Reading between the Wines, With a New Preface. Terry Theise

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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 СКАЧАТЬ