2003 Échantillon de Vin, Château de Small, Domaine de Clare
A typical échantillon, bright bourgeoisie bouquet with overtones of snobbery. Fresh on the palate, offering up a range of personalities and personas from the quirky to the serious. Smooth, pleasant and especially long finish. Will drink well for many years to come.
To some, the rather Dionysian practice of gathering to taste (and sometimes also to drink) a variety of wines is the cornerstone of an established bourgeoisie sub-culture in this country. Socialists rant about how the suitably rich can still indulge in such decadent flights of fancy when decent healthcare and social security apparatus is not even in place. But the whole spectacle of gathering refined alcoholic beverages and then debating about their qualities does send me into chills of anticipation, even as I parry away such accusations.
The speaker at this tasting was the typical, crusty, vest-wearing heptagenarian Englishman, of a long line of blue blood and a business with centuries of tradition and appointments to various monarchs and belying his prim appearance was the requisite dry humour and mule-like resistance to change. Naturally, in stark contrast was the largely youthful and mobile audience for whom wine was more a leisure activity than an institution to be defended under the aegis of some long-extinguished coast of arms. These people just wanted to have a little drink, some fun and a little rancour, not uphold the rich mores of a lineage older than most independent nations in Europe.
In wine terms perhaps, it would be the collision of the Old School and the New, just like the Old World and the New, but it had all the softness of a collision of a pillow and a sponge and the amiability of the clink of two wine glasses. The bottom line of such a clash is that both people agree that wine is itself a pretty good idea, just as long as you don't partake in that Australian rubbish that masquerades itself as wine, you ninny. This set the stage for a rather amicable encounter.
It may seem, to the casual observer, that a room of about thirty people sniffing and huffing like cocaine addicts at oddly shaped glasses containing miniscule amounts of a pale liquid and then sloshing it around like mouthwash, is truly quite laughable. Now if they only could see themselves. The whole of wine tasting is based upon the assumption that somehow, given grapes that are almost totally similar grown in almost totally similar soils can, somehow, produce a mind-boggling array of wholly different liquids. I think they can really, though it is rather dubious given the deficient olfactory capabilities of fallible humans, coloured further by cultural bias and psychological manipulation. Something that shows this fact is probably how white wines are inevitably described as having the smells similar to light coloured things and red wine terminology involves only red and dark-coloured things. But perhaps that is just mere coincidence.
But tasting itself does not lend confidence to the whole basis of wine tasting. It probably is the only alcoholic beverage between varieties there is sufficient difference to warrant the careful and systematic dissemination of (since people in general think that whiskey tastings are ridiculous, but wine tastings are perfectly acceptable) and the only one that has a sufficiently refined reputation to render such urbane treatments perfunctory. Yet as I breathed the gentle aromas of a succession of wines I was starting to panic because everything smelled really quite the same, which should not have happened in theory. So it must have been my fault, as I frantically washed down several water-biscuits to annihilate every bacterium and molecule in my mouth that might, somehow, be eclipsing the wonderful parfums of the wines. Either that was effective in itself, or my mind started to invent what I should have smelled. Once that barrier was broken it was easy to start of flow of lovely descriptors (of which good ones are used for nice wines and foul ones are used for lesser wines). Scientifically, it was a total mess, but otherwise it was quite enjoyable, if not for the alcohol then for what it stood for, at least to each of the many people present.
As in every social gathering, there is a selection of different people there for different reasons. In this case, there are the interested people, who have some knowledge of wine and are serious about pursuing the mechanisms by which wine erudition is gained. Then there are those who are there merely to drink, and to have fun, with the variety of wines available at competitive prices. Naturally, they bring lots of friends along and talk more about other things than the wine at hand. Of course there are the serious serious people who write down tasting notes and rate each wine for no other ostensible reason than to convince oneself that such a pursuit was worthwhile and that there was much scholarship to be had in the criticism and classification of wines.
Though the main point to be said is, whatever be the reason that people here come to tastings, the whole concept of wine as a way of life is deeply entrenched and provides quite a suitable cleft for the so-inclined. Bourgeoisie or not, I probably want to be sipping some wine a glass as winter chills slowly outside, in an artificial construct of pleasantries that tastings are, and have a good time while I'm at it, nothing more, and nothing less.
