Welcome to the Short Cellar’s mailbag column, where I address recent questions from my wine-addled readers.
Sir –
What’s the best cheap wine at the LCBO right now?
Thirsty
Dear Thirsty:
The Ontanon 2005 Crianza from Rioja, Spain ($16.95 [Ed. note: No longer available], Vintages #976910) offers outrageous quality for the price. This red wine is perfect for BBQ season; it’s lean and vivacious, with a distinctive nose of fresh black pepper and herbs. Although this Rioja is intense, it also has a lot of subtlety, which is rare for anything under twenty bucks. It tastes great now and will mature beautifully over the next 3-5 years. 91/100.
Sir –
Could you clarify your rating scale? How does the taste of a nine volt battery merit a similar rating to a wine that you dubbed delicious? I am also curious to know what prompted you to sample the gustatory qualities of a nine volt battery? Was it an Energizer or a Duracell?
Greg Sullivan
Dear Greg:
Great question about the ratings! Astute readers of the Short Cellar will have noticed that I have started giving wines a mark out of 100. This is a relatively common practice in the wine writing world – and like all common practices, it is mainly nonsense. Wine is subjective, and pinning it down to one number is not so different from assigning Moby Dick a mark of 96/100 but Ulysses a 91/100 merely because you prefer whales to Catholic guilt.
Nevertheless, I chose to include ratings because they give readers another tool to distinguish between a wine that I merely like, and one that I think is truly superb. Here is a rough key to my marking system:
100-96 means a wine that is nearly perfect, with spell-binding flavours and an exceptional capacity to age and evolve. Extremely rare, even for pricy bottles.
95-90 are wines which are superb, including $20 over-achievers or expensive wines that taste like they should (for the price). Sometimes just being bizarre will get you into this category.
85-89 encompasses wines that are tasty and worth drinking if the price is right.
84-80 are drinkable. The wines served at weddings.
Below 79 captures all the wines that won’t go down without a fight.
You also asked me to explain my wine review alluding to the flavour of 9-volt battery … As a youngster, I picked up the habit of tasting inedible objects shortly after my father started feeding me a black and indigestible rubber he called “meatloaf”. Coincidentally, he had the same name as you, Mr. Sullivan, but I am sure there is no relation.
Matthew Sullivan is a civil litigator in Toronto. He writes a weekly blog entry here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca NEW! Follow along on Twitter: @shortcellar.