a word about vintage
We don't believe wine by numbers. We don’t believe there’s any difference between an 85-point wine and a 93-point wine. We may or may not have them on the menu, but we’ll tell you instead about the story behind the wine, who the winemaker is, why he or she made it and why we think you'll love it.
There is an immense amount of neurotic hang-wringing and knicker-twisting around searching out the perfect wine in the perfect vintage, worrying whether 2000 was better than 2005, etc. This is very much the spirit of the age; living as we do in a world of rapidly diminishing intellectual ability and curiosity, our vapid generation increasingly guided by sound bites, executive summaries and 100 scale scoring systems rather than the joy of personal discovery. We childishly point to the modern curse of "being too busy", failing to realise that never has the human race enjoyed such a degree of leisure time and that being too busy is a phenomenon of entirely self-inflicted indulgence. Life has been reduced to an never-ending shopping trip, a futile attempt to achieve happiness through consumption - the very existence of Twitter, How to Spend It and Monocle magazine a sad reflection of how far we have strayed.
What this means for wine of course is that people are guided almost entirely by the Pied Piper's ratings, jumping blindly from one producer to the next just as they do from personal relationship to personal relationship, plaything to plaything - instead of sticking with a single producer they have discovered and enjoying the ups and downs of the relationship over time.
Sorry to break it to you, wine mavens, but the whole essence of why wine is superior to all other alcohols is precisely because it gives us a sense not only of place but also of time. If you want something that tastes the same every time pour yourself a G&T.
Vintage variation is quite simply one of the unique pleasures of wine; and if it is trampled in the blind stampede for 90 point wines we will end up with what we deserve: uninteresting homogeneity. Hence the success of Yellow Tail: wine for a lobotomised generation.
We are not saying that vintage variation is an excuse for bad wine: far from it. These days all self respecting wineries employ world class winemakers whose remit it is to transform the juice in the humble grape into the elixir that we call wine. Every vintage they try to create the best possible wine from the fruit harvested that year, and a huge amount of time and effort goes into picking out only the best grapes - a far cry from years gone by when the entire harvest would simply be tipped into the fermentation tank. In the Rhone Valley, for example, 2008 was generally seen to be an inferior vintage to say 2007. The wine maker at Clos du Caillou, one of the top producers in the Southern Rhone, therefore decided to de-classify both of their top Chateauneuf du Pape cuvees into their humble Cotes du Rhone, thus elevating the basic wine to a whole new level.
So stop worrying about whether Parker may have scored this year's Chateau DevilintheGrape an 87 rather than a 95; instead line up your glasses, pour yourself a series of vintages from the same producer and relish the exquisite differences between them.
What this means for wine of course is that people are guided almost entirely by the Pied Piper's ratings, jumping blindly from one producer to the next just as they do from personal relationship to personal relationship, plaything to plaything - instead of sticking with a single producer they have discovered and enjoying the ups and downs of the relationship over time.
Sorry to break it to you, wine mavens, but the whole essence of why wine is superior to all other alcohols is precisely because it gives us a sense not only of place but also of time. If you want something that tastes the same every time pour yourself a G&T.
Vintage variation is quite simply one of the unique pleasures of wine; and if it is trampled in the blind stampede for 90 point wines we will end up with what we deserve: uninteresting homogeneity. Hence the success of Yellow Tail: wine for a lobotomised generation.
We are not saying that vintage variation is an excuse for bad wine: far from it. These days all self respecting wineries employ world class winemakers whose remit it is to transform the juice in the humble grape into the elixir that we call wine. Every vintage they try to create the best possible wine from the fruit harvested that year, and a huge amount of time and effort goes into picking out only the best grapes - a far cry from years gone by when the entire harvest would simply be tipped into the fermentation tank. In the Rhone Valley, for example, 2008 was generally seen to be an inferior vintage to say 2007. The wine maker at Clos du Caillou, one of the top producers in the Southern Rhone, therefore decided to de-classify both of their top Chateauneuf du Pape cuvees into their humble Cotes du Rhone, thus elevating the basic wine to a whole new level.
So stop worrying about whether Parker may have scored this year's Chateau DevilintheGrape an 87 rather than a 95; instead line up your glasses, pour yourself a series of vintages from the same producer and relish the exquisite differences between them.
