Sunday, November 28, 2010

How should I rate natural wines?

I've been wondering whether I should rate the natural wines I taste in some way. Not out of 100 Parker-style, obviously or even out of 20. Marking wines like this seems more to do with the world of wine competitions and other conventional ways of assessing wine that natural winemakers deliberately turn their backs on.

The most useful rating it seems to me would be one that placed the wines somewhere on the spectrum of natural winemaking which is a pretty broad church. On the one hand you have wines that taste like any other wine from that area or appellation, on the other ones where you're hard pushed to identify the country let alone the grape variety.

Doug Wregg of Caves de Pyrène gets round this at Terroirs by flagging up the more challenging bottles on the list with a wild horse. I'd quite like to see a three tiered ranking, maybe flagged green, amber and red, traffic-light fashion. Green being familiar territory, unlikely to phase a newcomer to natural wines, amber suggesting it might be outside your usual register and red an alert that this is a more extreme style of winemaking that may not be to your taste at all.

Or maybe I should simply carry on describing the wines and just say how I find them. What do you think?

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