Why are there so many wines? The choice is daunting. Is this complexity spurious? Must buying fermented grape juice resemble a course in medieval theology?
The appeal of alcoholic drinks is more emotional than rational. We don’t need them; we like them. Well used, they lift spirits, unlock relaxation, nourish friendship and aid romance (even if, when ill used, they kill us). All fermented products are complex to smell and taste – but none more so than wine. It is one of the most sensorially detaining substances we can ingest.
The complexity has four sources: vintage, origin, grape variety and craft. If you’re going to pin the blame for the chaotic profusion of wines on one of those, it would be origin. To a greater extent than any other agricultural product, wine’s claim on our attention is predicated on its ability to reflect origin in aroma and flavour, sometimes with remarkable precision. Not unambiguously: craft, in particular, may veil origin, and vintage may dilute or amplify it. Wines principally made from the red Cabernet Sauvignon grape variety will, though, taste fundamentally different from one another based on origin: Bordeaux, Napa, Tuscany, Coonawarra.
The finer an origin’s quality potential is, the smaller the scale at which this is true. In central Burgundy, quality for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grape varieties usually depends on the vineyard’s position on a single, discontinuous strip of hillside called the Côte d’Or, the “golden slope”. Wine from the middle of the slope is so expensive as to be out of reach to all but the one per cent. The rest of us must save up for wines from the muddy bottom or the stony top. Or, more usually today, from somewhere else altogether.
Wine can be made in many places, but great wine places are as rare as pipes of kimberlite. The result is that the wine world is both a jungle of origins – and stiff with hierarchy. Price offers the simplest of these hierarchies, shared by all goods. But wine staggers too, under the weight of legally sanctioned vineyard and property classifications. The transition in the past three decades from informative and loosely appreciative wine-writing to the precision of wine-criticism and wine-scoring means that hierarchy has comprehensively hijacked wine aesthetics, and set drinkers chasing “the best” (generally taken to mean a wine given a score of 90 or more out of 100 by a noted taster). Turning tastes into numbers is now an inescapable part of any wine life, mine included.
I regret this, since the best doesn’t exist. And excellence, however defined, is not the most enjoyable thing about wine. It’s not even close.
“Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” David Hume pointed out in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste” (1760). “It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them, and each mind perceives a different beauty.” We might nonetheless assent, Hume comes to suggest, to “general rules of beauty”, just as we might roughly divide wines into bad, boring, good and excellent. Parsing these categories, though, must always be subject to “the different humours of particular men” and “the particular manners and opinions of our age and country”. Criticism is subject to fashion and foible. I’ve attended tastings where 100-point wines – supposedly “perfect” in every respect, supposedly impossible to better – were among the least liked. The contemplating minds (and palates) found them wanting. The quest quickly evaporates.
Delight in wine comes not from the pursuit of excellence, but from the pursuit of difference. No one can award points for difference; difference lies beyond hierarchy. Our needs and desires differ, and change from day to day. Our palates age; wines, too, modulate as they mature, and eventually die. Wine is as dappled, diverse and multi-faceted as the multitude of places it comes from. It’s there that its richness and nourishment lies.
[See also: The gardener’s bittersweet acceptance]
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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, American Horror Story