Fruit Bomb?

[stevebody]

Well, as an old actor, I wouldn't want to miss my cue...

"Fruit Bomb" is used as both a pejorative term and, as R. Parker sometimes uses it, as a way to let his more basic-minded consumers know how to get what they want. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a wine being a fruit bomb. But, as everybody has noted, wine is about a whale of a lot more than fruit. Despite whatever impression I may have given by insisting that people have the right to drink whatever they want without relentless criticism, my own preferences run to wines that express - and this is becoming more and more important to me as I get older - a BALANCE of all the elements: tannins, acids, fruit, minerality, surrounding vegetation (like the wonderful, bold flavor of dill that showed up in the L'Ecole No. 41 Schoolhouse Red a couple of vintages, caused by an adjacent plot of fresh dill), groundwater, airborne scents, types of soil, and on and on. Winemakers have a lot of leeway in what they can choose to play up or tamp down but the best wines I've tasted have all had in common a lack of calculation and simply letting the grapes and land speak for themselves. It's just that they sometimes say "fruit" louder than they do anything else. (See all of Australia)

Speaking of Cottarella, I met him at Esquin yesterday. It was, for me, like meeting Mick Jagger. I mentioned to him that I had read that his wines were routinely villified in Italy and he smiled and shrugged one of those great Euro shrugs that we Americans just can't pull off properly, and said that his wines sell as well there as they do here. Posterity will take care of his place in Italian winemaking so I needn't do that here. Yeah, he makes fruit bombs. He also makes the amazing Fobbiano, which expresses its terroir as well as any Bordeaux.

Anyway, "fruit bombs" sell very well here, for the reasons set forth previously: we ARE a nation of soda pop drinkers. We're a very young wine culture, to be fair to us. Italy and France are ANCIENT wine societies. Is it strange that they would know more than us? One day in the (I hope) not too distant future, the average American consumer will know a lot more about that Balance than about fruit. Until then - and this is the crux of everything I've said on this forum - it isn't kind or useful for me to inflict my own mild disdain on my customers - or on people on this forum - for liking fruity wines. I try to help them find better fruity wines and, whenever possible, move them into something that shows terroir, has actual character, and that Balance. Drink whatever you want without apology...but always remember that there's something more, different, and maybe better out there.