Wine musings (1) - Easy and hard wines

My cellar is nicely filled with lots of really good wines, which of course makes me happy as a wine lover. After all it will take you a couple of years before your cellar will not only be well balanced in terms of what it contains, but will also have drinkable vintages of all the stuff you like.

Yet, I notice my wine-behaviour changing lately. After a busy day’s work that bottle of wine-with-pretense does not always appeal that much: you need the energy to really go and sit for it. And what I’d really want then is just a good glass of wine, without having to think about it. “You’re not expecting me to find something about this wine, are you?” is the way my better half tends to put it when in the same mood. So, next to very good and good wines, there’s the distinction between easy and hard wines. The latter is about what a wine demands of your palate, the sensory equipment of the wine professional that seems to always be in stand-by mode, waiting to jump to action. It’s the easy wines that will then reassure you, that will ‘say’: “Hey dude, just enjoy me and relax.” For me, that would be more or less the thing I’d be looking for after that busy day’s work.
 
So, what qualifies for me? Chez nous it’s red and white St. Joseph, stuff we take from the Marché aux Vins in Ampuis, Northern Rhône, that we vist almost annually. Then there’s dry trocken riesling, the very basic stuff from good growers like Dönhoff. It’s also the very affordable Estate line by Errazuriz, a Chilean domaine I follow because its owner Eduardo Chadwick used to be a ‘classmate’ at the Masters of Wine in London. It strikes me now these are all wines made by good winemakers: so these people not only know how to make their top terroirs chant, they also make their simpler wines do the song that is easy listening for your palet.

Now, would that be easy or challenging?