Rank good Chardonnay from Ganevat

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality… true art lies in a reality that is felt.  ~Odilon Redon

Whether it is by being artful or artless some writers have the ability to make their writing seem as natural as breathing. Their work becomes ingrained in your consciousness, as if the characters are inside your head, dictating the book, or to look at it another way, the writing is so seamless that you might think the book must be self-generated. In the way that the artist aspires to be truly artless, to disappear into the text so Ganevat’s sublime Chardonnay Chalasses Marnes is pared to the essence of flavour, it forms a fluid wordless language of its own, it is vinous electricity. When the distance between ourselves and the wine is eradicated we don’t have to make the effort to analyse its “hues and fragrances” by lolling the liquid around our mouths, we are simply content to drink and be charmed.

Since natural wine has come increasingly under the spotlight there seems to be a tendency to stand back and evaluate every single with a gimlet scientific eye. The difficulty here is the inbuilt faux-paradox that the more natural the wine – ie the fewer interventions in the process – the more unnatural it tastes to many palates. Flaws and impurities are, however, part of life; in fact, life itself is a mixture of accident and design and yet we insist on conceiving innumerable parameters of correctness as if we can’t live without pettifogging rules and regulations.

Havelock Ellis ["Impressions and Comments” (1914)]
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

Those who argue for consistency in wine flavours treat wine as if it were a special case. Faults, however, are often in the mind of the beholder. Those who happily coo over a stinky cheese will derogate a slightly smelly wine. We don’t talk about correct chickens, correct eggs, correct apples, yet wine is reduced (no pun intended) to chemical right and wrong. Those who attack natural wines without even defining what they are, tend to be apologists for wines that are so bland and denatured, so full of unnecessary additives that any arbiter of good taste would surely describe them as faulty, for when you can detect the heavy hand of the winemaker and the additions that manipulate flavour, then the wine itself becomes redundant.

Generalising about a style of wine won’t do. One vigneron, for example, may make thirty separate cuvées. Is it that twenty of those cuvees might be considered highly drinkable by the majority of consumers that is the important fact, or that ten cuvees might be very challenging? On balance is the natural winemaker flouting the convention that the product should appeal to the consumer or is the wine honest and sometimes (by chance, by vintage) the taste of the wine will intersect with the taste of the consumer? We have to assess wine by wine, year by year, grower by grower, be they conventional or natural – it makes no difference. And we should reassess as well. The wine can be different and so can the aesthetic for judging it. Wine is a living, mutating liquid. We should perhaps remember Alice Walker’s observation that in nature, “nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.”

Ganevat makes an extraordinary range of no-sulphur wines. Some are delicious and simple, some are profound beyond belief, some are elegant, some are funky. What makes them natural - and what matters - is that each wine reaches its potential every year, for better or for worse and whether you like them or not.

In short, scoring is a demeaning approach whilst describing the wines is a challenge, but one worth taking up. What matters to me is winkling certain truths out of a particular wine, understanding where it comes from, how it is made and why it tastes the way it does, in other words assessing it on its own terms and merits. The best way to achieve this is to meet the wine more than half way, to drink it in the spirit in which it came to be.