Attention! A need for wine
Welcome to the latest selection of wine culture from the past week on worldoffinewine.com
The health-bringing properties of wine are much-debated, and nowhere more thoroughly or authoritatively than in the pages of The World of Fine, where our regular columnist, the medical physician Dr Erik Skovenborg, has sought to counter-act the propaganda and exaggeration that so often mars the discussion on both sides.
Erik’s valuable work takes a holistic approach, one that is fully cognizant of the human being’s status as a social animal and of the many and complex ways that our psychological health underwrites our physical health, and vice versa.
One striking aspect of this approach is an understanding that, in the simplest terms, being sad and lonely is very bad for our health—indeed, as Erik pointed out in one of his best-read columns on worldoffinewine.com, lack of social connection is a more serious risk factor in mortality than obesity and physical inactivity and at a level comparable to smoking. We should, therefore, welcome and take seriously wine’s proven ability to “[promote] conviviality and [help] people break the ice and reach out to each other” as a potential antidote to one of modern society’s most common ills.
According to another regular WFW columnist, David Schildknecht, wine may have similarly curative, or at the very least palliative, properties when applied as an antidote to another rampant contemporary ailment: the stress and fracturing attention spans caused by the non-stop barrage of information that is a defining feature of the digital age. Drawing on observations made about the immersive experience of listening to music in a thoughtful New York Times op-ed by the pianist and musicologist Jonathan Biss, David makes the case that wine is no less capable of providing objects that allow us, as Biss says of a movement of Beethoven, to “give our full attention to one thing, and marvel at its beauty and strangeness and specificity.”
“Any WFW reader will be familiar with an analogous experience of beauty, strangeness, and specificity from a glass,” David says. “Which makes one wonder why, at a time when wine appears to be slipping from public favor and its alleged physiological benefits are addressed with increasing skepticism, more is not being made of it as a potential antidote—not to mention a pleasurable one—to something that nearly everybody agrees is ailing us. One may balk at calling wine growing/winemaking an artform, but just as music organizes sounds in time, and along spectra of pitch, volume, and timbre, in tasting we experience the aromas, flavors, and textures of wine as localized in time and space. Similar structural preconditions arguably apply to any experience amenable to aesthetic evaluation and, thus, to any marveling at beauty.”
As David goes on to argue, it may even be that wine is better suited to this task than music, since it is resistant to the “cyber synthesization” of AI in a way that no artform can be. “[No] large language model can devour wine; nor is a digital simulacrum conceivable. Given how dominant interpretively is our sense of sight, even culinary dishes—via photos and recipes—can be conjured in a cyber medium, albeit not artificially ‘created’ in tasteable form. With wine, a photograph of it sitting in the glass or a list of ingredients barely, if at all, hint at taste.”
It’s an important and heartening point, one of many in a column full of insight and imagination that stands as another powerful corrective to the idea that wine has no role to play in a healthy life, well-lived.
Wine of the Week
Each week, the WFW team picks out a particularly fascinating wine from our extensive, constantly updated database of more than 20,000 tasting evocative, information-rich tasting notes composed by the world’s best qualified and most articulate wine critics.
This week, as Tim James profiles the pioneering South African winemaker Marc Kent, we go back to a WFW panel tasting in 2010 to highlight a wine made by Kent at the Franschhoek estate that he helped make into one of the Cape’s leading producers.
Boekenhoutskloof Cabernet Sauvignon, Western Cape 2007
Tim Atkin: Mid-ruby with some brick red at the rim. Leafy, cassis-and-wood-smoke nose, touch of burned rubber, but lots of flavor and breadth and personality. Nice, sweet oak, leafy, soft. Not sure this will age, but it’s ripe and soft and easy to drink. Burned rubber drying out the finish slightly, but enough fruit to carry it. 16.5
Gerard Basset: Medium ruby. Pronounced nose. Strong cassis, hint of cedar. Firm but ripe in structure, cassis and cigar wood, medium-long finish. 16
Anthony Rose: Medium ruby hue, minty, herbal Cabernet undertones on the nose, distinctive cool-climate mintiness and cassis flavors, nicely juicy, supple fresh-fruit quality, quite firm grippy tannins and acidity, nicely integrated touch of cedary oak, well-crafted Bordeaux-blend style with good overall balance of texture and freshness. 17
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In a recent New York Times op-ed, pianist and musicologist Jonathan Biss offers a now-familiar lament: “Our digital existence conspires to fracture our attention, barraging us with more information in less time than the human mind was designed to absorb […] a cacophony of dings [and] alerts.” He proposes “that music is uniquely well positioned to provide an antidote to this avalanche of stimulus,” having in mind the sort of listening experience—epitomized for him by a movement of Beethoven—in which “we give our full attention to one thing, and marvel at its beauty and strangeness and specificity.”
By David Schildknecht
Wine in history: St Scholastica’s Day Wine Riot
Relations between town and gown in Oxford have historically tended to be abrasive. The sudden hostile silences that could descend on a city-center pub when locals heard a table of posh boys talking about biochemistry or Foucault were still prevalent in the 1980s, and probably still are. Without regular murderous attacks on the University’s students in the medieval era, Cambridge University might never have been founded as a peaceable refuge from them.
By Stuart Walton
Continuity can be compelling and reassuring. I’ve known Marc Kent a long time, first as the producer of interesting wine-journalistic objects and then also as a close friend (that’s getting in a declaration of interest early). Two long-remembered quotes remain relevant to this profile, and I might not manage much better than expanding on them. The first is from him, to the effect that “if a winemaker can’t produce a first-rate wine when there are just a few barrels of the stuff, then it’s a poor show; the real challenge is to make a few dozen barrels—or a few hundred or more—of good wine.”
By Tim James
Why do we want what we want? What does our obsession with the new and novel say about us? What utopian currents might we be adrift upon in the vinous sea? Such questions were on my mind as I returned from tasting Bhutan’s inaugural vintage in Paris one balmy June evening. As we know, wine is as conducive to thinking as drinking, and this was no exception.
By Chris Howard
2024 Burgundy: Côte de Nuits tasting notes—Nuits-St-Georges
DOMAINE DE L’ARLOT
“Premeaux-Prissey may have had the wettest conditions in the Côte de Nuits,” remarks Géraldine Godot, who sprayed 19 times and used 5kg (11lb) of copper. She harvested September 18–21, with average yields for the reds of 8hl/ha, though in Clos des Forêts the yield was as low as 3.6hl/ha, for only nine barrels. The average yield for the whites was 14hl/ha. The levels of malic acid were high. Clos de l’Arlot, for example, had 4g/l, with pH 3.4 at harvest. “It was very important to get the balance of acidity and pH.” So, like many other producers, she tweaked the tartaric acidity, arriving at pH 3.45 and TA 3.65g/l (as sulfuric) for the Clos de l’Arlot.
By Sarah Marsh MW
