Andrew Jefford, as is his wont, wrote an insightful and timely article on what he calls the key question in wine aesthetics:
When you treat yourself to a special bottle, what do you hope you’ll find? Is it wealth and resonance – or freshness?…Broadly speaking, we’ve swung 180 degrees on this question over the last quarter-century. Until around 2010, the quest tended to be for wealth and richness; since 2010, we’ve prized freshness much more highly.
What I found interesting is that he tracks this change through the wine language we use to describe the dichotomy between freshness and resonance.
Words like unctuous, thick, fleshy, concentrated and succulent were, prior to 2010, the hallmarks of approbation. No longer. Nowadays, it’s terms such as pure, precise, arrow-like, tightly wound, tightly coiled and tensile which prime the pump for a high-90s score.
To be honest if I had to list the properties I most admire in wine, neither unctuous nor tightly wound would appear. They both sound objectionable, too extreme, like personality disorders in liquid form. Yet it seems when it comes to wine trends within the wine community we like to lurch from one extreme to the other. As Jefford recounts, nearly every wine region is now on the “tightly-wound” bandwagon—everyone has become an acid-head.
Jefford seems to have had enough of it—he’s nostalgic for ripeness and softness. I have to say I agree with him. There is nothing wrong with acid but I want some flesh on the bones. Sure, let the minerals sing on the finish but don’t leave that acid hanging out there exposed like a soprano wailing without the orchestra.
Last week I was at Atelier Crenn a MIchelin 3-star in San Francisco. The dishes were enormously complex and subtle but also quite delicate—all fish, seafood and spring vegetables composed with Dominique Crenn’s characteristic precision and reverent restraint, as if each element had been coaxed rather than commanded into the dish. The wine pairings were fine. Nothing surprising but they were interesting and from producers I was not familiar with. The fruit power was restrained as would be appropriate with this menu—none of the flavors disappeared under a avalanche of jammy enthusiasm. But that arrowlike, tightly wound, tensile quality was always there, just a bit too edgy when gentle and supple were called for. This is the problem with some of these contemporary wine styles. Edgy is not delicate; arrowlike isn’t subtle; tensile isn’t supple.
It’s a confusion of virtues, a kind of category error masquerading as precision. What reads on the winemaker’s spreadsheet as “linear” or “focused” can register, at the table, as obstinate and unyielding—more like a barked order than a whispered suggestion.
Hopefully, as white wines are becoming more popular, the pendulum will shift back a bit, not a return to Chateau 2×4, but just a bit more lees stirring and a day or two of ripening would be nice.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 
Since I know of your interest in wine and music, I’d suggest that similar pendulum swings — but opposite in direction — have occurred in the audiophile and oenophile communities. At just about the same time that wine was embracing the lush and unctuous, audio was discovering the “perfect sound forever” of etched, bright, unforgiving digital reproduction. And while the last decade has seen wines swing toward the focused and acidic — dare I suggest “digital”? — audio reproduction re-embraced its lost “analogue” qualities of of lushness and musicality, epitomized by the return of the phonograph record. There’s an interesting article to be written on the opposing dialectics of the two worlds!
That is an interesting connection, Joel. Thanks.