What price perfection?

BEETHOVEN'S String Quartet No 14 in C# minor, Op 131 is considered by many as his greatest achievement, even the greatest work ever written. Russian composer, pianist and conductor Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky called it "perfect, inevitable, inalterable". Austrian composer Franz Peter Schubert asked to hear it before he died. Reading Alex Ross' most interesting article Deus ex Musica (The New Yorker, Oct 20, 2014) raised the question: "What is or is there a wine that can be the greatest wine ever made?"

Opinions and judgments will clearly differ variously, dependent as it were on individual subjective assessments and personal tastes. It would be instructive to refer back to Opus 131 and ponder what features, what construction, what elements, and what passages, and feelings evoked by the music which collectively make it the greatest music ever composed. Similar aspects of wine could be put to the same test - elements of the aroma, the palate, and the finish. Inevitably there will be more than one candidate for the honour. Sauce for the goose. . .!

The more fundamental question perhaps should be: Is it possible for a wine to be nominated the "greatest" wine to exist in the same way as a piece of music? No, I would not think it possible. We are not comparing like with like. Music such as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony lives forever, it exists by itself, as a musical score, as a recording, but in whichever form it is, it exists. A Montrachet 1990 by Domaine Romanee-Conti is a temporal object, it exists so long as it is not drunk, so long as it does not decay with time. It is not eternal. It is temporal in its nature.