Twenty years ago, the wines attracting the most attention and the highest scores were often big, powerful reds, loaded with ripe fruit, oak, and alcohol. But tastes have changed. Certainly many critics and sommeliers but also everyday wine drinkers now place greater value on freshness, elegance, and restraint. Of course, the appetite for powerful reds hasn’t disappeared. There are still plenty of enthusiasts for a 15.5% Cabernet or a lavishly ripe Grenache, and producers continue to make such wines successfully. Yet the old assumption that greater concentration means greater quality has lost much of its authority.
But when a preference becomes an ideology it damages our ability to think..
I recently had a conversation with an old wine buddy who was ranting about critics who give good scores to ripe, alcoholic wines—Alto Moncayo’s Garnacha (16% ABV) was his example–and then give the same score to an elegant, low alcohol wine from Burgundy. I’ve tasted Moncayo’s wine several times. In fact I visited the winery a few years ago. Its hot in Zaragoza Spain where the winery is located, and so Moncayo’s wines are big and ripe. Part of taking terroir seriously is accepting what your soils and climate give you. Big and ripe is what that region produces. It’s not my style but Moncayo makes good wine, so I argued.
He responded, “I remember you being a Burgundy fan. What happened?”
I still am when I can afford it. I praised the virtues of a Chambolle Musigny from Francois Berteau that I tasted recently.
His response, was this (I am paraphrasing liberally here): “You used to do some criticism. Shouldn’t critics should take a stand? If you really like the finesse and balance of Burgundy, how can you enjoy wines like Moncayo that show no finesse and are unbalanced by comparison. A critic should have some coherent conception of what makes a wine worthy of praise. When a critic lavishes high scores on Moncayo and then does the same for Burgundy, I begin to wonder what those scores actually mean. Is there a considered judgment behind them, or merely a reluctance to offend anyone? If the critic is simply telling every audience what it wants to hear, he or she is being dishonest.”
I, as quickly as possible, disengaged from the conversation.
This is absurd. Wines from Burgundy are elegant, full of finesse and subtlety, and relatively low in alcohol. Moncayo is about power and concentration. Why can’t I admire Moncayo for its power and Burgundy for its subtlety?
No doubt, some over-ripe, over-the-top wines can be garish and exaggerated, trying too hard to be hedonistic. I usually wouldn’t want more than one glass in an evening. I prefer Burgundy–it’s not even close. But a good wine from a hot region like Moncayo’s Garnacha is still an achievement; it is one of the better wines of its type in its price range and I can recognize it as such despite preferring another style. My friend was claiming that wine critics in principle cannot maintain the objectivity to judge wines they don’t prefer according to their merits.
Think about what his argument actually entails. If I prefer indie rock, I must therefore despise soft jazz because they are radically different styles of music. And the features that make indie rock compelling are nowhere to be found in soft jazz. Moreover I could not judge Pat Metheny to be as compelling a guitarist as Annie Clark (St. Vincent) without being disingenuous since I prefer Clark’ s genre to Metheny’s.
But neither music lover nor music critics think like this. We wouldn’t hold any other aesthetic comparison to this kind of standard. Why insist on it with wine?
Part of developing critical expertise is developing the ability to judge merit without wholly succumbing to mere personal preference. Personal preference cannot be eliminated from the equation—why would we want it to be. But good criticism should teach us something about the wine, not just about our likes and dislikes.
It’s fine to have strong preferences. He doesn’t like high alcohol wines. Whatever. But preferences are not competitions or zero sum games. You can take pleasure in conflicting styles. And with practice we can recognize quality even if in a particular case it doesn’t produce enjoyment.
A critic who strives to look beyond their personal preference to find something intriguing about a wine other critics praise is not dishonest—they’re curious. It is hard to think of anything more cynical than the view that there is no such thing as expertise, only prejudice and corruption.
