What is a great wine? Verdicchio di Matelica has some ideas

Complexity is a good thing in a wine, right? It’s a descriptive term that is almost always used approvingly. You would not disparage a wine by calling it complex. Yet at times, complexity might be wasted on its audience. Whether because of fatigue, distraction or life getting on your last nerve, a complex wine may not always fit the moment.

This, in a nutshell, captures the paradox of wine evaluation. 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.

These are all wonderful characteristics in a wine, and difficult to achieve. A wine that could do all of these things would be considered great, and few would argue.

Sometimes, though, the occasion calls for a different kind of great. Instead, what’s wanted is a bottle that refreshes, relaxes and perhaps spurs conversation and intimacy. In a situation like this, the best bottle may not be the one conventionally lauded. How do wine ratings and evaluation square with the question of context?

We ask these sorts of questions frequently at Wine School, even if we are not always able to answer them. The answers, after all, are not necessarily as important as the questions.

I’m not referring to the simple sort of queries that are easily resolved with a swipes of the smartphone: What are the soils and bedrock in the vineyard? Was the wine aged in oak barrels? Let those cramming for the wine exam recite such litanies of facts.

Siri can’t tell you what greatness in wine means, for instance. This is the sort of question we all have to consider for ourselves. Such a question may better be left unresolved, maybe for a long time. Let it reside in the mind to be pondered with many sorts of wines on all types of occasions, in many differing moods.