiology, culinary science and semantics and not get mired in misconceptions of individual variation of our senses and a purported subsequent subjectivity of the characteristics of wine.
My concerns are that this requires serious effort and investment of time. After all, it is one thing to check in with twitter or OWC for 30 minutes a day and another to really buckle down and work through the details to create something meaningful, useful, potent and universal.
My question, then, is: will we be able to achieve this at the virtual water cooler?
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