There are different "kinds" of tasting notes here and they should be kept in perspective. The most important notes are "drinking" notes. They are fewer but represent the real experience of having a particular wine. In the case of this site they are ongoing. When I started the site I drank as many Zins with meals as I could and continue to do so, but at a slower pace. I just can't drink Zinfandel and nothing else for very long although many Zin fanatics can do this without fatigue. The next tasting layer are the open tastings where a slew of Zinfandels are tasted side by side openly -- labels exposed. I'm not tremendously influenced by labels and don't think this is necessarily bad. This type of tasting has drawbacks when you look at price and grape origination and let it influence you. But sometimes it's important to adjust for these things. Finally, there are the blind tastings. What is lost in a blind tasting is the potential that you made a mistake. If XYZ winery, for instance, has made drop dead wines for decades and you get a clunker in a blind tasting you never think to ask for another bottle assuming bottle variation. Still, blind tastings are always assumed to provide the most accurate results. I do not think so. I feel that only wine drinking, with a meal, over a period of time, provides accuracy. Unfortunately, that means only a few hundred wines a year can be properly evaluated. Worse, by the time many are tasted they are no longer available.
All Tasting Notes:
10/19/98 Ongoing "Drinking" notes