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Columbo: I want you to teach me everything you know.
Wine Expert: It took me forty years to acquire my expertise.
Columbo: Well, what can you do in an hour and a half?
Wine Expert: Oh, just the very basics.
Columbo: Let’s start with this–How can you tell a good wine from an average wine?
Wine Expert: By the price.

–Any Old Port In A Storm, Columbo (1973)

In the blog entitled On Not Enjoying Expensive Wine I ended up not writing about my apparent lack of enjoyment of expensive wine, but about something entirely different, that being the love of real, honest living wines which do not drown in their own make-up. Talk about blathering heights! The first piece was originally prompted by an instance of drinking expensive wines in a particular restaurant that were basically as dull as they were disappointing, and whose price tag was surely based on the fact that they were from highly-regarded appellations.

Expense is always in the eye of the bank account holder. What I might deem good value, another might view as over-priced. We all have our personal tipping points.

When I was a wine novice, seeing a lofty price tag of a bottle on a wine list used to reassure me. They must be classy wines, I deduced, ones meriting their exalted price tags, as though they had been forged in the rigours of a pecuniary purifying fire. The undeniable consequence of this process must be greatness. The more dollar signs, the better the wine. The price was the wine’s calling card and indicative of a hierarchy where all wines knew their place. And we knew their place as well.

It takes time to shed one’s wine preconceptions. For example, I used only to drink champagne on very special occasions, perceiving it as belonging to a fantasy world inhabited by a Bolly-swilling rich and famous bubblerati that I would rarely invade. I filed champagne away in my mind as one of those luxury items like yachts, caviar and (for some reason) peacock ownership, exotica that were basically beyond my humble aspirations. And means.

As a wine buyer, champagne became a more functional product for me. Rather than drinking celebratory giggle-water, I had to taste these damn wines objectively and pass judgement on their qualities. At one memorable champagne bureau tasting, after assaying a succession of raw, acid and sweet-sour sparklers, the scales suddenly metaphorically fell from my eyes and the enamel literally detached from my teeth. These champagne brands were no more than the spangled equivalent of the emperor’s new clothes, their prices vastly exceeding the actual quality of the product in the bottle, their reputation built largely (it seemed) on puffery.

Later I discovered the quality of small growers’ champagne and came to the belief that for all the skill in blending and ageing on the lees in the major brands to produce a consistent house style, the best wines usually resulted from excellent farming to produce wines with a clear sense of origin.

Notwithstanding over-priced champagne, ordering any expensive wine in a restaurant is a form of Russian roulette. Of course, many diverse factors come into play ranging from the personality of the wine itself, our previous familiarity (or otherwise) with it, how it is made, and the nature of the vintage, to the glass that we drink out of, the noise in the restaurant, the mood we are in, the company we’re with, the expectation engendered by the price tag,  the ambient pressure (high or low), the lighting, the food we are eating –  and so on. Whilst many of these elements are outside our control, the price tag and our expectations surrounding the wine are not.

We often associate expensive wines with a certain puissance and hedonic obviousness. A lofty price demands, does it not, structural scaffolding and manifold superimpositions. Certainly, this has been the case for decades, and undoubtedly the reason why oenologists earn their corn. We naturally expect to be impressed when we are paying a lot for a particular wine, and yet, as mentioned, more technique, more extraction, more bells and whistles, do not presuppose more wine in your glass.

It’s wrong to generalise. There are wines that one always feels a connection to – for one reason or another –and that one would always be happy to spend a good deal of money on. When it comes to ordering a wine at a very high price in a restaurant that you may be less familiar with, doubt is created in one’s mind whether that wine is genuinely that good, or whether the restaurant is exacting a punitive mark-up.

Not that I have to be forking out the actual hard-earned for a wine to be unimpressed by it. I have been privileged to be invited to join a group of fine wine lovers who meet a couple of times a year over lunch in a restaurant. Each member is asked to bring two bottles of excellent wine. We taste, we drink, and we react to the respective wines accordingly. My expectations are naturally always sky-high as several wines on show have legendary reputations. In the end, however, I invariably enjoy the wines that I have brought with me (I know my taste, after all!) and am very rarely wowed by the stellar wines of my companions. It should be noted that this is a not a competition; I want to enjoy every wine equally and understand why each one would merit its exalted reputation and equally exalted price tag. More often than not, I notice, and am distracted by, various obtrusive oenological tropes in the wine such as the presence of oak, the high degree of alcohol (extraction), the overabundance of sulphites. Not every wine on every occasion is in this vein, but being configured in a very particular way, my palate leads me to the opinion that for all their apparent quality these wines are lacking. The absence of vitality. They are marmoreal, neither living nor breathing.

What price beauty? Perhaps, this is not the question. Wine acquires its self-actualised aesthetic value in the very moment. The right wine at the right time in the right place. And the right person to be impressed by it. Value surely resides in personal perception. If the wine moves you deeply, and you love wine, the pounds and the pennies look after themselves.