wine critics

[Sir Tokyo Sexwale]

Wine criticism bunk?

 

I've written something for today's G2 about Tim Hanni – that's Han-eye, by the way – the turncoat American wine god who now says the industry that nurtured him is riddled with misunderstanding and greed.

 

Are you surprised? I've long had my doubts about that murkily arcane world. It's not just the fraud and the folly: it's that almost nothing is as fiendishly individual, as implacably subjective, as the taste of a glass of wine.

 

One person will tell you that such-and-such a bottle is better than another. It might have a copperplate label, it might be French, and it'll almost certainly be more expensive. But for all that, you could still hate it. Depending on your palate, a wine can come with more gongs than a Tibetan health spa and still do nothing for you. It's happened to me, and it's probably happened to you. That's why I think there might be a grain of truth, and perhaps more, in what Hanni's saying.

 

He argues that nothing makes Moët objectively "better" than Lambrini: it's all just pomp and profit. And that should give punters who have been made to feel ignorant a shot of confidence. Ignore the edicts thundering from Olympus, he says: just trust your senses and taste your way through. If he's right, a wine critic is just someone with a tongue and a thesaurus.

 

I must say I've never seen the point of tasting notes that babble of wet slate and pencil shavings with abstract nouns sprinkled like pixie dust over the real, gluggable, sofa-staining plonk. Most wine writing has all the grace and precision of carpet bombing. And the might of Robert Parker, a man who moves markets with a sip and a spit, is unnatural, absurd, and resented by many of the wine-buffs and merchants I've spoken with.

 

Something strikes me as equally odd about the methodologies and justifications for matching food and wine. Hanni believes that red wine works with steak because salt on the meat improves the drink's taste – it's got nothing to do with the cow. So I tried this, tasting a Burgundy with salted and unsalted steak – and the wine was noticeably better when I'd reached for the Maldon. People will say that 'regionality' is somehow crucial to matching food and wine, that Muscadet chimes with oysters because they come from the same wet and windy part of France, and so share undefined, ethereal bonds of time and terroir. What tripe. It would mean there was almost no point to New World wines at all; it's a horribly eugenic thought, antithetical to innovation and experiment.

 

For all that, though, I do prefer champagne to Lambrini. I think I'd say the same blindfolded. But I'll never know whether that's because I was born that way, or if I've been inculcated in a set of assumptions and cliches about image and class and price and value. Ultimately, it seems we taste everything with our muscles, genes and memories, which explains why people foster a lifelong love of yum-yums or macaroni cheese.

 

What do you think - is Hanni right or wrong? Can we learn anything useful from wine critics, and is there anything in matching food and wine? Are expensive bottles worth the cash?

[Sion]

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[Sir Tokyo Sexwale]

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[Jonesy]

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[Nerik]

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[ManxRed]

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