Why I stopped classify wines and began to appreciate them for what they are
Can we really classify wine and expect everything from a certain region to be standarized? Is it right to do so? It is a bit of a journey, but if you are able to depart from this need to put wines into a category you might actually start to enjoy them more
I had the pleasure to work with fine wines for as long as I can remember, and over the years I had very different opinions on different styles, but over time I came to the conclusion that I no longer hold an opinion on anything wine related, styles and region in particular. I came to the conclusion that I just want to enjoy the drink and take each bottle for what it is, without preconception and with a bit more ignorance in regard to wine. You see, we conceive ignorance as a innately bad connotation, but I think when it comes down to judging, it is a very positive approach. It is a liberating feeling and lets you live more in that moment without distraction and feel the experience of every bottle individually. Let me explain.
I do not think ignorance has any room in our time, we are in the Digital Age and with few strokes of our thumb on our beloved mobile we can retrieve any information we possibly want. Google ‘Monet’ on your mobile, and in an afternoon you can claim to be an expert on the French impressionist. And this counts for wine too. Type ‘Bordeaux’ in Google and there you go, you can become an expert on the matter, at least when it comes to sit around the table and talk about it. My opinion is however that ignorance is the best tool when it comes to appreciate wine, as attempting to compare them would inherently reduce our enjoyment of it, and with it the evaluation of the wine.
The turning point for me was at a wine dinner, when I was about to taste a wine from Banyuls. I had research and read everything that was available out there about that denomination, and I was ready to rock it. Then the first sip came, and swiped away all the certainty I had. It was nothing like what I was expecting and nothing like what I read about it. How could that possibly be?? I really enjoyed that wine, and it was bugging me that I was enjoying a wine that did not fit within the standard of that wine region.
You see, working with wines you build up a library of flavors and styles in your brain and you continuously recall them, and if I think carefully enough I can imagine what a Riesling tastes like, or what a Chianti feels like in the palate and so on so forth. I can navigate my brain and recall those flavors and recreate that wine in my imagination, almost as if I was tasting it right now. It take a while to develop this skill, but everyone can do it. In this way, when I am opening a bottle of something I drank before, I can compare it to the standard and I can tell you if that bottle has any defects. I can also tell you, if I drink the same wine over a certain period of time, how it evolves with time. It is a very useful skill and helps me concentrate on other aspect of the wine.
But that bottle of Banyuls completely threw me off my feet and I felt like I had little to say about that wine.
Mind me, I loved it and to this day it is one of the most remarkable drop I have ever drunk. It was a great wine, it had a perfect balance, good structure, a good depth and most importantly was able to do the one thing that only great wines can do: it was able to take me to a place and a region while I was there sitting at the table. Yet I had nothing to say about it, because it was not within the standard of what wines from Banyuls were supposed to be. It had a unique regionality (the expression of a certain region in a wine), it was telling me something about a corner of France, a culture, how hot or cold was the vintage was, but had zero regionality in terms of what the wine was meant to be for the regional standards. As a wine it was as alive and it was talking to us, and my stupid academic approach and my anticipation was completely hindering my enjoyment.
And that was the last time that I approached wine without ignorance. I have grown out of that necessity to classify wines and to put them in different categories, mainly because I realized that too many times I was wrong. I now enjoy each bottle for what it is, and I realized that there is a particular kind of beauty in not feeling the need to put it in a box and compare it to other wine I previously drank… it is the beauty of accepting what nature and man conspired together for a year or more and accept each and every wine for what they are, letting your instinct and their character telling a story rather than deliver a boring definition read behind a 15 inch screen.
I still loooooove to read about wine, their history, their climate, the soil and the producers and anything that is wine related, even review at times are really interesting. Sometimes sitting at a table with storytellers and listen to them telling you about the magic of wine is the most incredible experience you can have. But I don’t let any of that come in between me and my enjoyment for wine any longer.
I have learnt that ignorance sometimes is a good, particularly if we are talking about wine as it strips us of any expectation we have. We should let the wine do the talking (literally…) and enjoy it for what it is, not for what it is supposed to be in our head. And, maybe, sometimes, we should take that same approach into our daily life.
— Michele Percivati
