I guess you can call this a manifesto, and I start with two statements: (1) There are no longer any bad wines made today, and (2) my motto.
The first statement reflects modern sanitary knowledge and the fact that a bad or even poor wine could ruin a winery’s reputation. In the past, a wine could be ruined by a bad cork rotting, resulting in what is called a corked wine, or at worse, allowing bacteria to enter the bottle and turning the wine into vinegar (which comes from the French word for sour wine, vin aigre). Corked wines do still occur occasionally today, but they are very rare. It is a fact that wine collectors must have their older wines recorked every 30 years to keep the wine from spoiling due to a rotting cork.
Winemaking is no longer just jumping on some grapes and two weeks later you have wine — not at all. Grapes grow in an open field with all of the problems that entails. The list starts with fungus, bugs, bird droppings, animal refuse, and a hundred other things, including grapes that have split open and are rotting the bunch. Next comes the people who pick the grapes by hand and the myriad of diseases they could be carrying … “Aah choo!”
In the winery, the grapes are washed as well as hand-sorted to remove whatever stems, leaves, and anything else that should not be there. Then they are pressed to extract the juice. The juice, called “must,” is then put into tanks, and yeast is added to begin fermentation. While the alcohol will kill many of the microscopic problems, it takes about a week for fermentation to begin in full force and several more days for enough alcohol to be produced to have a sterilizing effect. If the wine is to be aged in wooden barrels, we run into another source of contamination. Wooden barrels, however, are treated with sulfur dioxide or by burning sulfurcandles inside them to sterilize them prior to filling. This is part of the reason for the “sulfite” warning on the rear label of a wine.
As a point of reference and FYI, one ton of grapes makes approximately 756 bottles of wine, and the grapes for a wine can cost as much as $5,000 per ton for premium grapes, so a bad ferment could be very, very costly. All in all, the production of wine is not an easy project, and I believe that winemakers must be a very religious group and do a lot of praying.
Now for the second part of this manifesto: my motto. While the world is full of experts on every possible subject, no one can tell you what wines you like or dislike. All that the “experts” can tell you is their opinion of the characteristics of a wine, and nothing else. There are even those experts who bestow quality numbers on wines that, unfortunately, some people believe. There is nothing more stupid in life than allowing someone you don’t know, and who doesn’t know you, to tell you what you will like. Here are questions that the experts of the numbers racket do not tell you: What toothpaste and/or mouthwash did they use that morning? What did they eat or snack on before the test? (It could have been pickled herring.) Do they smoke or chew tobacco? Do they take any medications? And on and on.… As you can probably tell, all of these, and many many more that you have probably thought of, could easily have an effect on their final consecration or desecration of a wine.
What this is all about is that wine is the only agricultural product that is written about, criticized, and endlessly discussed. I have never read a critique of a can of peas or a writer waxing poetic over an ear of corn. I have personally tasted wine that has received glowing reports and high numbers that I did not like. The wine was not bad — it just did not please me. This is why I am not a critic, but rather a wine educator.
You, dear reader, are the expert. Yes, you. If you enjoy a wine, it is a very good wine. If you did not enjoy it, you will never buy it again and the winery ceases to exist in your future choices. I close with my tried and true motto: “The best wine in the world is the wine that you like best.”