Couture Cuvées

Written by Carolyn Evans-Hammond | 11 October 2009

Couture. The high-end fashion that sashays down runways, ricochets through the pages of Vogue, and lands in swank shops is the very engine that drives what we see later at Harry Rosen, Zara, and even Le Château, as bastardized versions of the top stuff.

And so it is with wine.

The bespoke, hand-stitched wines from the finest fruit come from the top houses — the classed growth châteaux of Bordeaux, the celebrated Champagne houses of Reims, the most revered vignerons of Burgundy. These makers motor along as they have for centuries, crafting the very best wines money can buy. Their wares get paraded through the pages of Wine Spectator, Tidings and Decanter magazines before landing in the temperature-controlled glass cabinets of wine shops. At hundreds of dollars a pop, these bottles exist as archetypes for winemakers elsewhere to emulate. Though the copycats never seem to get it quite right, the best knock-offs are similar enough, much more affordable, and just what the banker/private accountant/spouse ordered.

So here we are parked in a recession asking, can we afford to celebrate Uncle John’s 50th birthday, Christmas dinner, the birth of our child with a top wine? The real question we ought to be asking is, can we afford not to? If we stop drinking them, how can they exist? Do we really want a world without couture cuvées? What would we be in a world without the masters? Looking at Champagne alone, we would be left to toast the best moments with the battery acid substandard swill of cheap sparkling and the less delicate look-alikes from California and the rest of the New World. We could kiss goodbye the gorgeously, barely palate-visible notes of warm apple pie, buttery brioche and nuts in favour of searing lemon, under-ripe apple, and maybe the odd note of yeasty bread dough masquerading as complexity. Life would be dull without the likes of Krug and Louis Roederer to add weight to an occasion — even if those milestones are private once-a-decade affairs.

Whether your thing is fine French Champagne, seriously age-worthy Bordeaux, sex kitten Burgundies, classic Amarones, Californian Cabernets or Super Tuscans, these bottled beauties stand for much more than wine: they stand for the wild and wanton copulation of art and science; history and pedigree; often devout cultural decorum and always raw, heady hedonism. Mid-week quaffers have a place in the refrigerators and wine racks of our worlds, but so do these. I’ll do without a second handbag, a fancy cell phone, extras on my car, and yet another pair of shoes, but I won’t cut out the instant gratification of fine wine. I might cut back on the frequency with which I uncork the great bottles but I’ll never bypass them altogether. And for very good reason that goes beyond private pleasure. The price of Krug? $265. Lynch-Bages? $215. The Quintarelli Amarone? $405. The price of ensuring these and the rest of the Greats are there for our children and grandchildren? Priceless. With that in mind, here’s a small tribute to 10 bottled heroes of the wine world.