originally posted by .sasha:
originally posted by Yule Kim:
CRB L'Arpent Rouge
This is it.
yiz.
there are more wines that are truly singular in this way. the chances are though, readers of this bored won't encounter them.
it isn't that there aren't others out there that share didier and catherine's understanding of farming and vineyard expression. it's just that the likelihood is that you won't come across them. (an obvious factor in this for our new world readers is the loss of a rarely talented, much-bigmouthed visionary who was willing to put his heart and often beautifully dubious rhetorical skills into selling the most singular of ideas: that you don't have to express quality differences with spooge.)
i'll admit now that i'm temperamentally deeply averse to the question posed at the outset. but, even with that said up front like, reading through most of this stuff has me thinking along the lines of "oh my dear fucking lord, not more mollydooker for hipsters..." (no disrespect to sparky's finest, obviously, chris; though, actually, for the most part, fuck the rest of you.)
the fact is, the majority of the stuff you are talking about is just the hispter equivalent of gobby viagra driven bukkake wine. oil thick monster shakes that slap the face and say, "hello!!!! i'm here!!!! geddit!??!!"
the only difference is that they are bio, or orange, or check some other box to reassure you that they have been made by a dude who hugs his terroir on a regular basis; ergo, you gets to have teh taste... and, uh, sure, this shit will let you take refuge in the fact that you have enough credibility to get past teh ebobz and newbz in a pissing contest, but it still marks you down as a rube who is missing what matters by a mile. (and don't you be shaking yo head at the back there, sucka, because this means you more than anyone else.)
question is, does it matter?
it depends: is this all you want? if singular is just another word for 'victorian freak show,' then congrats. you have made a progression from teh ebobz, and acquired another layer of self-dulusion in the process; and for a small fee, the fatcademy will forward you a signed degree to commemorate this big step up in teh wine knowledgez (tm).
if this is not the goal, then, thankfully, there is an alternative: you see, there really are truly singular wines that escape the circle of grotesqueness that we, the entitled mother fucking consumer, drives. crb is one truly great exponent of this approach; and in far more than fairness, truchot was another. see, there are growers who make wines that are truly singular in the sense that they are "real" in a way that much of the shit described in this thread misses by miles. growers whose sense of reality leads them to putting out the fancy shit that tastes almost exactly the same as the less fancy shit.
it isn't obviously singular at all. only somehow, if you pay attention, and maybe even set yourself towards learning some, it tastes more refined. and better. and that, dear reader, is what makes it singular. (for me, one of the coolest things about truchot was the lack of any markedly obvious differences between the villages and the 1er cru and the gc. the difference was in the terroir, and the farming of same, and in its subtle expression through balance, etc., and not in any spooge that was added to reassure you, the consumer, that you were getting what you paid for in the higher appellations.)
expressing quality without adding the training wheels of spooge, "extra" and "personality" is the hardest thing a winemaker can ever seek to do. the will and guts and sheer stupidity to make this kind shit is rare -- many winemaking dudes that you meet who really care and would really like to do this sort of thing never will have the confidence in themselves to even try -- and this is why it is that when you stumble across such a wine, it really does represent the most singular expression of terroir and winemaking that you will ever encounter.
shit is also the hardest thing to sell. it puts the pressure back on you, the consumer: have you the experience and wisdom to appreciate why the honest dude who also hugs his terroir on a regular basis made his wine like this, and why he did so, and why he honestly values it so much, albeit that the differences between his fancy shit and the baby cuvee are really so subtle?
which is to say that mostly, this thread makes depressing reading.
fatboy.