Chateau d'Yquem is the most famous sweet wine of France. It was even praised by Thomas Jefferson when he was basically the American Ambassidor to France, before he became America's 3rd President. He bought some 1787 d'Yquem for the White House and the 1784 bottles which were auctioned by Christie's 25 years ago are the subject of controversy and a court case.
What has this got to do with triage? Well, Sauternes gets its luscious sweetness from the concentrating effects of botrytis infection in the form of noble rot (Fr pourriture noble). Unfortunately, the infection is never uniform so that some grapes/bunches get to the perfect degree of infection, whilst others have just started. In any case, infection is also affected by the microclimate of the plants and so the development of the botrytis varies even if the grapes all got infected intially at the same time.
To get your perfect wine, you need to go out to the vineyards and select the optimally infected grapes for harvest. After going through it once, you wait a day or two and then then repeat the process. Each time is called a trie and the whole harvest can take many tries. The 1989 vintage pictured above was harvested in a total of 5 tries. This process of repeated going through the vineyards to harvest selected grapes is called triage successif. So triage was originally about wine harvesting and not battlefield casualties nor emergency medicine!
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