Chapter Four: Down with scores and up with drinking: Harry's kak en lekker scale of wine
Hopefully after the first three chapters we are all loving wine, drinking it more than ever, identifying differences, decanting, getting the temperature right, creating rituals, having a great time, laughing, drinking, popping corks with reckless abandon, and most of all fostering a great wealth of joie de vivre with wine at the centre. Too much to hope? Perhaps.
We are teetering on the edge of a diving board now. Below us is a pool of terms, varieties, winemaking techniques and more. We are bouncing on the board. Crouch, jump, thwack, crouch, jump, thwack. The board bends. But before we take this leap, I want us to pause and have a laugh, a laugh at the ridiculous world of wine scores, medals, and competitions.
Maybe you haven’t come across them yet, but if you drink wine for long enough, you will. I find them all too silly. Useful to some, I guess, but really just marketing schmaltz.
Assessing wine is part of the fun. We do it every time we taste and start looking for difference, and then work out whether we like it or not. But do we really need to drink in a world filled with scores out of 20, scores out of 100, bronze, silver and gold medals, a world, in my opinion that takes us further from enjoyment and closer to vanity.
The best wines made cannot be scored, and the worst do not need to be. So why do we do it? Why is the world obsessed with gold medals, trophies and 100 point wines?
Because wine is drunk over time – either a case of wine drunk a bottle at a time over years to observe the magic of maturation, or a bottle over a few days – the momentary snap judgment that a score or a medal reveals is problematic. A judge giving a quick score to a one wine among as many as a hundred.
What does a 96 point wine mean, really? Or a Double gold medal? It certainly does not mean you will enjoy it. These scores are generally given in an environment that is fundamentally different from the context in which the wine will be enjoyed. And while they do offer a rough guideline, help to the stranded and helpless supermarket shopper, they will never ever be a replacement for personal exploration and investigation.
Wine, at its most sublime and most excellent comes closer to art than mere utilitarian beverage. Do we score Picasso? Does Dali get an 89/100 or 93/100 for The Persistence of Memory? Do we assess paintings by writing down a list of the different colours used in the painting? No, so why do we do this with wine? Why do people all over the world insist on writing a list of wine flavours, and assigning a score out of a hundred? How does this help us enjoy wine?
Scores are a means of broadly placing wines into categories of quality. The best use for these descriptions and scores is a personal one. For you to keep track of the wines you drink and what you think of them. So if you have the bottle again in the future you can go back and see if your experience is different.
You can even make up your own scale, or just use mine. I give you,
Harry’s Kak en Lekker Scale of Wine.
Fokken Kak
Broken, faulty, disgusting, even bergies and students will not drink it.
Kak
Drunk happily by alcoholics, students and people with no sense of smell. Served at cheese and wines evenings where the only cheese is Pick n’ Pay Cheddar, and the goal is inebriation. Not just cheap and nasty wines are Kak; pricey wines can have teeth shattering tannins, reflux causing acidity, and splinters-in-your -tongue oak, and that could mean they are Kak.
Lekker Kak
You swallow it without fighting or gagging, but it is forgettable. It’s as interesting as Top Billing and about as much fun as a school outing to a paper-clip factory – inconceivably boring, but at least you are not at school. Don’t serve it to me.
Lekker
You can finish a bottle yourself. There are different elements working in your nose and mouth. Effort has gone into this wine’s creation. You are not embarrassed when opening it at a dinner, and if your friends are used to Lekker Kak wines they will comment on how ‘lovely’ it is. Basically this wine has elements of complexity, deliciousness, balance, and interestingness, but not really that memorable.
Fokken Lekker
Bearing your stained teeth to the world with pride, this is a wine that makes you smile. It is a Lekker wine, but well read, better looking, more wit and class, added flair and nuance; at its worst you happily sip away, at best you cradle it in your arms and whisper to it as you nurse it slowly to the end.
Kak Lekker
More complex than Boolean algebra, more layers than a Coetzee novel, with a colour that would make Rothko smile, all coming together with the balance and harmony of a Brahms symphony, a Tom Curran front-side barrel, or a Hashim Amla cover drive; a gobsmackingly orgasmically good wine.
Fokken Kak Lekker
Not sure if this is possible. I haven’t tasted one, but when I do I’ll probably weep.
OK, so I originally wrote that somewhat satirically. The point of this chapter was to hopefully spur you on to independence. Don’t rely on labels, stickers and scores. Don’t let your palate be influenced by an 18/20 score, two gold medals, or somebody shouting at you that this is “THE BEST DAMMNED PINOT IN THE COUNTRY”.
Critic’s descriptions and scores, competition medals and Platter stars can be useful, but they are very far from absolutes. Use them only as a rough guide. Before we take that dive into vinous knowledge you need to start trusting your own palate, tasting as much as you possibly can all the time, and working out your scale, justifying it along the way. Down with scores, and up with drinking.
Harry.
No comments:
Post a Comment