90 Bruno Paillard, Champagne Reims Brut N.P.U.

If you could combine my favorite flavors from Champagne and give me something that would age, easily, for at least another 10 years, you would be Bruno Paillard and your wine would be called "Nec Plus Ultra," French for "nothing more beyond." Because nothing lies above or beside this assertive summary of the 1990 vintage--a wine that pains me with its complexity. First, there is the simple dry raw almond taste of old chardonnay, which drowns in the passion of Paillard's pinot noir. It is indeed an extreme example of sparkling wine, as delicate flavors quickly transform themselves into the persistent taste of tart raspberry and baked Fiji apples with toasty caramel undertones. This is a wine that thrives on power, feverishly, manic with what tastes like the laughter of a crazy clown. And then it just explodes. Thank you, Danielle.

96 Alain Thienot, Champagne Brut Blanc de Blancs Cuvee Stanislas

I didn't know if we would make it through the night. Because when the cork finally gave in, after 12 minutes of prying with an 8" vice grip, I was pretty sure I'd shot it straight up my upstairs neighbor's ass. When the smoke settled, there was a vice and cork in my right hand, a bottle of golden elixir in my left, and three cats perched high in the next room. After nine years in bottle (the cork labeled 1999), this hasn't even begun to calm down. And the hints of oxidation you might expect to see in 100% chardonnay sparklers like this one haven't even begun to surface. These grapes must be grown, harvested, fermented, and bottled in a vacuum to produce a wine so incredulous of the natural world. How else to explain the sucking sound in my mouth every time I take a sip? My cheeks caving in against the anti-matter intensity of this Thienot cuvee. It's about as dry as Champagne gets and, like Clouet's Silver Brut, Orval, and Paillard's NPU, that means it tastes like aluminum foil. The salinity is a fetishist, tightening like a tourniquet the austere flavors of salt-caked honeycomb, green apple skin, raw quince, and undercooked baklavah. It's a candidate for decanting, at least worth pouring a few minutes before you actually drink it. In the meantime, it's more phenolic than any bottled wine I've ever had, closest to the 88 Sugot-Feneuil in its youth. If only you could cut smell like an apple. Think about who you are. Do you drink wines like this? And, if so, what other loves of yours are still unrequited? The Stanislas is every girl who didn't take your phone calls, every elfish English teacher who said you couldn't write. It's your mom in the 90s wondering what it is you do on the internet all day. It's a 10:30pm curfew when the community college bars don't even start letting underage kids in until 11. Which is to say, this wine is a resistance to everything in you that craves change. Why change? Why change when your moment, one harvest day in late 96, so perfectly describes who you are? Yeah, the others grow old. They get richer, softer, maybe even a little gray. But we'll stay who we are. We'll never change. And you'll never pry the spirits out from within our bodies. No matter how firm your hold.

09, Wine and Spirits Top 100

While I often question the purpose of these lists, the truth is, they're very necessary. And maybe for me the problem's never been that they exist, but instead why. When I first started in the wine business, I was greener than some of the chardonnays I would come to love, and so blanketed myself in that cold alleyway of wine knowledge with reams of wine mags. At the time, this blog was loosely called a zine. And, even knowing nothing, I knew some things could never make sense. I had famous blunders myself--once loudly proclaiming in a crowd of real live people that no Champagne in the world could challenge the world's best, um, beer. You had to give it to me. The little kid had heart. You don't teach heart. But you could, apparently, teach damp, moldy soullessness, then known as "Perfection in Piedmont," the November 30, 2003 issue of Wine Spectator magazine. The accessible, wildly perfumed vintage may very well have been perfection, but it was that all-or-nothing attitude that I took issue with. And though Mr. James Suckling knew an awful lot more about wine than I did, the two of us had the same fatal flaw. We would stop at nothing to, in the words of Dave Chappelle, just keep it real. But wine is a university of passionate ideas, tangential tracks united by the major that each one, though fallible, is worth pursuing for at least a few years. So I come to hate these haughty, often self-righteous lists for starting to suggest that maybe everything's not worth trying. Here are your 90-point wines, make pot roast with the rest. But we ultimately need some direction, provided our egos would exercise discretion. You don't want to buy every wine. And my accountant won't let me. It's why wine blogs, for all their failings, have done so well these past few years. Why even books polemically against the canonized rating systems themselves guide readers into purchasing specific bottles. So the that is just fine with me. We're not going to ever get around writing about wines. If a great bottle of wine should come with one accessory, it is not a corkscrew or VacuVin; it's a pencil, or maybe one dusty teletype as a nod to the modern age. And so naturally we'll rate them. But why we're doing this has to go past looking for headlines or trying to fill that void inside of us that looks for just one thing in this ridiculous world to be completely perfect. It's why I like almost the sheer surprise with which Wine and Spirits approaches its blind ratings, and the subtle gesture it makes by acknowledging not just the world's best wines, but the world's best wineries. Watching publisher Joshua Greene drink Cristal, a Champagne I've lauded beyond its PR successes as one of the greatest things in this universe (better, even, than beer), I couldn't help but notice how little he could talk about the wine and how much he and Gary Vaynerchuck talked about other things--rating systems among them. Unlike other tastings in the segment, the Cristal was a conduit for conversation--so good (Mr. Greene declaring the 2002 one of the four "perfect" wines he's ever had) it actually fell into the pastoral. As normally as there was a camera in front of them and a wall behind, these two men were drinking Cristal. And, oh yeah, it's perfect. And still Mr. Greene couldn't bring himself to call it the "best." Instead, he concluded, "this is the best--not the best--the most elegant and energetic wine that they make." What a tremendous reason to fall in love. This isn't how you talk about a wine; this was how you talked about Sophia Loren. It took a couple days of reading this to myself, but that may very well be my point. How can we look for wines to wow us with their 100-point personalities when the truly great wines of this world hardly ever speak so loud? Instead, they blend themselves into our surroundings--amaze us, no doubt, but in the way the final stroke of a brush completes a painting, the final reverb chord a score. And back to one. Wine and Spirits' list this year includes many of my favorite wineries, including L'Ecole No. 41, Krug, Ogier, Movia, Bruno Paillard, J.J. Prum, and Andrew Will. The issue hits stands October 13, and I intend to spend that fall night completely wrapped up in it.