Most of us hope to taste at least some great wines sometime in our lives, and those of us in the wine business spend our entire “wine lives” tasting in pursuit of wines’ greatness. In my consulting, greatness is also a theme I build many corporate wine tastings and executive wine seminars around. For who doesn’t want to taste the best wines in the world?
There’s just one issue: how do you know if the wine you’re drinking is, in fact, great? What exactly does great wine taste like?
Let me say off the top that no one needs any pointers when it comes to wines they like to drink. Subjectivity in wine is pretty easy. But a wine is not great merely because we like it. You may have loved that carafe of wine in the trattoria in Tuscany, . . . and yet know that it was not, in the end, a great wine.
I would argue that to really know wine—and to consider its potential greatness— we need to move beyond what we know we like. We need to attempt a larger, more objective understanding of wines that have garnered respect, wines that have consistently been singled out for their merit, wines that have, again and again over time, been cherished for their integrity and beauty.
Here then are the twelve attributes I believe all great wines share, no matter where those wines are from or what variety they are made from. In the wine tastings I give, I share my ideas on each of these attributes, and we taste a wine that demonstrates each attribute—twelve great wines in all.
It’s a phenomenal wine experience. And those are the best kind.
The Twelve Attributes of Greatness are:
- distinction
- precision
- balance
- aliveness
- choreography
- shape/direction
- beyond-fruitedness
- complexity
- connectedness
- length
- capacity to age
- the ability to evoke an emotional response.
A final note: An In-depth look at each of these attributes is also explored in the first chapter of my book The Wine Bible, 3rd edition (Workman/Hachette Book Group; New York).
