Tuesday, January 8 2008
Wine Criticism
Reading is fun, Maurice Sendak
I do an awful lot of reading in my job. Ten or twenty wine websites, at least half a dozen blogs every day, magazines and a lot of books. After all one can only drink so much wine, but you can read about it (and talk about it) without end.
From where I sit in my fabulous sound-proofed office lair, I can see sixty or seventy books on wine, winemaking and wine criticism on my shelf (and a stack of twenty or so on my credenza, the floor, under my elbow, bulging out of my briefcase and one under my desk keeping a stack of papers from tumbling away when I kick it, a stack of three versions of the Oxford Companion to Wine and a tottering pile of thesaurii [is there another word for that?], dictionaries, the Chicago Manual, etc.).
It's good to be a fast reader, but sometimes I read quickly but not well--too much blather and not enough content to really force me to think about what wine really means, both to myself and the people I share it with. Every once in a while one needs a good book of meta-criticism that can talk about talking about wine. I especially love to read the broad diversity of opinions about what makes great wine, where wine has come from and where the writers think wine is right this minute (I don't think making predictions about the future of wine is very interesting--it's an accurate prediction of the present that I favour).
That's why I've been delighted to read The Accidental Connoisseur, by Lawrence Osborne. Osborne, a journalist by trade, presents himself as a humble punter, knowing nothing about wine, struggling to find out if his lack of taste has some greater meaning about his own background and capacity for hedonic pleasure, or if it's wine and modern winemaking that have failed to touch him.
It's a load of malarkey. Osborne not only knows wine very well indeed, he knows the current landscape of internationalism, the history of wine, winemaking and wine criticism, and a heckuva lot about sensory perception, hedonism, and the current con-job being perpetrated on wine consumers around the world. His self-effacing personality and tricksy journalism skills allow him to meet the famous, drink their wine, and stick knives into them with wonderful delicacy and accuracy.
One passage in particular that made me sit bolt upright was a clean right-cross at the bland 'international' style being forced down consumer's throats by the Parkerized producers of uncomplicated, oxygenated, fruit-bomb, spoof wines. He's drinking with a couple of Rhône producers, discussing the bland sameness of modern wines:
"I wondered if it was true that modern taste–our taste–is essentially the taste of children. Such was surely increasingly dominant back home in America, where everything had the energy and instantaneous relish of childhood. Childish sex, childish relationships, childish entertainments–and now, at last, childish wine. Perhaps childish wine was inevitable. (. . .) For nothing is more nightmarish than childhood, when all is said and done, and nothing is more oppressive than the tastes of children when they are forced upon you. The only consolation being an adult, in fact, is in not having to be childish.
Not being childish is a liberation. And relishing things that children hate has always been the escapism of adults. Or so I thought drinking Jeune's Cuvée Tradition, which no child could ever like. It had none of that opulent sweetness that children love. I tried to imagine what a child would think of it, and I was sure that to a ten-year-old it would taste menacing, sinister.
It then occurred to me that perhaps what I was searching for in my own quest for taste was some sort of adulthood. It was a startling idea. The quest for taste might be nothing other than a voyage out of childhood. In the case of wine it was surely a pilgrimage away from the sweetness of mother's milk and toward the "unnatural" tastes of perverted (but sublime) old age. From sweetness to dryness; from simplicity to complexity; from certainty to ambiguity.'
It's never been presented more clearly to me: the abandonment and loss of international styles, local idiosyncrasies and challenging flavours is the same process that food underwent with the advent of processed foods and fast-food restaurants. Every kind of fast-food, right down to the hamburger patties, has sugar in it (or more probably, high-fructose corn syrup–it's sweeter and cheaper) to appeal to the infantile desire for sugary sweet food that neither challenges the palate or the mind of the consumer.
When I stared seriously thinking about the wine I drank, almost 25 years ago, there were still unusual and highly individual wines to be had. Today? Too many bottles taste like the inside of a winery and not the soil or the sunshine of their nascence, and certainly not like an individual made them. Bland, sweet and fruity, they taste like jam with a dose of vodka. It's enough to make you switch to Perrier.
No wonder I've been so attracted to making my own wine–after all I put childish things behind me a long time ago.
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