I Just Tried A Few Of Wine Spectator's Top 100 Wines. And, Oh, I Have Some Emotions

Never let anyone tell you what a wine tastes like. Until you've had a whole glass.

Wine came to me slowly. And then all at once.

Having grown up in a place where growing wine would be as sane as wearing only one layer of clothing (the Birmingham that’s in England), I eventually moved far too close to Northern California’s Wine Country.

For Northern California Wine Country’s comfort.

At first, I wandered blindly in the valleys.

Now, I wander blindly as a wine ambassador for Napa’s Honig Winery.

The pandemic, though, has rather slowed my wine-tasting impetus.

So, instead of my usual forays into Sonoma, Napa or Dry Creek — or even Anderson Valley — I sank to purloining a few wines that appeared on Wine Spectator’s list of Top 100 Wines of 2020.

I’m skeptical of lists in general.

They’re created by people and who trusts people these days?

Here, then, is my one-person, soi-disant review of a few of the wines I managed to grab from that list.

I should add that I don’t believe in sips. Judge a wine by drinking a whole glass, preferably over dinner.

You can call this the behavior of a lout and an oaf.

I call it Alcohol By Volume.

You see, all these sommeliers sit, sip and spit, possibly on an empty stomach.

Where’s the joy in that? Or the sense.

Allan Scott, 2020 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. $17 a bottle.

I took one sip and was ready for prolonged dental implant surgery.

After a glass, I communicated only by gurning.

The Sauvignon Blancs of New Zealand can be a touch on the acidic side. This Sauvignon Blanc was so acidic that my mouth was rendered insensate and my eyes began to bleed like a statue of Jesus in a remote Italian town.

Should you think this a criticism, it isn’t. Entirely.

As a child, I used to enoy chewing aspirin. I like acid. (No, not that sort of acid, silly.)

It’s just that this particular bottle offered me twenty aspirins at once and that was at least seventeen too much.

This is something worth remembering with wine. Not every bottle of the same wine tastes the same.

Perhaps this bottle was rogue. Perhaps I drank it at several degrees in the wrong direction.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have drunk it with mahi-mahi, potatoes, snap peas and a horseradish/sour cream sauce.

In any case, I like the fact that it was firmly itself.

Joel Gott 2019 Sauvignon Blanc. $12 a bottle.

I could use words like grapefruit, melon or frisson.

Instead, my initial reaction was: “12 bucks? You have to be kidding me.”

My next reaction: “If I got this in a restaurant and it was, say, 12 bucks a glass I’d be perfectly happy.”

Now this is partly because wine by the glass in restaurants — when it was actually possible to eat in restaurants — could occasionally feel like someone was tickling you beneath the table trying to get hold of your wallet. While giggling uncontrollably.

Moreover, I’ve experienced $12 a bottle wines that made me want to enter a monastery, just to scream the place down.

Frankly, I’ve had $12 a glass wines in restaurants that made me want to insert a tonsure in the sommelier’s head.

But that’s the fun of subjectivity, isn’t it?

You order wines by the glass because you want to try more, different wines.

Occasionally, you find perfect delights. More often, you find the perfect crime.

This wine is like an even-tempered puppy that’s happy to lie at your feet and doesn’t even dribble.

Quivira 2018 Sauvignon Blanc Dry Creek Valley Fig Tree Vineyard. $24 a bottle.

The Wine Spectator experts tasted verbena, beeswax, green tea, lemon curd, lanolin and quince the minute they came into contact with this wine.

Well, they’re professionals whose words sometimes taste of either joy or desperation.

Here’s what I tasted: clean.

To my mind, there are clean wines and dirty wines.

Just as there are happy wines and miserably self-absorbed wines.

This wine was like mouthwash made by a joint enterprise of perfumers and German minimalist interior designers.

I’m not one for insisting you should pair a certain wine with a certain food.

How on earth does any fine sommelier know how someone else’s mouth mashes different ingredients?

I drank this wine with an extremely well-prepared steak and it was lovely.

Berate me, why don’t you?

Cut me and I bleed verbena, beeswax, green tea, lemon curd, lanolin and quince.

And Nespresso Roma.

Ken Wright 2017 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. $22 a bottle.

Have you ever encountered someone whom your friends really love?

Someone whom they’ve talked about consistently as being immensely absorbing company?

Someone who brings life, soul and no rigmarole to every social gathering?

And then you meet them and think: “What are they talking about?”

I regret to say I experienced that feeling with this wine.

I tried and tried. My wife joined in the trying.

We failed to find the same sleekness, elegance, richness, raspberry, orange zest or even sandalwood that the Wine Spectator palate professor did.

We found red wine that was as inoffensive as the the slightly sad-looking person who does the flowers in church.

We experienced the same feeling we last had when everyone told us we just had to watch Behind Her Eyes.

Actually, that’s unfair.

Behind Her Eyes is truly awful.

This Pinot bowed, shook our hands and then had no stories to tell.

Which doesn’t mean that you won’t love it.

It might be your thing.

It’s not as if I’m offering points here. (Please don’t get me started on the points system. Not today, at least.)

I confess I got hold of a couple more of the wines from the Wine Spectator list.

I’ll leave those for another day.

I don’t want to excite you too much.