Michael Bauer over at his SF Gate wine blog posts a short interview with wine critic Karen MacNeil, the author of The Wine Bible. He asked her what qualities a great wine possesses, and here are the 7 that she identified:
1. The presence of varietal characteristics in the wine.
2. Balance or what she calls “the perfect tension of opposites.”
3. Integration or a harmony between all the elements.
4. Expressiveness, which she explains as “pinpoint clarity in all these flavors.”
5. Complexity, demonstrated when a taster needs to go back to taste, and each time the wine sequentially reveals more.
6. Correctness, meaning the wine should evoke a sense of place.
7. Finally, a great wine will elicit an emotional response. A great wine, she says, can literally make you cry.
I agree with all of it, with the one small gripe that I’ve usually heard “correctness” used when referencing varietal typicity rather than an expression of terroir. I’ve also never had a wine make me cry. Bummer for me I guess.
As I mentioned earlier on this here winery blog (a little SEO there), I visited Davis today to see the results of some research I was able to participate in. I’ll be posting about it in more detail later, but one of the interesting bits to come out of the presentation was that wine growers and producers grade wines more harshly than wine critics do. Of the 20 pinots and 20 Sauvignon Blancs tasted, only one was rated higher by growers than by the professional wine critics.
Notably, not one pinot was rated over 90 on anyone’s card (I’m pretty sure this is right, I’ll verify when I get my hands on the slides), though wine critics scored most of the pinots in the 80 point range. Conversely wine growers and producers scored many wines 70 and below.
MJ helped explain why the scores were low. Apparently she was only able to accept wines from producers who were willing to donate 4 cases due to the amount of tasting and testing that was going to be done. That rules out small producers who simply can’t afford to part with 48 bottles of wine, and small producers are the ones that typically produce the best pinots.
It also helps explain why there were no Russian River or Oregon pinots in the tasting. Most producers in our area and up in Oregon have vanishingly small case production and need to sell most of their wines to stay in business. As an aside though, I would like to see more local producers step up and help UC Davis out for all the valuable research and assistance they’ve given to the industry (easy for me to say I suppose, since I have no wine to give at the moment).
Bottom line of MJ’s research is this: the wine growers, wine producers and wine critics were in general agreement. None of the wines we tasted made us cry.
