At the first Decanter Asia Wine Awards in Hong Kong, four experienced judges sat in front of four glasses of wine and could not agree.
The flight was Georgian, made in qvevri, clay vessels buried in the ground where the grapes ferment on their skins for months. This was years before any shop in Hong Kong kept a shelf for amphora wines.
One judge found them impossibly tannic. Another read them as oxidised. I hesitated and said little. What we could taste was not in dispute. What it meant was.
As we finalised our scores, I said that a producer must have had real courage to send wines like these to Asia. Our panel chair put down his pen and sent for the competition chair.
Steven Spurrier came to our table. He tasted without hurry. He talked about where the wines came from, and how months on the skins give a white wine the colour, grip and tannin not unlike a delicate red wine. Then he raised our scores.
Nothing had changed in the glass. What changed was the question being asked of it.
We had judged a white wine by the standards of white wine, and by those standards it failed. But this was a white that behaved like a red. Spurrier judged it as one. Were the tannins integrated? Did the fruit carry them? Did the whole hold together?
It did.
His experience helped. A wine like that surprised him less, so trusting his reading took less courage. But his questions were open to all of us: what is this wine trying to be, and does it work?
Unfamiliar is easily mistaken for wrong. A wine can break every rule we have learnt for its category and still be in harmony with itself.
So when a wine confuses you, ask what it is trying to be, and judge it on those terms. Then ask the question that matters most: does it work?
The chapter of Reading Wine about this tasting began at that table.
Photo by JC Viens