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ISSUE 84 2024 ISSN 1743-503X THE WORLD OF FINEWINE www.worldoffi newine.com Founder Laurence Orbach Editorial Adviser Hugh Johnson OBE Contributing Editor Andrew Jefford Editor Neil Beckett neil.beckett@worldoffi newine.com Deputy Editor and Website Editor David Williams david.williams@worldoffi newine.com Tastings Editor Anastasia Edwards anastasia.edwards@worldoffi newine.com Food Editor Francis Percival francis.percival@worldoffi newine.com Chief Subeditor David Tombesi-Walton david@sandseditorial.co.uk Team Assistant Kazumi Suzuki Group Art Director Henrik Williams Designer Simon Murrell Production Manager Clare Ovenell Subscription Manager Ikram Qureshi Special Projects Manager Jeremy Wilkinson Advertising Group Sales Director Jiggs Patel jiggs.patel@worldoffi newine.com Tel: +44 20 3096 2286 Sales Director EMEA Anit Mistry anit.mistry@worldoffi newine.com Tel: +44 20 3096 2290 Wine Advertising: France Delphine Rouget-Marquézy drm@espacequadri.com Chief Executive Offi cer William Crocker Data Protection Manager David Watkins Subscription & Back-Issue Inquiries subscriptions@worldoffi newine.com Tel: +44 20 7406 6790 Subscription Prices One year (4 issues): US$202, €165, £105 Two years (8 issues): US$327, €267, £170 The World of Fine Wine may be purchased at selected stores worldwide. The World of Fine Wine John Carpenter House 7 Carmelite Street London EC4Y 0BS Printed by Stephens and George Goat Mill Road Dowlais Merthyr Tydfil Mid Glamorgan CF48 3TD For reprint, e-print and licensing inquiries, please contact: Media Licensing Co, The Grange, 3 Waverley Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 8BB, UK. Tel: +44 20 3773 9320 or email info@medialicensingco.com § WELCOME Neil Beckett The message that appeared here 20 years ago was much more brilliantly conceived and elegantly expressed than anything that has been in its shadow since. Hugh Johnson had nobly offered to define on the first page of our first issue what we meant by “fine wine” —“a wine worth talking about” (WFW 1, 2004)—and his profoundly simple definition remains our guiding principle. Happily, Hugh has continued to grace our pages, and he contributes here his characteristically entertaining and stimulating reflections on “modern” and “postmodern” wine, relishing a return to “authenticity”: “Is postmodernism dead in the wine world, too? We have had our modernist period: wine conforming to a universal standard set, as it were, by authority. Ripeness is (and this is Parker telling us, not Edgar speaking to Gloucester) all—or was. Postmodernism? I have tasted one or two pretty deconstructed wines. One or two where the real and the phoney have become confused. And if irony is a big part of postmodernism, we see plenty of that—if not on the palate, certainly in the price. […] Authenticism is where good wine has always been; expressing a real place and time, interpreted by a real person who takes total responsibility—that is what wine does uniquely well” (pp.32–33). Authenticity and responsibility run as leitmotifs throughout the landmark series of interviews related by our deputy editor and web editor David Williams: “If the story of the past 20 years of fine wine has a single overarching theme, it’s been the remarkable return to primacy of wine’s fundamental agricultural nature […] at a time when the wine grower, vigneron, or viñatero—the winemaker who spends as much time amid the vines as in the cellar—has become the emblematic figure in fine-wine production, eclipsing the all-powerful cellar technician who had emerged as the star of the late 20th century” (pp.120–39). In stark contrast to all the authentic intelligence evident, there is the artificial variety, the ever-growing role of which in the world of wine, for better and for worse, is explored here with typical perspicacity and tenacity by Barry Smith. While he admits that talking about wine is already “digitally tractable,” he avers that tasting it may always be “beyond the reach of AI”: “What sense could we make of a computergenerated aroma? Would a digitally created rose smell as sweet? For life’s most cherished experiences, what can’t be captured digitally will always remain essential” (pp.140–45). This extends, surely, to the actual experience of really sharing wine with family and friends—be it the amiable, life-enhancing, even life-extending, sociable activity prescribed by Dr Erik Skovenborg (p.91), or the Dionysian ecstasy, revelry, transcendence, and sense of unity with the universe that Martin Fuller captures in Twenty-Twenty Spectacular, Judy O’Kane evokes in “After Hours,” and Chris Howard senses in the color fields of Mark Rothko (pp.55, 100–01, 102–11). All of us at WFW thank you—our contributors, subscribers, and sponsors— for your support. And returning to Hugh’s valediction here, we hope you will continue to find the conversation worthwhile. “Authenticism is where good wine has always been; expressing a real place and time, interpreted by a real person— that is what wine does uniquely well”—Hugh Johnson , London io atter Stud MDark by lar. Photography Spectacu ller, Twenty-Twenty Fu ar tin : M ll. Cover image Murre Dan by Illustration THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 84 | 2024 | 3