What Makes Great Wine?
I'm going to tell you a story:
Once upon a time there was girl named Rose and a boy named Jack and they were floating at night on a door in the icy North Atlantic Ocean. Rose said to Jack, "I'll never let go," and then she let go, and he froze to death and drowned, while she was picked up by a rescue boat and lived happily ever after.
The end.
(Oh, and by the way, prior to their time floating together in the icy North Atlantic Ocean, Rose and Jack used to be on a really big ship.)
Yes, this is the worst telling of the story of Titanic ever.
Why is that? Because without all the build up and back story about who they were, how they got on the ship, why they were on the ship, what their dreams were, how they met, the pressures that were on the captain of the Titanic, the history-making voyage, the embedded class structure that was reflected in the building of the Titanic itself, the terrible accident and the ensuing sinking of the ship and each passenger's fight for survival - that is, without context - the final scenes of Titanic are meaningless.
Unfortunately the way I've butchered the story of Titanic - by telling the ending as the story - is most often how we assess greatness in wine.
When it comes to wine, we think it's perfectly okay to blind-taste a panel of all the 2018 Pinot Noirs from Oregon, for example, and rate them on a 100 point scale, and determine which ones are great, and which are not.
This has been the norm in wine greatness evaluation for decades.
Oh, and by the way, those wines got to your glass, or the critic's glass, after years of growth and production.
Without the context of how a wine was grown and made, any assessment of its greatness is as meaningless as watching the last fifteen minutes of Titanic.
Greatness, in wines, cannot be reduced to the experience of their flavor.
In a recent NY Times article, Eric Asimov alludes to the insufficiency of the standard reductive form of greatness analysis. He observes, "Without context, bottles are rated on a universal scale of what makes a wine good, which is weighted toward the ability to age and evolve, to express complex aromas and flavors, to convey the character of the place in which the grapes were grown and the culture of the people who made the wine, to evoke contemplation."
If you'll notice, his list of elements for which a wine's greatness is "rated" are all sensory - that is, things you would taste in the glass. His point in this article is that the occasion in which a wine is drunk must also be considered as part of the evaluation.
This is an important insight as well, and looks at the present and future of the experience of a wine in a glass, but I think the most important context of wine is its past.
Madeline Puckette does a great job, in cooperation with Carlo Mondavi, of describing the importance of looking back at the context of the history of a wine to determine its greatness. In her Wine Folly article, she delineates the important factors of terroir, including climate, soil, and flora.
I love that she included flora as one of the important factors of a wine's greatness. To me this is an acknowledgment of a wine's connection to the health and biodiversity of its total environment. She even includes the soil microbiome as part of this flora, which if anyone is paying attention, could actually be revolutionary. She's asserted that the fungi, yeast, and bacteria in a vineyard environment contribute to a wine's greatness.
Puckette also breaks down the important factors of vintage that contribute to a wine's greatness (or lack thereof). These factors include the viticulture and the harvest. Most interesting is her diagram and discussion of viticulture. She presents a scale or spectrum of sustainability, with Conventional viticulture on one end, Organic viticulture just off center, and Permaculture near the other end of the spectrum opposite conventional.
I couldn't agree more with her portrayal of this "spectrum of sustainability," and I haven't seen anyone else talk about a wine's greatness with the inclusion of permaculture as a consideration. I think that's very cool.
But I also think that viticulture extends far beyond the scope of a vintage. It takes soil and plants years to recover from the ravages of conventional viticulture, regain vibrancy and biodiversity, and flourish again with natural health.
Puckette stops one step short of saying where on that spectrum of viticulture a wine must fall to be considered great. I would go one step further.
IMHYFO (In my humble yet fervent opinion), the minimum requirement for greatness in wine is that the grapes were farmed organically.
Here's an analogy for you. Let's say we were evaluating the "greatness" of two smart phones. After analysis, we determine that smart phone A has more superior technology than smart phone B. But then we research and find out that smart phone A (with the better tech) was built by child labor in sweat shops with hazardous working conditions, while smart phone B (with inferior tech) was built by salaried adults with benefits in a safe and clean work environment. And let's say they both cost the same. Which smart phone is "greater"?
At the very least, I think we'd want to re-frame the discussion from an evaluation of "greatness" to an evaluation of specific aspects of the phone. Phone A cannot be considered "great" in its totality, because exploitation of children is part of its make-up - and most of us would not consider that great. But likewise Phone B cannot be considered "great" because, despite its stellar employee treatment, there are examples out there (A) of superior tech.
So let's stop thinking about the sensory components of a wine as the sole determining factor of its greatness. Let's stop assessing wine in blind tastings without any reference to how it was produced.
I don't care how good a wine tastes, if I know it was grown conventionally and heavily manipulated in the winery, I literally don't want to swallow it.
And I think the desire to swallow it should be considered a prerequisite for greatness in wine.
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