Is there such thing as a ‘perfect 10’? Does a truly flawless wine exist or is it illusory? I can say that for me, a perfect wine experience occurs from time to time, which is to say that a confluence of friends and remarkable wines come together and are served in a great environment at the perfect age and temperature, in the correct wine glasses, which makes for such an occasion. And as great as so many wines are at events like this, they may not be as remarkable in a different context. And I have had a number of wines rated 100 points (allegedly perfect). Overall I think only the wine experience (and not the wine itself) can be flawless on those rare occasions that serve up memories many years later.

Wine flaws are the reason great winemakers continue to challenge themselves to raise the bar ever higher. A perfect wine may exist at one moment in time with someone, somewhere, but getting a group of people in the same room to agree that a wine is ‘perfect’ is as improbable as thinking we can spend our way out of a recession. Someone will find something, however minute, to discredit the claim of a perfect wine and once that is out of the bag, others will also spot the flaw because we are highly suggestive creatures when it comes to wine. And apparently economics. 

On my website, I have finally finished writing and published a new page about wine flaws. You can visit this page by clicking here: http://www.classof1855.com/Wine_Flaws.html. Although there are a massive amount of potential flaws that can show up in a wine, this page describes the six flaws most likely to affect you. If you can master the identification of these six flaws, you will be able spot a large percentage of defects found in wine. Six? Sounds easy.

But it’s not easy because sometimes, what one may consider a ‘flaw’ another will consider an attribute. This complicates things enormously because of our threshold of detection, so what may be an acceptable level of ‘funk’ for one person, may be completely repulsive to another (excluding George Clinton and Bootsy Collins records – those were all funk and all great). And sometimes real defects are passed off as being ‘just part of the terroir’, which of course is rubbish. If your wine smells like burning rubber or band-aids, I guarantee you that it is not because of the vineyard’s terroir. Yet diesel fuel aromas in older Rieslings are perfectly acceptable and are as far as we know, truly from terroir. So the world of defective wines will always be around and alot of flaws will always be controversial.

Once you really get up to speed on what is considered defective wine, it will change your perspective and even change what is, and is no longer acceptable to you personally. I deem this a worthwhile goal for anyone that is more than a casual wine drinker – there will be rewards at the end of the rainbow if you learn about wine flaws. 

David Boyer