Lots of good, not so much great

We opened up a very nice bottle of 5-year old California Pinot Noir last night. Fragrant, good fruit, nice finish. I believe we paid around $50 for the bottle. It was very good, but not great. Which got me to thinking…of all of the wines we’ve consumed, most have been good to very good, but few have been extraordinary.

For all the money we’ve spent on acquiring fine wine, the inside scoops from places like Wine Beserkers, endless tasting and research, etc., I find that surprising. Do others feel the same? Are we just spoiled with all of our good wine and have lost touch with true mediocrity? Curious to hear other opinions.

Compared to the plonk the average person drinks, nearly all our bottles are great. Maybe you should recalibrate the meter by drinking bottom shelf sub-$10 bottles from the supermarket for a few months. You’ll relearn how to appreciate the bounty in your cellar.

Not my experience at all, but I am a very narrow-band purchaser. Over the years I have settled into a niche (both variety and producer) and know what I like. I find that when I experiment, that’s when my satisfaction percentage drops considerably, but then it does add a little fun to the mix.

To be sure, spending $50 for a wine that is just “good” actually sucks as a QPR.

I never did jump all in on Berserker Day, and I bet many people find wines from that special day that are just not their cup of tea. It’s a captivating day and opens some wallets, and sure appears to be fun. My Berserker Day purchases have been limited to Lagier Meredith, Halcon and a couple other cool climate syrah producers. Halcon hit my wheelhouse.

Ian, your point isn’t lost on me, and we do run across plonk from time to time, which is a stark reminder. I’m not whining at all - we have (IMO) an excellent cellar with lots of variety. It’s just that for all the time, money, and energy that goes into the hobby, I am surprised that I don’t come across more exceptional bottles.

Just curious. How often do you drink wine?

i hear ya. You spend so much per bottle and think it’s going to be great, or at least, better than ‘average’. And what do I end up with after nurturing these babies along for a decade more, or less, and nothing but a 90 on the point scale, or in publisher parlance “A good bottle” with the implied verbiage that it has a ways to go to become extraordinary. So wine buying is rather a huge waste of time and money, but then I think about what I like to drink and what happens when I drink those special bottles that have everything going for them and realize I couldn’t even buy these bottles now if I could (consider a 20 year old Tempier or Madiran or a 10 year old carricante), and the bargain seems less Faustian.

1-2 bottles per week.

Not sure if it is a question of frequency. Sometimes the more one drinks, the higher the standards for great bottles goes up and the rest become middling.

Too often I find that, when I open the “best” bottles, usually aged, the experience is somewhat disappointing. The wine is pleasant, but doesn’t send me with its complexity.

By contrast, I derive a huge amount of satisfaction from everyday wines in the $18-$39 range. Are they profound? No. Do they bring more of a smile than the fancy bottles? In many cases, yes. (Recent examples: Ramey - 2015 Sonoma Coast chardonnay and Felsina - 2016 Berardenga Chianti Classico.)

I’m curious: What was the pinot that prompted your post?

What surprises me is the other direction. Opening a $20 wine and thinking it tastes like a $50 wine. Had a really nice Spanish Granacha that blew my socks off over the weekend…for $20.

Sounds like your chasing a dragon.

At least from my perspective it is impossible to have extraordinary wine all or most of the time. Even if I were drinking “the very best” wine daily, over time, my critique of it would simply recalibrate such that I would view it as more ordinary. I like having the variety of both, well, variety as well as quality and complexity of wine to choose from and enjoy.

Unfortunately so much “good” California wine is a “bad” QPR, though. So I do commiserate with you on that issue.

Scott, I agree with you and have experienced the same. Not a good feeling.

Now to ramble a bit:
-isn’t this true in almost all aspects of life?. . . what we expect to be “special”, and make efforts to experience, often is not that special at all.
-“the great is the enemy of the good” thing . . . good and especially very good are “pretty pretty good” most of the time, but less so if we expect greatness.
-I like to “test drive” a wine before making a larger purchase , even for 3 or 6 bottles, no matter what the “hype” . I don’t always do it, but it minimizes buyers remorse.
-Alfert’s comments on zeroing in on “tried and true for you” wines and producers makes a lot of sense to me and it is something I also do to an extent. But I also have been venturing into some new-to-me wines. I try to maintain the “test drive” discipline. Have found some new favorites along the way.
-I like John Morris’ idea of having a comfortable to you sweet spot price range where you find a lot very good wine drinking can be found. Personally, I am happy to drink very good wines, although I do welcome the occasional “wow” wine every now and then.

May your next bottle be a very good one!

I don’t find it surprising at all. Great/excellent/superb or whatever other synonym thereof you choose * should* be a a rare occurrence. If it’s not, I think we’re calibrating wrong, or indulging in hyperbole. Most wine, even the wine we tend to drink on this board, doesn’t have that gear, and that is fine. It’s not supposed to. It is almost a miracle when vineyard, producer, vintage and everything else come together to create something transcendent. And miracles don’t happen that often.

I’m with you Scott on the relatively low percentage of extraordinary wines, but I’m not surprised or disappointed. After all, extraordinary isn’t ordinary. What’s ordinary to us would likely be extraordinary to someone used to drinking $10-15 bottles. It’s become ordinary to us simply because of familiarity, but that’s OK. I’ve known what I like for a long time now and purchased accordingly, so I know what to expect from most of the bottles in my cellar.

Having a less-expensive bottle that far exceeds expectations satisfies in different ways than an extraordinary expensive bottle does, but both are extraordinary in their own right.

This is my experience as well. Maybe my age (81). I find the same with a film or play, restaurant good but not great. So I have learned that great is something very special and rare, Even if I open a rare old Margaux or Yquem many are very good, but not great. If I have a great experience once a year that is a rare treat. BUT if I am living with very good food, wine, travel, friends, I am having a great life.

For us, $50+ is a special occasion: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, or similar.

And the wine had dadgum better deliver [which is possible, but not easy to find].

We concentrate most of our efforts on discovering nice sipping wines in the $9.99 to $14.99 price range, and, to be honest, even when we extend it out to the occasional $24.99 wine, we’ve been in a little bit of a rut this summer.

There was some Macon in our market last week, at $12.99 & $14.99, but apparently it all vaporized within about 24 hours [or less] of the email being sent.

Also some Argentinian Cabernet Franc which vanished equally quickly, at $14.99, but apparently they should be able to restock that one [knock on wood].

With this blistering late-summer/early-fall heat wave we’re enduring, I’ve got my sights set on a couple of sparklers [one from Slovenia, and one from Australia] which I hope will break our “good, but not great” losing streak.

On the red side of things, there’s an affordable Chianti in our market right now, with a huge score from the Wine Spectator, and excellent scores from Cellar Tracker, which I’m hoping will make something decidedly better than a “good, but not great” Thanksgiving wine, but I haven’t tasted it yet.

I think I found the problem

Good summary.

There’s an expectations game going on, and the poor bottle of wine often does not stand a chance. It’s stuck trying to live up to an imaginary ideal, rather than just be what it is.

  1. Ouch.

  2. California seems to be a work in progress. I think it might be another century or more before the industry has had enough empirical trial & error experience to get a handle on some quality recipes. And it might come from a combination of Mass Spectrometry and affordable Artificial Intelligence [the Chinese might be able to pull that off - reverse engineering some recipes for making 99 & 44/100ths percent pure Cote-de-Nuits somewhere on the Steppes of Central Asia].

  3. Financially speaking, Cabernet Sauvignon casts such an ominous shadow over the California winemaking landscape that I don’t know whether any California winemakers would want to invest in Mass Spectrometry + Artificial Intelligence, when they could just as easily rip out all the Pinot vines, replant with Cabernet Sauvignon, and likely make even more profit than before.