When you are truly your own best critic

YOU are your own best judge. This has been said often enough by more than one wine authority. It took a while for me to see the truth in this simple statement at the beginning of my own journey, but I am finally getting round to it.

When I began to study wine, it was about understanding what essential attributes and qualities to look for, what criteria you needed to master and to use as benchmarks, and how to fine tune your palate and how to master the language of wine.

The first thing I did was to look for the yardsticks - or gold standards - by which you judge the attributes of wine. This meant searching the wine literature for universally acknowledged "great" wines and since you could only understand and learn what the gold standards were, it meant you had to drink or at least get a taste of them!