Why it's ok to stop chasing the "best" vintages
It's become a cliché to talk about this or that wine as coming from a "great" or "legendary" vintage, which no wine collection could be without.
There are, of course, variations in a given fine wine from year to year, but we think the fixation of wine critics, writers and marketers on the "best" vintages is unhelpful to consumers and damaging to artisan producers. Are you really supposed to keep track of which years you "should" buy across dozens of different regions, and which to avoid? What exactly are you avoiding anyway?
At Vino Cammino, we love exploring the variations presented by different vintages, and the skill required of the winemaker to make the best of what nature presents. It separates the skilled artisan from the industrial product manufacturer. Wine as a representation of the person and place behind it gets washed away in the rush to buy up the “good” vintages and avoid the “bad”. We think there is real joy to be found in a vertical tasting where you can experience the impact of weather on what ends up in your glass. Our range of Barolo is probably the best opportunity to do that currently (we had a wonderful tasting of multiple vintages at the estate per the photo below), but our selection of aged Vouvray is also quite exciting.
What will change across vintages might include the dish to best pair it with (hotter vintages will have riper flavours), how long you might be able to age it (dependent on tannin, acid, fruit and alcohol levels), and how challenging it might be to source the wine (low yielding years can mean very small allocations to the Australian market). But as with most things in the wine world, the vintage you prefer is likely to be subjective, rather than what the experts tell us is the best. We'll give you our reflections on a particular bottle, but the rest is up to you.
We are committed to supporting our producers every vintage, because we trust they are only releasing wine they are proud of (ok, yes, we also verify that trust by tasting them...). We hope you will take the same approach.
Guess who benefits from the good/bad vintage system? Industrial wine producers who use winemaking practices to create bottles that taste the same every year. They will rush to declare a high yielding vintage a "great" vintage because they will have higher than usual volumes to sell. Never mind that higher yield can correlate with lower quality...