I’ve decided that this wine is too good to be Western MKT’s 2020 Red Wine of the Year.
Read a few of these tasting note-blog posts here. This is not literature, it is egocentric vanity. Every wine is forced into a narrative of “what it does for me;” what it tastes like to me; what it reminds me of; etc. And that is all fine and proper. After all, I am only trying to communicate with future opportunities.
The very finest experiences of wine that I know leave an impression on a brain like a bloom of multi-colored, textured phosphorescence. So then what happens when the same wine is contextualized in a series of other wines, let’s say at a tasting? If it’s a group of otherwise moving wines, these little brain blooms will tend to stack up and interfere with each other. So how can comparisons even be made?
Comparative tasting sets up a bias in favor of regimented, industrial virtues. Bordeaux … by the thousands. I think the hangover from comparative tasting, and worse, expert comparative tasting, is the cause of an ocean of dreary, overpriced lifestyle drinks that happen to be based on grape juice. Whole Foods is full of them.
Smell & Taste
Stirring, delicate, tender with age. The core is lean, perfumed, grape.
This really want’s to be experienced in a setting without stimulant pollution. Don’t drink it after a shot of Cap Corse. Don’t try and assess it after tasting 23 other wines. You’re going to miss it completely, and all the more completely if you have experience drinking and tasting wine.
Pencils in antique red berry and lavender jam. Patient archways.
I want to concentrate now on its flavor and texture of sap. Great red Burgundy can be sappy, but that term suggests a degree of aggression and amplitude that is not present here. This sap requires you to volunteer for it. And when you do, you fall into a tunnel of truffle and earth.
I invite you to buy a bottle of this. Serve it with slow cooked comfort food. Fats, produce, aromatic vegetables; that sort of thing.
A Wine of the Year has to be good, very good. It has to make you want to pinch yourself to make sure you are not dreaming when you drink it. But it doesn’t have to be this good, especially not at an artificially elevated risk of misuse.
2014 Elda rewards an open mind and sensitivity like nothing else I know.
I posted about this wine on 25 June 2020, and it still reads true, especially the part about tonic and cardamom.
Action Reward 
Good post. I hope to try this one! Have had Nusserhof’s 2009 and 2012 Lagrein Riserva….really excited by those wines and need to try their other makes and models. Dreaming of going to Bozen/Bolzano.