Romantic or Provincial?

On my return from London, where for the fourth year in a row I was a member of the tasting commissions at the Decanter World Wine Awards, I could not help but notice how different the approach international critics have to wine is from ours here in Italy. All, and I mean all, the judges I worked alongside with – Masters of Wine, Master Sommeliers and journalists – sought to place their experience at the service of the consumer.

In what way? By carrying out a technical evaluation of the various wines, which consisted in verifying correct winemaking methods, organoleptic characteristics and quality/price ratio. With some difficulty I was able to also include such considerations as the typicality of a wine and the role the area it comes from plays.  Sometimes I was even able to get them to forgive an excess of tannins, which they thought made the wine “greenish” or “unripe”. Backed up by  Alessandro Torcoli, the young and very talented editor of Civiltà del Bere who is studying to become a Master of Wines I tried to convince them that the tannins were not ‘green’ but ‘abundant’ and that many Italian grapes, Nebbiolo first among them, have this characteristic. 

However, I was not able to use this argument when the wine was not made correctly and suffered from volatile acidity, ‘brett’ and other problems with acidity, even if this had to do with its typicality. Their steadfast pre-requisite was that a wine needed to be well-made from an enological perspective. This because in their view the consumer needed to be protected, not educated or ‘dazzled’ by the wine ‘guru’ of the day.

For me it was a lesson in concreteness and while it was perhaps not romantic it certainly was not provincial, two attitudes that are most common in the way critics in Italy approach wine, where even aspects that can be considered a little folkloristic risk being considered ‘fundamental’.