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WHAT MATTERS

(AND WHAT DOESN'T)

IN WINE

Have you ever tried to field the question, What kind of wine do you like? Hard to answer, isn't it? At least it's hard to answer briefly, because often the kind of wines you like need a lot of words to describe them. I recently answered, “I like moderate wine,” and I knew what I meant by it, though I'm sure my questioner found me a tough interview.

Part of the business of deepening both your palate and your acquaintance with your palate is to pay heed to what it responds to. Eventually you organize that information as patterns manifest themselves. These patterns are almost never random. They tell you not only what you like and dislike, but also what you believe in, what you cherish, and what you disdain.

I want to suggest a kind of charter of values by which we enjoy wine, understand it, appreciate it, and place it in a matrix of principle and judgment. I'm hardly qualified to do this for “humanity,” but I need to do it for myself, to locate where I am at this point in my wine-drinking life. Test these ideas against your own experience. Use what works, discard what doesn't, create your own charter; in short, think about wine as something ineluctably attached to your life, not merely a diversion or entertainment.

Let's begin with how wines actually taste. It's the only reason to drink the stuff. It only seems imperative to our lives, but we can live without it. When we begin we drink wine because its taste is pleasurable, and indeed it remains so; it is only later (if at all) that we begin to realize we've formed a set of principles by which we've organized our wine experiences and learned to appreciate the many forms of pleasure.

Consider the following an attempt to codify a set of First Principles of Wine, starting with the way it tastes.

Aspects of Flavor: The Ones That Matter Most

Clarity

Distinctiveness

Grace

Balance

Deliciousness

Complexity

Modesty

Persistence

Paradox

These aren't the only aspects of flavor that matter, but when I delineate the relative importance of the things that make up Flavor, these matter most.

Clarity: Without clear flavors, none of wine's other aspects can be easily discerned. Clarity can connote brilliance, but it doesn't always; I think of the soft-lighted gleam of a Loire Chenin or dry Furmint, or the smoky evening-light depths of Barolo. But we should be able to see into a wine's flavor, even when it shows that which we cannot see. Clarity also suggests the work of an attentive vintner with a desire for candor and nothing to hide. For me it is the first of first principles. Flavor should be clear. The question of what the flavor is comes after. This is so obvious that no one considers it, but it is not self-evident. There are, distressingly, loads of blurry, fuzzy wines. I'm driven half-crazy if I'm riding in someone's car and he hasn't cleaned his windshield. Clarity!

Distinctiveness: Call it what you will—taste-of-place, terroir, “somewhereness” (author Matt Kramer's telling word)—but whatever you call it, it's the thing that says your glass contains this wine and no other, from this place and no other. Distinctiveness can include idiosyncrasies and quirks as long as they are spontaneous and not mere affectations. But it needn't imply quirkiness if it is a wine's innate nature to be classical and symmetrical. Some individuals are angular and others are rounded; what's crucial is that the particular is what shows. Distinctiveness makes a wine valid. The Wine Advocate's David Schildknecht wrote, “Wines of distinction are wines of distinctiveness.” The reason some of us are cool toward the “international consultant” school of winemaking—expert enologists-for-hire who fly around the world working their magic (and their formulas)—is that we feel these wines, no matter where they're grown, are stamped with a certain recipe, irrespective of what's at the market or in the pantry, so that we encounter big oak-aged ripe-fruited wine from this grape here and that place there, all melding into a big, bland glom. It's often an attractive glom, but how important is attractiveness, really? Should we pursue it at all cost? I don't believe we can even consider the question of “greatness” in wine until its uniqueness is established. I'll examine this question in more detail in a later chapter about globalization in winemaking. But suffice it to say, it's not enough for wine to have a passport; it needs a birth certificate. I'd rather drink something that tastes like something and not like everything. Anything can taste like everything, and too often does, and bores the crap out of me.

It's only a small digression to wonder at the whole international wine personage phenomenon, as it seems inimical to the rootedness that is inherent in authentic wines. I'm not sure why it's chic for someone to fly thousands of miles to make wine. I appreciate wanderlust, but I'm happier when people choose a place and make wine there, ideally the place they were born and raised. They then become linked to that place, and their wine expresses the connection. Otherwise wine becomes little more than a plaything. Don't misconstrue me; there's nothing morally wrong with making wine anywhere you please. I just don't think it's inherently fascinating or desirable. It rather adds to the incoherence of the world. And whatever it is, it ain't glamorous.

Grace: This quality can apply to wines of various degrees of strength, body, or ripeness, and it can be found in both polished and “rustic” wines. It allies to modesty, but not every modest wine is graceful. Grace is rather a form of tact, a kindness; it rejects coarseness and is even more dismissive of power merely for its own sake.

Balance (and its siblings, Harmony and Proportion): Balance is not to be confused with symmetry, as there are asymmetrical yet balanced wines. Balance is simply the palpable sense that no single component appears garish or inappropriate. It is a quality of flavor that draws you away from the parts and toward the whole. It is a chord of flavor in which no single note is out of tune. If you hear any one of its component notes, it's probably for the wrong reason.

In a balanced wine the flavors seem preordained to exist in precisely that configuration. You sit by the stream. The water is clean and cold. The mountain peaks are clear. There are no beer cans or cigarette butts in sight. You've been hiking for a few hours and you feel loose and warm and hungry. You unpack your lunch and take the first bite, and then you see your sweetheart coming up the path, smiling. The air is soft and cool under a gentle sun. Things are absolutely good. Happens, what, once in a lifetime? In a balanced wine it happens with every sip.

Deliciousness: It is strange to have to mention this, but deliciousness is hardly ever spoken of or written about. A wine can meet every other criterion for success and yet not taste good. Then what? Do we outgrow appreciating deliciousness? Do we cultivate more auspicious tastes? Well, poo on us. Deliciousness ignites something in us that delights at the scent of pleasure. Is it wise to quash this thing? What else dies with it?

Complexity (and its siblings, Ambiguity and Evanescence): There is explicit complexity, wherein each component of a wine can be discerned and we are delighted by how many there are and how they interact. There is also implicit complexity, in which we sense there is something present but oblique to our view. Finally, in the few best wines there is a haunting sense of something being shown to us that has nothing to do with discrete “flavor.” This is the noblest of wine's attributes, but the hardest to contrive by design. It seems to be a by-product of certain vintners” philosophies and practices, but neither formula nor recipe exists; this aspect is found when it is found, often unexpectedly. Some wines are complex in themselves, and it stops there. Other wines seem to embody life's complexity, and this is when we see the view from the sky.

Modesty: This denotes a wine that seeks to be a companion to your food, your state of mind, or the social occasion, as opposed to a wine that needs to dominate your entire field of attention. Some wines deserve your entire field of attention, but they don't need to shout for it. Modest wines are endangered in these times, when power is overvalued. Just because your text is written in boldface doesn't mean you have anything to say. Modest wines are tasty, tactful, and confident, and they don't show off.

Persistence (and its siblings, Depth and Intensity): This attribute properly comes after the ones cited above, since a persistent unpleasant wine is no one's idea of fun. A good wine is elevated by persistence, a bad wine diminished. Nor does persistence have to do with volume; the best wines are the ones that whisper persistently. We misunderstand the idea of intensity because we conflate it with volume. Bellowing flavor isn't intense; it's adolescent and irritating. Intensity arises not from a will to express, but from the thing that is being expressed.

Paradox: I can scarcely recall a great wine that didn't in some sense amaze me, that didn't make my palate feel as if it were whipsawed between things that hardly ever travel together. My shorthand term for that experience is paradox; again, this component is in the hands of the angels and doesn't appear susceptible to human contrivance, but when it is found it conveys a lovely sense of wonder: How can these things coexist in a single wine? And not only coexist, but spur each other on; power with grace, depth with brilliance….

Aspects of Flavor: The Ones That Matter Least

Power

Sweetness

Ripeness

Concentration

It's not that these aspects don't matter at all, but too many think they matter too much. They appear near the bottom of my scale of values, but they do appear.

Power: Power matters only when you're planning a menu and selecting the wines. You want to align the power of the dish with that of the wine, so one doesn't subdue the other. But power inherently is a quality neither desirable nor undesirable; it needs to justify its existence by combining with grace, distinctiveness, and deliciousness. Too often it stops at mere incoherent assertiveness: I'm putting my fist through this wall because I can!

Sweetness: In the wine world there's no single component of flavor subjected to more obsessive dogma and doctrine. The prevailing (and I'd say pathological) aversion to sweetness has diminished many wines. Sweetness figures in menu planning and in forecasting the way a wine might age. It is sometimes helpful. Like acidity, tannin, or any other single facet of flavor, sweetness matters only when there is too much or too little of it. Yet we focus on it in isolation, insisting that it be reduced or removed at all cost, unaware that we are misguided and have taken balance, length, and charm away from our wines. Sweetness should be present when it is called for and absent when it is not, as determined by the flavors of individual wines and not by any theory we have promulgated a priori.

And a lot of us are confused about sweetness. I'm here to help. There's the sweetness of an apple, and there's the sweetness of a Twinkie. They're not the same!

Ripeness: I refer especially to physiological ripeness, sometimes called phenolic ripeness, which is seen when a grape's skins and seeds are ripe. It would seem to be desirable, but the singular pursuit of physiological ripeness as an absolute has wrecked many wines by condemning them to a power they can't support, and it has removed the nuance possible when wines are made from grapes of different degrees of ripeness. When ripeness is sufficient, how do we assume overripeness will be preferable? It only brings more alcohol and an infantile swaddle of fruit.

Concentration: Concentration matters only after this question is answered: What are we concentrating? Tannin, viscosity, alcohol? Are these things we want even more of? In itself, concentration is merely an adjective, not a virtue.

Taking a Stand: What Is Not Important

Why begin by discussing the unimportant? you might ask. Because these ephemera take up far too much of wine discourse, deflecting us from more important matters. I remember Gore Vidal's famous answer to the question of why academic quarrels were so fierce: because the stakes were so low.

You might expect the wine world to be a gentle and civilized place, but you'd be wrong. You'd think habitual wine drinkers would be less querulous than other folks. Wrong again. Then you'd get tired of always being wrong, and realize that wine can be a lightning rod for many other debates—or arguments—that are conducted with humanity's usual standards of skill, intellect, civility, and tolerance. In other words, it's Mailer versus Vidal, minus the erudition.