Were we to pen a biography of wine, we might start out with a chapter entitled The Early Years – as many bios do. There, we’d tell the story of how the wild wine vine was native to a highly circumscribed region of the globe (what is today Georgia, Armenia, Eastern Turkey and Northern Iran). In its initial stages, wine was a homegrown, rural product like any other: important, certainly, but not extraordinary.
Families made their own and consumed it around the table. In subsequent chapters, we’d tell the story of how wine left home, took to the trade routes and became a beverage of urban sophisticates, first in the the cities of the Mesopotamian plain and later around the entire Mediterranean. In these contexts wine sent a different signal: Wine was both exotic and expensive, the consumption of which marked you as something special.
In population centers, wines from all over competed for buyers. Those considered best won renown and fetched top prices. Hierarchies were established and a notion of connoisseurship emerged. It’s silly to think, as many people do, that the best wines never leave the places where they are made. On the contrary, the best wines — like everything else — have always flowed to the places where they’re most appreciated; follwed the money. Once, that may have been Babylon. Today, it’s likely London, New York, Tokyo and Abu Dhabi.
Celebrity changes people, we’re told. It has certainly changed wine. Demand drives prices up. To justify them, producers feel compelled to take steps to make wine that’s even more extraordinary. In some cases, this means genuine improvements to quality; in many others, little more than touting them as ever more desirable totems of wealth, status and influence. This is neither a vicious or virtuous cycle, necessarily, but for us it’s an increasingly irrelevant one. In its place, we propose a more serviceable and practical model. Until a better descriptor comes along, let’s just call it Good Enough Wine.
In this context, good enough points to a set of best practices known to build quality: an appropriate site, conscientious soil management and vine husbandry, minimal dependence on pesticides and none on herbicides, modest yields, hand-harvesting of healthy ripe fruit, natural yeast ferments, minimal additions of sulfur dioxide in the cellar. These factors, employed wholly or in part, produce wines which, despite variation in place and style, are capable of displaying the satisfying concentration, adequate acidity, comfortable texture and appetizing character that are the traits of a Good Enough Wine.
GEWs readily and happily accompany many kinds of dishes and cuisines, not just a targeted list of “ideal” pairings. What this category is devoid of, by definition, are the things that add cost but make no contribution to quality or drinkability: branding, marketing, cachet (broadly speaking); One Percenters in hot pursuit.
Good Enough Wine is distinguished by an especially close quality to value ratio. Cheap, mass produced wine doesn’t fit here because the raw materials are cheap and the winemaking practices questionable. Prestige wines are excluded because their non quality-related costs sink the value part of the equation.
To advocate in favor of this kind of wine is in no sense to lower standards. There is actually precious little Good Enough Wine in this sad old world of ours. We like to think of our little wine corner as an outpost of it.