“In the past, you couldn`t have told me that when I spent $20 on a bottle, I wasn`t drinking good wine,” Stone says. “It was perfectly fine. I mean, it suited me perfectly. But what exactly do we mean when we say good wine? Do we use the term to describe something that is substantially different from others in some wines? Is the term even about wine or the perceived status of certain bottles and the people who haunt them? A good wine is supposed to improve with age. See en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_wine If we all agree that there is no one way to define good wine, why does the term persist? Is it the marketing text that is capitalized? Or is the mere idea of a good wine an affection, the textual equivalent of Niles and Frasier Crane swirling swirling with sherry and mocking their displaced father`s beloved chaise longue? Again, there are exceptions, focusing mainly on New World wines. The first vintage of Screaming Eagle was the 1992 – a toddler compared to Château Haut-Brion, which has been producing wines since the 16th century. However, critics generally consider Napa Cult Cab to be a good wine thanks to its consistently excellent quality and aging value, despite its relatively short history. The above characteristics of a good wine – craftsmanship, reputation of the producer, quality of materials – mean that production is often limited. Unlike the mass wines you`ll find on supermarket shelves produced by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of bottles, a good wine stands out for its relative rarity, with wineries producing only a few thousand bottles of each vintage and often much less. “It gives credibility to the brand,” says the former Winebow sales representative.
“Working with good wine means you learn how wine is made around the world, what the cultivation practices are, what the soils are and all those nuances that go into a quality wine.” Affordability is also not a universal concept. If you normally spend $15 per bottle, you might think a $35 bottle is best. If your wine budget starts at $50 per bottle, the calculation changes. However, this is not always the case, especially with New World wines, which generally push the boundaries of traditional winemaking. Consider Penfold`s Grange – arguably Australia`s greatest wine. It has always been a blend of two or more South Australian wine regions, often hundreds of miles apart, a concept that would likely horrify winemakers in Europe`s classic wine regions. A true statement indeed, but even here there are exceptions. You might try growing your own grapes in your garden to make your own wine, and you might end up with something passable to drink, but just because the odds were against you from the start doesn`t mean you`re now sitting on a good wine empire. So, approximations aside, a wine must tick a series of boxes to be considered correct.
One possibility is that the sentence is just poetry. “Fine” and “wine” rhyme – and “aged like good wine” rolls quite well on the tongue. Or it could stem from a misunderstanding of what it means for a wine to age well or be well adapted to aging. Even wine lovers don`t all agree on what “good wine” means. In this case, everything you think is correct. Wine is a sufficiently important category for each subsector to include an assortment. I leave you with one last important point. Each bottle of good wine in a vintage becomes increasingly rare over time, as it is the unique expression of a place in a single year that will never be created again. “It depends on their level of knowledge or education about wine,” says Deniece Bourne, account development manager at Wine & Spirit Education Trust.
Some people may consider good wine exclusive to Old World regions like Bordeaux and Burgundy. Others might say that the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti would not qualify. However, Bourne believes that good wine can come from anywhere, citing English sparkling wines as “some of the best” she has tasted. Anything that makes a wine “fine” also tends to affect how it develops after bottling. Wines produced for the local supermarket or wine store are meant to be drunk after a short defined maturation period and are as good as they get when they are purchased – and after a few years they are broken down. Wines that are made as well as possible take much longer to reach their peak – to reach their optimal quality of consumption. Wine lovers even go to great lengths to determine when it will be or know when it happened, so they can drink it as soon as possible after orgasm. Of course, one bottle does not age in the same way as another when stored under different conditions.