Minimalist Style in Fashion and in Wine

In 1989 I tore a picture out of The Face and stuck it inside the cover of my school diary. It showed a design by the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, and I looked at it every day for a year without being able to explain what held me. Part of it, I think, was that it looked impossible. Everything around me in 1989 was shoulder pads and fluorescent socks, and here was something black, severe and perfectly calm that seemed to have arrived from somewhere else.

At its worst, minimalism is boring: black and white, black and white, and perhaps a little navy when you’re feeling reckless. If you wear it in its pure form, you had better be more interesting than your clothes. Look a little closer, though, and you find it’s the hardest style of all to get right. A black coat looks like nothing much until you notice the cut, the weight and texture of the fabric, and the tailoring that makes it hang the way it does. That effortless look takes a great deal of effort, and Calvin Klein once described minimalism as a sense of balance, a matter of knowing when to take something away, expressed through cut, subtle colour and clean, strong shapes.

It also takes discipline, which I can say with some authority because I have tried several times and failed. Each attempt ends the same way, with a bright colour creeping back in, followed by a wild print, and the realisation that I have wandered off again.

The same vocabulary

What interests me is that the words used to describe minimalist fashion and minimalist art are the same ones we use for fine wine: balance, elegance, quality.

When I first set out across the great sea of wine, I went looking for the loud, the unusual and the outrageous, on the theory that anything standing out from the crowd must somehow be better. I liked the big wines. They were like a paragraph with too many exclamation marks!!!

Having since been lucky enough to taste some of the finest wines in the world, I find that the best of them are surprisingly calm, and a few years earlier I would probably have walked straight past them at a big tasting. They don’t seem to need anyone’s approval, or the pile of adjectives people like to heap on wine, which would only weigh them down like frills and silly bows on a well-cut dress.

The sofa at Latour

In May 2012 I tasted the 2011 Château Latour during en primeur week in Bordeaux. The tasting room has floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the vineyard, and there is a sofa in it. After one sip, all we wanted was to sit down on that sofa, look at the view and spend a few hours with the glass.

We had tasted hundreds of wines that week, and Latour had the effect of a long holiday, where it’s only once you’re lying on the beach that you realise how tired you were. Plenty of wines in the vintage seemed to be reaching for something, and this was what they were reaching for. It was self-assured and natural, with flowers and minerals on the nose and deep, layered fruit that carried through to a palate full of flavour. It seemed more delicate than Les Forts de Latour, the estate’s second wine, yet it had real power, with very fine tannins and a long, textured finish. It showed what the vintage could do when conditions were at their best.

The anti-flavour elite

Robert Parker once took to Twitter to grumble about an “anti-flavour elite”, by which he meant people who prefer restrained wines. I thought it was a wonderful phrase. The wines he had in mind were the opposite of the ones packed with berries until they were fit to burst: often pale, reserved and, as luck would have it, expensive.

I think of Château d’Esclans in Provence. All Provence rosés are pale, but its top wine, Garrus, has barely any pink in it at all. The palate, on the other hand, is intense and beautifully tailored, clear and defined, with herbs leading ahead of fruit. If there is an anti-flavour elite, this is their rosé.

From across the room, minimalist fashion looks easy, and only up close do you see the cut, the fabric and the clean lines. Wine works the same way for me. It often happens that halfway through dinner, or halfway through the bottle, I realise how good the wine in front of me is, and then I find out what it cost and need to sit down.

One good coat

There is another side of minimalism I admire, which is paring things down to what matters. It means cutting the clutter and putting quality ahead of quantity, choosing conscious consumption over the conspicuous kind.

The upfront cost is higher, but there’s something anti-consumerist about buying one perfect coat, made or tailored by a craftsperson, and wearing it for ten years in place of five disposable ones. In the same way, I would take one perfect glass of Champagne over a bottle of something generic, and I’ll leave you to decide which of those is the boring choice.

I’ll admit that minimalism takes more discipline than I usually have, especially with so much variety and adventure on offer. I am greedy, and I want to lick the earth.

Five minimal styles

Not every minimal wine costs as much as Latour, and some expensive wines are pure bling. These five styles show the kind of restraint I mean:

• Chablis from a good vintage
• Eden Valley Riesling
• A top Provence rosé
• Verdicchio di Matelica
• Unoaked Albariño

For reds, the first that comes to mind is Nebbiolo from a good year.

I still think about that picture in my school diary. It took me twenty years and a great many exclamation marks to understand what I saw in it, and in the end I found the answer in a glass at Latour, looking at a sofa I never got to sit on.

Archive note: First published in June 2012. Around the time of that tasting, Latour announced it was leaving the en primeur system, which made the 2011 the last vintage the château sold this way.

Read more: Fashion and Wine, Pt 1: Defining Personal Style and Ayala Brut Majeur and the Art of the Perfect Fit