How good decisions are made
How good wine decisions are made is rarely straightforward. Context helps determine which interpretations are plausible in practice – and where misunderstandings arise. This article explores applications, borderline cases, and typical misinterpretations – and refers to the canon (how-good-decisions-are-made-canon) as a conceptual anchor. The focus is on observation rather than judgment, and on the question of when patience, aeration, or temperature truly help – and when they don't.
Observation Before Routine
A good decision begins by reading the actual state: the tasting, the analysis values, the course of the vintage. Routine likes to replace this work with habit — doing the same thing in the same month every year. Concretely, that means checking tannin ripeness on the palate rather than only measuring must weight, because in a warm year the two values can diverge widely. A cool year and a warm year never call for the same thing. Whoever starts from observation rather than the calendar decides correctly more often, even if the path is different every year.
The Right Moment
Many decisions have a window in which they make sense. The picking date, a racking, the moment of bottling, the release of a vintage — fixed too early, it blocks development; acted on too late, it endangers it. Getting the timing right is often more important than the measure itself. That is why every decision carries the question of whether now is the moment for it.
Reversible Before Irreversible
Where possible, the reversible path is the better one. Something can still be added later; almost nothing can be taken back. This attitude also lies behind Low Intervention: not doing as little as possible for the sake of principle, but checking before every intervention whether it is even necessary and what it changes irrevocably.
Waiting Is Also a Decision
Doing nothing is not a neutral position. Whoever waits, delays or holds back changes the wine just as an active intervention does — only more slowly. Our practice of releasing a wine only once it is ready to drink is exactly this kind of decision: we carry the time and the risk of ageing in the cellar, instead of passing them on to the buyer.
Reading Individual Steps in Context
A single decision is hard to judge in isolation. Whether a step was right depends on the context it stands in and where it leads. It is tempting to read decisions backwards from the finished wine and label them afterwards as right or wrong. This retrospective view misjudges how open the process was at the moment the decision was made — under genuine uncertainty, based on experience and observation, not on certainty.
How We Decide
We work strictly by parcel and start from observation, not from rule — in the tradition of the estate that for decades belonged to Jean Ribéreau-Gayon, one of the co-founders of modern oenology. In the end, the quality of a decision is not shown by how elaborate or spectacular it was, but by whether the result is coherent in itself. Related thoughts can be found under Precision and in the Decision Models for Bordeaux.
A decision gives the wine a direction without prescribing its form. Where it comes from the state of the wine rather than from habit, room remains, in the end, for what the vintage itself brings.