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When someone asks me if I have tasted anything from Harlan Estate in Napa, or Quintessa, or Backus from Joseph Phelps, I know we are in for a long conversation. These wines belong to a special breed known as the cult wine.
We all know what a cult is: a closed group where those inside hold a special kind of experience that sets them apart from those outside; where people’ s emotions have taken them just a bit past the edge; and where those on the outside harbour a fascination about the inside that can border on fear and loathing. When the term is loaned to the wine world, the main difference is that the experience of cult wine, happily, does not involve having to move into the desert with strangely dressed people.
Sylvia Jansen, Sommelier( ISG, CMS), CSW
To become a cult wine, a few critical elements must be present:
Scarcity: The world’ s cult wines include those produced in respected, tightly delineated wine regions where the standards are high: Napa Valley, Burgundy’ s Grand Cru vineyards, a few tiny properties in Bordeaux and Tuscany, for example.
Demand: Scarcity counts only if more people want it than can get it.
Quality: The wine has to be good— sometimes ridiculously good. A great wine, created by a true artist from a special vineyard, has the capacity to gather together emotion, sense, memory, and mind. The experience sends shivers through your entire system. Every cult wine has done this to someone.
The Event: Something needs to help skyrocket the wine into the limelight. The event can be a longstanding awareness of scarcity, quality, and demand, or it can be a review impossible to ignore, coupled with a stratospheric rating, that catapults a wine into fame. The likes of Robert Parker, Wine Spectator, Gambero Rosso in Italy, and James Halliday in Australia have seen their enthusiasm for a tiny production wine send the product into cult status.
Reputation: Reputation is different from demand or quality, but drives both of these. Sometimes it is the presence on the scene of a gifted winemaker or winemaking consultant that brings the bright lights of the world stage and the bids on the auction markets. Michel Rolland from France and Carlo Ferrini from Italy have the sort of winemaking genius that generate cult following.
The downside is that cult wines are bound to be on the pricey side. Where demand far outstrips supply, some of us are willing to pay for the experience of being among the few who have tasted it. The wines usually start in the hundreds of dollars, and can easily run up to the thousands. For some people, the experience tasting liquid gold makes it worth the price.
The upside is that cult wines make us all pay attention to wines and winemakers generally. There are more than just a few producers whose reputations are just under the cult-radar, but that have the right combination of great terroir and great genius. In comparison to the cult wines you can almost never get, or that are the price of a small car, these are a fantastic option. At Banville & Jones we are fortunate to have a few wines with cult status on our shelves, and more than a few that are of cult quality. Just ask, or have a look around. They are the ones on the shelves, winking and waving at me as I walk by.
So here’ s to you, rarely. �
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