Not Oaky-Dokey

So I said to Carlo: “Let’s drink something dangerous”. In retrospect I’m not sure what I meant by that. Partly I meant “Let’s spend more money than we would normally do on a bottle of wine and risk being disappointed, but the sneaking, faux-natural, quasi-spiritual part of me wanted to sample an extreme wine that would trip the light fandango and send tiny squalls of reverberating flavours to the outer limits of my palate. Or something.

I ordered a rich Marmandais wine. The cuvee above the cuvee, so to speak. More is more, right?

At first the upfront fruit fronted up, but after a couple of snifters I feel like Woody Woodpecker rattling my beak against a solid oak tree. As the wine opened up it closed down, as if knackered by extreme lacquer, classic old Duke of York style: It marched all the fruit up the hill, then it marched it down.

And the wood tannins grew and grew and my tongue became enveloped in leather. That oak – not so much a structural corset as a dense overlay of toasty sweetness bruléed by an overenthusiastic blowtorch. I mentally contrasted this with a ridiculously drinkable, unassumingly rustic Marcillac from jester-grower Jean-Luc Matha that I had consumed the previous night single-handedly. It had slithery red fruits, was tinged with graphite and edged with iron and blood. This wine condensed the sentiment “I sneer at your oak and I generally thumb my bulbous nose at your extraordinary pretensions” into the concise command “Drink me!”

The trouble with the wine from Marmande, other than the fact that Carlo and I could barely manage a third of a bottle between us is that it was the wrong wine at the wrong time. One doesn’t drink to analyse and disinter the various components and qualities (or otherwise). Wine should move naturally, the bottle should empty itself into your glass without effort, but these clumpen, oaky, almost bathycolpian wines have a way of stopping you in your tracks and clogging your very taste buds.

I wonder whether I simply find the presence of new oak in wine rebarbative? Or, is it more a question of balance? Most wines do not need oak to be great; we don’t measure quality by breadth. I divide wines into the kinetic (driving across the palate) and the azoic (those rendered lifeless by over extraction of flavour). The curse of the super cuvée is that the wine may never come to terms with itself and digest the oak which, in turn, will make the wine virtually indigestible to the drinker.