Kingsley Amis said that the three most depressing words in the English language were “Red or White?”. “Fine Wine” is surely a candidate for the two most inefficient. Their meaning is diversely interpreted, and their use frequent but little defined.
My heart was captured and my career path changed, fifteen years ago, by a red Burgundy that I, and many others, would consider to be a Fine Wine. It was the first Fine Wine I’d had, and such was its call that I chucked in my job and joined the wine trade. I suppose it must have been expensive (I wasn’t paying), but one thing I have learned since then is that a high price does not a Fine Wine make. (Indeed, as Jamie Goode’s spirited post on Icon Wines explains, it is all too easy to obliterate subtle qualities of an interesting wine by throwing money at it.)
Fine wines are never cheap, as such. Some may as well be cellared on the moon, for all the average wine lover can afford to drink them. But many wines in which I find fine qualities can be had for well under £50 a bottle. Scarcity (and its distant cousin, Ultra-Low Yields), is no guarantee either, although the quantity made of any fine wine is always limited by some brilliantly dastardly combination of soil, sun and water, and demand may make them rare.
Fine Wine cannot be defined by a wine style, although fashion has ever favoured some and neglected others. We should thank fashion for this, as it’s the source of those sub £50 chances to experience something beautiful. Fine Wine is certainly not about the ‘numbers’ - acidity, alcohol, tannin, or any other quantfiable.
Balance is a quality, and not a predicate, of Fine Wine. The most exigent wine can be balanced. We humans struggle to define, because that is the nature of aesthetics. So, here is an entirely personal definition of fine wine. Yes, it will be balanced. And it will be intense, nuanced, and long. Fine wine is intoxicating in all senses. It speaks to our quest for life’s beautiful, risky, accidents. A test of a fine wine is whether it moves you – whether your synapses are tingling, and not just your tongue. Fine wines emerge from the intersection of people, place and plants. Most have evolved over centuries, grown from vines living on a just-about viable knife edge in places too hot, or cool, or dry, or steep or stony for any sensible person to farm anything. Or they emerge from hilariously eccentric, ingenious production methods that evolved from a need to problem solve. They are made by people who see themselves as custodians of a rare and precious expression of nature. You can have a relationship with them that lasts well after you’ve drunk the last drop.
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