Turning wine into words

Words, words, words. Over a couple of sessions, we drank a selection of serious wines, starting with a Cantemerle ’05. As everyone else thought it was delicious, it would have been curmudgeonly of me to say that although it had been open for a couple of hours, it would have benefited from another five years. So I abstained from curmudgeonliness. Even so, although 2005 is a great vintage, it needs longevity. We moved on to a wine I had never heard of, let alone tasted, but was ready: an ’06 Clos Louie, from Castillion in the Côtes de Bordeaux. Only in business since 2003, it has pre-phylloxera vines: 70 per cent merlot, 27 per cent cabernet franc and only a soupçon of cab sauv. Seriously good, seriously promising, it is not yet as expensive as it is bound to become.

Then to Burgundy: a 2009 Marsanny from Bruno Clair. Marsanny’s reputation is growing, partly because viniculture is improving and partly because it is good value when compared with greater names. Bruno Clair is an excellent grower, but we drank that wine in a club. When a third bottle was called for, we were informed we had just exhausted the stock — at the moment when the wine had reached perfect drinking pitch. In a world beset by chaos, it might seem self-indulgent to dwell too long on a minor frustration. But the tendency of wine to be drunk before it is quite ready is one of the piquant inconveniences of the human condition.

As the evenings moved on, the conversation became more ruminative. We began with the difficulty of using words to describe wine. There is a constant risk of sounding pretentious, but given the complexity of a good wine’s taste, it is hard to avoid an overindulgence in grace notes.