The enjoyment of wine is still a Great Experiment for me—and I expect it to be so until I take my last breath. Like all good science, the studies often take a few years as you wait for a wine to mature, or even better as you taste several bottles across several years of its history. And like all good science, some of these studies lead to disappointing results.

Recently I brought to a close one of the more minor studies of the Great Experiment. Years ago, a wine entered the critical spotlight. It was from a well-known wine growing area of the world, but made of a style not popular out of this area. In every way it was a media darling. I had a chance to try this wine young, near release, with a couple people of greater palate than I. I remember it being absolutely monolithic. Huge and ripe it was a purple teeth-staining monster. It wasn’t super-fruity, but it had a lot of fruit and a lot of tannin and a myriad other flavors all bound up in a tight knot. My drinking partners didn’t like the wine, thought it too ramped up and out of balance. I tasted a lot of stuff going on in that great big stew of a wine and wanted to support that appellation and the new style coming out of it, so I bought two bottles.

A couple years ago I tasted the first and it was totally shut down and while it was ultimately a disappointment, I took it as a good sign that the wine would soon emerge mature with elegantly knitted flavors and balance. A couple nights ago I came across an occasion to finish off this study and had somewhat high expectations—expectations dashed, I fear.

To my dismay, even on the other side of the “dumb” phase, the wine was almost identical to that first day I tried it—monolithic, wound up with flavor stumbling on flavor. It showed nothing of balance and it was absolutely impossible to pair with anything I was eating at the time. But this is the modern style: hyper-extracted, huge, and oftentimes undrinkable. These are wines are fodder for the critics. They need to wallop the drinker on the first few sips, for in the world of wine criticism, that’s often all you get. And while I can’t level the argument that winemakers are making wines solely for the critics while ignoring consumers, I can say that three sip critics have defined what we think of “perfection” in the world of wine today.

It seems that in our pursuit for the most highly refined and “perfect” of wines that we have out-created true perfection. It’s like we have set out to create the perfect human using lofty sets of ideals for human form and function. Only we forget to be human is to be imperfect, that no ideals are reached—which in turn defines true human perfection. Having constructed our new “perfect” human we see it’s actually a cold, hard robot. It exceeds human expectations and is by every measure super-human. And super-human is not human. This new breed has no place among the human animal and is seemingly made for the in-attendant  gods. We have forgotten that wine is alive, too. That it too attains perfection by standing outside ideal and expectation. It attains perfection in the depth of its character and the breadth of all that is not and can not ever be perfect.