finalanalysis

This is hardly a new point, but John Mariani makes it with panache:

For a five-year-old wine blended from 35 percent cabernet sauvignon, 35 percent merlot, 20 percent malbec and 10 percent cabernet franc, it is very mature, the tannins very soft. The real problem is that it tastes like a hundred other wines of its kind — the global taste you find when a very new, very well endowed winery lacks the tradition to know just what their vineyards may be capable of expressing…Had I tasted Andeluna Pasionado blind, I would no more guess that it was from Mendoza than I might think it came from Mendocino County, California, or Valencia, Spain, or Ragusa, Sicily…This is a wine designed to win awards, the kind of cabernet that California cult wine faddists say will “blow your doors off.” It tastes more of the lab than of the individual vineyard, like prune juice more than good wine, so cloying in its fruit, so lacking in a fine edge of acid, that my wife and I left half the bottle undrunk while having a simple dinner of grilled pork chops and white beans.

In this vein a friend and customer of mine recently shared that he “didn’t have any room in [his] soul for these kinds of wines anymore.” It is a sentiment one hears more and more among the wine cognoscenti, but one that doesn’t seem to have seeped into the consciousness of the general wine buying public. Wine that don’t taste more of the lab than the vineyard risk being tagged as austere, coarse or–insult of insults–”old world.”