Do we value ’soft-spoken’ wines?

...,whith no more than 4-6 people at the table, it is a good place to enjoy a wine with calm too.

I am not sure newcomers value concentration (specially when this involves a lot of tannins, from fruit and from oak). I think they appreciate fruitness and ";directness"; on the nose and taste.

Do you agree?

If you listen to too many Metallica albums at top volume, you may perhaps find Miles Davis’ ";KInd of Blue"; a tad weak... :-)

M.

Well ... I’m not sure about it, but may be you are right.

Then, these would be the 3 steps for newcomers:
1st Fruitness wines (easy direct wines)
2nd Concentrated wines (the critics influence)
3rd Soft-spoken wines (self-taughtly)

What about this?

These are the word from K. Lynch. He was written about the various Côte Rôtie bottlings from Guigal and how thet dominated blind-tasting events, the wine journals, newspapers and magazines in 1987-88 (15 years ago!):

";Ah the critics. Never have I seen one single discouraging word about Guigal’s Côte Rôtie, even though it is a very anonymous-tasting wine, easily mistaken for a big, oaky Gigondas or even a Bordeaux. I want my Côte Rôtie to taste like Côte Rôtie. (...) I cannot begin to communicate how profoundly the critic’s embrace of such freak wines depresses me.

";Why ask that a wine be jarring to the senses, a criterion that we do not apply to the arts like music or painting in which delicacy is valued, where shading, nuance, even silence or empty space can be considered remarkable. But keep an eye on the wine critics’s ratings. If a wine is black, packs an alcoholic, tannic wallop, and smells like a lumberyard, it receives high points."; (p. 203)

That was written in 1988, when Parker was starting to be a recognized critic... Perhaps a simplified and extreme view but quite stimulating, isn`t it?