It all can’t blow you away

There seems to be a tendency in the wine world for people to dismiss wines that don’t “blow you away.” What is being blown away by a wine anyway? Is it having your face wind blown like those people you see in jet propulsion testing laboratories after you have a sip of 1945 Mouton Rothschild. If so, I do not want to be blown away by wine. It really is a silly concept if you think about it. Wine is a beverage that is meant to go with food first and foremost. Most “food” wines as people call them, sometimes in a derogatory fashion, will never blow you away at all. (As an aside I have sat down and drank DRC Romanee St. Vivant with a meal and that was a great food wine.) On their own, these food wines, can be quite good but with the right food they can come alive and create a wonderful synergy on your palate. Most wines that blow people away are usually high-alcohol, richly fruited and have the price tag to match. The point of this rant/article is to show you that all wine does not have to blow you away and if doesn’t blow you away it is doing a disservice to yourself and the wine if you dismiss it.
I am talking about lovely little wines like Bernard Baudry’s 2005 Chinon Domaine which is a lovely little wine which will not make you sell your first born to get more but who cares? It is lovely now and can complement a coq-a-vin perfectly. It will improve for up to ten years and always will provide pleasure. This wine will NOT, I repeat not, blow you away. If that is what you are expecting then get ready for a whopping load of dissapointment. Another example of a wine like this would be the 2006 Domaine de la Pepiere Muscadet-Sevre-et-Maine sur lie which also will never blow you away. But because of that does this wine deserve to be dismissed because it does not have a two minute finish or prodigious levels of concentration. I bet wines that have those characteristics don’t go as well with oysters as Marc Ollivier’s trademark wine. I am glad this wine does not blow me away or the countless amounts of people who buy this wine every day from us. If so, we probably could not sell it as cheaply, and we also would not sell as much. I am glad it does what it does, which is refresh your palate, speak of place, and match impeccably with freshly shucked oysters.

Every now and then I do like to have a peak experience with wine just as much as the next wine geek. Isn’t peak experience a much more nicer term than “blow away” anyway? But I digress. I just had a lovely bottle of 1971 JJ Prum Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese and it was a peak experience. Just perfect harmony in a bottle. Yet this did not blow me away. I had it with a lovely meal at Tia Pol, a lovely tapas joint in Chelsea, and it went perfectly with the meal, enhancing the wine and enhancing the food and both actually enhanced me a bit too, which all good wine is supposed to do, regardless of pedigree. Yes some people spend X amount of dollars on a bottle of wine and do expect some sort of return. And if they have little experience in the world of imbibing wine the return that they would expect is big, blowsy wine that will “blow them away” with off-the charts levels of concentration and extract. Subtletly will not do the trick here. So alas there will always be that style of wines made, and the world needs them, as much as we need Big Macs and AOL customer service but that is no reason to dismiss little wines that go great with food, are refreshing and honest and most of all DO NOT BLOW YOU AWAY.