the connection. Otherwise wine becomes little more than a plaything. Don't misconstrue me; there's nothing morally wrong with making wine anywhere you please. I just don't think it's inherently fascinating or desirable. It rather adds to the incoherence of the world. And whatever it is, it ain't glamorous.
Grace: This quality can apply to wines of various degrees of strength, body, or ripeness, and it can be found in both polished and “rustic” wines. It allies to modesty, but not every modest wine is graceful. Grace is rather a form of tact, a kindness; it rejects coarseness and is even more dismissive of power merely for its own sake.
Balance (and its siblings, Harmony and Proportion): Balance is not to be confused with symmetry, as there are asymmetrical yet balanced wines. Balance is simply the palpable sense that no single component appears garish or inappropriate. It is a quality of flavor that draws you away from the parts and toward the whole. It is a chord of flavor in which no single note is out of tune. If you hear any one of its component notes, it's probably for the wrong reason.
In a balanced wine the flavors seem preordained to exist in precisely that configuration. You sit by the stream. The water is clean and cold. The mountain peaks are clear. There are no beer cans or cigarette butts in sight. You've been hiking for a few hours and you feel loose and warm and hungry. You unpack your lunch and take the first bite, and then you see your sweetheart coming up the path, smiling. The air is soft and cool under a gentle sun. Things are absolutely good. Happens, what, once in a lifetime? In a balanced wine it happens with every sip.
Deliciousness: It is strange to have to mention this, but deliciousness is hardly ever spoken of or written about. A wine can meet every other criterion for success and yet not taste good. Then what? Do we outgrow appreciating deliciousness? Do we cultivate more auspicious tastes? Well, poo on us. Deliciousness ignites something in us that delights at the scent of pleasure. Is it wise to quash this thing? What else dies with it?
Complexity (and its siblings, Ambiguity and Evanescence): There is explicit complexity, wherein each component of a wine can be discerned and we are delighted by how many there are and how they interact. There is also implicit complexity, in which we sense there is something present but oblique to our view. Finally, in the few best wines there is a haunting sense of something being shown to us that has nothing to do with discrete “flavor.” This is the noblest of wine's attributes, but the hardest to contrive by design. It seems to be a by-product of certain vintners” philosophies and practices, but neither formula nor recipe exists; this aspect is found when it is found, often unexpectedly. Some wines are complex in themselves, and it stops there. Other wines seem to embody life's complexity, and this is when we see the view from the sky.
Modesty: This denotes a wine that seeks to be a companion to your food, your state of mind, or the social occasion, as opposed to a wine that needs to dominate your entire field of attention. Some wines deserve your entire field of attention, but they don't need to shout for it. Modest wines are endangered in these times, when power is overvalued. Just because your text is written in boldface doesn't mean you have anything to say. Modest wines are tasty, tactful, and confident, and they don't show off.
Persistence (and its siblings, Depth and Intensity): This attribute properly comes after the ones cited above, since a persistent unpleasant wine is no one's idea of fun. A good wine is elevated by persistence, a bad wine diminished. Nor does persistence have to do with volume; the best wines are the ones that whisper persistently. We misunderstand the idea of intensity because we conflate it with volume. Bellowing flavor isn't intense; it's adolescent and irritating. Intensity arises not from a will to express, but from the thing that is being expressed.
Paradox: I can scarcely recall a great wine that didn't in some sense amaze me, that didn't make my palate feel as if it were whipsawed between things that hardly ever travel together. My shorthand term for that experience is paradox; again, this component is in the hands of the angels and doesn't appear susceptible to human contrivance, but when it is found it conveys a lovely sense of wonder: How can these things coexist in a single wine? And not only coexist, but spur each other on; power with grace, depth with brilliance….
Aspects of Flavor: The Ones That Matter Least
Power
Sweetness
Ripeness
Concentration
It's not that these aspects don't matter at all, but too many think they matter too much. They appear near the bottom of my scale of values, but they do appear.
Power: Power matters only when you're planning a menu and selecting the wines. You want to align the power of the dish with that of the wine, so one doesn't subdue the other. But power inherently is a quality neither desirable nor undesirable; it needs to justify its existence by combining with grace, distinctiveness, and deliciousness. Too often it stops at mere incoherent assertiveness: I'm putting my fist through this wall because I can!
Sweetness: In the wine world there's no single component of flavor subjected to more obsessive dogma and doctrine. The prevailing (and I'd say pathological) aversion to sweetness has diminished many wines. Sweetness figures in menu planning and in forecasting the way a wine might age. It is sometimes helpful. Like acidity, tannin, or any other single facet of flavor, sweetness matters only when there is too much or too little of it. Yet we focus on it in isolation, insisting that it be reduced or removed at all cost, unaware that we are misguided and have taken balance, length, and charm away from our wines. Sweetness should be present when it is called for and absent when it is not, as determined by the flavors of individual wines and not by any theory we have promulgated a priori.
And a lot of us are confused about sweetness. I'm here to help. There's the sweetness of an apple, and there's the sweetness of a Twinkie. They're not the same!
Ripeness: I refer especially to physiological ripeness, sometimes called phenolic ripeness, which is seen when a grape's skins and seeds are ripe. It would seem to be desirable, but the singular pursuit of physiological ripeness as an absolute has wrecked many wines by condemning them to a power they can't support, and it has removed the nuance possible when wines are made from grapes of different degrees of ripeness. When ripeness is sufficient, how do we assume overripeness will be preferable? It only brings more alcohol and an infantile swaddle of fruit.
Concentration: Concentration matters only after this question is answered: What are we concentrating? Tannin, viscosity, alcohol? Are these things we want even more of? In itself, concentration is merely an adjective, not a virtue.
Taking a Stand: What Is Not Important
Why begin by discussing the unimportant? you might ask. Because these ephemera take up far too much of wine discourse, deflecting us from more important matters. I remember Gore Vidal's famous answer to the question of why academic quarrels were so fierce: because the stakes were so low.
You might expect the wine world to be a gentle and civilized place, but you'd be wrong. You'd think habitual wine drinkers would be less querulous than other folks. Wrong again. Then you'd get tired of always being wrong, and realize that wine can be a lightning rod for many other debates—or arguments—that are conducted with humanity's usual standards of skill, intellect, civility, and tolerance. In other words, it's Mailer versus Vidal, minus the erudition.
