Recently I have come to realize that some so-called "great" wines, praised by influential wine people, are pretty strange and far from classic.
Moreover, I wonder whether some of these influential wine personalities aren't doing consumers a disservice by cooing and gurgling over wine that is eccentric, if not downright flawed. I wonder whether they aren't educating the public to like styles of wine that are atypical, not truly great at all.
Some of the wines I question have a tiny flaw I feel shouldn't be there, considering the high price; in other cases I've found the flaw to be so strong that it covered up whatever grace the wine might have had. Wine with the aroma of wet earth, rotting meat, nail polish or skunkiness is not my idea of fun.
Some evaluators who taste the wines within sight of the labels, and thus know what the wines cost, give expensive wines very high scores on the theory such a high-priced wine simply can't have much wrong with it. Thus extraneous aromas and flavors can't be flaws. (Moreover, to mark such an expensive wine with a low score might prove embarrassing.)
Yet when I've done blind tastings of famous name wines, I occasionally find extraneous elements in them that are so strange as to make the wines unrepresentative of their type and thus not in the "classic" category at all. Often, recently, the most expensive wines have had serious flaws. I wouldn't drink a couple of these wines if they were given to me, and I'm outraged at paying $50 to $75 and more for wines that are dull or even downright bad.
Nick Ponomareff, editor/publisher of the California Grapevine, noted this trend in the April-May issue of his privately published wine newsletter. Ponomareff, a mild-mannered aerospace engineer, in a most atypical (for him), strongly worded commentary, wrote that in the 15 years of publishing his newsletter he has not commented on a winery's pricing policy.
Yet he said that a number of expensive wines evaluated blind by the Grapevine panel were not very good and not worth their high prices. I concur.
Recently I tasted the 1985 Guigal Cote-Rotie "La Mouline," which sells for about $200 a bottle. I found it to have a horsy, wet-leather kind of smell about it, sort of like meat aging in a meat locker. This aroma was probably generated by a yeast called \o7 Brettanomyces \f7 (Bret for short) that some people like. I don't, not when it's as strong as it is in this wine.
