Otto Nieminen wrote:informing me if I'm going on the wrong tracks with my reasoning is welcome, but flatly stating that I'm totally wrong and not bothering to say why and saying all of this with such a haughty tone I find unwelcome
Let's see. If I sound irked with your use of the term 'spoofed' it is because we have already had this discussion, you and I, on another board, and you keep insisting on applying it to wines that have actually not been 'spoofulated', as the term coined on that board goes. And it gets tiresome. But I'll give it one more try.
A 'spoofed' wine is a wine with a heavy dose of mascara applied to it so as to make it look, smell and taste differently from what it really is. The mascara may be called reverse osmosis, flavoring agents, sugar, overextraction - what have you. Of course there can be different sensitivities as to where the border between good winemaking and spoofulation lies. Many traditionalist critics in Europe would, for example, accept micro-oxygenation, a procedure to mollify harsh tannins by instilling tiny air bubbles into fermenting wine developed by ultra-traditionalist Madiran vinegrower and winemaker Patrick Ducournau, who has to cope with the harsh tannat, because this procedure does nothing that other accepted ones (like long aging in old oak) don't do. The same critics, however, would reject reverse osmosis because it intrinsically changes the nature of the wine. Or not: these are subjects that are open to discussion.
The presence of new oak is probably the most debated question in the field of spoofulation. Some reject new oak outright as if it were an unholy addition. This means that they reject 90% of the world's greatest red wines, which are made using some percentage (often high) of new oak. Others accept it as an excellent tool to age, well, ageworthy wines, adding to their complexity without submerging the character given to them by the fruit and the terroir. Often in a great wine, the oak remains too prominent over its first few years (taste a young Château Margaux and you'll see), but if the wine is good enough a great balance will ultimately be reached.
Many lesser wines, with no structure or density or character to ever overcome significant doses of new oak, do get lavish portions of new oak aging by their producers: this is spoofulation indeed, and it's practiced in many places, Spain not being the least important of them. Since I'm a journalist who is constantly publishing in mainstream media and not just on internet fora, plus I'm a producer myself, there's ample record of what my opinions and my criticism on this subject are - whatever the misinformed Mr. Bueker may think - and they are crystal-clear and extremely severe about spoofers.
However, Otto, when you take on a wine like Termes you are, once again, hitting the wrong windmills, like a shortsighted Don Quixote. This is an entry-level wine with zero percent new oak (it gets old barrels from Numanthia, Termanthia, Sierra Cantabria and San Vicente) and its exuberance is not the product of some expensive witchcraft in the cellar by some enraged disciple of Michel Rolland's, but the reflection of a particularly hot, sunbaked, generous region called Toro and the deep-colored, dense tinta de Toro grapes. This is a region where the thermometer reaches 40ºC on dozens of days in July and August - one of the hottest wine-producing regions in the world. So if you want to be true to the region and its grapes, you harvest them at phenolic maturity and you make a wine like Termes.
You don't like these wines? Por instance - you prefer the less fleshy, more austere, more delicate reds from the rain-soaked Loire which others would call desiccated and dilute? That's perfect! You vote with your wallet at the wine shop.
But if you insist on calling 'spoofed' a wine that's not spoofed, you may get a rebuke or two from anyone who knows what's been spoofed and what hasn't.
We each had a glass and the rest went into a wine / mushroom sauce for the pork tenderloin the next night.
I probably rehydrated some wild mushrooms and used the strained mushroom water with the leftover wine.