Something’s Off Here
A hint of diesel fuel, a note of rotting flowers, an aftertaste of wet dog—these are the things that make our resident wine expert go weak in the knees
A hint of diesel fuel, a note of rotting flowers, an aftertaste of wet dog—these are the things that make our resident wine expert go weak in the knees
What separates a wine that checks all the boxes for quality—rich fruit, great balance, concentration— from one that goes further and makes your soul quiver in ecstasy? Considering the sheer number of otherwise sensible people who regularly fork out princely sums to enjoy a most treasured bottle, there has to be a certain something that makes some wines more special than others.
Cynical readers might point to the valorising effect of a hefty price tag. Indeed, research suggests being told a wine is more expensive genuinely makes the drinker believe it tastes better. The mind is an extraordinary interpreter of reality, which is why blind tasting is critical for professionals. However, for my own palate, the single, irreplaceable feature of a truly great wine is something I call “the crack”. The intended connotations are multiple: one is the idea of a poetic flaw, akin to Japan’s tradition of wabi-sabi or France’s embrace of the jolie laide aesthetic; a less highbrow reading reflects how maddeningly addictive this quality is once found.
A crack typically manifests itself as an aroma, or sometimes a texture, that feels like a moment of discontinuity within an otherwise “perfect” wine. It can be something distasteful, or even downright disgusting, that I know I should resist but don’t quite want to—a hint of diesel fuel or sweat or even blood, creating a tension that perfectly resolves the whole. Think of Jacques Guerlain’s contention that “perfume should smell like the underside of my mistress”, and you are just about there.
To step out of the abstract and into concrete examples, allow me to take you on a brief tasting journey through some of my most beloved wine regions, each of which provides fertile ground for the avid hunter of the indecently delicious.
The first destination has to be the peninsula of Italy and its greatest red wine regions, each of which comes with its own characteristic form. Barolo, the first place I ever experienced the phenomenon, holds a special
place in my heart. The crack in great Barolo (and Barbaresco) is an aroma like road tar or truffles, which, it is worth remembering, are fungi that grow on the roots of oak trees. These filthy tendrils wend their way through nebbiolo’s lucent scarlet fruit, both in modernist expressions like Paolo Scavino’s iconic Bric del Fiasc or traditional bottles like Burlotto’s Monvigliero.
By contrast Etna, a wine superficially similar to Barolo and Barbaresco with its satiny red-fruited translucency, has a distinction that is both aromatic and textural. It has a much smokier, harder, almost industrial aroma— volcanic, dare I say?—plus tannins that, compared to the palate-coating clay of nebbiolo, feel like hard, friable plates. Try Graci’s Etna Rosso to see what I mean. Then there is great Brunello di Montalcino, with its soft, generous pliancy, roses and raspberries made head-spinningly intriguing by a waft of something like an inflatable toy. If you can stomach the bill (and if I’m allowed to refer to it as Brunello), Soldera never fails to deliver.
Outside Italy, I most frequently find reds with crack in the Loire Valley’s Chinon. It’s that aroma illogically referred to as “pencil lead” that gives lift and energy to dewy red cherry fruit in wines like Olga Raffault’s Chinon. Outside Europe, I’m sorry to report I come across relatively fewer wines like this, perhaps because of a New World distaste for anything unsanitary or its predilection for the fruity and sweet (stereotypes, yes, but ones that are largely borne out by the data). I most often find it in New Zealand syrahs, a category I have covered extensively of late (try Trinity Hill Homage, Kusuda Syrah or Bilancia La Collina), where a tingling pepperiness joins ever so slightly rotten purple flowers, bringing illicit joy to every sip.
A through-line connecting the reds above is that they are sufficiently sheer for their fabulous flaws to be visible, not buried under gooey layers of fruit or chai latte oak. White wines, if anything, offer a more transparent setting, without the distractions of tannin or, in many cases, oak. White Burgundy is my benchmark. Along with that coveted struckmatch “flintiness”, it can carry a powdery, stimulating buzz like the aftertaste of aspirin just swallowed. For an affordable example, try to get your hands on any St Aubin from Hubert Lamy; if money is no object, it has to be Coche-dury.
Though most wine geeks swoon to the whiff of petrol on riesling, I often prefer to get that high from Hunter Valley semillon, where all pretence of prettiness has been dropped and the wet hay and petrochemicals sing out boldly over a base of verbena and yuzu. If you’re lucky enough to find a ten-plus-yearold Mount Pleasant Lovedale, try it
immediately. For a wine with both a richer base and a more strident crack, it’s chenin blanc you want: golden apples and quince with a charming dash of wet sheep (or dog, if you’ve never spent time in the country). Seek out Jacky Blot’s chenins from Montlouis.
Finally, there is a category that stands apart for its sheer degree of crackiness—a wine that in extreme cases is almost all crack and no frame. That is, champagne. Most Grande Marque champagne manages to keep the surprise coddled in a pillowy bed of stone fruit and brioche (Krug’s Grande Cuvée is a particularly plush example), but I find Dom Pérignon, especially from cooler years, has an ozone and sparkplug rawness that makes it truly electric. Grower champagnes trade heavily in crack, but the kind that is chimeric, appearing as anything from meat broth (try Charles Dufour’s many cuvées) to durian (Dehours La Croix Joly).
Some might argue the progression I’ve outlined above indicates the je ne sais quoi is merely the microbiological flavours of the yeast and bacteria used to make wine, and nothing more exotic than that. Others will say “the crack” is the signature of terroir. But let us not get too technical or too fanciful. If terroir is the answer, then why does champagne, a heavily blended wine, often have it in spades? Meanwhile, if it’s just microbiology, a wine style that should be maxed out on such flavour is fino sherry, which derives comparatively little from the base grapes and much more from ageing under a blanket of yeast. While I do enjoy great fino, and perhaps my view merely reflects relative inexperience with it, to me it often feels that the microbiological elements dominate: no longer a subtle break but a wholehearted rupture.
Experience suggests that most people enraptured with wine instinctively seek out the thing that makes a winner unique, they just don’t use the same term I do. Instead they throw around practically meaningless expressions like “minerality”, which often just means “something that doesn’t smell like fruit, flowers, herbs, spices or baked goods”, but gives non-wine people the impression we spend our days sniffing samples of magnesium chlorate or licking river rocks.
This hazy wine-speak is so ingrained among the gourmand public that I’ve even seen a restaurant menu refer to a hanger steak as having a “mineral” flavour. In truth, so many of the aroma descriptors we use are abstractions anyway that I say we might as well get fully unmoored. The point of the crack—that tantalising, smutty fracture—is that once you’ve experienced it, even if you’ve never before felt your soul shudder, perhaps you’ll start to understand what all the fuss is about.