The question of what makes a great wine has likely been around since thousands of years before the birth of Christ. The Romans, in fact, had some answers that resonate today, citing a lack of adulterants and naturally lower vineyard yields.

But how do we know if a wine is good, great, outstanding or none of the above? We can rely upon the Wine Spectator or Robert Parker, the most influential wine critic of all, to tell us which wine is best or measure quality by the price of the wine as a function of demand. There is no guarantee, however, that these guides will lead us to a wine for our own palate. In any case, what is the point of using prices or reviews as guides without an understanding of the criteria upon which they are judged?

Parker readily admits, in the movie Mondo Vino, that he simply rates whichever wines he likes with a high score. He makes no claim to be objective, beyond the principles of blind tasting, nor does he claim that his palate is in any way more valid than someone else’s when making a subjective determination. We can assume that he has a better shot than any of us at estimating alcohol levels or picking out which two glasses of a series of glasses are the same wine, but his opinions about which wines are good may not be much more useful to you the opinion of your son used to drinking boxed Franzia in his dorm room.

The use of price as the final arbiter of quality was the method of the 1855 classification of Bordeaux. The wine traders of Bordeaux rated the chateaux of the region by price, separating them into first through fifth growths, with only four chateaux being listed as fifth growth, though Chateau Mouton-Rothschild was promoted to this category in 1973. This notable promotion aside, the classification is essentially static. Yet it is still a great influence on the prices of Bordeaux, though many Americans would find little to love in some of these incredibly expensive bottles. How likely would you be to purchase a $300 bottle, which you would have to age at least a decade, only to find that it may still be too acidic or tannic and that this wine is nothing like the fruit-driven Australian and Californian wines you love so much?

So are there some solid, unchanging principles that indicate that a wine is of quality? Karen MacNeil, author of The Wine Bible, dedicates a section of her book to explaining what she believes these principles to be. She includes varietal characteristic, harmony, expressiveness, connectedness, integration and complexity. According to her, even if you don’t like a wine, you can, if trained well enough, determine its quality, which is not subjective.

The staff at University of California at Davis, the greatest wine research center in the country and maybe the world, generally disagrees. According to them, wine tastes are a fashion with styles coming and going and high-dollar fads like heavily-oaked chardonnays, older-vintage ports and merlot-based blends from Pomerol all eventually fade.

Since many centuries before the 1855 classification, the Greeks, with their ancient love of wine, have enjoyed retsina, an aromatized wine treated with pine resin during fermentation that would cause most of the world’s wine critics to gag.

I conducted a blind-tasting experiment at my own home with a group of low-budget wine drinkers, who rarely consume something that is worth more than $8 a bottle. Those wines which would score highest among critics were consistently beaten out by wines that are distinctly flawed. I’ve also noticed that when selling wine, the more a consumer knows about a wine, the more the wine is appreciated as a good wine when it is drank.

So, after all this flip-flopping about what makes a good wine, what is my answer? What makes a wine great is the joy that it brings. For me, wine usually brings me joy because of its appeal to all of my senses, with my sensual faculties as the judge of that. Wine can also provide a particularly pleasant intoxication, which is also a definite factor. Of course, a wine can pin together a good dinner and, together with good company, can play an important part in creating some of the most memorably happy times of my life.

Not that there is any shame in buying a wine for reasons other than the taste. For my parents’ anniversary, for example, I wouldn’t buy them a $12 bottle of Argentinean Malbec, no matter how good it tastes, even if I know they would love it. Why give them wine that is made on a large scale with little of the love that they feel for each other and no association with the festivity of a wedding anniversary? No, I am almost certainly going to give them a bottle of sparkling wine, likely Champagne. They know what Dom Perignon is, and revere it as something special. On the other hand, they would be delighted by an Iron Horse Wedding Cuvee, though they have never heard of Iron Horse, because it tastes great and has an appropriate name. In either case, I think that I, my parents, Robert Parker and price lists would agree that these are high-quality wines, perfect for two people celebrating a wedding anniversary.

Let me know what you think makes a good wine…

Posted under Thoughts on Wine