Andrew Jefford
‘There can be a sterility about technical perfection’
Life can be messy. So can wine. clean lines and boundaries help theoretical understanding; their practical application is more difficult. if you’re going to run a wine faults workshop, for example, it’s best to use doctored samples. in messy practice, wines often sit on the cusp between acceptable and ‘faulty’.
an example emerged at a burgundy dinner with friends. The dozen or so wines were tasted blind, notes taken and identities probed: a premier cru Volnay 1989 seemed clumsy and heavy, its fruits greyed out, though its owner had enjoyed ‘treasure chest’ bottles of the same wine on other occasions.
We then drank all of the wines with dinner – and it became obvious that the Volnay had a cork-related problem, though the tell-tale dry cardboard character had been buried behind whatever else had gone on in that bottle during 30 years’ glass imprisonment. another diner, a taster and wine educator of vast experience, confessed that he never threw away a ‘corked’ bottle until the next day, just in case it redeemed itself with a night of air.
Tca contamination (the source of cork taint) is usually incontrovertible – but the same tasting threw up at least three wines, both red and white, which seemed at first to be reduced, farmyardy, stinky or faintly oxidative (in a tangy, nutty kind of way – not the dreary flatness of premature oxidation), but which contact with air actually freshened and lifted into attractiveness. These changes can happen rapidly in the glass – within a minute or two in the case of older burgundies.
This, in turn, took me back to a discussion i had been having by email with chris Howell of cain Vineyard & Winery in napa, an indefatigable thinker of the unthinkable in wine. ‘a fault,’ he had written, ‘cannot be immanent or absolute. [it] can only be defined in the context of a culturally constructed set of aesthetic values. This context must always be fluid, subject to change, and variable depending upon the community and time.’ He also suggested that, ‘there may be multiple wine communities, each with its own set of evolving standards.’
anyone who enjoys both wine and beer understands this, since certain ‘wine faults’ are considered beer virtues. DMS (dimethyl sulphide – the ‘tinned sweetcorn’ smell) is loathed by wine competition judges in chardonnay, but it’s something the drinkers of carling black Label expect and enjoy in their lager. burton ale fans want a sulphur note, and lovers of belgian beer would regard any gueuze without its vital brettanomyces yeast character as a fake.
Howell went on to argue that the natural wine community had set alternative standards for what might or might not be ‘faulty’. They constitute a disruptor trend, something that the conventional tenets of oenology have no answer to: ‘a political statement: one of anti-hegemony, anti-elitism, anti-hierarchy: in effect, pro-anarchy’. He also pointed to an overlap with the craft beer and do-it-yourself movements such as urban wineries. ‘in these instances, the wine becomes an experiment rather than a product; it’s more about the process than the outcome.’
So: is there virtue in messiness? Might wine drinkers nowadays prefer that to the pristine cleanliness which has held sway as an ideal in recent winemaking decades? Maybe. When i taste with friends, they show a much larger appreciative breadth than that allowed by technical tasters. There can be a sterility about technical perfection, particularly when it is achieved by winery adjustments.
The very greatest beauty in wine, though, is never messy. The bottles enjoyed most in that same burgundy tasting were compelling, graceful and charming from the off; no allowances had to be made, nor did they need ‘time to clear’, or some interpretive latitude in order to see their features as enticing. That, in the end, is what endures through all the cycles and the fashions, and what should unite wine’s warring communities: the core of untrammelled loveliness evident in wines from the world’s greatest winemaking sites.