A couple of weekends ago I was lucky enough to have a long weekend in the Portuguese city of Porto. Set in the north of the country, and spanning the deep valley of the Douro River, it’s a stunning (UNESCO-protected) location, tinged with a certain beguiling faded glory. For Britain, Porto is known for two things: football, and Port Wine.
The Port Wine Caves that populate the South bank of the city are steeped in the history of trading with the UK (apparently, Port became popular during one of the many wars we had with the French, when supplies of Claret were blockaded). Like any good alcohol-producing industry, these days there is opportunity a-plenty for tourists to spend their hours and money taking tours of the production facilities. I’ve done similar tours in the Champagne region, in Scotland, in Cognac… maybe there is a theme developing here… but something that has struck me before is how a master blender, whether of whiskey or wine, is able to learn their trade when the outcome of their work might not be available to taste for 10, 20 or even 50 years. How do you learn to do something if you can’t get feedback on your performance?
The second group of editors of the Oxford English Dictionary had a similar challenge, and the way in which they approached it was interesting. The first edition of the OED (as documented in a fascinating book by Simon Winchester) took a very, very long time to complete. Decades. So when they embarked on the second edition of the publication, an interesting approach was taken – figuring that the first team were probably reasonably good by the time they got to the letter M (they went alphabetically), the second team started at that point with the hope that they themselves would be in the swing of it by the time they got to the ropier parts of the first edition where the first team were still finding their feet.
Not that this helps understand the puzzle of how you select and blend wines in a way that in 50 years time will result in a wonderful flavour, but there you go…
mmitII 