Optimism is pessimism: Is the glass half empty or half full? “Excuse me, guy, can you fill my wine glass a little more? Thanks.”

The wine vendor smiled at me with his starched white teeth and poured me a giant glass of the luscious Dry Creek zinfandel. It was the end of another industry wine tasting, and the giant, garish ballroom was filled with a hundred men and women in well-tailored suits pouring thousands of bottles of wine for liquor store owners and beautiful restaurant people.

I was sitting in a wine-purple colored chair with my full glass of zin, half listening to a couple of stressed-out wine salesmen trying to sell me a couple hundred cases of cheap and awful Chilean juice. My tongue was dulled – not so much from drinking as from spitting – but still the zin rang a bell.

Beautiful women and handsome men all passed by, not walking quite as straight as they did when they first arrived, laughing and chatting all the way out the door. I told the nervous sales guys that I would think about it (not really), downed my last drop of zin and carefully made my way out of the hotel toward the bus stop.

As I gave the exact change to the grandma bus driver and began the long trudge home, I started to reflect on the substance of the wine tasting. There were a lot of big, rich wines, and that was the problem. Wines that are traditionally light and delicate, like pinot noir, have become huge Godzilla wines, thick with extraction and thick-feeling in the mouth.

Why is this problematic? Quite simple: When certain types of wine varietals are too rich in alcohol, every other taste is overwhelmed. Wine is a lot about symmetry, and anything out of balance disjoints what the wine has to offer.

There is a very famous wine made in Italy called Amarone della Valpolicella, a raisin-style red wine. It is made with the traditional grapes of valpolicella, corvine, molinara and rondinella, but instead of being crushed at harvest it is laid out on mats for about three months until the grapes lose about 20 percent of their moisture, then it is crushed and fermented dry. Because the main element of wine is water, it takes 20-percent grapes to create a bottle of wine. Amarone has been described as the iron fist in the silk glove. I love Amarone, but I don’t want my pinot noir to taste like one.

There is an international movement to produce rich and extracted wines. This trend is based on wine scores by wine critics like Robert Parker and wine publications like Wine Spectator and Wine & Spirits. In the multi-billion dollar wine business, a 90-plus score can mean mega bucks for a winery or a winemaker.

I have never been an advocate of scoring wine on a 100-point scale. Wine is a sensual experience and should be enjoyed with friends and lovers, not quantified like a high school math quiz. Wine is an agricultural product, just like strawberries and watermelons. Just as you’re not eating an 89-point apple or a 92-point peach, no one is really drinking a 92-point wine. The primary aspect of winemaking is vintage: Wine is a product of nature, weather, sun and rain – you have a good year or a so-so year for a merlot crop, for example.

The way most wine is judged by critics is by a blind wine tasting. There are sometimes over 100 wines in these tastings; they are bagged in brown paper, so as not to reveal the name of the wine, then given a number. The judges have a general idea of what wines they’re tasting – cabernet, for example – but not much more.

The intrinsic problem with these tastings is the tongue-dulling effect of alcohol. Even spitting doesn’t diminish the effect. Your palate suffers from fatigue; a sensory overload of aromas and flavors. That is why an occasional odd-ball wine will score well – it’s markedly different from what they’ve been tasting. (For example, a lousy wine like two-buck chuck shiraz did well at a Wall Street Journal wine tasting, which was a total embarrassment to the fine-wine movement.) After spitting out 100 wines in these marathon tastings, all you can really detect is richness, which is what we call “extraction” in the wine biz, and which does not always mean that it is a really great wine.

Winemakers reach Amarone levels of extraction by letting the fruit hang longer on the vine to intensify the level of grape sugar. Remember Wine 101: yeast turns grape sugar into alcohol, but too much alcohol diminishes the other qualities that the wine has to offer.