The Merry Drinker

You often hear enthusiasts discuss a wine’s complexity, or lack of it. The term is seldom defined or even explained. Until the other day I assumed this was because its meaning was completely obvious. Now I am not so sure.

My understanding is this: a wine is complex when it possesses not one flavour but many. The more complex a wine is, the greater the range of tastes or “notes” you will perceive as it rolls about your mouth. The humblest wines offer only one or two notes, while the greatest are positively symphonic.

If I have this wrong, I would be happy to hear an alternative definition. My doubts in the matter arose when I read the producer’s tasting notes for this week’s wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon from California’s Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. The notes talk proudly about the wine’s complexity, as if this were obvious to all who taste it.

To be sure, any wine in this price bracket ought to be complex. Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars recommend that Artemis retail for around $55, or £37. I paid a little over $40 (£27), but the point holds. Once you charge more than $30 for a Cabernet Sauvignon, you have entered the heavyweight division. You are competing with Bordeaux of undoubted pedigree and complexity, serious stuff from the likes of André Lurton.

But I did not find Artemis the least bit complex. It was likeable and elegantly proportioned, with a dominant flavour of blackcurrant and perhaps a suggestion of stewed prunes. But this flavour altered very little as I worked my way down the bottle. I even paused for an hour, to see if the wine might open out a little more, but it did no such thing. My  last sip was disappointingly similar to my first. In other words, this wine was not a heavyweight but a middleweight, a decent enough drop per se, but hardly worth its price tag.

So, why do Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars think $55 fair? Well, Stag’s Leap is one of the most historically important wineries in the US. It was one of this firm’s Cabernets that won the 1976 Paris wine tasting, the event that changed winemaking forever. To any wine lover who is not French (and probably quite a few who are) the firm’s owner, Warren Winiarski, is a modern hero.

I am also well disposed towards Mr Winiarski because over the years he has been one of the few Californian winemakers who have resisted the general trend towards ever more concentrated, muscle-bound wines. (It is no coincidence, one feels, that California’s governor is a former body-builder.) Independence of mind should always be encouraged, especially in a nation where it tends to be frowned upon.

So Artemis is doubly disappointing in coming from such a distinguished source. One can only suppose that it costs as much as it does because of its maker’s reputation. Mr Winiarski is certainly very jealous of his good name. Over the years he has fought a fierce and inconclusive legal battle with the rival Stags Leap Winery, on the grounds that many buyers (the Merry Drinker included) have bought that firm’s wines under the impression that they were Mr Winiarski’s, and that he, Mr Winiarski, should be the sole user of the title “Stag’s Leap”. (It so happens that the rival outfit also makes very good wines, but I had better not get into that here.)

All the same, I do not think Mr Winiarski is doing his reputation any good whatever by putting out such a two-dimensional wine for this sort of money. If you think I am being unreasonable, go out and buy a bottle of Alter Ego, the second wine of Château Palmer. It costs about the same as Artemis, but it inhabits another world, another solar system, another galaxy.  The word “complex” does not begin to do it justice.