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As you may have gleaned, I’m a guy with views. Some of them are irritable, others are approving. A few are both.

Here’s an example. I’ve been reading Raymond Blake’s fine book Côte D’Or, and in its pages he writes something that made me almost shout with joy. “The character of a great Gevrey is most obviously manifest in Chambertin itself. ‘One hears the clang of armour in its depths,’ wrote Irishman Maurice Healy in 1940. As a tasting note that might not cut the mustard today, but it captures the gravitas of Chambertin perfectly….listing its component parts, identifying fruits and other flavors, mentioning its length on the finish would add nothing to the clang of armour.”

Yes – exactly that. The telling image, one that emerges spontaneously from a person’s imagination engaged with a thing of beauty is worth nearly every squandered word of the modern “tasting note.” Lest you think I am merely fussing, I do understand the type of notes critics write have a purpose for which they’re appropriate; guiding readers in their buying decisions. And I am also aware it can seem mean spirited to criticize someone’s tasting notes. That is why I don’t. I take no single writer to task. I think the whole thing is a wasted opportunity.

A measly description of the flavor components of a wine always feels inert to me. Are we humans tasting these hapless wines, or lab technicians writing up the results of your biopsy? The only “tasting” notes worth reading are those where the pulse of heart and mind are tangible, and can be felt. There should be something tactile and connective in the engagement of taster and wine. There should be something that is not disposable in these notes, something that makes you think “I’d like to keep this writing.”

In good hands this kind of writing can walk a wide range of styles. David Schildknecht and Andrew Jefford both produce it, in respective styles with little overlap. But these days my favorite taster/writer of all is Tamlyn Currin (whom you will find on the Jancis Robinson site), and I’m here to tell you that no one is writing better wine notes than she is. That is because there is never the slightest thread of humanity missing from her notes. You can almost hear the sizzle of her mind both probing and seeking the most vivid possible image for what she tastes, and there is a fine fearless heart behind her every word. Currin does the rarest of things; she tells you the story of the little slip of reality she has invited the wine to crawl into with her, and for that moment both taster and wine are citizens of a single space.

Aside from the world of tasting notes, I am more and more delighted by Meg Maker’s writings. Her prose is elegant and lapidary, she observes each thing you’d wish her to have observed, she is thorough, and she is considerate of her reader. Reading such writers as these, you grow aware of the poverty of heart in so much other “wine writing.” But I have a perfect right to demand it, and so do you.

While I’m in the mood to praise, a bottle of Nikolaihof’s recent Sekt is a harbinger of great things to come at that hitherto uneven winery. The newly expanded logistics and the buzzing synergy between Nikki Saahs and Katherina Salzgeber are about to catapult the world’s first certified biodynamic winery into profound orbits of quality. The Sekt, which I’ll discuss in detail a few weeks from now when I publish a tasting report, is pure and serene and remarkably balanced for a zero-dosage wine. In fact it’s better balanced than three out of four “zero” Champagnes, and there’s barely a desire it doesn’t fulfill. Disgorged November 2024 (and entirely vintage ’20 though officially an NV) it’s Grüner Veltliner, Chardonnay and (of all things) Zweigelt. It’s calm, almost introverted in the Nikolaihof way, but within its tranquility is an upwelling of tangible purity and deliciousness, and if you can find it, take it home.

We just drank a bottle of Loewen’s 2005 Leiwener Laurentiuslay Spätlese, a profound Riesling in perfect condition (in contrast to a distressing number of ‘05s with premox), and it was bittersweet for me, as I wasn’t able to send this reliably great Mosel wine the business it deserved. In my former portfolio of 250-300 German wines in any given offering, there were maybe – maybe – ten wines I’d buy every year, certain they would be Great, that I’d want them for my cellar, and that they belonged on your short list. This was one of those wines. Well, sigh, one does what one can.

Here's another sort of opinion. Most of us have too many damn wine glasses. We don’t need them. The whole panoply of stemware is a board-game for geeks. And I say this knowing full well that glassware is decisive in how a wine expresses, but once you accept that, you then must swerve to avoid the rabbit hole you’re tempted to fall into. Life’s too short to line the pockets of Zalto.

So what do you need? You need what I need! And I have more than what I need, and if I haven’t used a particular glass in a year’s time, it goes into the trash. So – I have an all-purpose white wine glass and another all-purpose red wine glass, both from Spiegelau. I have the Jancis glass with its excellent explication (and its genius in solving the problem with the appalling Zalto “Universal” which usually takes good wines and lays them to waste). I could get by with just those three.

Spiegelau Glasses

I have some white-wine variant glasses mostly ordered by mistake when I was looking for more of the ones I had. They have their uses but are not indispensable. I have two red-wine types (apart from the Jancis), one round and the other more tulip-like – the first for the Pinot/Nebbiolo sorts and the second for the Blaufränkisch (as I have but one lonesome bottle of Cabernet). The tulip-y one is a Riedel “Chianti Classico” glass, and it’s useful and flexible. That makes four: a basic white, a basic red, the Jancis splitting the difference, and the Riedel.

For sparkling wine I have the two iterations of Juhlin, and need no others. I have some old narrower flutes I use for repeatedly opened bottles whose mousse I want to preserve. I have a few Riedel “Krug” glasses a friend gave me, and which are okay for mature Champagne and, curiously, for magnums. But I could do without them. I play with the trio of Oneida glasses designed by Karen MacNeil and sometimes enjoy the results, but I don’t need them (especially the “Big & Bold” shape, since I don’t own that type of red wine).

So strip it down, and I really need four glass types.

Wine seems to conduce to a mentality that seeks the innards of things, the Nth degree of stemware variation and the borderline obsessive business of “pairing,” about which Mr. Yarrow and I have tussled cordially. He calls it “junk science” and I think he’s being anti intellectual, but I can see what he means. I do feel there are harmonies and synergies between wine and food, and that we should care about them and seek to bring them about. I also think we can go too far. We can lose sight of the variables in play, as all of us have experienced when we tried to replicate a great wine-food match – the “third-flavor effect” – with another bottle and the same dish of food. We are almost always doomed to dismay, because it was ONE MOMENT, you can’t repeat it, you got a glimpse of something sublime but learned the wrong lesson. The idea isn’t to press “repeat;” it’s to think about the general principles by which your magic moment came about, and put them into practice so you raise the odds of something like it happening again. You have to consider it, and you have to know when to stop considering it. You get 95% of the way with 25% of the effort. The rest is “We suggest a 8-12 year old Chenin Blanc from Tufa soil to go with the hint of persimmon in chef’s preparation….” Even if you were right it’s still superfluous. Always remember, if you hit the bulls-eye there’s a lot of luck in play, and certainly luck is the residue of design, but you’ll have much more fun if you simply hit the target and don’t fuss over the bulls-eye.

DEPT. OF RANDOM BOTTLES AND DUBIOUS INSIGHTS….

The bottle is a Dönnhoff 2016 Dellchen GG. It is remarkable, hardly a surprise; typically aloof at first – a Dellchen signature – but quite haunting once it finds its voice, and typically brisk as the ‘16s are. Yet it is also playful, as the ‘16s also are. We lingered over it while sitting on our deck in the sweetest late afternoon cool you could ever imagine, and as the wine warmed in the glass it seemed to relax and exhale, as we ourselves did.

I’ve spent decades wresting language into some unlikely form that would express these imponderable wines. There are only so many ways to say “purity,” and I have rummaged through them, sometimes finding gold and other times dross. But yesterday I heard myself think the words “Donnhoff’s wines are like Riesling before Eve ate the apple.”  I like that image.