What’s a good wine?
“What’s a good wine”, a question a colleague once asked me and which since has been a touchstone for a general sense of buffoonery and ignorance. But, what is a good wine? Well, its horses for courses really: one person’s Barefoot Rosé (non-vintage, obvs) is another person’s Lafite Rothschild 1982. The sense of reverence afforded a bottle of wine can range from the warm bottle of white wine, hastily bought from the off license for some ‘pre-drinking’, to tasting a Barolo in the cool cellars of Piemonte in Northern Italy with the winemaker themselves, away from the blazing sun outside.
What’s a good wine? I can only answer that from my point of view, trying hard not to get on any particular soapbox and ram it down other peoples’ throats. For me, wine is the greatest way of travelling the globe from the comfort of your wine-stained sofa. But wine is also your DeLorean, a way of navigating back through the sands of time: every bottle of wine is a miniature time capsule and instead of discovering newspaper cuttings from that year, letters from kids about what the weather is like and a couple of coins (perhaps that’s just my primary school experience), bottles of wine are instead stoppered vials of liquid time. You might sample the fruits of a Spanish bodega owner making rioja in the year man first stepped on the moon, a South African biodynamic producer trying something different in 2014, or a bottle of Mouton Rothschild that captures the apex of wine-making in one of the great years in Bordeaux.
A good wine might be that wine you enjoyed at a friend’s summer wedding, before your eighth glass made things a bit blurry, or it might be that time a particularly keen friend showcased a bottle of grape juice at a dinner party that meant so much to them that their evident passion rubbed off on you. It might be a bottle of rose that goes ‘just perfectly’ with ice and soda on a hot summer’s day, or it might be a punchy, smoky red that you and your partner swear by in front of the fire in deepest, darkest winter. It doesn’t matter, a good wine sticks in your memory like a Phil the Taylor dart impacting the oche.
The Olfactory nerve - your nose’s direct hotline to the brain
The olfactory nerve, the sensory highway from your nose to your brain, is one of the single greatest memory recallers we have as a species. From the smell of cut grass and cheap burgers at the football match, to your granny’s coal fire in Belfast when you were four, smell jogs our memory like nothing else, and the best wines stick with us. That’s why a cavalcade of experts can talk about a wine being ‘quintessentially’ Saint-Estephe, a small region in Bordeaux: its because they’ve tried wines from the region hundreds and hundreds of times. Most of us know the smell of frying bacon, so, given enough training or exposure we too could get to know the ‘notes’ in particular wines until they become second nature. Knowing to expect rose petals from Gewurztraminer, asparagus from New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc or rich blackcurrant cassis from the Haut-Medoc comes from familiarity.
I suppose here the question isn’t even “what’s a great wine” but more broadly, “what is a good wine”, a decent wine, a wine that does the job – a Ronseal wine, if you will (look it up, kids). For me, wine is the hunt for acidity, in whites, reds, sweet wines, rosés, bubbles – without acidity, that bite-on-a-lemon-until-your-mouth-waters, saliva-inducing trigger, wine is just flabby, sugary liquid. It is acidity which makes us lick our lips, which radiates the elements of the drop we’ve just swallowed around out mouth as we salivate, making us want more. Acidity is king, and I won’t hear anything to the contrary.
Bollocks. I’m on my soapbox, aren’t I?
Anyway, I will leave you with what I believe contributes toward making ‘a good wine’: the company. The place. The occasion.
The company. For me wine is so much better when shared with others. It is after all that most social of drinks to have as a group. You can appreciate, debate and chastise en masse and there is a particular wonder and sense of satisfaction in sharing a bottle of wine with other oenophiles who really do ‘get’ what you’re opening for them. When you pull out a special bottle of 1999 Gaja Barbaresco you want to share it with people who will be as excited as you as you explore its beautiful depths. In a similar way it can be just as special introducing wines to people who will swear they won’t touch red wine, or white wine, or perhaps anything German, in fact (the ABC anything but Chardonnay gang are particularly close-minded). Gently prodding them towards producers who are doing it right with bottles that absolutely won’t break the bank is a genuine joy, particularly when they become mini experts themselves.
The place. Tasting Dom Perignon in a nightclub with fireworks coming out of the wine bucket is going to be a very different experience to tasting it in the chalky caves of Moët & Chandon who make the prized nectar, deep in the champagne region with a real expert, just as your first, cool cerveza (sorry non-beer drinkers) on holiday in the sun, tastes so much better than the same product in a can on the train. People, place, occasion.
The occasion. Ultimately, good wines rise to the top for the occasion. When the critical consigliere and the hoi polloi both affirm a wine to be “good” then it has done its job. Whether it’s a bottle of Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc which takes the edge off after a particularly stressful day at work, the provence rosé you always take to barbeques because “did you know Brangelina used to own the Château before they divorced?”, or that special champagne that you only ever have on Christmas day as you open the presents with the people you love / put up with, if its good enough for you, its good enough for me.
What’s a good wine? It’s whatever makes you happy mate.
So, crack on, explore, try the new world, try a biodynamic wine, try a Slovenian wine, try Bordeaux (its not as stuffy as it is made out to be), and when you find a wine that you want to tell other people about then, my friend, you’ll have found a good wine.