This question has gone through my mind many, many times over the past 5 years, but never more often than the last few weeks. Financially, we have a lot riding on this. Of course the second vintage is in barrel now, and 2010’s will be shortly, but as the old saying goes, “The first impression is everything.” Right before the 2008 harvest I was at the vineyard with the winemaker who would help me make the wine, and he said that he couldn’t guarantee any specific qualities in the wine seeing it was the first harvest from a new site and so on. My response to him was, “All I care about is when people taste our wine they know that it could only have come from The Grande Dalles and our vineyard.”
I think we’ve captured that in our first vintage, but the problem is it’s not easy to sell something unique, and you can multiply that problem by 10 when it’s coming from someplace new and from “unknown” people. I wonder, should we have made wine more in the vein of what people expect, you know, “yummy,” “jammy,” “inky-purple,” “fruity,” “unctuous,” etcetera? Would that make it easier to sell? Then I ran across this quote on Vinography from Matt Kramer’s new book Matt Kramer on Wine:
“Isn’t taste what fine wine is all about? Nope. You’d think it would be, but it’s not so. Let me push this further: the purpose of fine wine is not to give pleasure, but to give insight. . . . The greatest wines literally mark the land for us. They tell us something about the earth that we could not otherwise know. This is their pleasure, an insight so intrinsic that it endures and repeats itself over generations. Everything else is just, well, taste.“
What Matt says is exactly what I’ve thought about wine and our wine for years and years. There are a whole bunch of good tasting wines out there, but in my opinion the ones that show what Matt Kramer calls “somewhereness” are far and few between, particularly those from the US. I know new and unique things are almost always initially viewed with skepticism, I just hope that at some point people “get it” about our wines.
