Good Wines and Great Wines

Eric Asimov at the New York Times has a thoughtful post about what makes a good wine. It’s behind a paywall but here is the summary. A good wine must:

• taste good (assuming it is ready to open)
• be appropriate for the occasion, and
• come from a good terroir, although that doesn’t necessarily mean a terroir of established reputation nor is it a guarantee of quality.

Sound environmental practices always add value. But vintage and grape variety are too variable to be criteria.

I don’t disagree with any of that but I have additional criteria.

For me a good wine tastes alive and has personality. A good wine is like a good song; it has a hook that invites you in, a rhythm that holds your attention,and balance that allows its personality to shine. That is usually the result of good terroir but skilled winemaking and careful blending matter a great deal. The grape variety has a lot to do with how a wine tastes but there are many, many varieties from which good wine can be made.

I don’t care much about interventions in the winery, if it’s the right intervention and doesn’t kill the life and personality of a wine. Technology isn’t bad when used appropriately.

If I know a winery does not care for the land or environment I won’t buy from them. There are too many good wines around to bother. But I don’t spend much time seeking out that information since it is seldom available.

If that is what makes a good wine, what is a great wine? A great wine has all that but is also distinctive and paradoxical.

Wines can be agile, solid, sharp, dense, sparse, sumptuous, clear, profound, brooding, or shadowy—great wines show many of these dimensions in a single swallow as they transition from one quality to its opposite.The best wines show many sides, not just many aromas or flavors, but undulating waves in which peaks appear and then disappear, the tone lightens then darkens, textures thicken then melt. There is oscillation between determinate properties and their shadows, great clarity and differentiation alongside misty in-distinction.

Great wines are like a magnificent but difficult person (best described by Walt Whitman):

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) (Song of Myself)