Giuseppe Quintarelli Valpolicella 1992
Grapes: mostly Corvina and Rodinella
Looks: Deep ruby bordering on garnet
On the nose: Not particularly pronounced raspberry, figs, and plum. Smoke, leather, and tobacco.
On the palate: So much smoke. Really savory vegetal character pairing with figs to create almost like a smoky chutney taste. Overpowering and out of balance, but quite interesting and delicious. Past best by date. Texture was quite nice, and there was relatively little sediment for the age. Structure was there.
Price Point: 86 EUR / 1000 NOK at auction
Terningkast: 3/6
I, dear reader, am sick. And sick is one of the most annoying things to be. I was reflecting on my status ailment as I looked at my son this morning and thought one of the brilliant things about being a baby is that you are not “sick” in the way that we adults are, there is merely something annoying happening to you, until it’s no longer happening to you. There’s some level of natural insight into the ephemerality of life and our conditions that babies have and we, as adults, unfortunately grow out of. They are locked in the moment, and do not or cannot waste time ruminating over their own mortality, time lost at work, or the things they’ll miss out on. Babies are just bummed out for a short period of time, and then they are not; they have no fear for the future. While that would be a naive way to go through life, it’s also adorable, emboldening, and life-affirming.
Which brings me to last night’s wine, which is (like myself) 32 years old, and—unfortunately—slightly past the peak of its powers, damned with the faint praise of being a “food wine”. The characteristics of age took hold of the wine and made it like a condiment to accompany the lamb stew I made for dinner. The wine had so much smoke, chocolate, tobacco, and a vegetal streak cutting down the middle, with just enough acidity and red and dark fruits to make it good enough. But it wasn’t in balance. That moment of perfection was probably 10 years ago, and it has definitively passed. There’s a level of delusion that many wine consumers sink to (especially when they’ve invested time or money into the idea of a wine being GOOD) where the best days are always ahead of us, but the reality with wines more than 25 years old is that—more often that not—they’re behind us and that’s beautiful too.
Note: In reading a bit for this post I noticed that someone on the wine app Vivino said in 2021 that this vintage just needed 5-7 more years for the fruit to come through, to which I reply: are you fucking crazy?
Sidenote: don’t trust people on Vivino.
When people ask me why I like wine, it’s this ability to transport through time and space that is inevitably what my answer comes back to, even in drinking’s numerous small disappointments. When you drink this wine from 1992 that is not perfect in 2024, you can imagine when it was perfect, what it would have been like for me to open it then, in the row house I shared with 5 other people in London, 10-15kg lighter with a scalp hirsute. Would I have appreciated its perfection? Or did we in fact meet each other at the right time, both a bit washed up, but lively enough, and a bit more interesting for our flaws? Is perfection what we should aspire to in wine? Probably, but it is still damn fine to enjoy things that aren’t. Sometimes it’s this desire to appreciate that brings life’s greatest epiphanies.
Then you can travel further back. What was it like making Valpolicella in 1992? Did the sun shine off Lago di Garda when the farmers took their families down on the weekend in their FIATs? Could you hear the cheers of the ultras as the Swede Robert Prytz scored 2 goals for Hellas Verona to earn a draw at home against AC Milan in the Italian Cup? What was the late winemaker Giuseppi Quintarelli like then, at the age of 64? Did he feel like he was in his winemaking prime, or was that still to come? 1992 is considered a weak vintage for Amarone, but I wonder how that was perceived at the time vs. today? Was it the rain or hail or cold that made the vintage weak? What was it like in the vineyard? They now pray for rain every year in the foothills of the dolomites, and the oppressive summer heat has made the vintages juicier and harvest earlier. A cold vintage might not be as good, but it would be a welcome sight. One of the strange paradoxes of our modern, warmer world.
These seductive, unknowable questions and ideas are the threads that wine connoisseurship allows us to pull on in our everyday lives sitting on a sofa, sick, in Oslo, waiting to get better. But it also allows us to be present in the here and now and truly taste something. Drinking wine allows us to strike a balance between the baby and adult mindsets: you can contemplate, or you can just drink.
