What are we looking for in great wine?
Whenever I ask winemakers in Napa Valley or Bordeaux who make wines based on Cabernet Sauvignon this question, they often talk about their effort to get good “black” flavors in a wine—blackberries, black plums, black cherries, cocoa, etc.
But maybe we’ve all forgotten a subtle but essential concept: For great wine, it’s not flavors that count. Rather, how a wine “moves” on the palate is what gives that wine a sense of aliveness. For fine wine, it’s the choreography of movement—a dancing, lit-from-within character—that counts most.
And you can sense and feel it immediately when you drink a wine. When you find it, it is awe inspiring.
If there is a corollary between flavor and movement, I would say this: dark, raisinated flavors don’t move; they fall dull and flat.
Which leads me to this: Every winemaker I have ever talked to has said that the quality of their wine is based in large part, if not mostly, on a single fact: they only pick when the grapes are ripe. This implies that all winemakers in the world (how many are there? half a million?) pick at a certain moment or during a certain small “window” of time. But there is no moment of ripeness. Ripeness is a construct, not a fact. It’s a range. As Dr. Carole Meredith, Chair Emerita of UC Davis’ Enology and Viticulture Program once said to me, “ripeness is in the mind of the winemaker.”
So whenever a winemaker tells me his/her wine is special because they “only pick when the grapes are ripe,” I no longer write that down in my notebook.
Instead, I taste and go looking for choreography and aliveness in the wine.
