The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture (2 page)

But the onslaught of fake wines is part of a larger tale, about the global wealth boom of the past few decades and the tireless pursuit of cultural capital by the newly moneyed. Above all, what created a market for all these fake Lafites and Romanée-Contis was the desire of wealthy people to be able to say that they had experienced something unique, that their wealth had conferred on them the ability to taste the rarest of the rare—wines like the 1945 Romanée-Conti, of which just 608 bottles were produced and which has become a popular counterfeit item. A collector friend of mine once told me that with wines like the '45 Romanée-Conti, you quickly leave the realm of fermented grape juice and enter the deepest recesses of the mind. “You've paid a lot of money to experience the wine, and you're so emotionally invested in having this experience, in being able to say that you tasted the 'forty-five RC, that you can easily convince yourself that the wine is great even if it really isn't,” he said. Those who manufactured fake rarities understood the psychology of their intended victims perfectly, and ultrawealthy collectors, so anxious to acquire that cultural capital, turned out to be shockingly easy marks.

For me, a big part of the pleasure of writing about wine is exploring the culture of oenophilia and connecting it to these broader themes. I think the finest wine writing combines helpful tips with insights into the people, places, politics, history, and economics of wine, and that's what I have attempted to do here. Many of my ideas are drawn from the nearly ten years I spent as the wine columnist for
Slate
magazine, the pioneering online journal, and some of the material is drawn from it, too. It wouldn't be quite accurate to say that
Slate
gave me the freedom to write about wine in a different style from that of other publications; the editors insisted on it, which was great, because I wanted to write about wine in a different way—I wanted the column to be punchy, entertaining, and slightly irreverent. I think it was all that, but it also helped steer readers to many exciting wines from around the world. You'll find the same combination of spirited wine talk and practical insights in these pages.

1

Wine Without Apologies

I
T HAPPENS
without fail every election season: at some point during the campaign, a candidate will be portrayed as being the favorite of wine-sipping elites. Sometimes the description is more specific: the candidate will be described as the choice of
Chardonnay
-sipping elites (as if Chardonnay is somehow more froufrou than other wines). Inevitably the candidate will be a Democrat, since everyone knows that only limp-wristed lefties enjoy wine, and political commentators will expound anew on America's wine versus beer divide. Get the impression that all this blather about wine and political allegiances drives me nuts? It does. The idea that alcohol preferences are linked to political allegiances is asinine. Worse, though, is the underlying premise—the notion that wine is something exotic and somehow alien to mainstream America, that it is a beverage that appeals only to decadent coastal elites who are more Continental than Yankee.

Warning: A rant is coming.

Maddeningly, this image of wine persists in American pop culture even though we have become a nation of wine enthusiasts. There is apparently no limit, for instance, to the media's enthusiasm for studies that cast doubt on wine connoisseurship. If a group of “experts” decides that they prefer a $10 wine to a $100 bottle, rest assured that the story will be headline news as soon as it breaks. That's especially true if the study involves some sort of ruse—say, switching the labels on the bottles. Poseurs humiliated! It is a mystery to me why these stories continue to hold so much appeal for reporters and editors, many of whom surely enjoy a glass of Muscadet or Mencia whenever it comes their way. No doubt a certain segment of the public—a small, shrinking, very sad segment—finds pleasure in such stories. But really, these efforts to paint wine appreciation as pretentious nonsense are woefully outdated.

So why do they persist? To a certain extent, we oenophiles invite the abuse (yes, I'm being dramatic for effect here). While a very self-confident wine culture—confident in its taste, receptive to all sorts of wines—has indeed taken root in the United States, we grape nuts don't do a good job of projecting that confidence. Quite the opposite: we seem to apologize for our oenophilia and continuously downplay wine's significance. I'm as guilty of this as anyone: I can't tell you how many times I've trotted out lines like “Wine isn't war and peace” or “It's only fermented grape juice.” It's sort of a preemptive cringe. And what are we cringing from? Accusations of snobbery. Much of the public and private discussion of wine revolves around the notion that people who are wine enthusiasts are by definition snobs—that merely possessing a keen interest in wine and some knowledge of it marks you as a snob. Not surprisingly, wine writers, who communicate with a broad audience routinely, are particularly sensitive to this charge and tend to strike an apologetic or self-deprecatory note reflexively when it comes to their own expertise, so as to not be branded with the scarlet
S
(as in
Snob
). The shelves of bookstores are stuffed with wine guides that seek either to capitalize on the presumed link between wine connoisseurship and snootiness (
The Wine Snob's Dictionary, The Official Guide to Wine Snobbery, The Great Wine Swindle
) or to inoculate their authors against accusations of such (
Wine for Dummies, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Wine
). The prevailing wisdom seems to be that wine knowledge should be worn lightly and that the most effective means of sharing one's knowledge is to downplay or even poke fun at it.

In the past, this approach made sense and was probably even necessary. There is no denying that wine was a tough sell in America for many decades. Historically, a taste for high culture has often been regarded with suspicion and disdain, an attitude that has extended to habits of the table. Thomas Jefferson, America's first and greatest oenophile, was excoriated by fellow Virginian Patrick Henry for having “abjured his native victuals” in favor of French foods and wines, and for two centuries thereafter, wine was regarded as something Continental, decadent, and elitist. Even after the first shoots of America's wine revolution emerged—the Judgment of Paris in 1976, the arrival of the wine critic Robert Parker a few years later—wine's image problem persisted, and wine writers responded accordingly. The general thrust of the literature was that wine was arcane, intimidating, and exotic and needed to be demystified and spoken of in ways that the man on the street could understand if it was ever going to win over large numbers of Americans.

Some wine writers believe that this is still the case. Eric Asimov, the wine columnist for the
New York Times
, recently wrote a book called
How to Love Wine
, in which he claimed that wine remains horribly intimidating for the layman—that wine experts, with all their jargon and obscure metaphors, create feelings of anxiety and inadequacy in regular people and scare them away from wine. (Asimov, it should be said, writes in a delightfully accessible and genial way and is a source of unfailingly excellent wine advice for his readers.) Asimov contrasted our supposedly cowed wine culture with America's dynamic beer culture: “Beer consumers are a far more confident lot than wine consumers. They're at ease with beer, mostly because they've had a solid grounding in their subject, unlike wine consumers who've been brainwashed into believing they must be educated or taught how to ‘appreciate' wine before they can enjoy it.” He went on to say that with top-end restaurants starting beer programs and scholarly tomes devoted to beer popping up on bookshelves, “some fear that a consequence will be a rise in the same sort of anxieties and pretentiousness that plague and intimidate wine consumers.”

Asimov took some flak for these comments, and not without reason. By beer consumers, he presumably meant beer geeks (beer snobs, if you prefer), as opposed to the muscle-shirt-and-tattoo types swigging Budweiser at the neighborhood tavern. But beer geeks weren't born with that “solid grounding”; they acquired it by tasting, by listening, and by studying. And no one has “brainwashed” wine consumers into thinking that they can't enjoy wine if they don't study it; the point is that one's pleasure can be enhanced by knowing a little something about the subject. Writing in the
Wine Spectator
, the aforementioned Matt Kramer pointedly rebutted Asimov's comments, and it is worth citing his rejoinder in full:

This is the “cringe.” Too many wine lovers are needlessly embarrassed by wine. They feel a need to “democratize” wine by debasing it. Wine, you see, is too hoity-toity. So it's best if it gets taken down a peg or two. Ironically, nowhere is this more prevalent than among the very intellectuals who have spent a goodly part of their lives becoming educated and are, in turn, educating others. Wine lovers have nothing to apologize for. You don't see music lovers apologizing for suggesting that perhaps you might better understand a concert or even a song if you spend a little time learning about music. You sure as hell don't see art lovers apologizing for the seeming incomprehensibility of so much of contemporary art. If we don't get it, we're unashamedly told, the fault is ours for not bringing enough context to what we're viewing. Whether that's true or not is beside the point. The point is this: Wine, like many other aesthetic pleasures, admits and supports deeper investigation. To suggest that such investigation is worthwhile is hardly “brainwashing” or bullying. It's called education. And that's surely an admirable, worthwhile thing, right?

Yes, it is.

But the bigger problem, it seems to me, is that Asimov was describing a problem that no longer exists. The idea that wine consumers are plagued by “anxieties and pretentiousness” just doesn't accord with the reality of the American wine scene circa the second decade of the twenty-first century. If people are being chased away from wine by all that arcane wine talk, it sure doesn't show up in the data. Indeed, the historic, two-decades-long wine boom that America is experiencing has coincided with the proliferation of Robert Parker–style tasting notes, filled with florid, esoteric descriptions (caramel-coated autumn leaves, anyone?). While it might be a stretch to think that the notes have somehow
encouraged
this budding oenophilia, they clearly have not inhibited it. With more Americans drinking and collecting wine than ever before, it is hard to see exactly how the high-end discourse about wine is serving as a barrier to entry.

The reality is, we live in a very different wine moment now than we did fifteen years ago. I see it all the time—at dinner parties, cocktail receptions, and other social occasions. I meet people who have little, if any, formal wine knowledge but who enjoy drinking wine, are eager to learn more about it, and are not remotely intimidated by it. Even though they know I am a wine writer, they don't hesitate to share their opinions of wines and are not afraid to take issue with mine even though I am supposedly the authority figure (it's the same way with my kids). A few years ago, I hosted a tasting in Chicago at which I served a López de Heredia Rosé. López de Heredia is a great producer of traditional Riojas, but its Rosé is an unorthodox wine; it is aged for a number of years in barrel, and it has a very distinctive oxidative note as a result. It's one of those wines you either like or hate (I'm not sure anyone actually
loves
it), and half the room at the Chicago event hated it and wasn't afraid to let me know. Was I insulted? Hell, no: I found the pushback gratifying. It's a sign of an increasingly confident wine culture.

Like Asimov, I am envious of America's beer culture, but for another reason. With the advent of the craft beer movement, beer has been able to move upmarket, but at no cost to its blue-collar bona fides. The beer geeks and those heavily tattooed Bud drinkers happily coexist. Wine, by contrast, has not been able to bridge the highbrow-lowbrow divide nearly as effortlessly. It is still portrayed in the media and the culture at large as a hobby for rich swells, and every attempt to dumb it down, to make it seem somehow more accessible, ends up just . . . dumbing it down. (A few years ago, one somewhat prominent wine writer wrote an entire book geared to women in which she compared wines to articles of clothing; she managed both to demean wine and to insult women.) Wine writers, and wine enthusiasts generally, have no need to apologize for their oenophilia and ought to give the apologias a rest. If wine makes some people insecure, that's their problem, not ours. Oenophilia is now just a normal American hobby.

But while we've come a long way as a wine culture, there is one other thing that I would love to see: it would be great if we could get over our fixation on the possible health benefits of wine. In 1991,
60 Minutes
ran a segment calling attention to the so-called French Paradox, which posited that the low rate of heart disease in France, despite a national diet gloriously abundant in foie gras, cheese, and other rich foods, was due to the country's prodigious consumption of red wine. That report led many Americans to start drinking wine, but it also fanned an obsessive interest in the nutritional and therapeutic properties of fermented grape juice, an obsession that endures.