I never thought that, after so many years of a solid wine tasting career, I could end up tired of such exciting task as mine. Never before have we been able to find so many “perfect” wines, and never before have the differences between been so narrow. I have said to exhaustion: perfection in wine tires me to death, a thought that has brought me to ponder whether singularity ­–i.e., the bunch of features that singles out wines– it is more important than the obsessive search for winemaking perfection, or vice versa. This issue of perfection seems to be bound to the sensory realm but does not happen so much in gastronomy. The commonplace liturgy of harmonizing food and wine leaves me cold. I enjoy good wines and good food but do not believe in such a thing as “marrying” them. Probably I am just more indulgent with food than with the more intellectual and humanistic task of judging wines. And since eighty per cent of contemporary wines are well made ­–compared to what was the case just a decade ago– I look for “something else”, a surprising feature, an engaging nuance. State-of-the-art technology and applied winemaking are taking the world by storm. Globalization has also given ground to a faster exchange of wine knowledge and techniques, so wines tend to be impeccable but terribly and regretfully similar. Nowadays, flaws and over-practices happen at harvest time and during ageing but never at winemaking itself. Tasting for the Guía Peñín, the best and broadest barometer that samples year after year more wines than any other Spanish wine guide, has given me the chance to ascertain the homogenous high quality of both national and international wines. And this happens not because winemakers may copy each other but rather because, following their ingrained habits of asepsis, purity and cleanness, and along with the fact that they usually resort to the same grape varieties and wood origin for their barrels, they all fall eventually and inevitably in the same winemaking model that regards “flaw” as the ultimate monster. In this respect I wrote ten years ago an article titled “Between trichloroanisole and pleasure” in which I denounced as exaggerated the search in wine tasting for that humid-mouldy note that all of a sudden was detected in almost every national wine. That modern horror to the good old friend known as TCA allied itself with another contemporary witch-hunt, that of “brett”. Brettanomyces, formerly known as “farm-yard” or “horse sweat”, has ended up being named with a terminology born out of the laboratories. Let alone notes the likes of “green pepper” or pirazines, assigned to grapes from the Bordeaux region, or the acetamide commonly known as “cat’s pee” that serves to identify the sauvignon blanc from cooler regions, or the “high volatile” aspect that, along all the above mentioned terms, have become a sort of trendy wine glossary for showy oenophiles.

This excessive attention to “flaw” with the appearance of a witch-hunt was fathered by what I call “hospital winemaking”, which has on the asepsis promoted by North-American and Australian laboratories its real cornerstone. With wineries looking more and more like operating theatres, wines have been rendered somewhat denaturalized products tasting too much alike. Driven by both “taliban” amateur drinkers and the strict sanitary measures demanded by markets like USA, winemakers have taken to exterminate those presumed “flaws”, regardless of their incidence in the wines’ final taste. I think we should mind what our senses dictate rather than the technical data, since those “flaws” are part of the nature of wine, of its essence, and should not be eliminated completely. What defines a good wine is the harmony of all its elements, the “good” ones (fruit, oak, spices…) and the “bad” ones (volatile acidity, lactic, brett, TCA, oxidation…). In a wine it is as abominable a strong pineapple or raspberry note as an oxidative excess. Then, what do we understand by “good” or “bad” aromas? Is it just an educational issue? Why do we put up with and even rejoice blue cheese notes and reject the feet perspiration ones or the strongly bitter taste or beer? Why do we regard oxidation in a table wine as a flaw and as a positive asset in olorosos and amontillados? And what about tar (the horror, the horror, the hydrocarbons!!) that we may perceive in some red wines aged in heavily burnt barrels? Why do we reject volatile acidity or mouldy notes of botrytis that we may spot in a red wine but exalt them in any given Sauternes? Why do we still value so highly in such prestigious drinks as old champagnes the finely reductive and “withered petals” quality typical of the autolysis which takes place in the bottle? To this sensory universe we ought to add as well the current organic and bio-dynamic practises that promote little or no sulphur dioxide addition and which account for higher levels of volatile acidity and oxidation. Also, the trend of using wild yeasts has increased earthy and herbal notes as well as the more obvious organic nuances typical of the bio-dynamic “front”, along with the more radical ones encouraged by the Asociación de Vinos Naturales (Natural Wines Association). All these features present in the avant-garde of the philosophy or “terroir” are not shocking in any case to the new generations of French and Italian sommeliers and wine critics. Even I could easily detest with good reason those aromas that have (followed) me for three decades, since I started exploring the then unknown map of Spanish wineries and in the course of which I got accustomed to those vivid and sometimes hellish aromas. Nevertheless, I have to recognize that whenever I found a good balance of all of these so-called “flaws” in wines of any given vintage or grape variety, they ultimately showed full of singularity, which is something I always look for even when just for fun’s sake. The best examples are found within the current practices that promote vine and soil singularity. The latter is what we call “terroir”, with the goal to use less of the added resources intended mainly to get a longer shelf (bottle) life for the wines. Haven’t we said enough that 90% of the wines around the world are consumed within their first three years in the market?

Traslation: Antonio Casado