I was lucky enough these last few days to help with judging the Adelaide Review Hot 100. She is somewhat different to traditional wine shows in promoting emotional tasting and embracing those wines stimulating greatest pleasure at the time they traverse tonsils. The wine doesn't have to be clinically perfect, or made using only techniques from the 'canon'. There's no reward for a wine that might be an absolute belter in 5 years time, unless said wine offers the same pleasant thrashing in here and now. Fair call, given much of wine is necessarily cast loose quickly by companies for cash flow and then considered or chugged within 24 hours of disgorging our coin. Its a theory which works counterpoint to the big companies medals/massive/mawkish/maudlin/mediAOchre/munted marketing missive yet speaks directly to the punters that ultimately enjoy their fruits. K'n awesome. It also offers a very considered reworking of the traditional notion of terroir ... suggesting that wine may represent the place and people that formed it and can be respected, even revered for that. It also respectfully offers that terroir is implanted most firmly in the personal and oft privately tended gardens of the imbiber. We bring our emotional, cultural and educational consiousness (plus our shared, cultural unconscious) to the experience everything where sensory pleasure might be sexily wallpapered with an intellectual lick or 2. What else should they bring. Nuttin. That why I love this show. Right, pants off, time for a glass or two.
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