It all can’t blow you away

1/21/2008 -

There seems to be a tendency in the wine world for people to dismiss wines that don't "blow you away." It really is a silly concept if you think about it. Wine is a beverage that is meant to go with food first and foremost. Most "food" wines as people call them, sometimes in a derogatory fashion, will never blow you away at all. (As an aside I have sat down and drank DRC Romanee St. Vivant with a meal and that was a great food wine!) On their own, these food wines can be quite good but with the right food they can come alive and create a wonderful synergy on your palate. Most wines that blow people away are usually high-alcohol, richly fruited and have the price tag to match. The point of this rant/article is to praise the delicious and affordable natural wines that we love to sell here at CSW - no points, no gobs, just real pleasure...

I am talking about lovely little wines like Bernard Baudry's 2005 Chinon Domaine, a beautifully balanced example of Cabernet Franc from the gravel deposits and clay/limestone hills along the Vienne. It will accompany a Coq au Vin today and will continue to provide pleasure for up to a decade. Another example of a wine like this would be the 2006 Domaine de la Pepiere Muscadet-Sevre-et-Maine sur lie. It may not have a two minute finish or prodigious levels of concentration, but it has subtle citrusy fruit, crisp acidity and zingy minerality which make it complement a wide variety of meals from seafood to poultry and more. I am glad it does what it does, which is refresh your palate, speak of place, and, of course, match impeccably with freshly shucked oysters.

Every now and then I do like to have a peak experience with wine just as much as the next wine geek. Isn't peak experience a much nicer term than "blow away" anyway? But I digress. I just had a lovely bottle of 1971 JJ Prum Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese and it was a peak experience. Just perfect harmony in a bottle. Yet this did not blow me away. I had it with a lovely meal at Tia Pol, a lovely tapas joint in Chelsea, and it went perfectly with the meal, food enhancing the wine, wine enhancing the food and both actually enhanced me a bit too, which all good wine is supposed to do, regardless of pedigree. Yes some people spend X amount of dollars on a bottle of wine and do expect some sort of return. And if they have little experience in the world of imbibing wine the return that they would expect is big, blowsy wine that will "blow them away" with off-the charts levels of concentration and extract. Subtletly will not do the trick here. So alas there will always be that style of wines made, and the world needs them, as much as we need Big Macs and AOL customer service, but that is no reason to dismiss little wines that go great with food, are refreshing and honest and most of all DO NOT BLOW YOU AWAY.