Ch’ng Poh Tiong in World of Fine Wine insists that wines are either impressive or charming but never both.
Why we love what we love lays bare our predilections. It betrays what seduces us. Like most things, wine can be either charming or impressive. The two do not normally cohere: Montrachet may be impressive but rarely if ever charming.
I’m no expert on Montrachet so I won’t comment. But the best wines I’ve tasted have been both impressive and charming: Screaming Eagle, the better vintages of Margaux and Leoville-Barton, an Alighiere Amarone, many wines from Clark Smith and Randall Grahm just to name a few off the top of my head.
When you read further it becomes clear what he means by impressive:
Impressive wines tend to power and concentration. People who are so vinously moved gravitate to the same in other kinds: powerful, wealthy, people; big, chunky cars; careers defined by uber-salaries; and, noisy, pompous wine critics.
Charming wines are never in our face. There is a mystery to their persuasion. The ones who are charmed are happy to be mystified, to leave an element of the unknown to the inexplicable, to never need to be in charge or have to know everything. We enjoy being baffled. …
Charm is as much an addiction as impressiveness. Charm swaggers, sidesteps, and deviates, even as it moves along. Impressive simply marches on, stomping its headlong way, ignoring everything else in its path. Impressive wines are something of a missionary position in the glass. It may be a big glass, but it’s the same sip over and over again.
So what he means by impressive are loud, linear, over-oaked monstrosities that don’t evolve, and never show multiple dimensions.
A lot of wine, smeared by oak chips or unnecessary expensive new oak, faces an existential reckoning. Why use grapes to make wood juice, when running spring water (for added freshness) through sawdust and collecting it at the other end would bear the same result?
Sure, if you define “impressive” as unsubtle and obnoxious then impressive wines will never be charming. But then you have defined out of existence the many wines that manage to be both.
The best wines cannot be placed in a tidy definitional box. Contradiction and paradox are the heart of their attraction. They move around on us, play hide and seek. They are dimensional and delicate, assertive and wistful. We wonder how the same wine can be so incongruous and perplexing.
It is not all that unusual to find wines that are both impressive and charming if you avoid tendentious definitions.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 