A Vertical Tasting of Civilisation
Eight Wines, Eight Revolutions, and One Remarkable Berkmann Masterclass
Every so often, a masterclass reminds you why wine remains one of the most intellectually rewarding subjects to explore. Not because of rarity or price, but because of the way a carefully built lineup can illuminate something far larger than what sits in the glass.
At Berkmann’s annual portfolio tasting, Alex Hunt MW and Emma Dawson MW welcomed us with a statement that immediately shifted the scale of expectation. Rather than guiding us through a region or variety, we were about to travel across roughly eight thousand years of human history.
A vertical tasting, not of vintages, but of civilisation itself.
It is a beautiful idea when you think about it. Wine is older than writing, older than most organised belief systems, older than the political borders we take for granted today. Some of humanity’s earliest written records are effectively wine labels, noting origin, producer, and harvest. Agriculture demanded documentation, and wine helped create bureaucracy long before bureaucracy knew what it was becoming.
As Roger Scruton once wrote, wine is not simply a drink. It is a form of social intelligence.
This tasting made that argument quietly but convincingly.
Georgia. Before History Had a Name
We began where any serious conversation about wine must begin: Georgia.
Tblvino’s Qvevri Kisi is not merely an amber wine. It is a technological survival story.
The qvevri method, in which clay vessels are buried underground to ensure natural temperature stability, predates most architectural traditions. What is striking is not that this technique exists, but that it endured repeated attempts at erasure. During the Soviet period, Georgia’s vast mosaic of indigenous grapes was dramatically reduced in favour of high-yield varieties suited to industrial production. Quantity replaced identity.
Today’s revival is therefore more than stylistic nostalgia. It is cultural reclamation.
Kisi itself sits in a fascinating aromatic space. Pear skin, dried orchard fruit, a suggestion of wild herbs, and that delicate phenolic frame are often compared to white tea. Four months on skins provides structure without aggression. The tannin is not textural decoration; it is connective tissue linking contemporary drinkers to the earliest known wines.
What feels exceptionally modern is precisely what is ancient. Minimal intervention, ambient fermentation, patience over manipulation. Much of what we describe today as progressive winemaking is, in truth, a rediscovery of pre-industrial intelligence.
If there is a trend shaping fine wine in the 2020s, it may well be this quiet return to origin.
Rome. When Wine Learned the Language of Luxury
From prehistoric continuity, we moved into the architectural confidence of Rome.
By the first century AD, Pompeii supported hundreds of wine bars. Wine was no longer simply nourishment; it had become a marker of sophistication. Falernian stood at the top of that hierarchy. Pliny the Elder described its slopes in terms that read remarkably like early terroir theory, linking soil to perceived quality.
Villa Matilde’s Falerno del Massico Vigna Caracci is best understood as a scholarly reconstruction rather than a replication. The estate has long worked to restore the viticultural prestige of the Massico hills, propagating Falanghina from ancient genetic material and treating the site with almost archaeological respect.
The wine is precise, saline, and quietly structured. Volcanic soils often deliver this combination of energy and restraint. Partial fermentation in amphora feels less like a stylistic flourish and more like a historical conversation.
Low yields concentrate the fruit without pushing it toward heaviness. There is clarity here, but also intention.
Luxury, in Roman terms, was rarely about excess. It was about endurance. The ability of a wine to age became shorthand for its worth.
Two thousand years later, the definition has not changed as much as we sometimes imagine.
Burgundy. The Moment Observation Became Doctrine
If Rome gave wine prestige, the medieval monasteries gave it intellectual structure.
Emma Dawson MW reminded us that the Cistercian monks were relentless observers. They mapped slopes, tracked drainage, studied frost patterns, and noticed how snow melted differently depending on exposure. Over generations, they constructed what is arguably the world’s most sophisticated agricultural blueprint.
Modern Burgundy still rests on its laurels.
Puligny-Montrachet Les Enseignères from C&G Boillot illustrates something Burgundy understands better than anywhere else: greatness is often about adjacency. Bordering grand cru vineyards, Enseignères benefits from geological privilege without the gravitational pricing of its neighbours.
Planted in the mid-twentieth century, the parcel delivers both concentration and mineral tension. The vinification is deliberately restrained. Vertical basket pressing, modest oak, no bâtonnage. Nothing is designed to distract from site expression.
Tasting it now is an exercise in foresight. The wine carries density, but its energy is coiled rather than expansive. Time will be its most articulate interpreter.
Perhaps the monks understood something we occasionally forget. Precision is not the opposite of romance. It is what allows romance to endure.
Bordeaux. When Wine Became a Global System
Bordeaux tells a different story entirely. Not of contemplation, but of movement.
Following Eleanor of Aquitaine's marriage, English demand transformed the region into an export powerhouse. Yet another influence shaped the trade in ways that remain underappreciated: the Irish merchant families known as the Wild Geese.
Among them, the Lynches.
Operating from the Quai des Chartrons, they helped professionalise wine shipping, stabilise supply chains, and build trust in distant markets. Wine became reliable enough to travel. Reliability, in turn, created prestige.
Château Lynch-Bages represents the mature form of that commercial intelligence. The 2010 vintage is classical Pauillac: graphite, cassis, structural tannin, and an architecture clearly designed for decades rather than years.
There is power here, certainly, but what stands out is proportion. Nothing exaggerated, nothing hurried.
Bordeaux did something revolutionary for wine. It proved that scale and seriousness could coexist.
In today’s era of global fine-wine markets and investment portfolios, we are still living inside the framework Bordeaux built.
Tuscany. The Courage to Break the Rules
By the mid-twentieth century, Italian wine law had become paradoxically restrictive. Regulations designed to protect typicity sometimes prevented excellence.
Piero Antinori’s response was elegantly defiant.
Planting Cabernet Sauvignon in Chianti Classico, fermenting with modern precision, and ageing in French barrique meant Tignanello could not legally carry the region’s designation. It was released as table wine.
History enjoys these moments. The wine was so compelling that legislation eventually evolved around it.
Tignanello is more than a blend of Sangiovese with Bordeaux varieties. It marks the moment Italian wine rediscovered ambition. Quality first, bureaucracy second.
We see echoes of that philosophy today wherever producers question inherited rules in pursuit of clarity, sustainability, or site transparency.
Rebellion, when disciplined, tends to become tradition faster than expected.
Australia. Elegance as an Argument
The narrative then pivoted toward the New World, though the term feels increasingly outdated.
When Dr Bailey Carrodus founded Yarra Yering, Australia was still largely associated with fortified production. His vision was quietly radical: wines of restraint, perfume, and structural finesse capable of sitting comfortably beside Europe’s benchmarks.
Dry Red Wine No. 1 remains a compelling articulation of that ambition. Cabernet-led but texturally nuanced, fermented with partial whole clusters and matured extensively in French oak, it favours line over mass.
It is worth remembering that only a few years later, the Judgment of Paris would permanently disrupt assumptions about where greatness could originate.
Wine talent, it turned out, was not geographically predetermined.
Today, as climate reshapes viticulture worldwide, regions once considered marginal are becoming reference points. Carrodus looks less like a pioneer in hindsight and more like an early reader of the future.
Napa Valley. The Shock That Reset the Hierarchy
Few tastings altered wine psychology as dramatically as the 1976 Paris tasting.
Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars did not simply outperform revered Bordeaux estates. It recalibrated confidence across the New World.
The SLV vineyard, planted on volcanic soils in the Stags Leap District, produces Cabernets that balance generosity with structural discipline. Twenty-one months in new French oak provide breadth without obscuring detail.
What Napa demonstrated was not superiority, but possibility.
The old hierarchy did not collapse. It expanded.
Today’s drinkers move fluidly between hemispheres, guided less by geography and more by precision, farming ethics, and stylistic intent. Napa helped normalise that openness.
Champagne. Transparency Becomes the New Luxury
If ancient wine was about survival and Bordeaux about reliability, modern fine wine increasingly revolves around trust.
For decades, Champagne thrived on the mystique of consistency. Non-vintage blends concealed variation in favour of brand identity.
Jacquesson chose another path.
By introducing numbered cuvées tied closely to base vintages, the house reframed difference as virtue rather than risk. Disgorgement dates, dosage decisions, and extended lees ageing. Nothing hidden.
Cuvée 740 Dégorgement Tardif, resting over seven years on lees, moves decisively into vinous territory. Depth, savoriness, and layered autolytic complexity place it closer to great still wine with bubbles than to a purely celebratory drink.
Transparency has become a contemporary expression of luxury.
Consumers no longer equate secrecy with prestige. Increasingly, they reward articulation.
Looking Across Eight Thousand Years
As the tasting drew to a close, what lingered was not simply the quality of the wines, but the pattern they collectively revealed.
Wine evolves when someone questions the established script.
Georgian growers reclaim buried traditions.
Romans define prestige.
Monks map land with scientific devotion.
Merchants globalise taste.
Antinori challenges regulation.
Carrodus argues for elegance.
Napa dismantles hierarchy.
Jacquesson replaces myth with disclosure.
Wine is often described as timeless, yet nothing about it is static. It records migration, commerce, climate, belief systems, technological shifts, and changing definitions of luxury.
Alex Hunt MW captured it perfectly near the end:
Wine is not just something we drink. It is evidence of who we have been.
And perhaps more importantly, of who we are becoming.