Wine writers: the future is unwritten
If we accept the statement, made by many veteran wine tasters, that wines today are significantly better than they were several decades ago, I have to wonder what the purpose of our ‘greatest’ wines is (other, obviously, than to relieve very well-off people of a healthy dose of cash).
This is no rant against expensive wines and the people who put them on sale for that price (though heaven knows, there’s enough to be getting on with), this is merely an affirmation that if the general level of winemaking and quality has gone up since the 50s, 60s and 70s, our efforts and focus should turn from the greats to look at the rest.
Sure, Hello! magazine might concentrate on the likes of the Duquesa de Alba, William Windsor or Kate Middleton, but if everyone was getting better looking, we’d only need to say hello to the boy or girl next door and save our subscription to Hello! to take him or her out for a drink. The same is true of wine.
If wines overall are getting better, why are we so fascinated with the all-time greats? From what I gather, most veteran tasters would have rated a young 1959 Cheval Blanc the same as they might an overblown, over-extracted Toro today. Perhaps a renowned wine taster will tell me that the Claret’s terroir gives it the edge over the beefy Toro but if, in 50 year’s time, I’m going to have more or less the same experience as a show-off wine collector has today with his or her ’59 Cheval, I’d be laughing all the way to the bank. And back.
And are the greatest wines getting correspondingly better? I doubt it. Granted, they’ve invested a lot of money in laser sorting tables, hand destemming and Infra-Red vineyard management tools, but all that’s doing is adding 5-10% extra. I believe we’re talking about much greater improvements in the world of the more wallet-friendly wines.
Lately I’ve had a few wines that most experienced tasters would class as unexceptional (either producer, vintage or both) that have been sitting in my cellar for some time. They have been wildly impressive and will go on being wildly impressive and truly enjoyable for many more years. They might be said to ‘punch above their weight’ – or some similar form of ‘praise’ given out by our venerated wine gurus that is basically a put-down. But I think it truer to say they are just great wines, and they might well be the great wines of the future.
So why is it, if the ‘lesser’ wines we can buy off a high street merchant’s shelf are equivalent to the great Vosne-Romanée’s and Pauillac’s of yesteryear, are we still bombarded with these ‘Royals’? Sure, they make a pretty picture, but you don’t need them to be drinking like a king. This might be no revelation to a lot of people, but we can still ask why tasters and writers continue to turn up to the banquet.
There is, though, a very positive point to all this. In about thirty years’ time (long after we’ve left ‘great’ wines to the collectors and millionaires), our wine gurus will be the people who, today, told us to buy the €15 Bergerac, or the £20 UK Sparkling, or the $25 Virginia Viognier. And, given that winemaking has improved immeasurably, if we rave about certain unknown wines these days, the chances are we’ll be proved right. So go on, sieze the day, and really hype the unknown wines. Any old fool can tell you to buy a Bordeaux First Growth.
Very true. If I list my favourite wines today, based on style of the wine and its price, my list covers Ribeira Sacra, Beaujolais, Chinon, Cotes Catalanes and a Cornas that’s seen almost no oak. Although the finest wines in the world today are very fine, the pleasure derived from the ‘quiet man’ is within spitting distance and a lifetime and a life’s earnings does not have to be spent waiting for them to be drinkable.
Hope there still will be wine writers in 25 years time to say if you were right or wrong…
If…I am not convinced that the ‘best’ wines made today are any better than they were 50 or 100 years ago. Then there is the issue of pre-phylloxera vines.
A few years ago there was a theroy doing the rounds that in the past, before people had studied viticulture and vinification at university, great wines were made by accident – the producers had been lucky with both the weather and in the winery.
I live and work in Piemonte and a quick chat with ‘old timers’ here – people in their 70s or 80s who learnt winemaking from their fathers and grandfathers – leaves you in no doubt that they knew exactly what they were doing. There may be a greater level of quality and consistency across the borad, particularly at the bottom level, now than then, but the basic know-how has not changed. They may not have had the know-why, but they knew how to get good results from their grapes.
In a UCD text book I have from my study here, there is quite a large section devoted to various studies conducted on Moscato must and wine: how pH variations affect aroma and flavour, and so on. One was a look at temperature and the researchers were very surprised to find that heating the must to between 45 and 65°C made the resultant wine much more aromatic. They concluded with a remark along the lines of “this lends weight to the old practice in Piemonte of heating moscato must before fermentation.” None of these old producers had trained, or conducted trials in control conditions, but they still knew. They could not tell you what aroma and flavour pre-cursors were involved, nor the chemical pathways, but they could still get the right result.
In addition to this, in the past a producer would do something because over time they had noticed that this is what worked. Now, winemakers do things because someone in a lecture tells them to. The person giving the lecture may well have no knowledge of the grapes and vineyards that a particular producer might use.
There is no doubt that knowledge is never wasted, but we must make that knowledge work for us – apply it as necessary, try something and bin it if it does not work – rather than simply following the ‘rules’. Your own experience is the most important thing there is, not what someone else tells you should work in theory.
And, yes, try as many different wines as possible!