A PINNACLE OF DELICIOUSNESS: GLATZER’S 2025 COLLECTION

No one drinks wine any more. Fewer and fewer people drink alcohol of any kind, thanks to a WHO report that will be contradicted in five years by another WHO report. But we here are interested in wine.

Let’s leave aside the question of wine’s status as an “alcoholic beverage.” And then let’s admit that wine is singularly unattractive to anyone but we who’ve been bitten by the bug. Let’s further admit that wine is unattractive because we who are nuts about it are also unattractive. Not all of us, but too many of us. And while we’re prostrating ourselves, we have to stare unblinkingly at the stark reality that too many “high-scoring” wines are not self-evidently enticing except to people who’ve drunk a highly specialized kool-aid.

What we have squandered for years now is any sensual connection with deliciousness. We don’t talk about it or write about it or use it as a parameter in our “scoring systems” and yet we wonder why new wine lovers aren’t swarming into the fold. It’s as though deliciousness is banished into a punishing corner wearing a dunce-cap that says “tasting good is for idiots and the maladjusted.”

In a better world than ours, we’d have at the very least a parallel scoring system that accounts for simple sensual delight. Something like “STG” (shit-tastes-good!) or even a three-pointer – delicious, fucking delicious, and seriously fucking delicious. I wince to see (or even to imagine) some earnest wine geek trying fruitlessly to impress upon some hapless neophyte the virtues of the typical “high-scoring” wine by adducing each and every recondite element of the pitiful beverage while the neophyte casts about desperately for the exit.

Contrast that with a glass of wine that, as soon as it’s sipped, engenders an immediate and spontaneous yelp of joy. “Jesus, what the hell is this, and can I have more??”

Lest you suppose that such a quality must be reduced to a rudimentary level of simplicity that insults even an average intelligence, you are mistaken. And you are missing one of the signal delights of the wine world, the graceful combination of delicious flavor with layers and dimensions and all the stuff that makes wine interesting. You really don’t think such wines are the kind that would make life-long wine lovers? Really? Then my friend, you are lost.

I always recall the power of deliciousness when I taste Walter Glatzer’s red wines. Previous reports posted on this website have attracted too few eyeballs, because Glatzer is considered less consequential than some of his peers. This is seriously misguided. It is so misguided that Glatzer himself started to wonder if he shouldn’t make his wines more overtly “serious” so that he wouldn’t be shoved into a ghetto of merely tasty wines. Indeed he made those efforts yet even as his wines (Blaufränkisch especially) grew more intricate and layered they remained delicious, as though it was in their DNA and couldn’t be erased.

I’ve had the wines open for two weeks now. They keep well but they do not, as rule, get better. Open them and drink them. Have a spare bottle at hand because you’ll empty the first one in half a snap. And not once, and I mean never, will you pause and think “Sure it tastes really good but it’s kinda simple…” These wines are not simple. It is we who have been stunted into thinking “If it’s fun then it can’t possibly be serious.”

And we wonder – we really wonder – that so few young people are entering our world of wine.

The white wines at Glatzer are good, sometimes very good, but his is a 70% red wine estate and it is on those that his reputation is built. To me he is a god-of-flavor, and anyone could comprehend that if we weren’t so effing busy being sophisticated “experts” and groping for things to appreciate about wines that really don’t taste very good. And we could, if we only remembered how, find our ways to wines whose flavors grin at us and still give us plenty of grist for the cerebellum.

Let’s start with the WHITES...