On passing the MW you are required
to participate in the Institute’s education programme, and as part of this obligation
I spent several days marking students tasting notes. The best notes were
deductive - the Institute has an exacting approach to notation – whilst the
worst answers just kept on plundering a limited lexicon of descriptions, like a
still-life artist condemned to rearranging and painting the same bowl of fruit
over and over and over again.
Subjecting nouns to this sort
of functional and metaphorical shift in usage is meat and drink to the wine trade.
Anyone who has ever stood-up in front of a crowd of diners with a glass of wine
in hand knows nothing pacifies a drunken mob better than the timely naming of a
fruit: “raspberries here”, “plums”, “blackcurrants” etc , and it’s tempting to
think the better the wine the more elaborate and more exotic these depictions must
be. Yet it seems that just as you can induce a trance by staring into a mirror
for too long, so continually hanging your nose over the same wine will
eventually bring-on olfactory hallucinations. How else can we possibly account
for people conjuring up such queasy mixes as cassis, cherries, bacon-fat,
Asian-spices, pepper, liquorice and garrigue within one glass? And at what
point does wine tasting become legalised solvent abuse?
Often tagged onto these
longer notes are “drinking windows”, and it’s not unusual to find that there is
a correspondence between the over-endowment of descriptors and the number of years
to peak maturity. Discursiveness and ageing potential seem inextricably
linked. You think its complex now,
blah, blah, blah, Asian spices, blah? Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet! 2025-blah.
Somewhat against the trend,
I am increasingly persuaded that ageing potential follows on from wines’
homogeneity rather than the faux-complexity found by over-zealous tasters. In
my recent blog on Otago (The Heart of Lightness) I drew out the differences as
I saw them between Otago and the Cote de Nuits:
"Depending on your
point of view, a prism either scatters light into its constituent wavelengths
or refocuses them back into a single beam. Loosely applied, this seems a
reasonable analogy for the differences I tasted between the Pinot Noir of
Felton Rd and the wines of Vosne Romanée; viticulture, vinification, elevage,
maturation, and polymerisation act like a lens in Burgundy, drawing everything
to a point, whereas at Felton Rd, the studied application of the same
techniques produces a hugely varied palate."
If you taste red burgundy whilst
feigning ignorance of its appellation divisions, then the wines can be
categorized according to the purity and intensity of the rather singular red
fruit character they possess, and the extent to which the rustic counterpoint
to this fruitiness is replaced by condensed and soluble tannins. In other words,
the trend towards homogenisation is a good sign in young red burgundy. In fact,
I would go as far as to say that the ageing potential for Pinot Noir is
inseparable from this process of youthful coalescence.
And why stop with Burgundy.
The best wines of Pomerol can have a lozenge-like softness. I recently wrote of
Vieux Chateau Certan it was “Blissfully simple”, which might sound like I was
damning the wine with faint praise, when in fact I was utterly entranced.
Richard Smart taught us that
deep shade is the enemy of high quality wine production, and since he first
published “Sunlight into Wine” we have been slowly learning about the
intricacies of the relationship between light exposure and wine style. At first, sunlight exposure and long hang-times
sounded like good prescriptions in cool and temperate climates, yet the more I
taste and compare wines drawn from different hemispheres and continents, the
more convinced I am that long exposure to direct and diffuse UV builds flavour at
the expense of homogeneity. Chilean Pinot might taste of blackberries,
cherries, rhubarb, coffee, ivy and resin, but it’s hard to work out how wines
inclined towards such youthful divergence will do anything other than fracture further
apart with age. Far from being the prerequisite for ageing, youthful complexity
perhaps mitigates against anything but future decline.
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