All of us have completely different motives in selecting wine. There are these hoping for a journey into unexplored areas of elegant sensation, and people with earthier wishes, completely satisfied when the primary glass has them seeing double. There are wines to accommodate them each: a prickly little Mosel on the one hand and a 15% Barolo on the opposite. Doesn’t the best wine, although, mix the 2 – inspiration with stimulus, fragrance with punch?
The three little letters ‘abv’ (alcohol by quantity) solely inform half the story, and never crucial half. Notoriously, abv drifted up and up (you’ll be able to’t solely blame US critic Robert Parker for this, although his 100-point scoring system actually didn’t discourage it). I used to ask revered California makers of head-spinning wines, ‘can’t you simply add water?’ From a few of their solutions you’d suppose water had an indelible flavour of its personal. Purists may argue that if fantastic wine is the exact expression of grape, place and time, then it ought to let you recognize plainly it had had an insufferable roasting.
There may be nonetheless a marketplace for 15% abv reds. Laithwaites certainly efficiently sells one from the Languedoc labelled ‘XV’. A strong argument (from the producer’s standpoint) in opposition to them is that one glass goes a good distance, a second makes you legless, and a comatose buyer just isn’t able to order one other bottle. The pattern as we speak is extra average, aiming in lots of instances for a goal round 12.5% abv. Champagne is nearly all the time labelled 12% (however then dosage provides the cellarmaster the ultimate resolution). Energy, nevertheless, or lack of it, is as a lot a attribute of a area as scent and flavour. Or certainly of a method. Sherry goes each methods: your summery fino or manzanilla is 15% abv; your winterweight oloroso nearer 20%.
Regardless of the abv, the important for high quality and pleasure is stability; stability between the depth of the flavours and the facility behind it. ‘Depth’ just isn’t one of many key phrases in wine textbooks. It’s not within the vocabulary of Michael Broadbent’s definitive Wine Tasting, nor in Len Evans’ deft abstract of the enterprise, Find out how to Style Wine.
Isn’t depth, although, in a single kind or one other, what attracts your consideration to wine’s completely different qualities? It’s the eye-catching trait that separates an excellent wine from an excellent one. And it actually isn’t simply alcohol by quantity.
Hugh Johnson is a world-renowned creator. His ebook The Story of Wine was republished by Académie du Vin Library in 2020.
