The heat finally broke yesterday, so we took the best of the GGs – Pechstein and Kirchenstück – outside to sip on the deck, with our local trees and birds. No stale a/c atmosphere, no cooking smells lingering and thankfully no neighbor’s drier sheets in the sudden cool air, blowing fresh off the ocean. A few gulls even blew along in the east wind, from the water nine miles away.
Those two GGs were the pinnacle of what is certainly the greatest collection of Von Winning GGs since the 2014 vintage, and arguably the best collection of the new era at this estate, inaugurated in 2008 with the arrival of one Stephan Attmann.
I thought about the two wines, happy to let them be the center of my world, and to attend to them as was warranted by their beauty and complexity. A question entered my mind: are these wines too good? Because I felt that any occasion in which they weren’t the center of attention would squander their gifts. And what, I wondered, might this mean.
You could certainly “have them with food,” i.e., they’ll taste good with a reasonably well composed dish, but they’ll invariably lose something in the more distracting situation. I wonder if any “situation” other than full immersion isn’t a waste of what would otherwise be a remarkable moment of beauty. But what does this imply?
We have the term vino di meditazione and we agree that it describes a certain way of apprehending a wine, but we have to carve out these moments from our active task-filled lives, and we usually don’t. Thus I wonder, are some wines so beautiful they are no longer useful? And if so, does it matter?
I may be odd this way. I detest having music playing “in the background” unless it is already designed to be ambient. If the music is any good I don’t want it tinkling uselessly while we talk and eat (and drink), and my wife thinks I’m crazy. The difference is, if I’m not listening to the music just then, I can listen to it another time. It’s still there to be played. The great bottle of wine we empty thoughtlessly is more perishable.
Curiously, this problem barely exists with great sweet wines, because by the time we serve them we’ve usually cleared the dinner plates and everyone is calm and mellow (and ready for something sweet) and prepared to “meditate” over the unearthly loveliness of a wine perfectly suited to its moment. But what is the moment for a great dry (white) wine? What is the moment for any great dry wine? If a magnificent red is served, my heart always sinks a little when we take it to the table.
We’ve always heard that wine is for “friends, conviviality, hospitality, food, and relaxation,” and that’s true of 99.8% of all the wine in the world. The remaining tiny number of truly great wines….are another matter. They are, I will argue, beyond function.
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