Vineyards

The October 15 issue of the Wine Spectator carries two intriguing features. The first is a series of reports, with lavish photographs, on “The World’s Greatest Vineyards.” This list of ten superstars is followed by a cast of twenty supporting actors, wineries the editors regard as “world class” but relegate to slightly lower rungs on the scale of vinous celebrity. You might think that any such listing would be powerfully subjective. Isn’t one’s taste in wine a classic instance of de gustibus non disputandum est? Well, yes and no. You don’t have to be Immanuel Kant to appreciate that in judging wine there are some objective, or objective-like, features, as well as wholly subjective ones.

Sometimes, I pretend that I worked the wine beat thirty or forty years ago. I picture myself in formal wear, kicking back in gilded settings, sipping perfectly aged first growth, trading bons mots with winemakers. We’d spend hours solemnly considering the slow, steady, seemingly eternal rise of wine culture, and how inevitably it would soften the cruder edges of society. It would be so merry, yet cerebral — but also something we could feel good, even morally superior, about participating in. Instead, I’m in 2024 wearing yoga pants and guzzling mineral water (must hydrate!) by myself holding Zooms with winemakers, sweating over the fact that scientists say climate change imperils up to 73 percent of the world’s current wine-growing regions.

Every good vintner deserves a good origin story. David Bruce, the founder of the eponymous winery in the Santa Cruz hills, has one of the best. When he was at medical school at Stanford in the 1950s, he chanced upon Alexis Lichine’s classic book The Wines of France. Lichine said some fancy and evocative things about the great wines of Richebourg in Burgundy. Bruce padded down to a wine shop in San Francisco and collared a bottle of 1954 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Richebourg. “The minute I opened this bottle of wine,” he recalled, “the whole room was pervaded by this floral, spicy aroma.” Here’s the kicker: “I remember thinking, I guess you get what you pay for.” Oh yeah? He paid $7.50 for the bottle.