Beyond Best
In early 2016, I realized something had changed in my relationship with wine. I didn't want the best any more.
What? How can anybody not want to taste, enjoy and own the wine world's summits? Explain yourself...
The best is now unaffordable
Notions of 'affordability', of course, are relative: that's obvious. Personal circumstances are all, and a particular price for a bottle of wine is either affordable or unaffordable in relation to one's wealth as a functioning economic unit (as an individual or a family). In the interests of journalistic transparency, I've made an annual disclosure of earnings on my own website from 2011 onwards (http://www.andrewjefford.com/disclosure/) - so by consulting that you can, if you wish, approach what follows with some relevant figures to hand. All of these GBP figures are calibrated for 2016 - but differentials have done nothing but widen since.
I first bought 'the best' in 1983, when I purchased a case of Château Pichon-Lalande 1982 for £9 a bottle, equivalent to £28.71 in 2016 figures (allowing for inflation). It was wonderful wine, and at that price I never had qualms about drinking it: bliss.
I have subsequently bought 'the best', but the prices have risen steadily. Pichon-Baron 1990 at £30 a bottle (£60 allowing for inflation); Bâtard-Montrachet 1995 from Sauzet at £69.50 a bottle (£117); Château Margaux 1996 at £97 a bottle (£164); La Fleur Pétrus 1998 at £45.62 a bottle (£72.54); Lynch-Bages 2000 at £40.15 a bottle (£61.03). Per bottle prices for the latest releases of these wines vary from around £100 a bottle for Lynch-Bages 2015 to £400 a bottle for the Château Margaux 2015; and a young vintage of the Sauzet Bâtard is going to cost at least £200, so we can say that the prices of 'the best' have certainly accelerated ahead of inflation.
When inflation is taken into account, my current earnings are about 27 percent less than my two best earnings years (2000 and 2008), and those earnings now largely support a family of four. I only mention these circumstances to point out how the affordability of 'the best' can easily be obliterated, which is why most of the purchases mentioned above have been re-sold: wines like these are now too costly for me to buy and too valuable for us to drink.
Any income of over £60,000 per year puts its earner in the top seven percent of the UK working population, so I am already much better paid than most of my compatriots, as well as an immensely privileged individual in a global sense. Yet for 'the best wine' to be truly affordable for those with children to support, I think you'd need to be in the top three percent of UK earners, bringing in more than £91,300 per year before tax. Ideally, you'd be a one-percenter (£159,000 per year plus): those people own 21 percent of the UK's wealth - but must surely own a much, much larger percentage of all the country's top wine.
The best is overpriced
If a particular commodity is high-status, sought-after, and limited in supply, then 'the best' will always be disproportionately more expensive than other quality categories of that commodity 30303030, by virtue of nothing more than its rarity. Footballer Paul Pogba (who moved on August 9th 2016 from Juventus to Manchester United for a record transfer fee at the time of £89 million) was not 89 times better than a professional footballer whose transfer fee at the same moment was £1 million, or infinitely better than a player on free loan. He was better by an incalculable number of small increments, and justified his fee because those slight incremental improvements are very hard for the managers and owners of football clubs to locate in a single individual. Wine is no different. The best must necessarily - by any value-for-money standard or (if you prefer) objective assessment of quality increments - be overpriced. If affordability of 'the best' is a consideration (as it will be for 97 percent of Britons), forget fine wine: it's not worth it.
The best isn't interesting
Let me be clear: I don't mean that great wine cannot offer sublime drinking pleasure. It can, and if any of my one-percenter friends offer me a glass of Cheval Blanc or Musigny, I count myself fortunate and revel in the experience. I would love to be able to drink these wines at home, informally and thoughtfully, a couple of times a year.
Such wines tend to be tasted reverentially amid formal surroundings, though; they are often (in my opinion) over-aged by their owners; and it requires no great intelligence, originality and tasting ability to single them out for praise, or lavish them with points. Because of their status, they are often accumulated and served en masse at grand, showy horizontal or vertical tastings where full, profound and leisurely appreciation and enjoyment of their qualities is impossible (see pages 180-82). In other words, tasting great wine can often be a pre-programmed, ritualized experience. It may be exquisite (because of the secular sanctity of the ritual rather than the taste of the wine), but it isn't necessarily interesting.
Whereas if you sit down with an old friend in a restaurant in Heraklion, and he suggests you try a bottle of Yiannis Economou's 2006 Liatiko, and you discover that it looks and tastes like some kind of kinky, low-acid cousin of Barolo, and its aromatic sweetness (sniffed amid the restaurant scents of burnt sage and grilled octopus) makes you think for some reason of Byzantium, and its savoury qualities and lush tannins bond perfectly with the roast goat and bitter foraged wild greens that the Egyptian-Filipino waitress has just brought you... well, all of that is interesting. In 20 years, I may well be dead. I want as much interest as possible in my tasting life before I die.
The best is somebody else's decision
Sometimes I adore 'the best' wines that I'm served; sometimes their strengths seem to me to be gestural and button-pushing; on rare occasions I think they're an out-and-out swindle. But the point is that they are always someone else's definition of 'the best': a committee verdict by the world's one-percenters, working in co-ordination with a few centuries or decades of tradition.
After 40 years of thoughtful and questing wine drinking, I now know the kind of thing I like to buy for my own drinking - as opposed to the much broader spectrum of wines that I would hope to appreciate professionally.
If it's red, I want some kind of palpable and detaining tannic presence (based on skins or stems, of course, not oak or powder) and textural wealth; I don't relish unripe, prominent or exaggeratedly structural acidity; I'm looking for a certain sobriety, challenge or allusiveness of aroma and flavour, and sometimes a strange sort of viscerally appealing comeliness (typical, for example, of Pomerol or of some Napa Cabernet). If it's white, I want discretion and subtlety, a closeness of grain, a little teasing aromatic intrigue. (Or its visceral opposite, especially from Condrieu and Alsace Gewurztraminer). The non-fruit flavours we habitually call 'mineral' are usually welcome.
Purity and limpidity are outstanding virtues in wines of either colour. Originality of flavour is preferable to banality, though on its own it does not guarantee merit. I don't want too much fruit in wines of either colour: I don't want violence of flavour, garish balances, or the lack of drinkability that goes with these things. I don't want any palpable oak at all. I don't want wine to smell like cider or beer.
These are my tastes; yours may be quite different. But whatever they are, you can probably eliminate three-quarters of all the wines commonly considered 'the best' in different categories by arriving at a calm understanding of your own preferences, and by hunting them down wherever they might be found.
Given my set of tastes, it's not difficult, for example, to find wines which deliver much more profound satisfaction than many of the world's 'bests' by hunting round for outstanding sub-€25 bottles in Alsace, Bordeaux, South-West France, Roussillon, the Southern Rhône Valley, Italy, Austria or Georgia. And when 'the best' is your decision - then it really is the best.