Astute, seasoned wine journalist Jon Bonné, who recently released the amazing and expansive two-volume The New French Wine, shares the confidence of Champagne Louis Roederer’s chef de cave Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon that “the best Champagne doesn’t currently exist.” “ I’d apply that,” says Bonné, “not just to Champagne but to any wine culture that purports to be enacting its quote-unquote ideal. Just because a region has reached a wonderful state of grace doesn’t mean there isn’t room for growth and improvement.” One way of interpreting this is as a claim that the best wines of any given type or region have yet to be bottled. I am encouraged by Jon’s optimism … but not convinced to share it.

Interpreted that way, a worthy ambition becomes a thing I think fulfillable only in certain regions or with certain wine types. I mean: If I contemplate some of the most exciting wines that I have drunk from certain regions and or of certain types, I would consider it almost an insult to those wines to suggest that they could ever be “bettered.” Merely as examples: Will there ever be greater Chenin wines (or, indeed white wines, period) than Foreau’s 1945 Vouvray or Foucault’s 1953 Saumur Brézé? From my experience as a taster, I can’t imagine it.

But I don’t have that opinion about every region or type, and I doubt that is in every instance due to my lack of experience.  I have a fair bit of experience, for instance, with Rheinhessen Sylvaner, and with wines of the Savoie generally, about which categories and regions I am indeed confident that there will be wines in future of a quality not yet realized. That opinion is based in large part on the fact that a quality consciousness and a diligence has emerged among the relevant producers – alongside a sheer sense of possibility – that did not exist even 20 years ago and that I am pretty sure from what I know of history didn’t exist at any previous time.

A more reasonable way to interpret “the best wines of our region are in the future,” is probably as a prediction about the potential of a region or the practitioners of a given wine type in aggregate. So, in the case of Champagne, when one considers the vastly increased number of awesome wines when compared with two decades ago let alone earlier; the growing quality-consciousness, diligence and knack among growers; the revitalization of abused soils; and, of course, also a very much ongoing movement from house brands to bottling growers’ vins de terroir, it’s easy to express confidence that the genre and region are on a rising qualitative curve and that there will in future be a greater number of outstanding wines than in the past and that growers will hold themselves to ever-higher standards. Even so, it would not be unreasonable to simultaneously suggest that perhaps some of the finest bottlings of the past decade will remain benchmarks that can only be qualitatively  equaled, never surpassed.

When it comes to Bordeaux or to Riesling Germany, I also don’t anticipate higher aggregate quality in future nor individual wines to qualitatively surpass the best of the past.  And as for Napa Cabernet, I’ve never again experienced the thrill I got from youthful wines of the late 1960s or the 1970s – few though they then were in number – nor did that thrill diminish when I revisited those wines two or three decades later and with a great deal more palate experience. You can certainly chalk some of that attitude up to stylistic preference and a belief that California Cabernet, after basking in international attention for only two decades began succumbing (as did Bordeaux), to jamminess and alcoholic excess. But one can’t ignore the effects of climate change on classic categories of wine. As Diana Snowden Seysses of Snowden Vineyards in Napa and famed Domaine Dujac in Burgundy relates:  “I grieve, when I drink Jacque Seysses wines, like [those of] 1978, my birth vintage. That planet is gone and no amount of irrigation, canopy management or whole bunch vinification will give us another 1978. Change of taste is inevitable. We farm much better today than in 1978,” she insists, “but the wines will be different, riper, certainly.”

Both styles and viticultural practices evolve. Whether that consistently represents progress, or even whether a given style must be considered either better or not better than another is debatable.  In his aforementioned recent book, Bonné himself has arguably made a case for turning back the clock and rediscovering lost viticultural wisdom – genetic and varietal diversity, sustainable management of vineyard ecosystems, attention to what one’s vines are trying to tell the vintner – that will not only have relevance in an era of alarming climate change, but even help to address its challenges.  

So what do these reflections portend for wine lovers? Some of us have had “Aha!” experiences of wonder that might never be surpassed. But I don’t think disappointment at that thought is going to deprive us of future excitement. Probably for most of those engaged in active discovery – which certainly includes a majority of self-described “wine students” – expanding horizons is going to not only bring experience with wines whose like and possibly also whose beauty one has never before encountered, but also going to heighten awareness that can enhance not just the acquaintance with new wines, but also reacquaintance with wines revisited.