Millions of wine drinkers rely on tasting notes provided by professional critics to guide their wine-buying. Recently there’s been quite a bit written that’s skeptical about just how reliable such notes are. I’m not going to address this contentious issue today, except to note that one of the serious shortcomings of these notes is the way they come into existence: mostly at large-scale tasting events where an expert will sniff, swirl, sip and draw conclusions on a hundred or more wines, spending no more than a few seconds to scratch a few words on a note pad before speeding blithely on to the next glass.
I don’t doubt that a skilled taster can give a wine a fair evaluation in that amount of time. The problem is that he or she can only really be analyzing a snapshot of it, the thinnest possible slice of a wine’s useful life. It’s the wine version of meeting cute, as modeled by Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable (above) in Frank Capra’s 1934 comedy It Happened One Night.
But this isn’t the way most of us experience the wine we drink. We linger over it at meals, often closing up what’s leftover to enjoy a day or even several days later. In the interim we may take steps to keep the wine as fresh as possible, perhaps by drawing the air out of the top of the bottle with a pump, or adding a squirt of inert gas. The idea seems to be that wine is at its best when fresh, and that, once open, it can only go downhill. Here’s what really happens.
The moment we pull the cork, we disturb the nearly air-tight, self-contained environment the bottle provides. With the first pour, wine is rushed headlong into a different world. Its sudden exposure to air sets in motion a series of changes to its chemical composition, and thus to the way wine presents itself to us. The term that’s usually used to describe this process is evolution. You can think of the changes as describing a curve, with an uptick in composure and expressiveness at the outset, followed by a leveling off and a gradual decline in appeal. In quality wine, the whole process can take days to fully play out. When we periodically revisit a wine as it cycles through these alterations we get a more complete picture of its character and a deeper appreciation for both its virtues and shortcomings.
Practice leaving yourself something to come back to and there’s a good chance you’ll discover features you didn’t suspect existed when your wine was fresh from the bottle. In this way, wines are not unlike persons. As Colbert and Gable discovered, there’s only so much you can learn on a first date.
-Stephen Meuse
Taste, talk, was learn about wine this week in the FKC wine corner . . .
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 14 3-6 PM – UPTICK IN COMPOSURE
2017 Renardat-Fâche Cerdon de Bugey Rosé, $24.95
2015 Mas de l’Ecriture “Emotion” Terrasses du Larzac $24.95
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15 3-6 PM – SHALL WE DO THIS AGAIN?
2017 Azienda Santa Barbara, Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi, $16.95
2017 Cascina Corte Dogliani Classico, $22.95