What is truth in wine? said jesting Pilate
A fascinating article by Matt Kramer on the wines and philosophy of Frank Cornelissen. I like the wines because they challenge preconceived notions of correctness, of right and wrong, of typicity, of beauty, of greatness. To assert that they are extreme goes without saying, but it is also irrelevant. Frank’s wines are pure - he has set himself an ethical standard of non-interventionism.
Kramer suggests the old certainties are being blurred. Sometimes you are uncertain whether a wine is great because it is aethetically appealing or great because it is utterly original. Some great wines appeal to the intellect, others to the senses (and Frank’s to the id!) And perhaps we over-intellectualise ourselves. Sometimes, the wine is the wine is the wine.
Is Magma a great wine? Good question. It’s an original wine, a red like no other in my experience. But winegrowers like Frank Cornelissen aren’t really interested in conventional notions of “greatness.”
This is the nub of it: How do you define “greatness”? Of course, the usual elements of complexity, balance, proportion and that indefinable yet unmistakable sense of uniqueness (dare I say terroir?) make up most of the equation. The French, by the way, would insist that a great wine be “harmonious,” a word and a concept that I don’t think is part of California’s or Australia’s wine vocabulary or aesthetic.
Winegrowers like Mr. Cornelissen are now stretching our understanding of “greatness.” Mr. Cornelissen’s best red wine, Magma, is like no other version of Nerello Mascalese, nor any other red wine of my experience. It does deliver the complexity and characterfulness conventionally understood as a prerequisite to the acclamation “great.”
But the element of intellectualism cannot be ignored. Is a wine like Magma “great” not only because of its sensorily pleasurable qualities, but also because of the winemaker’s own revisionist notion of the possibilities of wine beauty, brought to life by an extreme non-interventionism? Is it telling us something about wine and the Earth that we might not otherwise know?
Make no mistake: We’ve seen this before. We’ve seen it in the dramatically revisionist winemaking in Barolo and Barbaresco that took place in the 1980s and ’90s. Today’s mainstream Barolos were yesterday’s radical—and to the eyes and palates of traditionalists, insupportable—distortions of previous notions of goodness and greatness.
We’ve seen it in German Rieslings as they’ve transitioned from sweet to dry, and in Alsatian Rieslings as they tiptoe from drier to sweeter.
And we’re seeing it right now in the various Crazy Club white wines made with extended skin contact, a type of dry white wine that at least two generations of wine drinkers—if not more—have never experienced.
Recently, I served a 2007 Santa Chiara Bianco from Paolo Bea, the great Umbria producer, to a French winegrower. A blend of Grechetto, Malvasia, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Garganega, this extended skin-contact dry white dazzled the French producer. Even a professional such as he, with decades of experience, had never previously tasted or even imagined such a dry white wine. It was a revelation.
Perhaps Mr. Cornelissen himself offers at least part of an answer, one that suggests that the life of the winemaking mind has its limits.
“When I first arrived here, in 2000, I used to bottle late,” said Mr. Cornelissen. “That was in what I call my ‘intellectual’ phase. I didn’t want to have any fruitiness in my wines. I wanted them to be highly evolved, like old-style Burgundies and Barolos. Now I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “Those wines were too intellectual. Now I like some fruit.”