Whatever one may think of Sancho's opinion that skill in judging wine can be inherited from one's forebears, this anecdote about intimations which are initially dismissed as fanciful or impossible, only in the end to be vindicated, resonates deeply in Don Quixote, which is a novel simultaneously committed to two warring propositions: on the one hand, that what the imagination perceives is truth, and on the other that the imagination perceives only delusions and errors. When the apparently far-fetched impressions of Sancho's relatives turn out to be simple fact, the blankness of the opposition between those two apparently irreconcilable positions softens into something more nuanced, and more interesting.

I was recently put in mind of this detail of Don Quixote when going to the various big press tastings of the 2010 Burgundies which have been put on in London during the past few weeks. These can be quite serious affairs. They are held in large, often imposing rooms. A crowd of journalists, some rather down at heel, others suspiciously sleek and prosperous, shuffle around sniffing, sipping and then spitting often over a hundred wines. Sancho Panza, swigging from a leather bottle and munching through a rabbit pie, would have stood out in their company. 

My own preference on these occasions is to be quiet and anonymous, acknowledging the few people I know with a smile or an inclination of the head. This policy of self-effacement means that, as I ghost through the room, I overhear what other tasters are saying about the wines. Their language is very remote from that of Sancho's uncles. The modern professional fashion is to eschew impressions of taste, and absolutely to shun the more baroque developments of that way of assessing wine ("A wine that will remind you of a stroll through an Alpine meadow in early spring, when the sun has just kissed the edelweiss", etc, etc). Where that mode of appreciating wine survives at all, it does so in the pungently degraded language of some wine writers, who praise a wine by, for instance, talking of "gobs of bright cinnamon-stashed red-fruits, supported by traces of brioche, crushed stone, forest-floor, pencil shavings and cigar-box". The hectic piling up of comparisons, and the vulgar avidity of such prose, is its own discommendation.

Instead, the modern taster's language is apparently more objective, apparently more analytical. But it is really just a rhetoric. They like, at the most elementary level, to talk of fruit, tannin and acidity, but only very sparingly to attribute qualities to these components of a wine (single words such as "bright", "harsh" or "soft" are about as far as they'll chance their arm). However, they will inquire earnestly about yields, soil types, and practices in the cellar. What kind of oak were the barrels made of, and what degree of "toast" did they receive? How often was the cap punched? Was there any batonnage or remuage? Was the wine filtered? Others focus on the vineyard. Was there a green harvest? Is the vineyard bio-dynamic? How were the vines trained?  How old are the vines? And, even, what kind of vines are they? I should explain that when our modern adepts pose that question, they are not, as you might imagine, simply inquiring about the varietal (pinot noir, sauvignon blanc, etc). As I overheard one say: "There's no point in just saying that it's chardonnay — you've got to get the clone number."

All of these more objective facts about how a wine has been produced are, of course, of interest, and may even be illuminating when it comes to understanding a particular feature of the impression a wine makes in the mouth or on the nose. But the judgment of wine, like the judgment of anything, is not about merely furnishing information. It is about discrimination, or the application of intelligence to information. It is also about not being mesmerised by the information you are given if your impression tells you something else. Sancho's uncles were not to be moved from their assessments, notwithstanding the — as it turned out, misleading — assurances from the winemaker about how his wine had been handled in the cellar. We need to return to the laconic sagacity of Sancho's uncles.