Decanter World Wine Awards
Let’s though, start with what we can measure. Most people would say that the wine quality equation has two main terms. The vineyard itself is one; viticulture and winemaking is the other. The vineyard represents potential wine quality (perhaps, in mathematical terms, an ‘unknown’). Viticulture and winemaking are the ‘known’ or discoverable qualities through which that potential is realised and the unknown comes to be known.
Even the greatest winemaker can never exceed the potential of the vineyard; slapdash viticulture and crass winemaking, by contrast, can obscure that potential. Climate (the long-term weather pattern) and weather itself (the meteorological events of a vintage) are further variables which need to be fed into the equation.
Each of our terms, too, is capable of complex dissection. Finding the right variety or varieties for a site, for example, has both a physical and a cultural dimension. Physically, Counoise may be the perfect variety for a particular site in Paso Robles; culturally, though, the owner may prefer to plant Cabernet. Much the same is true of most of the thousands of decisions a winemaker is faced with each year. Few winemakers, in truth, have the economic or cultural liberty to do exactly as they please. Perfection, thus, usually has to wait for next year.
Now back to that restaurant. It was an unflashy, neighbourhood eatery; there were no Ferraris lined up outside. It was though, bustling; you could see by the way the diners and staff interacted that the restaurant was a familiar, well-loved instrument of great benefit to both. As anyone who has visited Argentina will know, this is a common sight throughout the country. Argentina has a settled, demotic food culture rare elsewhere in the southern hemisphere (though wherever there is wealth, of course, you will find great restaurants for the wealthy).
I have long puzzled over why Argentinian reds seem to have an extractive depth and a textural dimension which it is hard to find amongst its southern neighbours. I’m not sure that this is necessarily to do with any uniqueness of terroir, nor is it the result of conscious winemaking traditions. I now suspect that the main reason may be gastronomic.
Argentinians eat well. They have some of the best beef in the world. Wine is meant for food. Their red wines have developed in that way in order to play an effective role at table. The strength and familiarity of that highly carnivorous gastronomic tradition has helped shape wine quality. And it’s a food culture which exists from the bottom up, rather than from the top down.
This is not true to the same extent in Chile, nor is it yet true in Australia or New Zealand. That’s why there are Argentine restaurants in many of the world’s great cities, but not yet many Australian or New Zealand ones. The ghastly legacy of British culinary insouciance takes a lot of eroding. The process is well-underway in cities in Australia and New Zealand, thanks to southern European and Asian immigration. Eat out in ordinary country towns, though, and you’ll find the demotic base depressingly unreconstructed. Much the same is true in the USA, though for different reasons.
The relationship between wine flavour and what we could broadly describe as ‘the national palate’, in other words, is perhaps the supreme intangible in terms of wine quality. I suspect it is far more important that we acknowledge in terms of creating what we might call the ‘messy’, dabbling and gastronomic qualities of European wine (in contrast to the ‘clean’, bright though sometimes hollow qualities you find in the wines of nations where wine is often consumed in isolation, without food).
Consumers like both, to be fair, and the measurable elements remain the most important route to great wine. But if you are interested in the quiet backdrop to these matters, look to the table.
Have your say!
Patrick Matthews
January 30 18:35
I think AJ's piece explains why in developed wine countries wine makers and drinkers tend to be of few words: a good wine is simply one that takes its place as part of a meal which will, under the influence of local expectations, be good to outstanding ..
Roger Day
January 14 10:06
I have experience of decades of touring Europe by car, thus reaching all kinds of places not easily accessible if travelling by train or by air. Almost without exception, any region producing quality wine, not simply big names, will have welcoming neighbourhood restaurants in the small town and villages, at lunchtime full of good-natured, friendly, boisterous workers, eating honest, uncomplicated food. I am sure that is not co-incidental to the produce of the local economy.
I have found this to be true in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Switzerland in my experience.
James Swann, Ditton Wine Traders
January 11 10:14
In so many ways it is at the moment of drinking a wine that its score is at its least reliable. A grower from Priorat, a region only lately moving towards elegance, once told me that a good wine – ‘un bon vi’ – is one that can be finished over a meal between two people.
The wine world is beginning to respond to its experience that many wines that are spectacular to taste are not necessarily so to drink. How many ‘investment grade wines’ (that show so well two years prior bottling!) could be said to fulfill this?
Not that this is an argument against use of wine for investment; Swiss banks have done so for a long time prior to the advent of wine-searcher or Liv-ex. Moreover, perhaps it could be argued that there is no more ‘ethical’ an investment than the product of a winegrower.
However, if our interest is in wine as an aesthetic and social object and repository of meaning, in that it can transmit place, history and human intervention, then there must surely be no better measure than that observed by the Priorat grower above.
Hunter
January 11 00:51
Fashionable as may be today to make a religion of gluttony (when ascribing notions of merit), the foundations on which any culture has made an historical priority the production of quality wine has been (oh so unfashionably ) its appetite for religion.
After that perhaps comes an appetite for liberty and free trade...
The wines of the Medoc, and Burgundy flourished thanks to those clients who (according to this piece) were part of a "ghastly legacy of British culinary insouciance".
Indeed, they (the ghastly ones) courteously blended, bottled, sold, consumed, promoted, and wrote about such wines for most of their history. How kind...
It would seem, in part, such advancements in wine depended on such, “ghastly legacies”.
By the same reasoning, one might deduce (if oblivious that France was McDonalds largest market, and of other greater and deeper horrors ) that the solvency and success of such European states rested conditional on their degree of fast food consumption.
Perhaps the only fair take on Andrew Jefford’s reasoned argument above is: the production of quality fine wine (red?) in any nation rests on its consumption of beef.
A toast to the ghastly ones perhaps; those historic encouragers and purchasers of the great wines of Germany, Portugal, France, and more recently the rest of the world. May they continue to be ghastly, vibrant, curious, free, and solvent.