What Is a Quality Wine?
This one’s easy, right? A quality wine is a wine you enjoy. But what do you enjoy about it, and how do you find other wines you’ll enjoy just as much? Will you only like wines similar to the ones you’ve already tried? Or are there other types of wine you’ll love when you find them ? Like so many questions in life, these questions get complicated in a hurry. As a professional Sommelier, I’ve been trying to answer this question for almost twenty years. After years of exploring and many empty bottles, I’ve come up with an answer that works well for me: a quality wine is a wine that clearly and emphatically expresses what it is and where it comes from. Okay, maybe that’s not a simple answer after all, but it’s the best definition I’ve come up with so far.
Nearly all wine is made from one (or a few) of around 1,400 genetic variants of Vitis Vinifera. These different grapes are grown in more than 35 countries in hundreds of different climates and at a range of elevations. In addition to the numerous environmental factors that affect the final product, the process of winemaking itself offers a broad array of decisions that influence each bottle in ways both obvious and subtle. Inevitably, this leads to a dizzying diversity of flavors, aromas, and textures within the world of wine.
When looking for a quality wine, the elements of the wine itself are important. One must also consider the occasion, season, weather conditions, accompanying foods, and personal preferences that impact your experience of the wine. While it is technically possible for a person to only want to drink one type of wine, the reality is that most people will want different things at different times. So, when the circumstances call for a particular type of wine, you want the best possible example. As a consumer, you want to predict what’s inside the bottle based on something you can see on the outside. Since climate and geology have such a strong influence on wine and, over centuries, the evolution of grapes themselves, the origin of a wine is one of the best indicators of its identity.
As a professional Sommelier, my goal is to use my years of experience to make the whole universe of wine accessible to anyone who is interested. I know there are people who prize consistency, and if we’re talking about ball bearings, I’m on board. But, with wine, diversity is, for me at least, the whole point. Each wine potentially provides a window into the life of a place and people far away; the environment, the climate, the weather, all the living things, and the culture.
If we were to make all wines the same, then we would erase all those beautiful inputs in favor of the mindless consistency Ralph Waldo Emerson was talking about. Nullifying the identity of a truly unique agricultural product takes away every reason it was planted and cared for by those people in that place. Absent this identity, wine is just tasty alcohol. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but, to me, bottlings like that really seem to have missed an amazing opportunity.
Some people always want to go to the beach on vacation, others always the mountains. If you’re the kind of person who likes to explore, to have new experiences, then wine offers you endless exploration. Whichever of these describes you, a diverse selection is more likely to contain the very thing you need, even if it’s something different every time. If my definition of a quality wine is applied, then you’ll always have something that is gloriously and uniquely what you’re seeking.
