What
makes one wine great, and another just good?
One of the aspects of the wine trade that most
fascinates outsiders is the disparity in prices between ordinary and
great wines. Two winegrowers, just a few miles apart, grow grapes and
harvest them. They crush them, let them ferment, press them and
transfer the juice to oak barrels. A couple of years later, when they
are standing on the shelves of a wine shop, one is a basic claret
selling for £6, the other a classed growth Médoc selling for 10
times this price, and which isn’t supposed to be drunk for another
decade, at least.
Let’s take another example. We’re standing in the
famous Montrachet vineyard, home to the world’s most sought after
Chardonnay. Price disparities are apparent here in at least two
dimensions. First, if we travel a few hundred yards down the gentle
slope and cross the N74, there are vineyards that make Bourgogne Blanc
to be sold well below a tenner a bottle. You don’t get Montrachet
that costs less than £100 a pop. But there’s another complexion to
this. The row we are standing in is owned by a grower who isn’t
thought to be on top of their game. You can pick this wine up for, say
£120. Two rows along, however, the vines are owned by a superstar
grower and their Montrachet fetches close to £600 a bottle on
release.
The first issue we need to explore, therefore, in
trying to understand these price disparities is that of terroir: the
influence of the place where the grapes are grown. It’s a complex,
much debated topic that I could happily write 10 000 words on –
let’s try to summarize the issues in a paragraph. While terroir is a
French word, it’s a concept widespread in the wine world. At the
most basic level, it’s immediately apparent that the same grape
varieties grown in even subtly different locations will make wines
that are somewhat different, even when treated the same way in the
winery.
These differences are due to variations in factors such
as microclimate (through differences in elevation and aspect, for
example) and soil properties (certainly drainage and water
availability, but possibly also chemical differences). Of course, in
real life, it’s hard to dissect these out from human factors such as
viticultural regimes and winery practices, which shouldn’t really be
included in definitions of terroir.
While almost everyone recognizes the existence of ‘terroir’,
it’s the French who make the biggest deal out of it. Indeed, the
lack of a word in French for winemaker is indicative of a mindset
where wine is made in the vineyard, and winemakers are relegated to
the position of custodians who allow the wines to make themselves.
Cynics point out a potential financial motive at play: if the vineyard
is seen as the sole arbiter of wine quality, then this acts to
maintain the value of prime properties. Certainly, wines from
vineyards of exalted reputation, which have a track record of making
great wines (that is, terroirs where grape variety and environment are
perfectly matched) fetch very high prices, sometimes even irrespective
of the quality of what is in the bottle.
Second, there is the issue of reputation. Reputation
matters a great deal in the world of wine. Our senses of taste and
smell are, it seems, easily fooled. We bring a lot of expectation to
bottles of wine that are supposed to be rather grand. In a mischievous
experiment, a French researcher called Brochet served the same average-quality wine to
people at a week’s interval. The twist was that on the first
occasion it was packaged and served to people as a Vin de Table, and
on the second as a Grand Cru wine. So the subjects thought they were
tasting a simple wine and then a very special wine, even though it was
the same both times. We’d probably all like to think we’d not have
been taken in by this ruse, but Brochet’s tasters fell for it, hook,
line and sinker. He analysed the terms used in the tasting notes, and
it makes telling reading. For the ‘Grand Cru’ wine versus the Vin
de Table, ‘A lot’ replaces ‘a little’; ‘complex’ replaces
‘simple’; and ‘balanced’ replaces ‘unbalanced’ – all
because of the sight of the label.
Brochet explains the results through a phenomenon
called ‘perceptive expectation’: a subject perceives what they
have pre-perceived, and then they find it difficult to back away from
that. For us humans, visual information is much more important than
chemosensory information, so we tend to trust vision more. Brochet
uses these results to explain Peynaud’s observation that ‘Blind
tasting of great wines is often disappointing’.
This is not to say, though, that great wines never
deserve their reputation. There do exist many seriously great wines
that merit, at least in part, the reverence accorded to them. The very
top ‘trophy’ wines, though, do have a reputation that extends
beyond what is in the bottle. You are paying for more than just an
exceptional bottle of wine.
Thirdly, scarcity is important. ‘Great’ wines are
often made in small quantities, but there are many wealthy wine lovers
for whom only the best will do. The result? Lots of people chasing
relatively few wines. For those wines with a reputation of being the
best, there is huge demand and relatively little supply, so the result
is that prices get pushed up. Couple this with the law of diminishing
returns (each extra increment in quality costs proportionately more),
which fits quite well to wine, and it is easy to see how prices for
top wines can escalate quite rapidly. Wealthy wine nuts aren’t
usually looking for value for money (although they are sensitive to
being ripped off); they generally want the best, and are prepared to
pay for it.
Finally, while it does actually cost more to make
better wine – all the necessary care in the vineyard, the economic
loss of lowering yields in pursuit of quality, and the cost of good
new oak barrels ramp the price up a bit – this is generally not the
reason for the high prices asked for top wines. It’s the triumvirate
of terroir, reputation and scarcity that cause the startling disparity
in prices between the cheapest and most expensive wines.
I’m aware that in this brief piece, I’ve hardly
touched on the issue of comparative wine ‘quality’. Are some wines
‘better’ than others? If so, why? And who gets to decide? Is it
possible to be objective in assessing wines? These gripping questions
will have to wait for another article.
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