The writer Herman Melville once said, “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” While this aphorism applies to many facets of life, originality is, curiously, less valued in the world of wine. Instead, typicity—the degree to which a wine adheres to the profile and expectations of its site, grape variety or varieties, vinification practices, and even vintage—is a more common discussion point in the assessment of quality or the essential aesthetic merits of a wine. There is inarguably a certain usefulness to typicity. Wine buyers rely on the typicities of grape and region in making purchasing decisions when they cannot taste a wine in advance. Wine students worldwide fret about what is “testable,” seeking out bottles that are paradigmatic of their categories in preparing for blind-tasting exams. How typicity should be rewarded in ascertaining quality, however, is more nuanced and much more contentious. Typicity can prove an appropriate measure of quality as it relates to terroir expression and adherence to traditional styles and appellation guidelines, but these factors are not applicable to all wines, and, under the least favorable conditions, the pursuit of typicity might even impede quality potential.
Any attempt to assign quality to a wine involves some degree of subjectivity. Different wine scholars have different criteria, but typicity is often a consideration, albeit one that comes under varied names. In the third edition of The Wine Bible, the wine writer Karen MacNeil assigns 12 attributes to great wine, among them factors most other critics would concede, including balance, complexity, and length. She also includes distinctiveness, an interesting word choice that, despite alternative definitions, is effectively her proxy for typicity. She compares varietal character in wine to a Granny Smith apple that is purchased for being a Granny Smith apple and judged by how “Granny Smith-ish” it seems. Her discussion of distinctiveness extends from taste to texture, ultimately concluding that “distinctiveness is perhaps the highest attribute of great wine. It’s the sense that this wine could not be just anything; it is something.” In short, for MacNeil a great wine proves it comes from a specific grape and place.
The Oxford Companion to Wine forgoes typicity for typicality, explaining that typicity is an anglicization of the French word typicité, a recent coinage by the agronomist Jean Salette, in the 1970s. MW Julia Harding expands further on JancisRobinson.com, noting that there is an inherent Francocentrism to typicity, with Salette originally arguing that wines bound to the qualities imposed by French appellations were superior. Typicality, by contrast, extends beyond wine, and it has been used in English to describe what is typical since the 17th century. More recently, the word authenticity has been circulating in the wine vernacular, but this, typicality, and distinctiveness all touch on this same concept of typicity, whereby a wine is valued based on how closely it conforms to some platonic ideal.
Controlled appellations are the wine industry’s most widespread tools for communicating and enforcing typicity. These designations of origin were first protected in the 1920s and 1930s as a response to rampant fraud that plagued the French wine industry in the post-phylloxera era. With wine stocks ravaged, merchants regularly diluted wines with raisins and engaged in other quality-reducing measures. They blended wines across regions, brazenly affixing the names of illustrious sites to the wines’ labels. In 1919, the first step was taken toward formal appellations that allowed French wine regions to draw official boundaries. In 1923, the baron Pierre Le Roy de Boiseaumarié successfully petitioned the court at Nîmes to impose further quality restrictions for Châteauneuf-du-Pape—providing a model for the national Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) system codified in 1935. Since their inception, France’s AOCs and their equivalents across the world have operated as a form of consumer advocacy. Through strict regulations that force winegrowers to obey type, appellations strive to guarantee quality for purchasers who otherwise may have no way of predicting the character of a wine. Appellations often feature built-in quality tiers, such as Brunello di Montalcino Annata and Riserva, and some appellations themselves are tiered, such as Italy’s IGT, DOC, and DOCG (however flawed such generalizations may be). The appellation system is designed to explicitly link quality with typicity so that people know what they are buying, and suppliers can justify price.
In many parts of the wine world, quality is perceived as inversely proportional to the size of land from which a wine is cultivated. Nested appellations hold higher value than umbrella regions, and single vineyards carry particular prestige. Single blocks may yield even more expensive wines. From a business perspective, such stratification of sites, and the increasing prices that accompany them, is simple to justify: the smaller the vineyard, the smaller the supply and, ideally, the greater the demand. But for many lovers of wine, any premium on smallness extends beyond mere microeconomic forces. Among the most remarkable and romantic achievements of great wine is its ability to communicate a sense of place. In essence, this is the most basic definition of terroir—and the smaller the terroir communicated, the more impressive the bottle. Perhaps nowhere is this truer than in Burgundy, a region where, over centuries, Benedictine and Cistercian monks meticulously documented the differences in expression between wines harvested from one diminutive climat and those from its neighbor. Here, should not a Clos Saint-Jacques be evaluated based on how much it tastes like a Clos Saint-Jacques?
Myriad other regions measure wine quality in a similar terroir-focused fashion, such as Barolo with Nebbiolo and the Mosel with Riesling. But for other wines, quality is achieved through their manufacture. These wines of process derive much of their character in the cellar through a series of vinification processes that further implement typicity. Amontillado gains its complexity through extended aging under flor, just as vin jaune earns its tertiary depth from its time spent sous voile. While Champagne has its own set of classified vineyards, a classic tête de cuvée achieves quality through extended sur lie aging and the associated autolytic notes this brings to a wine. All these practices deliver quality, and increasingly the longer they are performed. But they also have a homogenizing effect that obscures site and brings these wines closer to type. Accordingly, typicity’s relationship to quality is not exclusive to terroir, as it also includes the human traditions of vinification specific to a place.
Importantly, typicity can signal quality not only positively but also negatively. While wineries generally benefit from compounding their brand with that of their appellation, others take various measures to evade poorer reputations for what is perceived as typical of their category. In 2000, the winemaker Roberto Anselmi, one of the foremost interpreters of Garganega, abandoned Soave DOC on the eve of its application to DOCG status. Anselmi criticized the potential appellation for lacking sufficiently stringent quality control. He did not want to associate his family’s wines with what he saw as a pedestrian image for Soave. Anselmi told Wine Spectator at the time, “Ninety-eight percent of Soave production is mediocre. My aim is to make a better-quality wine. When the DOC quality improves, I may reconsider the DOC appellation.”
Anselmi is but one example of several appellation defectors in the 21st century, either voluntary, as is the case with Rioja’s Bodegas Artadi and the ex-Cava producers composing Corpinnat, or involuntary. This past May, Roland Velich, the winemaker of Moric, revealed that the 2023 vintage of his Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben Blaufränkisch, considered among the world’s greatest expressions of the variety, was deemed faulty and denied Qualitätswein approval by Austria’s government tasting panel. As such, Velich was forced to relabel the wine as Wein aus Österreich. The demotion quickly courted attention and controversy, especially as its announcement came days before Austria’s biannual wine fair, VieVinum. The wine critic Stuart Pigott, who had awarded the wine a perfect 100 points for JamesSuckling.com, polemically deemed the move “wine fascism.” Austria’s tasting panels regularly reject wines for several reasons, including microbial faults (such as Brettanomyces or volatile acidity), cloudiness (eliminating many wines in the natural-wine camp), and not adhering to typical expressions of a variety or region. In Velich’s case, that may mean the Blaufränkisch was not as fruity or extractive as might be expected from most volume Burgenland Blaufränkisch. To Velich, however, the wine expresses Lutzmannsburg.
With Moric, the utility of typicity as a quality measure begins to unravel. Like beauty, typicity is in the eye of the beholder. Who gets to decide what is typical? Is typicity tied to a place? A tradition? A style? A point in time? The debate erupted into a heated conflict in Vienna this past spring, and it is not the first time the industry has engaged in a passionate argument questioning typicity. For many, typicity is an enemy of creativity and, in the worst circumstances, one that can impede rather than enforce quality. In the mid-20th century, the Super Tuscan category emerged as producers willingly declassified their wines to Italy’s then lowest rung, vino da tavola, to dodge what they saw as quality-reducing regulations. In some cases, this simply involved removing the obligatory white grapes Malvasia Bianca Lunga and Trebbiano Toscano—components of the “traditional” Chianti blend, which had been developed only a century before by Bettino Ricasoli. In 1971, Piero Antinori, the son of the then-patriarch of Marchesi Antinori, traded the white varieties for a small amount of Cabernet Sauvignon in developing Tignanello, just three years after his uncle Mario Incisa della Rocchetta, the founder of Tenuta San Guido, harvested his first commercial vintage of the Cabernet-driven Sassicaia in Bolgheri. In 1977, Sergio Manetti, the owner and winemaker at Montevertine, in Radda in Chianti, crafted a monovarietal Sangiovese, Le Pergole Torte, abandoning Chianti Classico to chase his notion of quality as well. Unlike Anselmi in Soave, these Super Tuscan producers did not leave their appellations because of their perception of substandard quality but because the appellation regulations prohibited them from maximizing the potential of their land. For them, the mechanisms meant to uphold typicity blockaded quality.
Notably, wine styles that start as innovation or accident or even open revolt can, with time, evolve into traditions with their own typicity. Bertani invented a new expression of Amarone’s famous appassimento wines with its 1958 Recioto Valpolicella Amarone when a few barrels of the traditional sweet wine continued to ferment toward dryness. Now, Amarone is one of the most collectible and expensive staples of Italy. The first commercial Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc was not released until 1980, from Montana Wines (today Brancott Estate); in the 21st century, its exuberant aromas elicit sighs of relief from many who encounter it in a blind tasting. Facing a surplus of Merlot in the cellars of Switzerland’s Ticino region, in 1986 Adriano Petralli vinified Merlot as a dry white wine. Bianco di Merlot was formalized into Ticino’s PDO law and is now a specialty of many of the region’s producers. Chianti and Chianti Classico no longer mandate the inclusion of white varieties and permit both monovarietal Sangiovese and small inclusions of Cabernet, while Bolgheri and Bolgheri Sassicaia have their own DOCs. And in Austria, murmurings among the wine community suggest that serious conversations might be underway to adjust tasting-panel methodologies and allow for a broader suite of contemporary wine styles at the highest levels. In each of these cases, wines that relatively recently were deemed radical now veer closer to typical. The timelines between invention and convention for wine are often shorter than credited.
Still, countless wines are born outside any tradition. This is especially true in emerging wine regions, where, without sufficient vintages, it is impossible to say what is typical of these places other than broad varietal character. Appropriately, younger appellations are generally much more liberal than the earliest European appellations, with little more than demarcated boundaries, inviting greater experimentation as winegrowers trial different grapes and practices to figure out what works best. Still, there are other wines in both infant and established regions that neither chase tradition nor seem to have any aspiration of forging a new one. I recall a salty, ripe Mexican Barbera from Victor Moreno Goldbaum, a winemaker in Valle de Guadalupe. Released with the figgy patina that comes from a near decade of cellaring, the wine was of undeniable quality but also utterly singular. Why should it be docked for having no real analogs?
Typicity can be a convenient and valuable measure of quality, but it is useful only if a wine is made with typicity as a goal. Further, it should never be treated as static. Traditions and, with them, typicities can be created, and they can also shift. Perhaps this has never been truer than in today’s changing climate, where even the most historic regions must plan for a future that may require different approaches in the vineyard and cellar and, under drastic circumstances, different grape varieties.
Moreover, typicity need not be in a constant battle against innovation. Other art forms do not force their audiences to choose between the old and the new. The Met’s classical, embellished production of Franco Zeffirelli’s La Bohème arrives practically each season, delivering Puccini’s score with familiarity. This does not take away from the intrigue provided by Yuval Sharon’s new staging for Detroit Opera, in which the acts are performed in reverse, or the more fundamental reimagining of Bohème as a rock musical set against the AIDS crisis in Jonathan Larson’s Rent, which has become Broadway canon. A novel like Percival Everett’s James, which retells the story of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, works in dialogue with Mark Twain’s original text. Whitney Houston’s vocally virtuosic rendition of “I Will Always Love You” bears little semblance to Dolly Parton’s twangy, melancholy original recording. With art, a departure from the typical introduces new vision while reinforcing the brilliance of the original. Why should wine, then, be so confined?
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