Wine & Spirits - Fall 2022 - 1

Editor's
Note
Taste the
Change
Y
OU MIGHT REMEMBER YOUR FIRST
taste of coff ee, and thinking how
adult it felt to have your own
cup of a bitter black drink, something
your parents mysteriously craved every
morning. Or the fi rst snifter of a peaty
Islay Scotch whiskey, the one you put
down after an exploratory sip. Some
people's tastes don't change, but most
people's do, and wine can trigger or
accelerate that change.
For centuries, the fi rst taste of a great
wine would often provide that trigger for
a new wine drinker. Many of those wines
came from places that had been classifi ed
based on their historical record of growing
great wine. Then, the defi nition of
greatness began to change. In 1976, the
Judgment of Paris focused attention on
ripe New World cabernet from young
vines. And, in the 1990s, cult cabernets
shifted the boundaries completely. Not
to connect them in any way, but those
cult cabernets happened to come along
at a time when scientifi c voices became
louder and more urgent about climate
change, which has since had its own disruptive
impact on great wine.
For most wine drinkers today, it's
impossible to be a climate-change denier,
as many pillars of the wine world we came
to know have crumbled. At re-enactments
of the 1976 Paris Tasting, it's not a
battle between ripe New World cabernets
and their austere Bordelais cousins. It's
ripe against ripe, with the classic French
vignerons working to hold their alcohol
levels below 14 percent. Meanwhile, most
of the classic great wines are unreachable
for new (and most longtime) wine drinkers-the
loss a casualty of global wealth
disparities, another accelerating change.
It's not hard to imagine how quickly
the map of the wine world will change, a
map many of us have doggedly sought to
understand through our sense of smell,
through the textures and fl avors of wines
that appear to have singular identities.
Even if we cannot identify a wine exactly,
it presents itself as irreproducible, a distinctive
matrix that triggers our senses
toward wonder and joy.
A warming climate has helped to
genericize some-certainly not yet all-
of the wines from historically great sites.
Meanwhile, technology has enabled quality
to be enhanced at vineyards and in cellars
that do not necessarily have anything
distinct to say in their wines. And as it
becomes more challenging to tell these
wines apart, we, at Wine & Spirits, believe
it is also increasingly irrelevant. We set
out to provide an alternative to tacit
agreements about taste, whether they are
fostered by fellow critics, or algorithms
and crowd-sourced reviews. We seek to
bring the same consideration and care to
our tasting and reporting on wine as our
favorite growers bring to the biodiversity
of their land.
When we say a wine tastes of a place,
we mean that it is not a simple presentation
of perfectly ripe fruit, supple textures
and vanilla scents from aging in fi nely
crafted oak barrels. It is not overworked,
and whatever work was done on its behalf
was in service to the wine's singular identity,
rather than to a formula based on
market-proven contemporary tastes.
Blind to producer and price, our tastings
identify beautiful singularities, wherever
those wines may grow. It takes conviction
for our panels to agree that, yes, I
would tell a friend to buy this wine, whatever
it may be, and, sure, I would want to
drink it with them. That said, our panelists
and our editors are not interested in
drinking generic wine. Outside of a few
selections in our Best for $12 or Less,
you won't fi nd it in these pages. They are
fi lled, instead, with wines tied, indirectly
or precisely, to the place where they grew.
And many of them off er discoveries you
will not soon forget.
In another change, this is the last issue
with contributions from our long-time
executive editor Tara Q. Thomas, who
is moving on after 25 years. We wish
her well in her new endeavors and will
all miss her more than we can say. Tara
helped rein in some of the more disruptive
tendencies of our editors, but maybe
it's a good time for a little disruption.
It's always been an unstated goal of our
tastings.
JOSHUA GREENE
http://www.cristomvineyards.com
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2022

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