100 points! | New Brief #254

There is no such thing as perfection. At least not in wine. If anything, the perfect wine is the one you currently have in your glass. Yet one gets the impression that many are looking for the perfect wine or the perfect occasion to drink a wine from the cellar when it has reached perfect maturity. And achieve the perfect food and wine combination.

If anything can scare away would-be wine drinkers (and the wine industry needs new consumers!), this is it. The pursuit of perfection. And the complexity (we come to that later).

Maybe a wine that costs a little more (much more) and has a famous name is more perfect? If it costs several hundreds, surely it must be close to perfect, right? But the value probably lies more in the text on the label than in the liquid in the bottle. You easily get the impression that you must spend a lot of money to get a delicious wine. That is not correct.

The only way to judge a wine honestly and without preconceived notions is to taste the wine blind, completely blind, without knowing anything (anything at all!) about what is in the glass. Those who give 99 or 100 points to wines seldom taste them blind. They almost always know roughly what they have in the glasses – if you are sitting in a château in Bordeaux, or at a tasting with prestige cuvées in Champagne or at a themed tasting for an article for The Wine Magazine – it is not blind even if you do not know exactly what you have in each particular glass. And so, the score will be accordingly.

And then this complexity issue. We just sat in a telephone queue with the bank for around an hour to arrange a simple payment, and three times, we had to give them our social security number, company id number (two different), plus various other strange “control questions”. Not something that made one want to deal with a bank. Too complicated. Not infrequently it feels as if wine plays in the same league.

Many self-proclaimed wine experts make it sound complicated and complex to choose wine for food when, in fact, it is simple and something that people have done for centuries without anxiety. Before transporting most things worldwide became easy, people drank the region’s wines with its food, the most natural thing in the world. Was it good? I am almost sure it was.

How did we end up making wine and food a complex question? Why have we failed to convey that wine is great to drink with food and that combining the two is not complicated? If the wine industry and wine writers are now worried about declining consumption, we should start by NOT saying it is challenging to combine food and wine. Because it is not. If you want, you can make it a science (well, a pseudoscience). But otherwise, you pick a wine you like or are curious about and drink it with good food.

It is as simple as that.

Not only consumers but also producers strive for perfection, to make their wines better and better, year after year. Should we blame the 100-point scale that claims that perfect wines exist (which they don’t, see the first sentence) or just ambition, that they believe that their wine can constantly get better and better? Of course, it is crucial to define what ” better” means; it could be small details in the wine that the winemaker notices but not the regular wine drinker.

Is wine like athletes? Records are constantly broken in various disciplines in the World Championships and the Olympics. It is not only because the athletes run faster, jump higher and so on, but also because their equipment – shoes, boats, poles – is designed to enable them to perform better. Is wine’s equivalent of sprint shoes a new state-of-the-art peristaltic pump? We have seen some advanced cellars during our tours this autumn. I remember some fermentation tanks I had not seen before that were designed differently to provide different types of skin extraction depending on the grape variety. Did they make the wine more perfect? Perhaps. It did taste delicious.

On the other hand, in the Douro Valley, some people think they make better wine with foot treading. And they do make delicious wines. If it’s better than non-foot treaded wines, I cannot say. And anyway, all producers, regardless of cellar equipment, believe that perfection is only achieved if you have perfect grapes at harvest.

The perfect wine does exist. But it can be any wine that turns into something perfect under certain favourable circumstances. Thanks to who you drink it with and where you drink it.

Travel season

Now we have made it through almost all the autumn tours, Champagne, Mallorca, Portugal, Austria and more. Only one remains, our new tour to the sherry district of Andalusia. Fortunately, they are not expecting rain there next week.

Winter wine tours

A tour that is really special is our South America wine tour that takes you to Chile and Argentina in January. It is perhaps our most exotic trip juxtaposing these two Latin American countries and also an absolutely fantastic journey over the Andes. If you want to come along, you need to act NOW. Booking extended to let more wine enthusiasts join. Book now.

We have two other very special tours this winter. First, The Great South Africa Tour, which takes you to almost every wine region in South Africa. A unique insight into South Africa’s wines that no other tour can give you. Book now.

The third winter tour is to New Zealand. I should probably also call it “The Great” New Zealand tour. From north to south over 16 days, you get a view of this new and modern but far-away wine country that few others have. Be one of the first to realise that New Zealand has so much more to offer than “just” sauvignon blanc. Not least nature and culture. A so charming wine country. Book before 15 November.

More info on our wine tours here. “World’s Top Wine Tours“. Tours with the people who know wine and who have an unrivalled experience of wine and tours.

Travel in wine regions with someone you trust.

Enjoy the Brief!

Britt & Per

Wine editors to the national encyclopedia, Forbes.com contributors, award-winning wine book authors, wine tour advisors to the UN and national wine organisations, wine judges … and, above all, passionate wine travellers.

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