Love that Clark Smith

Really? This just baffles me. The only way I can make sense of this is to assume that you don't think that any technological process can actually correct or improve a wine. Because if it really does work, why would you settle for something "less than" when you could fix a problem?
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Yeah, really. Call me an uninformed lush (stand in line please), but I think, in a very basic speak way, we all "know" what we mean by technology and trying to extend the continuum to winemaking techniques of, say, the 1940's is a category mistake. It sounds rational at first gloss but doesn't really stand up to extended analysis.

So, yup, I don't want the correction or improvement. I want it to be what it would have been "back in tha day." Warts and all. That's just me. Luckily for the wine biz, I don't move markets.

Part of this may be because... as an imbiber, you don't know what a great vintage is unless you suffer through bad vintages. If every vintage is at minimum "acceptable" how the hell do you get excited about being blessed by the LUCK of a truly great vintage? Wine lovers sing the songs of greatness about certain vintages in certain regions *because* we keep knocking up against subpar vintages in-between. Contrast is being diminished. Contrast teaches us deep lessons. We gets stoopid as a result.

I don't want to collect wines from any given producer or region *every* year -- I want to get my neck hairs standing on end about hunting down a certain superlative vintage because I *know* its like will not be seen again for some time...

Again, I don't consider the economic impact on the winery and tend to ignore such.
 
originally posted by Marc Hanes:
Part of this may be because... as an imbiber, you don't know what a great vintage is unless you suffer through bad vintages. If every vintage is at minimum "acceptable" how the hell do you get excited about being blessed by the LUCK of a truly great vintage? Wine lovers sing the songs of greatness about certain vintages in certain regions *because* we keep knocking up against subpar vintages in-between. Contrast is being diminished. Contrast teaches us deep lessons. We gets stoopid as a result.
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Fair enough. Not for me, but maybe it works for you.

And just for fun - does this idea extend to the rest of the things in your life? Would you wish to have some percentage of restaurant meals to be bad in order to be able to better savor the great meals? Would you hope to have a bad car now and then so as to better appreciate the goods ones you buy? How about condoms? OK, that went a bit too far - sorry.

I guess I fall on the "I'd like fewer disappointments in my life" side of the argument. Contrast doesn't have to be so black and white for me.
 
does this idea extend to the rest of the things in your life?
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With things primarily driven by my aesthetic sensibilities, the answer is a strong yes. I consider wine in this realm.

I listen to a lot of shit music, I have like 36,000 songs in my iTunes, many waiting for me to listen and delete. So, when I find some band who actually rocks the rock I get excited. This is a peak in one's otherwise quotidian existence.

Same for books, you can read lots of ho-hum crap. Then you read DeLillo's "White Noise" or Max Frisch's "I'm Not Stiller" and the rest of the crap falls away.

For better or worse, I could give a crap about food.

I don't view a car as an aesthetic experience. It is a practical issue. Like buying a washer/dryer that doesn't fuck up your clothes and gets them clean. Or a microwave that doesn't go on the fritz after two years.

Of course, what is one person's "aesthetic experience" may be another's "practical experience" and vice versa. If the people conversing do not agree on which bucket that which being conversed upon falls into, well, chances are you will talking past each other. And I can't offer a consistent solution to that.

I do very much like hot chicks. Gamine, skinny, gaunt. Concave. Does that help?
 
Jim, were you ever of a mind to read philosophy, I would recommend Levinas. I'm sure there's some sort of "Levinas reader" out there with both primary text and explanation. I think you'd like him.
 
Brian and Marc,

I think I don't share your assumption about vintages being just better or worse (I bang my multivariate drum again). Vintages are different. If you have to assign points to them, you get a linear scale, but that doesn't capture the different utility of, say, 2006 vs. 2007 Puzelat romorantin. You would serve them with different food. Maybe at a different time of year. But you don't *have* to call one "better" in an absolute sense and think that you mean it (unless you are the vlm and are tapped into the cosmic convergent Truth and all). 1928 is a better vintage of Leoville Poyferre than 1929 today, because the '29 is OTH. But probably for the first 40 years you would rather have had the '29. '05 is a "better" vintage in a bunch of Burgundy than '04, unless you want to drink the wines anytime soon. Similarly in Bourgeuil. The reverse in Muscadet.

Variation in character may not imply variation in quality, at least in regions where I drink a lot of wine. Quality isn't univariate. And so on....

The variation is interesting and appeals to the geek in me. Sometimes it is qualitative to the point that the vintage was like '80 in Vouvray, and it's really tough to drink. Or it's like '02 in Vouvray and everything is bliss. But sometimes it's just interesting to have an '03 Haut Lieu non-greffe demi-sec and think, gee, I don't love this over the '02, but what an interesting animal to have to compare. Maybe '02 is "better," fwiw. But maybe it's nice to have a few '03s in the cellar too for the light they shed on the '02s (and the '80s).
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
1928 is a better vintage of Leoville Poyferre than 1929 today, because the '29 is OTH.
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Nice to know. These are the current vintages on the shelves in Pennsylvania.

V[intage v]ariation in character may not imply variation in quality, at least in regions where I drink a lot of wine. Quality isn't univariate. And so on....

The variation is interesting and appeals to the geek in me...
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And while I'm here, let me just add, "Amen to that."
 
Vintages are different. If you have to assign points to them, you get a linear scale, but that doesn't capture the different utility
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There's nothing worse than a kind hearted soul who tries to split the difference.

C'mon, Joe, yeah, any given bottle will be different. Even if from the same case. In the same vein, the 2003 may offer some charms that the 2002 does not offer, and vice versa. It's hard to deny this, especially if the empirical evidence (i.e., open bottle) is in front of you. No one, self included, is going to say if the wine is from Vintage X it HAS to be superior to Vintage Y because of vintage characteristics, etc.

If you want to see these assorted wines as arrows in a quiver, that's your right and more power to you. I'll just ask Tom to stick a few of your bottles in the microwave for three minutes and we're all good. But that's not what I was getting at. You are still hewing to the practical side of things, "utility" and such. I am talking about aesthetic experience, which at once encapsulates specific empirical examples as well as non-empirical extrapolations. No one with a brain doesn't understand that one vintage would *generally* age better than another in dialogic shorthand but that's the freaking fun of the game. I don't think that anyone, self included, is saying that one vintage is *objectively* and for all time superior to the next, drinking windows and horizons of specific, actual wines have a natural part in the discussion.

If you want to simplistically reduce it to an apposite better or worse dichotomy, that's fine and dandy. But it's splitting hairs in the face of a broader argument. The discussion between Loring (who is a swell guy) and myself here has to remain fairly general to maintain coherence. If you want to get granular and talk about this producer or that vineyard in vintages X and Y it is an entirely different discussion. If you want to put forth that vintage generalizations have no merit, sure, go ahead and do so. But such vintage shorthand does have utility in wine discussions and, maybe kinda perhaps, we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I am in fact drinking Australian Shiraz tonight.
 
But I think his argument is at once powerful and subtle, and not quite as Marc states. Using a single, linear dimension elides the type and amount of variation between vintages (and wines). I'm all for vintage shorthand, but would prefer it in multiple dimensions rather than just "better" or "worse", because I find the latter distinction uninformative at best (and usually misleading).
 
Quote: I think 25+ year old puncheons make a spiffy container for ageing most reds.

Bruce: God bless you! You're the only other American winemaker I've ever known to express such a thought!
 
Yixin's kind exegesis is quite fair.

I think you might ask, "what's this wine for?" Rather than, "how can this be 'better'".
 
Using a single, linear dimension elides the type and amount of variation between vintages (and wines). I'm all for vintage shorthand, but would prefer it in multiple dimensions rather than just "better" or "worse"
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And hence my qualifier, "If you want to get granular and talk about this producer or that vineyard in vintages X and Y it is an entirely different discussion."

Discuss.

Joe: Wine for me is for analyzing, which puts me in the minority. I don't really think about "what is going to go best with the glazed duck and asparagus tonight?" But you knew that already methinks. I can generally answer that question but it is not paramount to me.

Steve: Did you mean Brian and not Bruce?
 
I hear the cone a spinnin'
It's rollin' 'round the blend,
And I ain't seen the sunshine,
Since, I don't know when,
I'm stuck in Folsom Cellar,
And time keeps draggin' on,
But that cone keeps a-spinnin',
On down into Chalone.
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
I hear the cone a spinnin'
It's rollin' 'round the blend,
And I ain't seen the sunshine,
Since, I don't know when,
I'm stuck in Folsom Cellar,
And time keeps draggin' on,
But that cone keeps a-spinnin',
On down into Chalone.
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I m'Oxed some wine in Reno, just to watch it die.
 
originally posted by Rahsaan:
originally posted by Marc Hanes:

Steve: Did you mean Brian and not Bruce?
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I think he meant Bruce.
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Right you are, right you are, further back in the thread...

Forgot to note before that answering the question "what's this wine for" can prove a very expensive and time consuming approach to wine. Given financial finitude and temporal finitude it's hard to consistently find a legitimate use for wines from "vintages one would normally not care for," this comment based on (a) one's prior experience and (b) the need to *sometimes* let generalizations lead one in one way rather than another.

If one had the opportunity, it would be great to sample all the Vouvrays of 2012. But if the "general consensus" is that it was a washout and subpar vintage, why spend extra $$$ tasting wine after wine with similar results? To find the exception? The exceptions, as well as the other "subpar" wines, may have some practical uses (at the dinner table, etc.) but I can't afford to find out what they are through experimentation. Hence, the utility to me of vintage generalizations. I don't have the extra dinero for a cellar of contrasts...

Exeunt stage left.
 
Marc,
Just curious; what vintage in the past was a "complete wash-out?"
And if you have a candidate or two, how do you know?
Best, Jim
 
originally posted by Florida Jim:
Marc,
Just curious; what vintage in the past was a "complete wash-out?"
And if you have a candidate or two, how do you know?
Best, Jim
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Methinks I am getting painting into a corner here, hah! As they teach you in grad school, always take the weakest argument you can to make your point. Never go out on a limb unnecessarily. I guess that's why I am ABD, I never learn...

But why not... Let's say 2002 in the Northern Rhone. I think it is conversationally legitimate to call it a complete washout. In saying this do I intend to say that there is not a single wine of merit produced in the Northern Rhone in 2002? No I do not. And how could I defend such a statement unless I empirically tasted every single wine made in the Northern Rhone in 2002? Unless I did so I would always be open to refutation via the unsampled wines. Not to mention the spectre of personal preference.

I tasted quite a few 2002 Northern Rhone wines and found them less appealing than say, the same wines in 1999. This was sufficient for me to make the decision to allocate my time and little money to other wines available on the market at the same time the 2002 Northern Rhones were for sale. The law of diminishing returns kicked in for me. I used my money conservatively and purchased other wines instead.

I return to the topic of finitude in terms of time and money. There's a world of wine, why focus on a region that is not generally up to snuff in a given vintage? If someone asked me, "Hanes, how come you're not buying any 2002 Northern Rhone wines?" I'd say "Dude, they all pretty much suck." I believe that my interlocutor would understand what I'm saying. She might even say back, "I totally know what you mean, I tried a few myself and decided to spend my money on German Riesling instead." This, to me, would be a perfectly normal conversation.

Typing proleptically, you might say that some are not ageworthy but nice "luncheon wines." This might be the case for some imbibers. Especially if the price was a third of what it would normally be. Or that the characteristics of the 2002 Northern Rhone wines allow you to pair it with food which would not be suitable to, again say, the same 1999 wines. Chacun a gout. All I could say is, it's your coin, spend it as you like. I'll take a free glass if you offer it but I'm not buying it myself.

Going back to a point I attempted to make earlier in the thread, the 2002 Northern Rhone wines have heuristic value in contrasting with the same wines in 1999 and so on. Via these contrasts you can teach yourself what is the pinnacle the wine can reach ("ay carumba") and the nadir to which it can fall. That is highly useful.

But it is also more useful at the beginning of the learning curve than further on down the road. I know what crap Syrah tastes like (should I add the "to me" caveat?). If 2011 weather, etc. in the Northern Rhone was identical to 2002, I'd pass big time. Sure, I'd taste a few at trade tastings or if a pal had a bottle open. But I wouldn't buy any. Too RISKY. And there would definitely be others wines I am experienced with available at the same time and I'd rather sample them. I don't have the money to taste the whole Huet lineup in a single vintage (not picking on Joe) and then decide which ones I want for the cellar and which ones I don't. I'll taste one or two and then probably buy an assortment based on past experience or advice and put it in the cellar untasted.

Call me crazy, but I think my position here is fairly mainstream. Hence I should not have posted it here.

I'm typing this at work! They're paying me to type about wine! (cf. King Missile)
 
Marc,
I understand the part about diminishing returns.
And the part about comparing highs and lows.
I'm not real good at translating the rest but, frankly, I think the part I got answers my question - and pretty well, I might add.

But . . .
. . . in what must surely be an attempt to get the last word in - I bought several cases of the 2002 Allemand, Cornas. I did this not to compare vintages or create context, but because I thought the wine delicious and got it for a reduced price.

Okay, so maybe I also got your point about limited resourses.
Best, Jim
 
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