July 19, 2024 - NWR

🍷 Tasting shapes with Nick Jackson, MW

July 19, 2024

Nick Jackson, MW, wrote Beyond Flavour with the expectation that it would be read by “maybe a hundred MW students.” Instead it became an instant classic, a must-read for the wine cognoscenti, and perhaps the most influential wine book of the last decade among wine experts. We spoke with him for the site and live on Slack this week about his book’s simple and provocative premise: wines are distinct from one another not for the way they taste, but for the way they feel and behave in your mouth.  

  • “The different flavors in a wine are not the end in themselves, they’re a means to a more complete experience. They’re vehicles for telling a story. Only the complete experience can give you the whole. What’s the complete experience? Not just flavors, but tannin, acid, sapidity, structure, length, all those kinds of things. Personality and character are elements of wine which we just don’t think about enough. And they’re so much more important than fruit flavors.”

  • “The way we teach wine is through the lens of French wine—as if French wine is the gold standard. Now, it may be, but let’s think about why: they’re emphasizing things like flavors, the texture of the fruit, ageability, specificity in terms of terroir expression. I’ve got no problems with any of those things. A velvety Burgundy, Sonoma Pinot, Napa Cabernet, or Bordeaux—these wines perfectly fit the model that’s been made by education. But if you have a Sangiovese or a Barolo—frankly, they’re powerful, but they lack that generous mid-palate fruit texture. What do they have instead? This piercing acidity, this grainy tannin. So the wines become less about fruit, and more about texture and the structure of the tannins.”

  • “Appreciating wine is the study of beauty. It’s aesthetics. Often, in a pretty ugly world, wine is a daily experience that gives us a moment of grace.”

Read more about his approach and what the texture expert is drinking (and skipping, and kind of trying to get into but maybe isn’t sure he loves just yet) in our interview.

This spring and summer brought forth an unrelenting string of bad news from California wine country. Most notably, in May, the San Francisco Chronicle declared “California Wine Is in Serious Trouble,” noting that wine consumption had dropped nearly nine percent in 2023. One well-known winemaker told the Chronicle, “A lot of brands are dead, but they don’t even know it right now.” Recently, the newspaper also reported that much of this year’s upcoming California wine harvest could go to waste, with wine growers unable to sell their grapes.

Jason Wilson places blame for much of this on what he calls “corporate peddlers of shitty wine.”

“We all need to clearly see the problem for what it is: The wine industry’s reliance on the sales of poor-quality, bulk wines,” he writes. “For U.S. wine consumers, there’s essentially a line in the sand: $20. Above that is what the industry calls ‘premium wines.’ Those sales are relatively steady, if slightly smaller. Below that price point is a vast ocean of American mass-market wines, and sales of these middling or even lousy wines are exactly what is in decline. That’s where the crisis is happening.”

So why does the industry keep putting its grapes in the bulk wine basket? And what does the mainstream wine consumer actually want to buy? Experts have some answers.

HAPPENINGS IN OUR SUBSCRIBERS-ONLY SLACK

What you might have missed in the NWR Slack:

  • Our resident Champagne expert established a special channel for her fellow bubble-heads

  • Reader Seth opened a bottle that made our editor in chief rather jealous

  • A question about wine fridges sparked some heated debate

Not in the Slack chat community yet? Subscribe now for the full New Wine Review experience so you can join in with the rest of us there!

If you’ve ever been an ingredient short right when you wanted a nice mixed drink or overwhelmed by the prospect of breaking out the juicers and strainers for a single serving, Susannah Skiver Barton has a solution to propose: the canned cocktail.

  • “High-quality, canned and bottled cocktails have arrived, allowing you to skip the effort and go straight to the enjoyment. These aren’t White Claws or High Noons or, God forbid, wine coolers; you’ll find nary a vodka soda or hard lemonade among them. Instead, they’re built on recipes devised by seasoned bartenders, transparent ingredient lists that eschew artificial flavoring and excess sweetness, and spirits from well-known distilleries.

  • “The best of the best of canned and bottled cocktails can (seriously) stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their counterparts from a high-end bar.”

After extensive testing, she’s picked more than 30 different cans (and occasionally tiny bottles) across multiple categories that hold up to her exacting standards.

ANY QUESTIONS?

We want your questions about the worlds of wine and whiskey! Submit them here and we may answer them in an upcoming article. And yes, you can be anonymous, so ask us anything that’s been on your mind.

WINE STORIES WORTH READING FROM AROUND THE INTERNET

⌛ Medieval wine records help researchers look deep into the past for evidence of climate change. “The 1470s, for example, had the highest rated wine must of all time.”

🇪🇸 Drought is crushing Cava, as some large producers have furloughed most of their staff. Will Albariño save the day?

💯 What is Napa’s Hundred Acre up to with these acquisitions?

🧎 Is Napa’s next cult wine made in Sonoma?

As always, thanks for reading! See you next week for much more.

Santé!

The NWR Editors

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