Wine - Roger Scruton says that better wine is made in Bordeaux
Published 27 February 2006
A good Bordeaux tells us that drinking and drunking are different things
In my long apprenticeship as a wino, I took the line recommended by Hegel: to move out from the mere immediacy of self towards the mediated object, to realise subjective freedom in objective action, to build an ever more splendid Entausserung in the world of others - in short, to get magnificently, operatically and stupendously drunk, and so perceive, in those last moments of illuminated consciousness, the transition from quantity to quality that is the final stage of the dialectic. In due course, however, I came to see that you can understand quality in another way, not as the final Aufhebung of quantity, but as an intrinsic feature of the stuff you taste. I discovered this through claret, and it is to claret that I always return in search of the pure, clean experience of wine as something to be sipped and savoured, rather than poured on the inner flames.
There is something about the red wines of Bordeaux that justifies their old English name - a clarity, purity and airiness that make them companions of the soul rather than stimulants to the body. And the extraordinary thing is that they are cheap - half the price of comparable Burgundy, and as cheap as their gross Australian rivals. For £7 a bottle you can obtain a Premieres Cotes de Bordeaux that will see you happily through the evening and cast a halo of acceptance around the day's defeats. In fact, I have just drunk such a wine - a Chateau de Laville 2004 from Virgin Wines - which illustrates the enormous strides that have been made by the petits chateaux in recent years. Dark but clear, full of fruit but with a delicate veil of fairy-laden aromas that must first be brushed away by the nose, this wine took me back to those early encounters with claret, when it was brought home to me like a revelation, that drinking and drunking are quite different things.
Incidentally, Virgin has a gift for choosing clarets for under the £10 ceiling that I set myself, and whatever you think of Richard Branson's decision to descend from the skies and place his brand on everything here below, he has certainly done it in style. He was helped by the market in claret, which easily admits the newcomer. Everywhere you turn there lies some as yet undiscovered chateau, often bordering a property with a celebrated name, and awaiting only the confidence of a shipper to get its act together and install the new equipment. If you come across a faulty bottle, then the fault will be those old and untutored forms of vinification, which survive because no shipper has yet taken an interest.
Now that wine-making has become a science, however, so that good wine can be made almost anywhere, it is more than ever apparent that better wine is made in Bordeaux.
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