This question comes up constantly, and it deserves a straight answer.

What is the most important thing that makes a wine good?

It is not the price. Price is a signal of many things — marketing budgets, scarcity, reputation, the cost of land in a particular region, the ambitions of a particular importer — but it is not a reliable signal of what is in the glass. There are expensive wines that taste blah, and inexpensive wines that taste like someone really knew what they were doing. Both exist. Both are widely available. The price tag, by itself, tells you relatively little.

It is not the score. Scores provide a clue, but they are opinions expressed in numbers — and while the opinions of knowledgeable tasters are worth having, they are opinions about someone else’s palate applied to your glass. A wine that scores 95 points with one panel may leave you cold, while something that scored 87 may be exactly what you were looking for. The number is a starting point, not a verdict.

And it is not the label, not the region, not the vintage, not the name of the château, and it is not the fact that it won an award in a competition you have never heard of and cannot pronounce.

Underneath all the branding and marketing and scoring and regional mystique, the one thing that determines the quality of a wine more than everything else combined is the quality of the grapes.

Consider orange juice. You cannot make world-class orange juice from bad oranges. You can squeeze them, you can add sugar, you can put them in a very attractive bottle with a label that implies sunshine and health and everything good about citrus. But the juice will tell the truth. The juice always tells the truth. Freshly squeezed from a ripe Valencia orange, pure juice cannot be beaten by anything that arrived in a carton — and no amount of clever packaging changes that. The raw material is the product.

Wine follows the same logic, with one important advantage: where orange juice begins its decline within minutes of being made, wine can be controlled, managed, bottled, and served at the most opportune moment. The winemaker has time. But the winemaker cannot manufacture quality that was not already in the grape.

The grape is where quality begins. Where it was grown, what the soil was like beneath it, how much sun it received, how long it was allowed to ripen — these things determine what a wine can be before anyone has done anything to it. A great winemaker handed poor fruit will produce mediocre wine. An average winemaker handed exceptional fruit has an excellent chance of producing something memorable.

The industry just prefers that you not know it, because simplicity is harder to charge a premium for than mystique. A good winemaker owes much gratitude to the farmer who farmed the grapes.

At Vampire Vineyards, we have taken that view since 1988. The gold medals are the result.

The better the grapes, the better the wine, the better the experience.


Cheers!— The Count

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