How, today, can a wine surprise us? And does that element of surprise come by accident, while both we and the wine are, as it were, looking elsewhere, or can it be intentional? Can a wine set out to shock?
A wine can certainly set out to be different, and a lot do. It often involves doing the opposite of what is normally done. If it’s normally fortified, you make it unfortified. If it wasn’t oxidised, you oxidise it, and vice versa. If it’s a red grape, you vinify it without the skins, as a white. Or if it’s a white grape, you leave it on the skins. If wines of that kind are usually aged in oak, you put it in concrete, or an amphora, or glass. Or if it’s normally aged without oak, you give it oak. There is so much revolution going on that it’s become almost impossible to be really innovative – to make a wine that makes one see wine differently.
Yet it does happen. When I first tasted the reds of Gredos, that was one such moment. This was Garnacha with all the inessential extraction and overripeness peeled back, to reveal delicacy and extraordinary aromas. There was one such at a tasting the other week, from Daniel Ramos: compelling and revealing, and doing it seemingly without the least effort. Overnight, with those first Gredos wines, Garnacha became a grape to seek out, rather than keep at a distance.
Numanthia is another such wine. I remember it even before it was getting 100 points from Robert Parker, and I remember how proud its inventors were of its stand-a-spoon-up extraction and power. My fellow tasters loved it too. I thought it a travesty, but I could see why they were doing it, 200% new oak and all. It was revolutionary, it set out to shock, and it was many years before I was willing even to set foot in Toro again.
But now… Numanthia has been on a 16-year (so far) journey ‘to do what Toro does best and make it pleasant in the mouth,’ as Julio Rodríguez puts it – and he is aware of the contradiction in that ambition. Winemaker Jesús Jiménez has been juggling earlier picking, less maceration after fermentation and more before, less oak, bigger oak, different oak, non-Saccharomyces yeast – all sorts of things. Still to come are the results of rootstock and massal selection studies. At the beginning everybody at Numanthia was frightened of drastic change, but the change gradually became more and more drastic, and there is no sign of it ending any time soon. The 2023, just released, is fine and fresh, floral, firm, even delicate; it is unrecognisable from the wine that LVMH paid a great deal of money for, along with those 100-point marks of perfection.
I’m reminded of the difference in art between the brazen ‘this’ll shock you!’ nature of some contemporary art, and the art that makes you see things differently – as opposed to just inspiring a sense of deep gloom about humanity. The energetically discordant colours of the Fauvists, for example, or the distilled simplicity of Matisse cut-outs. They’re beautiful; they’re not revolutionary or new any more, but they still make you see the world differently. Music, too: I heard Smetana’s Hungarian Dances at the Wigmore Hall the other night and came out reeling, though not in the Scottish sense. But drill music on somebody else’s phone at full blast in a bus? Intended to shock. Let me off at the next stop. Please.
Likewise, there are wines that a good and interesting, and there are wines that are just interesting. Think of when natural wines first appeared. A lot of the stuff that was said at the time – the idea that there is no such thing as a fault in wine, for example, because it is all part of the journey of the wine – seems as comical now as the over-extracted anonymity natural wines were rebelling against.
The pendulum now has swung so far to the centre, with innovation the norm everywhere, that it is difficult to see where it might go next. Are we still surprisable?
The innovation is led by climate change, of course, which has endless capacity to surprise, and often not in a good way. The Parker palate was a lot more predictable than today’s extreme droughts and floods. Indeed, when I asked Alex Hunt MW what he thought counted as surprise in wine, he briskly dismissed most innovation as not remotely surprising. If it’s a consequence of climate change, he says, should we really be surprised?
‘The longer one’s been in this business, the more likely a new wine will fall comfortably within the flavour gamut of what one has tasted before,’ he adds. ‘Rare indeed is the wine that lies outside the compass of our olfactory ken, and rarer still that it should be any good. I would cite Thymiopoulos’s Xinomavro Rosé 2013, which I drank two years ago, a decade from harvest, as the last time I encountered such a wine – utterly delicious, shining and resonant in flavour, yet so different to all the other wines in my memory as to be almost indescribable.’
And then there’s the drill music equivalent: ‘just when you think you’ve seen it all when it comes to use – and abuse – of oak, along comes [a wine which Alex would prefer to be nameless] which rejoices in such unspeakably burnt oak you would think the vineyards were ablaze during the harvest. It took my breath away, for all the wrong reasons, the sting in the tail of this wine being the price: around €200 a bottle.’ (In the interests of balance I should point out that the wine’s website describes it as a ‘masterpiece’.)
For Numanthia, it is revolutionary to be ‘pleasant in the mouth’. Such a bland-sounding ambition. But if you accept it as understatement – that it contains, without spelling it out, all the detail and precision and finesse of a great wine – then it is quietly revolutionary. I’m reminded of something Vittorio Antinori (27th generation) said the other day: it’s very easy to make a simple wine, but very hard to make an easy wine. And even given where we’ve come from, still surprising.
Photo by Luca Iaconelli on Unsplash