Tag Archives: wine quality

How Do You Know a Wine is of Great Quality?

03 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine

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two dancersForget the scores, aroma notes, hype and price points. How do you know a wine is of great quality?

If you want to get to know it better.

You feel drawn to it and want to learn more. A great wine has hidden dimensions that don’t reveal themselves all at once. You have to settle in with such a wine, taste it over time, try to develop a sensitivity to its unique charms. In that sense a great wine is like a great person. .

Such wines have a supple, yielding character as if you can enter into a sympathetic relationship with the wine. Its movement becomes my movement, directing my attention so I become open to its influence. Like two dancers reacting to each other’s every move.

Wines that give you that sense of hidden depths and sympathetic vibration, that draw you in to their world, are the one’s you will remember and come back to again and again. There is something inexhaustible about them.

There really is no other criterion for a great wine. It’s a wine that moves you.

There are Reasons Why Good Wine is Expensive

15 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by in Wine Culture

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stacks of cashFor those inclined to claim that there really is no difference between expensive wine and cheap wine, this symposium at the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium should be enlightening.

Using Cabernet Sauvignon because of its prominence in the marketplace, four different Cabernet wines at four different price points were dissected in a tasting and panel discussion which included Francis Ford Coppola’s Diamond line Ivory Cabernet at the lowest price point of $13, Rodney Strong’s Knight’s Valley Cab at $35, Steven Hills Cabernet from Eastern Washington at $50, and Napa’s Cliff Lede Vineyards Cabernet at $78. Representatives from each winery were present to explain how the wines were made.

The differences were remarkable.

Long story short, the $13 Cabernet was a product of thoroughly mechanized vineyard work, high yields with a single pass through the vineyard taking all the grapes that were available, grapes sourced from several vineyard locations in the state, large scale fermentation with short extraction times boosted by the use of enzymes and tannins softened by micro-oxidation, barrel alternatives (meaning oak chips) to build complexity, with the overall aim being consistency, volume, and speed.

The higher priced Cabs by contrast were a product of hand pruning by trained, experience, sometimes in-house crews. There was some machine harvesting but in many cases the grapes were harvested by hand with several passes through the vineyard over time to ensure optimal ripeness. Grapes were usually harvested at night when temperatures were low to ensure adequate acidity. In some cases the grapes were hand sorted. Fermentations were done in small lots so winemakers had lots of control over the final blend. Macerations were longer and pump-overs carefully calibrated. Real oak barrels, both old and new and often custom built, were used for aging, with the new French oak barrels costing about $1300 each. And the wines were barrel aged sometimes for over 20 months requiring storage space and constant monitoring.

Every step of the production process of the premium wines costs money and the article never mentions the cost of prime vineyard land compared to the cost of land suitable for inferior grapes.

I suppose it could be the case that the premium winemakers are going to all this trouble and expense to maintain the illusion of quality. But that doesn’t sound very plausible does it?

Sure part of the cost of Napa Cabernet has to do with branding and supply and demand. And some expensive wines are not worth their price. But there are intrinsic costs of fine wine production that explain the much of the quality differences.

To suppose otherwise is to assume a conspiracy theory worthy of Congressional Republicans.

Luxury, Inequality, and the World of Wine

29 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in The Ethics of Eating, Wine Culture

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luxury carFor food and wine lovers, Robin Givhan’s piece in the Washington Post, “The Case for Luxury” is a very solid essay with an important argument in this age of bad taste parading as opulence. The occasion  was Ralph Lauren’s over-the-top celebration of the release of his Fall 2017 collection, which included “a show and dinner in the private garage that houses his collection of rare and exotic automobiles”, a collection reputed to be worth $300 Million. As you might imagine, a vitriolic backlash to this ostentatious show of wealth ensued especially at a time when economic inequality is through the roof.

Givhan acknowledges the legitimate arguments behind the anger:

High-priced consumption is unseemly, wasteful and selfish — narcissism writ large. And it is especially problematic juxtaposed with today’s abundant supply of distressing news — an epidemic of opioid addiction, a tide of refugees cast adrift, an American health-care system in turmoil. How can the well-off justify spending thousands of dollars on a designer dress when that money could be used to feed their hungry neighbors?

Indeed. The gap between rich and poor in this country is a travesty, impossible-to justify-thievery, offensive to anyone who cares about justice.

But there is another side of the argument that is equally important to acknowledge.

Yet amid all the legitimate concern surrounding wealth and inequality and unfettered capitalism, it can be easy to forget the other side of the argument: that luxury can be more than just a high price tag. That luxury products can be astonishing, glorious — even inspiring. That luxury items — some of them, the best of them — can be examples of human artistry at its finest. That they can offer enduring beauty. That their inherent creativity propels the world forward. That luxury, true luxury, can in fact be sustenance for a culture.

This also is true. And arguments that we can dispense with “human artistry at its finest” are as bankrupt as arguments justifying gross inequalities of wealth. Such an argument seeks to banish human excellence from the face of the earth.

The wine world offers a good example. Wines of great quality and distinction are almost always produced by small-to-midsized wineries. Even the largest Premier Crus Chateaux in Bordeaux produce only about 25,000 cases. In Burgundy which now features the most expensive wines in the world, meritorious vineyard plots are tiny with no room to expand. When supply is limited and word gets out that a wine is distinctive its price will inevitably soar. The point can be generalized. Anything that is rare, distinctive, and well-known will be expensive. There is simply no way around it. Do such wineries artificially restrict the supply to maintain prices? Of course, some do. But the point still stands—if it’s rare and distinctive it will cost you because it’s rare. The alternative, if the price is artificially limited, is that the product will be unavailable, snapped up by the people who get there first. So it’s still rare and unavailable to most of us. This is true regardless of whether our economic system is predatory capitalism or democratic socialism.

Thus, the argument against luxury goods cannot be that they’re too expensive. It must be that they are not of genuine quality. And this is the important point that Givhan makes.

The essence of luxury used to be innovation and quality. And there was an audience that appreciated both. Today, innovation and quality often are lacking in the most ubiquitous luxury brands, and the size of the audience with the knowledge to appreciate either is dwindling….The result is that luxury has become disengaged from its historical context: no legacy, no sense of craft, no understanding of the raw materials, no appreciation for inventiveness. It’s all just a bunch of really expensive stuff in the minds of its critics. The perception is that luxury products are only tools for lording one’s status over others, not also demonstrably better products. In the sea of generic marketing campaigns that categorize everything from stainless-steel appliances to candles as “luxury,” the term has been devalued.

Again the wine world is a good example. The great wines–some of the Napa cult wines, the Bordeaux Premier Crus and some Burgundian Grand Crus, for example–are of genuine quality. But we all know that price is no guarantee of quality. Many high priced wines rest on their reputation for years while producing plonk. They sell because some customers don’t know any better and are simply looking to show off.

As Givhan argues, it’s the older form of luxury synonymous with quality and artistry that is worth preserving. This is the heart of the argument. Wine, art and other products of culture are not necessary except for the enjoyment they bring. Yet the sort of enjoyment that comes from appreciating genuine displays of human creativity and craft are priceless, and human life would be much diminished without them.

So how do we square a concern with economic justice with the existence of luxury? By returning to social norms that admire moderation and condemn excess, by recognizing that what is rare and distinctive must remain rare and distinctive and that means sometimes being content with less so others can flourish. It is not wealth by itself that is of value but genuine quality. If we got rid of the junk in our lives we would have more resources for the social goods that lift everyone.

Distinguishing Cheap Wine from Expensive Wine

06 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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cheap-vs-expensive-wine-300x216I suspect that most people who drink wine regularly think they are able to distinguish expensive wine from the cheap stuff. But there are numerous studies like this one that show the average wine consumer can’t do so in a blind tasting. This is not surprising. The relationship between wine quality and price is not straightforward—there is a loose correlation but with lots of exceptions. Price often has more to do with supply and demand than the intrinsic quality of the wine.

But more importantly, wine is a vague object, with features difficult to discern. The properties of fine wine are not simple sensations but involve judgments about complexity, finesse, and harmony that require the discernment of relationships between multiple sensations that experts and connoisseurs  spend years learning to appreciate.

It is strange that anyone would expect the average consumer to reliably identify quality wine. We don’t have that expectation in the arts or music. Most “average” art lovers prefer Kincade to Pollock, and Katie Perry is far more popular than Arvo Part. Enjoyment and quality are only loosely correlated.

So what’s the average wine consumer to do about this?

The good news is that learning to distinguish quality wine from cheap wine is really just a matter of gaining experience. So drink more wine. What’s so hard about that? But in fact it’s not just drinking more but drinking more thoughtfully that builds competence. Start paying more attention to what you drink and note the differences. Compare wines side by side and try to describe the nuances. If you’re on a budget that’s no problem. Start out with cheaper wines until you get good at detecting differences and then gradually move into higher price tiers keeping in mind that price isn’t necessarily an indicator of quality.

Or alternatively, just buy really expensive wine and don’t worry about it. Studies show the higher the price of a wine, the more we enjoy it. Even if you can’t tell good wine from bad  you will persuade yourself of the quality of the costly wine. Your pleasure will be based on an illusion rather than genuine quality but caring about reality is so, well, last year.

What Makes a Great Wine Great?

02 Thursday Feb 2017

Posted by in Art and Wine, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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la tacheJamie Goode’s post What is Greatness in a Wine? is insightful because it moves greatness out of the realm of subjectivity and personal preference:

Greatness is conferred on wine by a community of judgement. When we, as the wine community, taste wines together, we recognize the great wines. It’s an aesthetic system, where we form a judgement together, by tasting together, discussing, listing, buying, consuming.

But ultimately this kind of answer is unsatisfying. When the wine community confers greatness on a wine presumably there is something about the wine that warrants such a judgment. Without an account of what that is, the judgment is threatened with arbitrariness. The job of a critic is not just to announce greatness but to explain it by giving reasons. A genuine understanding of “greatness” would include those reasons not just the fact of widespread agreement.

Such an account of course is hard to provide. As Jamie writes, “There’s no definition that we can apply to determine whether a wine is great or not.” Each great wine will be great for different reasons and general rules that mention complexity, harmony or finesse will not capture the individuality of great wines. The best we can do is use description, metaphor or some other rhetorical device to call attention to those features that seem salient yet inarticulable.

Yet, perhaps Jamie’s idea is in the right direction. A great wine is great because it appeals to a wide range of people in the wine world who agree it’s a benchmark but often for vastly different reasons. Each person’s account of why the wine is great will differ due to biological differences, differences in descriptive powers, aesthetic preferences, and the fact that we all have different tasting histories. Thus, perhaps what makes a wine great is it’s ability to generate a verdictive consensus despite those differences.

Greatness in a wine lies in a wine’s capacity to be appreciated from many different perspectives, a multi-dimensional potential that invites a common verdict despite vastly different ways of arriving at it.

Thus, it is not the fact of agreement that makes a wine great but an underlying breadth or accessibility that makes it alluring from multiple points of view.

Sadly, without some way of quantifying this “underlying breadth” or specifying its causal mechanisms that explanation is close to empty—like attributing the effectiveness of a sleeping pill to it’s dormitive power.

But it does point to the fact that this underlying breadth is not an arbitrary accident but is in some sense “in the wine” and perhaps it is something we can learn to sense if we practice looking for it.

The search for it is likely to be more interesting than picking out aroma notes.

How to Identify a Wine of High Quality

21 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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cellared wineAny discussion of wine quality must begin with a distinction between commodity wines and premium or fine wines. Commodity wines usually sell for under $15, although the “commercial premium” sector is growing rapidly and pricier wines will increasingly fall into this category. A quality commodity wine is reliable and familiar, with no obvious flaws, that is easy to drink and designed for immediate consumption. It will spring no surprises that would offend the casual drinker. Unlike the situation 20 years ago, when $10 might have bought you an attractively packaged bottle of battery acid, there are few bad wines on the market today. The technology of mass wine production has made extraordinary advances. Wine connoisseurs will think these wines uninteresting, but they may be full of flavor, food-friendly, and satisfying to drink.

Fine wines of quality sell for considerably more than $15, although you can sometimes find bargains. (There are many wines that fall in between the categories of commodity and premium, and price is no guarantee of quality.) Fine wines of quality will not necessary have smooth textures or familiar flavors. Their virtues may be hard to discern if you don’t know what to look for. Regular consumers of fine wines tend to be fascinated by the diversity of wine styles and the more discriminating are looking for a sense of place where the wine reflects the geographic features of where the grapes are grown. Surprise is a good thing for these consumers, and unusual wines with unconventional flavors may be welcomed. Some of these wines may actually be challenging to drink because they reflect the idiosyncratic vision of the winemaker or come from regions in which the flavor profile changes significantly from year to year because of weather variations. It takes experience and education to appreciate them. Such wines may be interesting even though they don’t hit your pleasure “sweet spot.” They are to be judged according to criteria that emerge from the aesthetic culture that surrounds them. To recognize quality, you have to be acquainted with that culture. This is why, in taste tests, untrained subjects will often fail to pick out the more expensive wines.

People who sell wine have to be familiar with these cultures and their expectations. Restaurants will need a wine list that can satisfy both the casual drinker and the connoisseur.

That said, there are some general criteria that all these various wine cultures look to as benchmarks and can be applied to quality commodity wines (up to a point) as well as fine wines.

Characteristics of a Quality Wine

Dense Texture or Mouthfeel

Most commodity wines will have lots of fruit up front and will taste full in the mouth because they are made with ripe fruit or have residual sugar, both of which create the impression of fullness. But as the tasting experience proceeds, many commodity wines turn watery, or are simply soft and smooth, lacking the presence or a firm finish. Quality wines by contrast have a density to them at the midpalate (midway through the taste experience) and some astringency (dryness) on the finish. Even lighter-bodied quality wines have some viscosity and will feel like silk or velvet, coating the mouth rather than simply feeling soft. A quality wine should have a pronounced and pleasing texture regardless of its weight. Harsh, aggressive, or rough wines are of low quality unless they are designed for long aging, in which case they should not be opened when young.

Finesse

Not all quality wines are bold. Some can be slender and delicate. But quality wines that are delicate must have finesse. Their flavors and textures have intricacy and detail which are not delivered all at once but emerge as the tasting experience proceeds. Even bold, powerful wines can have finesse. In fact, this is the sign of greatness in a wine—power plus finesse.

Strong, Persistent Finish

The finish is the impression a wine leaves in the back of your mouth after you have swallowed it. Commodity wines tend to have a short finish with a pronounced drop-off in flavor, because casual consumers are put off by wines that are drying or have a strong aftertaste. By contrast, most connoisseurs of fine wines prefer a long finish with some astringency that comes from tannins in red wine or acidity in whites. Furthermore, in a quality wine, flavors persist all the way through the finish. Some wines may leave a burning sensation in the mouth because of high alcohol or have a bitter finish. These are flaws if they are excessive.

Complexity

Commodity wines are simple with a few generic fruit and spice notes. Quality fine wines will have layers of fruit, spice, herbs, earth, and (in red wine) wood notes that give off different aromas each time you sniff. Which aroma and flavor notes a wine has doesn’t matter in judging quality, as long as there are no off-flavors. What matters are how many aroma notes there are, and how they work together to produce an integrated whole. One important element of complexity is evolution on the palate—a quality wine will show different aspects through the beginning, middle, and end of the tasting experience. Commodity wines tend to be linear without much development.

Integrated Components

Balance refers to the relationship between sweetness, acidity, tannin, and alcohol. A wine is balanced when none of these components sticks out as being too much. Most commodity wines are balanced for the average consumer because these components are relatively easy to adjust in the winemaking process and many large wineries do extensive market research to find popular flavor profiles. But more sophisticated wine lovers will find commodity wines too sweet and lacking tannin or acidity. Balance in fine wine has more to do with whether all the components are working together to produce a wine that is perceived as having good structure. The acidity should enhance the fruit, making it seem fresh; the fruit should enhance the tannins softening them so they don’t grip; the fruit should mute the sourness of the acidity. Balance in quality wines is a matter of the components working together, not simply staying out of the way.

Intensity

Commodity wines often have murky flavors that don’t stand out. A quality fine wine will seem to leap out of glass and have clearly delineated flavors that are immediately apparent. However, keep in mind that some quality wines need decanting before they will show the full range of their flavor, and even the best wines can go through a “dumb” stage, where their flavors are muted.

Time in the Bottle

Because commodity wines are designed for immediate consumption, few of them will improve with age. Most quality fine wines in recent years have also been designed to drink when young. Nevertheless, they will have many strong components that must come together before they will show well, and will benefit with some time in the bottle. There is no rule for how much time they need, but for most wines, three years past their vintage date will give the wine time to settle down. However, some quality white varietals such as most Sauvignon Blanc should be consumed when young.

Cross posted at Full-Service Restaurant Magazine

Is Estate Bottled Wine of Higher Quality?

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

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wine estateA recent post by Steve Heimoff raises the issue of whether the designation “Estate Bottled” tells the consumer much about a wine.

Legally, in the U.S.,  “Estate Bottled” means that the winery controls the grapes, the grapes must all be sourced from the same AVA, and the wine must be fermented, bottled, and aged in the same facility. (It does not mean that the winery possesses a lovely mansion set within scenic vineyards)

Heimoff, with some qualification, says this is all useful information and speaks well of a wine:

If you think about it, each of those specifications might in itself be of minor importance, but when you add them all up and take them together, they make it far more likely that the resulting wine will be of high quality. Having that precision control over farming is certainly the most important of the “estate bottled” requirements, but to have the entire winemaking process “in the same place,” usually the winery or a facility located very nearby, removes the risky transportation elements that can drag down wine quality. You want to move grapes, must, fermented wine or bottled wine as little as possible; wine is living food, and doesn’t like being manhandled.

Perhaps. But there are some caveats to note. Estate Bottle does not mean that the winery owns the vineyards from which the grapes are harvested–the control may be via contract rather than ownership. Some wineries are better at enforcing contracts than others, and if the winery is looking for high yield rather than high quality, the fact they control the viticulture will not enhance their wine. Furthermore, AVA’s in the U.S can be rather large and diverse. Thus, vineyards in the same AVA may have vastly different soil compositions and be subject to different climates. So Estate Bottled does not mean that the wine expresses a particular terroir.

I have consumed many, many very fine wines over the years that were not “estate bottled” because the grapes were sourced from independent growers who were very good at what they do. Transportation of grapes is always an issue but it can be done well with no discernable loss of flavor. So is an “estate bottled” wine more likely to be of high quality than not? I see no basis for assuming that.

However, “estate bottled” does rule out one important possibility–the wine cannot be bulk wine purchased from another winery. That is an important bit of information because bulk wine is usually, with some exceptions, inferior wine.

So “estate bottled” is useful information but offers no guarantee and perhaps not even a liklihood of quality wine.