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Somewhere, a place for us

Jamie Goode laid the gauntlet down. Of course, he did it on Facebook, so I doubt most people did more than trip over said gauntlet on their way to superpoking someone. Nonetheless, he got my attention…which might just mean I spend too much time looking at the ground, wary of things over which I might stumble. Anyway, this is what he said:

Terroir matters but what exactly is it? We need a good definition.

Right now, anyone who’s been around the online wine fora block for a few years (or decades, in my case) is rolling their eyes. Terroir is one of the trifecta of grossly overworn subjects, along with the efficacy of scoring wines and their ever-escalating cost, that has been so thoroughly masticated that there’s absolutely nothing new to say, though there’s an ever-revolving crowd of newbies to say it. Long-timers know each others’ arguments and positions by heart.

So why would I – one of those eye-rolling long-timers – want to dip my toes once more into this exceedingly tepid and turgid water?

Blame Jamie Goode.

Usually, the definition offered up is “somewhereness” (I prefer “placeness”). Both are a little un-rigorous. They tell us what terroir means, but not what it is. I think we can do better.

Let’s start with the fundamentals. I’ll begin with one of the most controversial things I could write: terroir exists. It’s true that not everyone believes this. “Terroir is bullshit,” claims one well-known California winemaker of my acquaintance, and he’s hardly alone in saying so. “Terroir is marketing,” claim a number of his brethren elsewhere in the Golden Two-Buck Chuck State. (I’m sorry, was that snarky? Hey, it’s a blog. Snark is what we do.) And so forth. If terroir doesn’t exist, then everything that follows is a waste of time. It still might be. But I think that the definition, or perhaps the argumentation leading up to it, will actually take care of this foundational problem. Judge for yourself, later.

Much later.

Continuing with the fundamentals, wine is a construct made with a defined number of inputs. Only two, in fact. They are:

  1. the grape(s)
  2. the winemaking

You’ll notice the distinct lack of the word “terroir” in that list. Not to worry. Because the grape, too, leaves the vine having accepted its own collection of inputs:

  1. the grape(s) inherent characteristics
  2. the viticultural choices made by the grape grower
  3. all other grape-changing effects not produced by human intervention

That last part includes the weather over that growing season. But it also includes longer-term meta-effects. Anything that changes the chemistry of the vine (and thus the grape) in any measurable way would be one of these meta-effects.

The meta-effects are terroir. Well…more or less.

What meta-effects? The list is well-known, if not necessarily universally agreed-upon. Non-comprehensively, these include overall mesoclimate (this is the proper term, not the usually-deployed “microclimate”), anything that effects water retention, sun exposure, heat retention, soil chemistry (and thus soil type(s)), and so forth. Broadly speaking, these meta-effects can be broken down into two categories: those below the surface of the ground, and those above it.

For some, we’ve gone far enough, and with a little more specificity in that list will have defined terroir in a satisfactory fashion. But if that were all there is to it, Jamie wouldn’t have dropped his gauntlet on Facebook’s scuffed-up floor. Very, very few people argue that what I’ve just iterated doesn’t exist, or doesn’t have an effect on grapes…and those that do argue the point seem unacquainted with basic agriculture. Any farmer will tell you, without necessarily knowing or caring about terroir, that these effects both exist and affect their practices in a fundamental and inexorable way. However, we need to continue, because not everyone is willing to stop their definition in the realm of the sciences, or at least the evidentiary. For this we can probably blame the French.

Part of the definitional problem is that terroir is a borrowed word with no obvious English equivalent (that is to say, there’s a translation, but it’s not what we mean when we talk about terroir in the context of wine). To many French folk, the word is imbued with much more than climate and chemistry. Anyone who has seen a “produits du terroir” sign while driving the French countryside knows this; the word has quasi-historical implications, and certainly is laden with a measure of cultural baggage that is, to the French, inseparable from geography. Some even talk about human inputs as being part of terroir, though a rigorous definition of this type would have to include everything from training methods to complete site (re)constructions of the type practiced by certain mega-wineries, and that’s most certainly not what the human-input proponents mean. Others claim that people themselves are part of terroir, arguing that the majority portion of the word “viticulture” is not “viti,” but “culture.”. Traditions are sometimes mentioned. As are other living creatures. And so on.

[Geisberg & Osterberg over Ribeauvillé]While these diversions appeal to the romantic in me, they pose a definitional problem. I’m going to solve that by insisting on another fundamental precept: terroir must have clear, scientifically-measurable, and scientifically-repeatable boundaries. If it does not, then a definition is going to be impossible, because it can mean different things to different people. Since we’re here to define terroir, that’s not of much use. Moreover, imposing a structure on the concept of terroir doesn’t preclude the consideration of any of these other categories of influence. Far from it. I certainly think that human inputs exist (I’ve mentioned some of the forms already), and I think that traditions absolutely matter for certain wines, though not for others. What remains to be determined is whether or not they have anything to do with terroir.

Tradition has a more specific name in wine lingo: typicity. Some think that typicity should fall under the definition of terroir, and most who think that live in the Old World, in places where the traditions of wine run deep into the centuries. However, following from the determination that terroir must have scientifically-measurable and scientifically-repeatable boundaries, typicity cannot be part of terroir. Why not? Because while there are components of typicity that can, under certain circumstances, be derived from the immutable qualities of grape varieties and terroir, those components are not the entirety of the concept. Winemaking – practices and style – must also be considered. Thus, taken as a whole, typicity isn’t inherent, it’s artificially imposed. And remember that there are wines whose typicity is a matter of great debate among their advocates. Does a Cotat-produced wine from the Mont-Damnés really taste of Mont-Damnés despite being so different from other producers’ interpretations? Does Brun’s “l’Ancien” taste like Beaujolais or not? How much sangiovese is too little in a Chianti, or tempranillo in a Rioja? There are also wines whose typicity is a matter of arbitrarily choosing date ranges; is Bordeaux “typically” blended with Hermitage or not, and what sites and/or grapes does a given label actually comprise? Is a Mâcon botrytized or not? Montrachet: sweet or dry? What is a Rasteau “supposed” to be? Are varietal bottlings or blends the true Alsatian tradition?

I could go on for a long while, but these examples are all well-known among controversy-loving wine geeks. And they all serve to illustrate the basic impermanence and subjectivity of typicity. Thus, it cannot be part of our definition of terroir.

What about culture? Again, which culture? Greek? Etruscan? Roman? Roman Catholic monastic? Germanic? French? Many cultures may have contributed to the viticulture of a long-planted site. But the cultures were different. And even within narrower groups, culture is not steady-state, it’s a shared environmental construct in constant motion. To say that terroir includes culture is to introduce a permanent variable into the equation. That may satisfy a romantic urge, but it’s of little use when trying to construct a definition with any utility or rigor.

How about creatures other than man? It depends: are said creatures a permanent influence on a given set of vines, and – this is important – in a way that affects grape chemistry, or are they transitory? Most pests, like glassy-winged sharpshooters, or the phylloxera louse, are transitory; they (or the parasites they carry) may affect grape chemistry, but it’s hard to call something a permanent influence when it eventually kills the vine, and when it’s fully mobile under its own power. Grape-noshing birds might seem to be a permanent fixture, but they don’t influence grape chemistry, just quantity (if they ate underripe grapes, performing a sort of avian green harvest, then maybe we could include them…though maybe not, since unless they’re trained their influence is hardly predictable, and thus not scientifically measurable).

One biological entity might be part of terroir, though, and that’s botrytis cinerea, the fungus known in certain forms as noble rot. That botrytis affects grape chemistry is unquestionable, its effects are predictable, and thus the effect is scientifically-measurable. And if a site has a clear and permanent predilection to be affected by botrytis (or the opposite), then it can be said to be part of the site’s inherent characteristics…thus, more or less scientifically-repeatable. So it should be part of terroir, right?

[St-Jean-de-Minervois]One objection is obvious: if terroir is to be scientifically-repeatable, its form should be a constant, or close to it. Thus, if a vineyard isn’t botrytis-affected every single year, botrytis cannot be part of terroir. Right?

This seems an easy escape clause from what appears to be a thorny definitional issue. In fact, it’s too easy, because it misapplies the concept of terroir. In any case, there’s a better reason to eliminate botrytis from the list of terroir-influencing sources. Bear with me here…what follows will seem to be a bit of a diversion, but it will eventually come back to and explain this point.

One more thing we can probably blame the French for goes right back to one of those frequently-heard Californian objections to the concept: terroir is marketing. Because the fact is that, for many, it is very much a point of differential and qualitative marketing. And it has been used in both positive and negative ways. The latter is what gets other winemakers’ backs up, because some will insist that only certain wines “show terroir”…those wines usually being those with a long tradition of site, varietal, and winemaking continuity, and thus (obviously) few of which are placed anywhere in the New World.

Others will point to a generalized inability to, in controlled double-blind conditions, inerrantly identify specific terroirs as proof that terroir does not exist. Two things are worth mentioning here. First, anyone with enough experience has met tasters – many, but certainly not all, of them grape-growing winemakers – who seem to be able to identify sites with surprising regularity. Sometimes, they can even do this by tasting the grapes themselves. A remarkable talent? Maybe. More likely, it’s long familiarity. The wine generalist may not be able to reliably differentiate Schlossberg from Sommerberg, but a specialist in Alsatian wine will be better, and someone who grows grapes on those sites will often prove to be quite adept. Second, however, is the more fundamental objection: the “proof” thus demonstrated by such tastings is not that terroir does or doesn’t exist, but that it is not always useful for the consumer of wine. Again, hold onto that thought for a moment or two.

The (indeed highly marketable) idea of a “terroir wine” is an entirely different concept from the basic definition of terroir. Note that nowhere in my proposed definition have I mentioned a requirement for terroir to be organoleptically identifiable. A wine may or may not show its site-derived characters , just as it may or may not show its varietally-derived characters, and just as its winemaker-derived characters may or may not be obvious. In no case would a taster, having failed to discern certain qualities in a wine, deny the existence of the grape(s) or the winemaker. Yet for some reason, when terroir is not discernable, they’re perfectly willing to deny its existence. This is remarkably insensible; remember our farmers, who would weep at the notion that one plot of ground is pretty much the same as any other. If farmers acted on such an absurd belief, a lot (more) of them would be out of work.

This brings us to the key point: it’s not that terroir is useless or irrelevant in terms of wine appreciation, but that its actual point of application in the process that leads from vine to wine is wholly within the vineyard. In other words, in the purview of the farmer, not the taster. There may be terroir for the taster to discern, or there may not, but there is always terroir for the farmer to discern and deal with.

So to return to our moldy conundrum, is botrytis part of terroir? From the farmer’s perspective, the question is not about botrytis, but about an affinity for botrytis. That predilection is something with which the farmer must deal, compensating (or not) according to the demands of the wine, just as a mesoclimate-derived predilection for extreme August heat is a factor with which the farmer must deal. Botrytis can be prevented or encouraged, yes, but the predilection itself cannot be eradicated without significant changes to other aspects of the terroir (proximity to water, altitude, water retention, diurnal temperature effects, etc.). In other words, the terroir is not the fungus itself, but the predilection for the fungus…a property of the site, not of the mold. This keeps us safely within the boundaries of our earlier assumptions; the yearly presence of botrytis may or may not be fully predictable and thus not scientifically-repeatable, but the chance of a site’s embrace/rejection of botrytis most certainly is predictable and scientifically-repeatable. What follows from this seems to be a firm, clear standard: no biological entities aside from the vine itself have terroir effects.

Right?

Well, what about the wee beasties in the soil itself? Worms, bugs, bacteria, and so forth…are they or are they not part of the terroir of a site? And what about grasses and other things planted in and around the vineyard? How about eucalyptus trees in the neighborhood, from which oils adhere to grapes, affecting the taste of the resulting wine? And how about pollen from nearby lavender fields, often cited as a “natural” flavorant in wines from Provence?

The fashion in which we dealt with fungus shows the way forward. It’s certain that the physical and chemical makeup of the soil is indeed affected the creatures living in it (and, it might be added, by cover crops and other in-vineyard plants of that nature). Since we previously asserted that soil chemistry is part of terroir, surely these chemistry-modifying biological entities are also part of terroir.

Again, no. Botrytis affects the chemistry of the grape in predictable and measurable ways only given its presence…which is not assured, only predicted. The same holds true for things living in the soil; they can move away, or be killed by means physical and chemical, or experience a growth spurt one year and a decline the next. In other words, they’re a variable influence, like the weather. The only aspect of their existence that may be part of a site’s terroir is, as with botrytis, a predilection of that site to encourage or inhibit such biological entities.

In both cases, the key point is that our fungi, annelids, bacteria, and so forth are an effect of terroir, not a cause thereof. They exist, or not, as a response to the site…just as the vines themselves do. And while it’s true that they also may affect the site, the same is true of vines, whose questing roots may change the physical nature (and thus the water retention, and as this proceeds over a very long time the geological composition) of a site. Yet the vines themselves are a response to the terroir, not the terroir itself.

Which brings up another question. Doesn’t the preceding demonstrate feedback effects that suggest terroir is an evolving system? Yes. Without external management (which is in direct opposition to the concept of inherent terroir; management is man-made), it is impossible to think that a site does not change over time. Soils change. Vines are uprooted, and their younger replacements’ roots access different soil realms, leading to different vine chemistry. Mesoclimates change, not least in response to anthropogenic climate effects. Farming methods change, causing chemical and biological discontinuities in the soil as viticulturalists adopt, then abandon, various treatments and theories. Weather “events” and regular old erosion change entire vineyards, permanently. And as the previous paragraph demonstrates, the biome created by a given terroir has its own inexorable effect on the terroir.

So how can there be terroir if there’s no continuity? Well, remember what I wrote earlier: terroir is not tradition. Continuity is not a foundational requirement for the existence of terroir. Identity is…but even then, the identity that matters is an agricultural one, not the kind required by a taster for the purposes of identification. Again, terroir is about farming, not tasting.

This is, I think, a hard mindset for people to accept. Of what use is terroir if 1) it’s not about identifiable qualities in wine, and 2) isn’t even a consistent factor?

The response to this will begin to sound familiar: this isn’t a significant question, because terroir isn’t about tasting. That there’s enough identity and continuity for some experienced tasters to identify some terroirs is both a marvelous thing and a demonstrable truism, and in fact without identity and continuity as expressed in finished wine we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place, because no one would care whether or not there was such a thing as terroir. But the entity to which terroir actually matters is the grape hanging on the vine, not the person putting his nose and lips to a glass. Everything else is a mere ancillary benefit, not the effect itself. Terroir is of tremendous utility to the grape, even if it lacks the consciousness to know it.

Oh…and as for eucalyptus, lavender, and the like? An apparent vineyard signature, perhaps (until the offending plants are cut down, or the wind shifts), but an external influence no more intrinsic to the site than a “pool” of humidity birthing dormant fungal spores, or farmer spraying fungicide. So no…not terroir.

Moving on…

Here’s another fundamental concept that follows directly from the above discussion of marketing: all sites have terroir. All sites. Despite what those who which to use it as a wedge marketing term would like you to believe.

“But what about wine X, or Y? There’s no terroir there!”

What did I just say? “All sites.” Terroir is in the vineyard. Whether or not it is in the wine is irrelevant to its definition (though a given taster may care about this very much; I, myself, have a general preference for wines that reveal terroir). The most industrial multi-site blend comes from sites that have their own measurable terroir, even if the only thing discernable in the finished wine is the chemical stew used to bludgeon unpalatable grapes into commercial submission. (Sorry. Again with the snark.) Which is another way of stating yet another fundamental concept: quality has nothing to do with terroir.

Again, we run counter to traditional usage. Terroir, for many commentators, is all too often a synonym for the qualitative phrase “good terroir.” Certainly that’s as misguided as employing “wine” as a synonym for “good wine.” It may stand to reason and the law of averages that not all terroirs are “good,” whatever standards one may wish to apply to that qualitative assessment, and we could delve into the reasons a terroir may or may not be “good,” but they’re all subordinate to one of our guiding principles: scientifically-measurable properties. All qualitative assessments of the “good/bad” type are subjective, and thus not scientifically-measurable.

So are we any closer to an actual definition of terroir? I think so. And here – heaven knows you’ve waited long enough for it – is my proposed definition of terroir:

Terroir is a biological outcome derived from the interaction of mesoclimate, geography, and geology (including soil chemistry), expressed by the entity sustained by that interaction and possessing a chemically identifiable identity, but excluding the influence of external biological entities.

Now comes the important part: let’s pick at it. I’m quite sure it can be improved – certainly it can be made shorter – with a little external biological input.

(And Jamie…are you happy now?)

Just say note

[wine tasting]The poor tasting note. Beloved and loathed, essential and useless. And now, finding its very purpose questioned. It’s enough to give a laundry list of anthropomorphized fruits and vegetables a complex.

Via Vinography…itself via Eric Asimov (don’t you just love the self-referential, navel-sucking blogosphere?)…there are some interesting musings on the benefits and/or dangers of the form out there. (For example: here and here.) Since tasting notes are, by far, the most common form of written expression on the subject of wine, this is a matter of some import. And, of course, as a generator of seemingly endless iterations of the genre, I’ve some thoughts on the matter.

It’s sometimes said by the jaded online wine literati that tasting notes are the least interesting form of wine commentary. That’s not true. Ratings and scores are. This is not the forum for well-worn arguments about the utility or sensibility of scoring wines against each other, except to note that in the end, ratings provide only two potentially useful bits of knowledge: 1) the scorer’s personal hierarchy of preference, and 2) a demonstration of something well-known before the widespread use of scores…that, in the main, there’s fairly widespread agreement on the qualities and identities of the world’s best wines.

Since the latter – a long-held, “establishment” view of wine – is one of the things many of scoring’s most ardent advocates claim to be subverting with their rating systems, there’s a particular irony involved in this result. And in any case, it’s where that general and congenial agreement collapses that a discussion of wine quality becomes truly interesting.

But we’re already off-topic. It’s probably true that, after ratings, tasting notes are the next least-interesting form of wine commentary. However, the gap between the gold and silver medals (or, I guess, their opposites) is rather larger than one might first suspect. For tasting notes can delve directly and succinctly into the areas of interest I just mentioned: the measures of quality and difference that bring actual diversity of opinion to the worlds of wine production and appreciation.

That’s can, not do. Naturally, this is a standard few tasting notes actually attain. Why? Lack of skill, sure – wine writing’s no more overwhelmed with brilliance than any other pursuit – but that’s not the key reason. Many with demonstrable skill still produce tasting notes that fall short of this standard. The reason is that tasting notes of depth and literacy, that enlighten as much as they reveal, that contextualize while they characterize, are difficult and time-consuming to research and write. And the simple fact of the matter is that most people don’t want to spend that much effort, especially when notes aren’t that well-compensated (from top critics, on a per-note basis) or, as most are, produced simply for the love of it.

Should they? No. Not because I wouldn’t like to see it reflected in the collective body of tasting notes, but because I don’t care for the concept of “should” here. It’s not up to me or anyone else to dictate to people the whys and hows of their notes. They’re as personal as expression gets from the appreciation (rather than production) side. It takes great depth of knowledge to write longer-form notes that enlighten, and it takes even greater skill to distill that enlightenment back into short-form notes. But there’s no way to develop that skill without exploring the form in a sort of personal apprenticeship; wine writers, even the best of them, are not produced from whole cloth, they’re created by a long process of self-development and collaborative feedback. To insist on formalization before that development is to narrow the wonderful diversity of voices and modes of expression, and while this might have surface appeal for the bewildered consumer overwhelmed with competing and contradictory authorities, it’s ultimately bad for both wine writing and wine itself.

A better approach to the problem identified by Asimov – that tasting notes, as currently conceived, confuse rather than educate the consumer – might be to suggest ways in which the form might be improved without stunting that essential development, and from which interested writers may select those techniques that work for them, and reject those that don’t.

One caveat, though: I reject the notion that the seeming impenetrability of tasting notes to the novice is evidence of their lack of utility. All fields of specialized knowledge have their subject-specific nomenclatures. For some reason I’ve never understood, wine aficionados are unusually sensitive to the existence of theirs, either clinging to it out of misplaced snobbery or, more often, deliberately subverting it to the point of true disutility. Why? Look, if all a consumer wants is for someone with the mantle of authority to point to a tasty bottle of wine, then they don’t need to learn the lingo, and there’s no need to infantilize the jargon in a vain attempt to cradle these people within the fraternity. They’re not interested, because what they want is a shopping list. And if another consumer wants a deeper and more specialized experience, they’ll make the effort to learn what they need to learn, just as an enthusiast of cars, or baseball, or stamp collecting will. Wine folk need to stop apologizing for their grammatical flights of fancy in a misguided attempt to entice the uninterested, and instead concentrate their efforts on those that care enough to play along.

So how can tasting notes be made more useful? An obvious first answer is to lengthen them, bringing background, history, context, and food pairings into play. Many excellent writers do exactly this. But, as I noted, it’s a laborious process. And not just for the writer; there are readers who don’t want all that background, who just want to know about the wine, and will find deeper and more verbose explorations no less off-putting than the jargon they were designed to supplant.

There may not be one solution that pleases all audiences. But there are improvements that can be made. Whether in long- or short-form notes, the essential points of “difference” are worth more emphasis than they currently receive. A tasting of fifty chardonnays from the same region will result in a lot of mostly-identical notes. As with a mathematical equation, one could go through each note striking out the constants and leaving the variables intact. I don’t mean that commonalities should actually be excised (though it’s an intriguing idea), but that a note can, and perhaps should, speak more to the question: why this one rather than that one? And in what situations? That, certainly, is of more interest than noting the presence of tropical fruit aromas for the twentieth consecutive time.

Another technique, and one that I’ve been working on myself, is to make the note less about what the wine tastes like, and more about the experience of drinking the wine. That’s not a distinction that makes sense to everyone, so let me expand on that point a bit.

In a typical tasting note, there are two components: the organoleptic assessment (I tasted these fruits, I found these structural elements, and so forth) and the qualitative assessment (I liked it, the previous vintage was better, it probably won’t age, etc.). The latter is sometimes turned into a score, and sometimes not. It is commonly assumed that the latter is also the full representation of the taster’s personal reaction to the wine. It may be, but I suspect that in most cases, it’s not. And this is the verbiage that’s missing in most notes.

Why restrict the grammar of wine notation to plants, rocks, and chemicals? Why not talk about mood? A wine might remind one of a sunny day in a golden field (a white Southern Rhône), or a chilly drawing room in an old European estate (a German riesling). Or of the wine’s character as if it were a living thing? An Austrian weissburgunder may stand stiff and Teutonically rigid, like a soldier guarding palace gates, while a Santa Barbara pinot blanc might be as relaxed and easygoing as any “dude”-uttering Californian.

People express discomfort with this sort of language, but they shouldn’t. In the latter pair of examples, all the descriptors are doing is standing in for a set of characterizations that could be done with the standard grammar, but in a far less interesting way. A “stiff, Teutonic” pinot blanc could be ungenerous with its fruit, high-acid, and with a significant mineral component that reminds one of Germanic wines, especially riesling. Its qualities would seem to be held in reserve, perhaps to be teased out with age. The wine would be the opposite of “showy” or “easy.” And its “relaxed, easygoing” Santa Barbara counterpart would have more forward fruit that’s immediately accessible on first sip, lower acidity and less structure in general, and an approachability that suggests against careful study in search of something more purely emotional. The first wine encourages the taster towards analytical exploration, the latter encourages the taster to stop thinking so much and enjoy the experience. These are common reactions to wines; why are they so infrequently reflected in the language we use to describe those same wines?

There’s so much more that can be said. Wines may transport one to a place, or a memory. An old red Burgundy may recall a sunset, a young Madiran the blackest midnight, a Kumeu chardonnay the first rays of dawn. A Sardinian vermentino may transport one to the docks, a saline breeze from the sea filling the air, as the first fishing boats return with the morning’s catch. A Zidarich vitovska may be so iconoclastic and difficult to grasp that it becomes an intellectual task to drink, while a young zinfandel may make one laugh out loud at the sheer fruity joy of it. And all these responses will be informed by, but also depend on, context…a notion I’ll explore in a moment.

[note-taking]Overly serious tasters reject this sort of verbiage for several reasons. First, there’s simple repression; these are more personal reactions that the coldly clinical forms in common use, and not everyone is comfortable with that level of revelation. Second, there’s the fear that such descriptors are less useful because they’re overly personal; that a wine described as “cold” means nothing to a reader unless the issue under consideration is something scientifically measurable, like temperature.

But this is silly. Unless we move to fully chemical tasting notes, wherein quantities of the various esters, structural elements, and so forth are given in numerical form, there will always be an inherent individualism to wine description. One person’s freshly-picked Granny Smith apple is another’s elevated malic acid. Different tasters use gooseberry, boxwood, or cat pee for what is essentially the same character, found so frequently in sauvignon blanc. And not everyone knows what a Makrut lime leaf smells like, even though it may be the best way to express what a taster is experiencing; what meaning does that term have to the uninitiated? If the answer is “none,” then how can its use be justified? Yet if it’s the right descriptor, how can it not be used? Even structural elements cannot be pinned down so easily; for example, we may find agreement that a wine is acidic (given sufficient experience identifying acid in isolation from other components), but its balance in relation to other elements will be a personal assessment, not a scientific one, and so moving from “acidic” to “too acidic” is fraught with the uncertainties of personal judgment.

Further, consider the utility of tasting notes from a more objective, less enthusiast-oriented perspective. Does anyone head to their store in search of a wine that “tastes of apricots and gravel?” Ever? No, of course not. But they might want a fun crowd-pleaser for a party. Or something that’s going to impress their oenophilic boss at a formal event. They might desire a wine that will satisfy rather than make intellectual or emotional demands after a difficult day at work. One that provides a revelatory moment wherein they finally understand the appeal of nebbiolo. Something that reminds them of their honeymoon on Santorini, or a wine that will challenge every assumption they have about Italian whites. Grocery list notes cannot respond to these desires – they lack the vocabulary – but more personal, emotional notes can.

Next, it’s important to render an opinion. But remember that an opinion doesn’t have to be a rating, or a simple binary expression of approval/disapproval. If a wine is confusing, say so. If a wine is enthralling despite its objective flaws or imbalances, say so. If a wine is compelling at first taste but a chore to drink, say so. Though some do indeed drink (and thus notate) in a rigidly binary way, sorting all wines into yes/no categories, I suspect most don’t. Wines and the potential contexts in which they can be experienced are far more varied than such a simplistic, neo-Neanderthal response. A deeper, broader, and more nuanced way of talking about wine embraces this diversity.

Finally, remember that there are as many different ways to express thoughts on wine as there are wines. There’s not just one style, and those who find (say) the list-and-score method wanting can turn to commentators who possess a more personally appealing style. And there’s power in that. For while it’s important that individual expression be preserved in all its diverse forms, the corpus of that expression is also worthy of consideration. Each commentator brings their own colors and styles to the weave, and though it’s not true that a collective perspective is inherently superior to the personal kind, it’s hard to deny the mind- and palate-broadening potential of all those individual pieces knitted together in a vast tapestry of knowledge, emotion, and thought.

No, the tasting note is definitely not dead. It rises again, but unlike the Phoenix it must sometimes change forms to be reborn.

Identity crisis

[grapes]Describe the taste of a raspberry.

Asked to do this from memory, rather than by biting into the actual berry, your initial instinct will likely be to rely on a tautology – raspberry tastes like raspberry – rather than to start rattling off a litany of qualities that define “raspberry-ness.” In fact, given an audience that has also tasted a raspberry, this may be the most useful description one can propose.

Now, describe the taste of a peach. Again, invoking the “Reflexive Property of Peaches” is tempting. But now that there are two fruits under consideration, you might also be able to compare and contrast the two, which brings new vocabulary into play. You might, for example, point out the greater acidity and seed-and-squirt crunch of the raspberry, or the sweetness and smooth chew of the peach.

What you’re not likely to do is declare that “this peach tastes like a raspberry,” or vice-versa. Why not? Because it would be extraordinarily unlikely to think that, and even less likely to actually be true. The differences, even if one lacks the organoleptic vocabulary to iterate them, are both significant and obvious at first taste.

Or, consider two things a little closer to each other (genetically speaking): tuna and sole. While the gulf between the taste of these two fish may be shallower than in the previous example, there’s still very little chance of mistaking one for the other in their native, unadorned form. Why not? Because they don’t taste alike, nor are they texturally alike. There is, for lack of a more developed explanation a “tuna-ness” and a “sole-ness” that, once one has tasted them, draws clear lines of separation between the two. And in both cases, this knowledge is essential because informs how we use the ingredients. For example, aggressive preparations that work with tuna will obliterate sole, while delicate sauces perfect for sole might be overwhelmed by the intensity of tuna. Raspberries will bring a tartness to a dessert (which might, in some cases, necessitate adding sugar for balance) that peaches will not. Were we unaware of these differences, we would have no idea when to use which ingredient; we might be making a linzer torte with tuna jam, or dipping raspberries in little slurries of wasabi and soy. (And yes, I’m aware the latter is bad sushi etiquette.)

“All this is obvious,” you might be thinking to yourself. Quite so. But make the subject of analysis a wine grape, and for some this obviousness apparently goes right out the window. Describe the taste of pinot noir? How dare anyone suggest that pinot noir is like this, that, or the other thing…why, it’s varietal fascism of the highest order!

A straw man? Unfortunately not, as anyone who’s spent much time on online wine fora will know. Consider, for example, this recent thread on eRobertParker.com, wherein a debate over this point is joined by people on all sides of the issue. Even Parker himself sees fit to join the fray, though given his all-too-typical syntactical incoherence it’s hard to say exactly what position he’s taking; he seems to be against “typicity” as a general concept, but for the idea that grapes have identifiable characteristics. Here’s a verbatim excerpt; see if you can make sense of it:

I have never found anyone who can give an accurate definition of “typicity”….or anyone who can find much of it in a double blind tasting….if typicity is merely reciting the generally agreed upon 2-4 flavors/aromas that each varietal offers,I am impressed….usually I associate the use of “typicity” as a substitute for mediocrity

(Let’s get one bit of definitional precision out of the way. I’m not talking about “typicity” as it is used within, say, the French appellation system. That sort of typicity – a Sancerre must “taste like a Sancerre,” and so forth – is related, but fraught with complications, and a longer subject than I’m willing to tackle at the moment. The issue under consideration here is both broader (the very existence of typicity) and differently focused (how that concept applies to grapes).

So what is varietal character? In the context of wine, it’s the qualities of grapes that differentiate one from another, and that make that grape identifiable in isolation. It’s one of the three elements that create the character of a finished wine (the other two are terroir and winemaking). Components include various aromatics, of course, but also structural and developmental factors. For instance, some grapes have naturally long ripening curves, or inherently low acidity, or a persistent greenness from high concentrations of pyrazines, or a natural inconsistency in maturity within a bunch.

[grapes]This all seems basic enough, right? Yet it is denied by so many. Let’s start by examining the consequences of this stance.

If, for example, sangiovese does not have an identifying signature, then how can a raspberry? Lavender? They can’t. In the absence of an essential character to the wood used for barrels, what does it mean to invoke the aroma of oak in a wine? Nothing, because who can say what oak smells like? Much of the language of wine description is thus lost at a stroke. Consider, for example, this representative note from Robert Parker:

A blend of 82% Zinfandel and 18% Carignane, the similarly priced, full-bodied, inky ruby/purple-tinged 2004 Zinfandel Buchignani reveals superb raw materials along with abundant quantities of raspberry, blueberry, black cherry, and loamy soil notes as well as subtle oak in the background. Nicely layered with good acidity, and an opulent, powerful finish, and a low 14.4% alcohol, it can be enjoyed now and over the next 4-6 years.

Now let’s try that note again, but this time removing references to things that (according the anti-inherency crowd) cannot have identifiable characteristics:

A blend of 82% Zinfandel and 18% Carignane, the similarly priced, full-bodied, inky … 2004 Zinfandel Buchignani reveals superb raw materials along with abundant quantities of … as well as subtle … in the background. Nicely layered with good acidity, and an opulent, powerful finish, and a low 14.4% alcohol, it can be enjoyed now and over the next 4-6 years.

Not very descriptive, is it? No, it’s not useless, and some might prefer that the wine notation abandon its over-reliance on the produce aisle, but the language is fundamentally and unrecoverably stunted. Even “acidity” is problematic, because it is a discrete chemical (several, actually), with defined organoleptic characteristics, and those who believe that such definitions are impossible would certainly wish to be consistent. Tannin, not mentioned in this note, would be another victim as it, too, is a specific thing, though describing its effect (“bitter,” “smooth,” etc.) would remain acceptable. What about sugar, or alcohol? I’m not sure, but they might have to go as well.

So, as some would have it, one should no more be able to tell gewürztraminer from mourvèdre by taste and smell alone than be able to differentiate tuna from a raspberry. Does that make sense to anyone? Of course not, and I doubt most who take the position that there is no or little inherent varietal character would agree with that statement. Why, then, do they insist on its truth in other situations? If it’s true that there’s no gewürztraminer character, then indeed who’s to say that’s it’s not mourvèdre after all?

Something that one notices, almost right away, is that the deniers of varietal character tend to be mostly, though not exclusively, from the New World. Or, if not, from newish producers and regions of the Old, where viticultural traditions are not measured in centuries, or even millennia. Why might that be?

As with the never-ending terroir debate, there’s an element of resentment involved. Not jealousy, it’s important to note, but fatigue. A weariness and wariness over constantly having to defend their wines as “bad” or “wrong” not because they have their own assortment of individual flaws, but because they are not [insert paradigm-defining Old World wine region here]. And that’s certainly understandable. The Willamette Valley is not Burgundy, the Santa Ynez Valley is not the Piedmont, Mendoza is not Cahors, and so forth. If terroir is to mean anything, that must be acknowledged.

And sure, maybe there are some who would ask, “who is anyone to say what a raspberry tastes like?” But while I wish them well in their philosophically pure subjectivity, there’s not much point in engaging them in a debate on the subject, because they’re not likely to agree on any definitions upon which to base a discussion. As I suggested before, however, most objectors to the codification of varietal character probably don’t actually believe in definitional anarchy, despite their protests to the contrary. Instead, they’re defending their wines as a finished product, and by extension are drawn into a corollary debate about the grapes required to produce that product. Grapes that sometimes don’t taste much like their historical or traditional antecedents.

What does it mean, for example, to say that a pinot noir tastes like a syrah or a zinfandel; a charge leveled at many a New World pinot? We can restrict that charge to the finished wine, in which case there are all manner of winemaking techniques that can achieve, at least in part, those results. But in the main, winemakers utilizing such techniques aren’t the ones doing the complaining, they’re the industrial, mass-market-focused types that aren’t heard from much outside of annual stockholder reports. No, the winemakers raising objections tend to work pretty simply from grape to bottle, or buy from those who do. Yes, they utilize some of the “tricks” – one might more charitably call them “mitigations” – that are a part of every winemaker’s portfolio, but not often to an unduly deformative extent. Thus, the difference in their wines’ character comes not from strange voodoo in the cellar, but more often than not from the practices of the farmer, who uses knowledge both ancient and modern to achieve results that would be recognizable by the first people to ever grow wine grapes…even if they might not find the resulting wines particularly familiar.

To push a pinot into realms where people think it tastes like something it’s not (without mucking about in the cellar) requires one of two things: an individualistic terroir, or something historically atypical about the condition of the grapes at harvest. The terroir differentiator is easily tested by comparing the wine in question with other wines from the same terroir. Do any of them “taste like pinot” by the standards of the person leveling the charge? If yes, it’s not the terroir, it’s a farming choice. Which, one learns, it almost always is. And these days, the most common path towards difference (or what critics would call deformation) is the search for greater ripeness (or what critics would call overripeness). Not just of the aromatics, but of the grape’s various structural elements.

Is it reasonable to assert that, across wildly varying terroirs, a grape will show identifiable yet common characteristics? Within certain parameters, yes: a grape tasted at analytically similar stages in its evolution, and – this is important – bracketed within the range of what most people would call “ripe,” will indeed taste much the same from place to place. And so, lacking fundamentally deformative cellar practices, will the wine that results from it, though of course there will always be differences as well. But note that key caveat. A grape pushed past that bracketed stage, or not allowed to reach it, shares something in common with very old or botrytized wines in that it becomes very difficult to identify in contrast to its genetic cousins and distant relatives. Varietal similarity due to the less controversial form of this – underripeness – is amply demonstrated by supermarket wines in pretty much any country, where one €5 Jurançon will taste much like another $6 pinot blanc: green-tinged and vague fruit, and watery, perhaps with some sugar to “cover up” the winery’s general indifference to quality.

And as for the more controversial stage – elevated ripeness (see how even I’m afraid to use the loaded word “overripeness”? though the French sur maturité finesses the issue with the usual French élan) – here we see how New World producers and their Old World spiritual cousins can feel so put-upon. For indeed, their wines are often bigger, fruitier, and more alcoholic (at least at harvest; alcohols are easy to adjust downward) than the paradigmatic regions to which they are so frequently, and to their minds unfairly, compared. There are good and bad reasons for seeking escalating levels of maturity, but they’re beyond the scope of this particular post, so for now it’s enough to accept that such viticultural choices and their results exist, and then turn our attention back to the issue of varietal character.

One might legitimately wonder whether or not there’s an objective way to accuse a given grape of misrepresenting its established standards. As is almost always the case, the only true way to assess objectively is to restrict study to quantifiable criteria. The problem, of course, is that the mere attempt to assign those criteria brings us very quickly back into the realm of subjectivity. Who decides what the criteria are? We could, by fiat, decide that certain levels of X, Y, and Z (including aromatic and structural elements) define the characteristics of a given grape, and in fact we might have just about enough scientific understanding of grape chemistry to do this. But to what end? Deciding that gewürztraminer must possess X amount of whatever chemical is responsible for its signature lychee aroma is a great idea…right up to the point that one encounters a beautifully made gewürztraminer that smells nothing like lychee. If this is a result of terroir influence, as seems quite possible, then by elevating and enshrining one we negate the other: either varietal characteristics must trump terroir, or terroir must trump varietal characteristics. And that’s a subtraction from, rather than an addition to, our understanding of wine.

Outside of the lunatic fringe that insists all aspects of wine quality can somehow be assessed objectively, there’s no reason that this judgment can’t be, at heart and in practice, a subjective one. In other words, nothing more complicated than “it tastes like pinot noir to me”…the oenological equivalent of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” definition of pornography.

[grapes]But isn’t this subjective and restrictive definition a little unfair to our objecting winemakers? No, not at all. In fact, it’s the only sensible way to approach this issue. Here’s why.

Our understanding of the “essentialness” in things (raspberries, tuna, nebbiolo) is not useful because it gives us an opportunity to practice our tautological vocabulary, but because it allows us to make an informed decision about how we utilize those things. We choose olives rather than chocolate with our tuna because we have foundational expectations for what both will bring to the combination. We drink a yogurt-based beverage with lamb vindaloo because we know based on experience that a high-alcohol zinfandel that might otherwise go with lamb is going to taste like 151-proof rum when faced with that much heat. And we control the choices we make based on our experiential and theoretical understanding of the information available to us. Information that includes an internal and personal database of “essentialness.”

In other words, we make our own choices for our own reasons. And just as a chef’s opinion that tuna and chocolate are just spiffy together doesn’t matter unless that chef is participating in our dining experience, neither does a winemaker’s opinion that grenache is best when it tastes like riesling matter unless that winemaker is drinking with us. The chef and winemaker also make their own choices for their own reasons. But their choices and their reasons need have nothing to do with our choices and reasons as long as we have options. Which we do, in spades.

So it is not only enough to believe and thus say, “this pinot noir tastes like syrah,” it is the only way to say it, given that as with all assessments of wine, the implied subjective preamble (“for me…”) must be understood. Since that is all we have, it cannot be gainsaid merely because it is subjective. It cannot be disproved either, though it is susceptible to being shouted down by weight of anecdote. Especially when a winemaker, or the winemaker, is supplying a good portion of that weight.

This happens all too often, and it’s very unfortunate. The leap from “this pinot noir doesn’t taste like pinot noir” to “this pinot noir is [objectively] faulty because it doesn’t taste like pinot noir” is taking one’s rightful subjectivity into realms of claimed objectivity that it cannot possibly navigate. But “who are you to say?” (especially from a winemaker) makes a similarly dubious and perhaps even less useful claim that the very lack of objective truth is itself the objective truth. This is wrong. The absence of truth is just that…its absence. It cannot be repeated enough: other than a few bits of measurable data of only marginal interest to the consumer (rather than producer) of wine, all we have is subjectivity, unless we want to restrict wine appreciation and discussion to the laboratory.

So where does that leave us on the subject of varietal character?

Rejecting wines, or even entire categories of wine, based on personal conceptions of how grapes should and shouldn’t taste is not only justifiable, is eminently sensible, albeit more honorable if it’s done in response to experience rather than to reputation. Some may choose to eat and drink whatever they like whenever they like, without regard for the interaction between any of the elements. But I suspect those people are in the distinct minority; after all, most people don’t put ketchup on ice cream and could offer reasons why (e.g. “it sounds disgusting”). We as consumers regularly make choices, and those choices are best when based on a set of expectations. If we cannot rely on our expectations, then we cannot make informed choices. Since it is to our benefit to make informed choices, it is essential for the realization of that benefit that information be interpretable by our expectations. And, so, it is essential that a pinot noir taste like a pinot noir…by whatever individual standards we have set.

Still no closure

[screwcap, reproduced under the GNU Free Documentation License provided by Wikimedia Commons, from user wnissen]Thanks to comprehensive note-taking, one of the things I’m able to do is note trends in my personal wine experience. None of which anyone else should care about, except for one:

I calculated the percentage of corked wines I experienced over the past year. As expected, it went down, and the current identified taint rate (I’m far from the most sensitive TCA-detector) is about 2.5% or so. That’s still too high, but much better than the 7-9%, even occasionally pushing 10%, failure rate I regularly experienced a half-dozen years ago.

Or is it? Those old numbers were generated in the near-complete absence of screwcaps and the only anecdotal presence of other alternative closures. So that, too, needs to be factored into the new percentage. Subtracting screwcaps, glass closures, both kinds of synthetic corks, and crown caps (I had several this year, on a bottle of California sparkling wine and some Italian sparklers as well), the number goes up. And it goes up again when I eliminate barrel samples, which obviously can’t show cork effects.

So what’s the real number? The number, it must be remembered, that comes after the cork industry’s much-heralded (unfortunately, mostly by themselves and their bought-off journalistic shills) attempts to, at long last, address their taint problems with technological solutions?

It’s better than one might expect: just a shade over 4%. Much better than it used to be, for sure, but still not good enough. I’m not yet at the point where I can express even cautious optimism, given the cork industry’s decades of lying and obfuscation on this issue, but we’ll see what the new year brings. At least the numbers are headed in the right direction, and obviously it will take their efforts a while to catch up to the older vintages in everyone’s cellars.

Meanwhile, two related numbers seem worth considering. The oft-discussed reduction issue with screwcaps did occasionally rear its head this year, but I still don’t see the problems that others do, which makes me wonder if I’m simply insensitive to the phenomenon. I identified four reduced wines this year, for a total reduction rate of .35%, but one of those was (somewhat surprisingly) under synthetic cork – the very last closure that should be able to preserve reductive characteristics – rather than screwcap. Restricting the data to screwcapped wines alone, the reduction rate – and this includes some aged wines, which are what those beating the anti-screwcap drum seem to fear most – was 1.6%. Not very high, and certainly far below the percentage of wines tainted by natural cork, but still not ideal. As I’ve said before, more research is obviously needed, but remember that the vast majority of the stories on this issue are being generated by a single journalist…which doesn’t make him wrong, but should at least lead to some healthy suspicion.

The most worrisome number is the physical failure rate for extruded synthetic corks (for those confused by the terminology, those are the spongy ones that look like a real cork, not the stiff plugs of multicolored plastic that strip the Teflon off corkscrews and are often impossible to remove). It’s important to note, however, that my number will be a bit of an outlier, as this past year included a number of wines that I inadvertently aged without realizing that they were sealed with artificial corks. The ability of synthetics to seal bottles for more than a few years has long been doubted, even by the people who invented them, and my experiences bear this out: the failure rate for extruded synthetic corks was a rather shocking 9.7%, and that’s only wines that were completely or very nearly dead, not those that I thought were inferior to their expected states.

In sum, my previous recommendations (not that anyone necessarily cares what I think) stand: there’s no reason for wines made for youthful consumption to be under natural cork. Synthetic corks must not be used for wines that have any aging ability at all. As for the longer agers and which closures are best, the questions remain: 1) how much oxygen ingress, if any (and from where?), is necessary for wine to age, and 2) what adjustments to wine chemistry, if any, are necessary to guarantee optimum performance for different types of wine under each closure? We need to answer the former first, however.

Grognostications

[crystal ball, created by user EvaK and used under the terms of a Creative Commons license]English wine writer Jamie Goode, whose progression from online wine forum bomb-thrower, through webby groundbreaker (albeit with dodgy site design), to authoritative and respected author is surely some sort of sign of the apocalypse1, has published a list of predictions for 2009 (short version here, longer version here. Since this is something I’ve done in other venues and years, I figure: why not? I couldn’t possibly be more wrong than everyone else trying their hand at a game of oenological prescience, could I?

Don’t answer that.

1) The number one story will be, as everyone knows, the economy. The dominoes have already started to fall, with some wineries going out of business, others on the block, and many, many others in the production and trade realms poised on the brink of disaster. According to friends who watch such things, however, the real carnage is going to be in the restaurant world…not just closings, but people scaling back on their extravagance when they do go out to eat. And what will be the first thing these customers drop? Wine, of course. It’s going to be bad for restaurants (who make most, and sometimes all, of their profit from beverages), it’s going to be really bad for sommeliers, but it’s also going to affect that previously choosy set of wineries who’ve demanded that their wines be represented only on the best wine lists. Some of them will just shift the product onto their mailing lists, if they can, but there’s not a market for all of those wines.

2) Diversity is in danger. Some wineries will just go out of business, but others will be gobbled up by avaricious giants. Perhaps more importantly, the same will be true for vineyards, which will start falling under the umbrella of the megacorps, permanently lost to the artisan farmers and winemakers who’ve previously shepherded their grapes. Small, philosophy-based importers will struggle to get their wines recognized in an increasingly price-oriented market, especially because the small, alternative-minded retailers who’ve supported their products will not have an easy time of it. Again, the purveyors of mass-market plonk gobbling up the spoils will benefit. It’s a vicious circle, and it’s hard to say when it will stop.

3) As Jamie notes, this is indeed South Africa’s golden opportunity, but one that might very well slip through their fingers. What they’ve got: a) a very wide range of quality wines…certainly one much more diverse than New Zealand, whose arduous agricultural quarantines and tiny size make for an exceedingly un-diverse vinous output, b) neither an impending agricultural disaster (see Australia) or an oversaturated market of identical-looking and identical-tasting wines (again, see Australia and its ubiquitous “cute animal” labels), and, c) their own form of an economic disaster – a currency that’s absolutely crippled (even against even the dollar) – which could potentially make for some rather spectacular bargains. That is, if they can get their wines to export markets. And then, sell them.

What South Africa most obviously lacks is a coordinated marketing effort. There’s no will (or money) on the part of the government, so the producers will have to do it themselves. That costs a lot of money, especially given the essential task of being physically present in any target market, and the very thing that makes South African wines especially attractive on the world stage – low cost – means lowered profits for the wineries, and thus tight marketing budgets.

4) There will be no closure on closures. The studies will take many more years, but even the research that we are doing doesn’t answer the most crucial question: how much oxygen does a wine require to age in the way to which we’ve become accustomed? Without knowing that, we can’t know what effect the alternatives to cork will have over the long term. That said, for the vast majority of wine that’s meant for near-term drinking, there’s very little reason to even consider using a bark cork.

5) Whither wine writing? A very good question. As advertiser-supported print publications continue their long-predicted drift into oblivion, the opportunities for aspiring young writers to hone their craft are growing thin on the ground. It’s not that higher-end wine-specialist publications will cease to exist, though some of them will, it’s that Jane Doe isn’t going to be able to step into Jancis Robinson’s shoes without a little preparatory work at the Smalltown Pike & Gazette. But the few such publications left to us aren’t much interested in wine coverage. So, the blogs, then? So far, they’ve been tough to monetize. A few will make it big, a few will struggle through, but most will simply not be able to support a serious self-education in the art and practice of wine writing unless there’s a serious shift in the willingness of advertisers – and maybe even readers – to support high-quality content. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

6) Despite the economy, entire wine regions and styles are, essentially, permanently out of reach to all but the mega-wealthy. Individual bottles here and there will continue to be enjoyed, whether through the generosity of another or as the result of an occasional splurge, and no wine lover should rigidly eschew the necessary expense, once in a while. But the days of being able to build a broad and deep appreciation for the top classed-growth Bordeaux, grand cru Burgundy, and many other ultra-luxury producers, appellations, and cuvées has probably come to an end for most people. If there weren’t so many interesting alternatives, it would be a wine-lovers’ tragedy. As it is, it’s a great shame. These wines carry their reputations for a reason, after all.

7) More than the current handful of nuts and cranks will finally get serious about alternative grapes in California…grapes that are better-suited to the various vineyard climes than the famous but ubiquitous stuff now planted…but of course it’ll take years before the results are available. What will drive this shift? An economy where the permanence of demand for ultra-pricey wines from just a few grapes no longer seems assured.

8) Posts at oenoLogic will grow longer and more intricately-argued, but even less comprehensible to the passing reader. Of all these predictions, this is the one I’m most sure about.

1Just kidding, Jamie.

How to lose friends & influence no one

[bungee jump]In 2008, I tried an experiment. I attempted to post a note on every single wine that I tasted that year. Every single wine. You can see the results over on the tasting notes blog, oenoLog.

How’d that go? In terms of completing the task I set before myself, about as well as can be expected. In the backlog of travelogues and tastings, there are still quite a few wines (especially from the jaunt to South Africa) that remain un-noted, and so the listed 1143 wines – itself a bit lower than the real total, because identical wines often get grouped together on that blog – should really be more in the 1400-1500 range, probably closer to the latter.

Now, before I get a flood of email concerned about my liver and desperate to get me into AA, that’s “tasted,” not “drank.” And yet 2008 was a fairly light year, for me. 1500 wines aren’t that much. That’s only 125 wines per month, 29 per week, or just over four per day…which any working wine critic will tell you is a rather paltry average. I didn’t attend many press or trade tastings, for various reasons (some of which I’ll get into in a moment), and so this is probably less than a third of the total I would have amassed in my earlier, more fecund years.

But whether or not I could have tasted more wines isn’t particularly interesting, nor is the total itself. What’s interesting is what this project entailed, and the results of the experiment.

Obviously, taking and then posting notes on so many wines requires a sort of discipline, and that’s something that isn’t always my strong suit. But I did try to apply some diligence to the task, and – with the above-mentioned caveats noted – got most of what I wanted to note up on the site. The good, the indifferent, the bad, and the ugly…it’s all there, in black, red burgundy, and some sort of nasty cream sherry color. (Maybe it’s time for a new blog template?)

So was it a useful thing to do? It’s certainly useful when hunting for wines to include in print or more thoughtful online work, so it’s a valuable resource for me, if for no one else. And in some ways, that’s enough; I used to keep a personal database of my notes at home, and this is just one more way to keep that database…one that won’t disappear if my computer does. But there are some drawbacks, as well, and I think they’re worth talking about.

To my knowledge, this is not something that any major critic has ever attempted. And I’m not sure most minor critics or writers have tried it either, though I’m sure there are a few – more likely in the self-published blogosphere than from the ranks of those who write for print or online publication. Even the most prolific tasters tend to focus mostly on the best (or, if they have a mind, the worst), rather than the entirety of what passes their lips.

And with good reasons. The for-public-consumption reason – which has the value of being true – is that, especially in print, space is money. One can waste that space writing about wines that no one should drink, just for the sheer glee of it, or one can use what space is available to be useful to the reader/consumer. Space restrictions don’t really apply online, but other restrictions do: who has the time to taste and write up all those notes in a given day? Who has the time to read them, or the interest in doing so?

But there’s another reason not to work without an internal editor, and it’s not much talked about, because it tends to drive a certain segment of the audience into paroxysms of ethical pontification. Noting, for public consumption, every single wine will necessarily entail writing about a lot of bottles that the taster doesn’t so much like. Now, not everyone will employ as colorful and abusive language as, say, me – some people still adhere to the “if you can’t say anything nice…” dictum – but there’s no getting around the fact that most wine writers taste a lot of really lousy wine.

They taste most such wine (who would voluntarily buy wine they won’t like?) in the presence and at the behest of people in the trade. Free samples in the comfort of one’s home, perhaps, or at portfolio tastings, or over lunch with an importer, or in a producer’s cellars. Whatever the source, these are wines that haven’t been tasted in distancing isolation, but instead were bundled up with personal relationships…relationships that are often a regular (and easily-severed) source of a broader tasting experience than most under-funded writers can afford. And as I’ve written before, the majority of people in the wine trade are lovely people, no matter the quality of their products, so even aside from considerations of access, it’s not the easiest thing to trash the lifework of someone you like.

(And that’s just within the trade/press relationship. Friends and family, too, can fall victim to the unedited critic’s bloody pen. If the motivation to avoid confrontation occurs between those with whom one has an inherently adversarial critical relationship, imagine offending your in-laws by savaging a wine they poured you over the holidays.)

As a result, the critic willing to employ their poison pen finds themselves rather frequently uninvited. They drop off PR lists, sample lists, guest lists. They find doors closed where they were once open. They find their contacts in the trade suddenly less than helpful, their local retailers less glad to see them, their attempts to set up tastings rebuffed by producers with long memories. And it’s not just the peon-level writers who experience this. Even the most powerful critic of all, Robert Parker, has run afoul of producers, importers, and even entire regions that have attempted to limit his access. If Parker can be asked to talk to the hand, what hope for those with less star wattage?

Now, one may say that this is short-sighted on the part of those in the trade, and I tend to agree. So would some of the better tradespersons, who recognize that they too pay a certain price for burning bridges, and that the inability to promote a wine through a hostile critic doesn’t mean that another wine might not benefit from that relationship. One is more likely to hear the objection that none of this should be the critic’s concern. That, too, is correct, albeit from a position of rigid ethical purity, but it does negatively affect the quality of the work most critics can produce. (For an expansion of this controversial point, pull up a chair and a few spare hours, and read this and this.)

So has there been blowback from my year of full disclosure? Yes. The worst of it was actually at the end of the previous year, but that little contretemps continued into 2008. And though I don’t attend many press events anymore (partially due to travel, partially due to having fallen off some people’s mailing lists without an attempt to get back on, and partially because a long history of antagonism between me and the trade has led irrevocably to this point), the invitations are thin on the ground these days, and getting thinner. I don’t expect the next year to be an improvement, either, though some of that will obviously be attributable to the economy.

So if you’re crazy enough to consider your own version of this project, now you know the cost. Post all your notes – every last one of them – and there will be a price to pay in your relationship to the people who make, ship, and sell your wine. Not to mention your free time, and the health of your fingers, wrists, and liver. Are you willing to pay that price in a recession?

Oh…and in case anyone is wondering, the answer is: yes, I will be continuing this project in 2009. Hey, who needs friends?

Ullage

Winemaking[1], for most of its best practitioners, is more about passion than it is about money. And a good thing, too, since – as the saying goes – the only way to make a little money in the wine business is to start with a lot of it. Even in good times, many of the most famous names are far, far less wealthy then their fame…or their prices…might lead one to think. And a surprising number of wineries of acknowledged excellence operate under the near-yearly specter of imminent ruin. One ill-timed hailstorm, one misstep in the cellar, and it’s all over.

Unfortunately, we’re in the midst of one hell of a financial hailstorm, and we’re going to see a lot more of this and this in the near future. Good people – whether they make extraordinary wine or not – are going to find that they simply can’t afford another harvest. Dedicated importers and retailers will shut their doors. Wine-savvy restaurants will stack up the tables and chairs one last time, and for good. It’s going to be ugly, probably for a good long while.

I have no words of comfort here. I can try to support those about whom I am most afraid with my purchases, and so can others, but the sad fact is that consumers are hurting as much as anyone, and thus the inevitable reality is that not everyone will be saved. When we come out the other end of this long, dark tunnel, the world of wine is going to look very different, and perhaps rather barren.

[1]And grape-growing.

Oregon, going, gone?

[vines at Bella Vida winery, Willamette Valley, Oregon]Marketing. It’s really not my thing. I’m mostly immune to it, and though I am as frequently awed by its most adept practitioners as I am repelled by their best work, I’ve no discernable skill at it.

So it’s somewhat amusing to me how often I get asked, by those who make and sell wine, for an opinion on how they might a better impression on the market. Usually, but not always, it’s a foreign concern wishing to sell more – or at all – in the States. In fact, I just got back from South Africa, where this question was much on the minds of many of the winemakers with whom I swirled and spat.

While I was traveling, Thad over at Beyond the Bottle invited my comment on a piece he’d written, itself a follow-up to a winemaker’s thoughts on how to market a decidedly non-foreign wine region: Oregon. Since this is a place I’ve actually been, and a state that produces a rather larger number of wines that I like than is the norm for other domestic sources, I took a special interest in the topic. Herewith, then, a few thoughts from a someone who knows nothing about marketing. And what could be more valuable than that?

The contrast between the two essays to which I’ve linked is interesting, even though they cover some of the same ground. On one hand, we have a winemaker talking about wine as a niche (some would argue luxury) product and how to market that product to a knowledgeable audience. His idea is to find the hook, the mnemonic, the attention-grabbing uniqueness that will move his state’s wines into the public consciousness. And he suggests their fundamental “Oregon-ness” as that hook.

Thad Westhusing, on the other hand, takes a broader view, examining everything from wine tourism to price points in an effort to wrestle the problem to the ground. But neither he nor Hatcher really question the latter’s assertion that Oregon and the associations to be made with that place are the path to sales glory.

That may be, and I find thoughts with which to agree from both, but I think they’re missing the key point. The problem is pinot noir.

Oregon, for better or worse, has hitched its wine fortunes to this supremely expressive but finicky and expensive grape. Though there’s pinot gris, chardonnay, pinot blanc, a little sparkling wine (question: why not more?), and the occasional outlier variety, the consumer is, first and foremost, presented with a range of pinot noirs as the representatives of Brand Oregon. It’s a sort of marketing monoculture, and while it’s taken for granted in the Old World and frequently codified in Europe’s stringent appellation laws, it’s somewhat of a rarity in the anything-goes New. Most New World regions plant a diverse range of varieties (many of them, alas, painfully unsuitable for the terroir) and then let the shifting winds of popular taste do the marketing…or, when necessary, the winnowing.

The problem with doing it the other way – the Oregon way – is that success or failure are entirely subject to the public appetite for one specific product. Now, it happens that we’re still in the boom years for pinot noir, and whether one identifies it as a continuing post-Sideways effect or something else, the fact is the public loves its pinot. However, it must be noted for the record: not nearly as much as it loves its chardonnay or pinot gris/grigio.

Given that, shouldn’t Oregon be going gangbusters, since they’ve got pinot noir to sell and an allegedly avid market to sell it to? Maybe, but…well, see, there’s a problem. Oregon’s not the only modern monoculture in town. There’s the Central Coast of California, which has been around for a while but which has really exploded into the public wine-drinking consciousness over the past few years (and that is attributable, in large measure, to the aforementioned movie). There’s the Central Otago in New Zealand…and in that same country, Martinborough and the Waipara/Canterbury region.

So what’s the calling card of the Central Otago? Pinot noir. The Central Coast? Pinot noir. Martinborough? Pinot noir. The Waipara? Pinot noir (and riesling). What’s previously-monocultural Marlborough, widely known for it’s sauvignon blanc, planting a lot of these days? Pinot noir. How about Germany, the still-beating heart of rieslingdom? They’re making a big name for themselves these days among a subset of the wine geek set with their spätburgunder…a/k/a pinot noir. Meanwhile, the Russian River Valley, long a source for succulent pinot noir, hasn’t gone away. Nor has the Anderson Valley. And there’s still that other place…what’s it called?…oh, yeah. Burgundy. They make just a bit of pinot noir there, still, and despite centuries of fame and reverence, many commentators think it’s only getting better.

But why should pinot noir be a special problem? It’s not like people have any trouble selling chardonnay from pretty much every grape-growing region in the world, right? Didn’t I just say that there was an ever-escalating demand for pinot?

Sure, but the grape carries some baggage. It’s notoriously fickle on the vine, and when it does grow well, it requires careful shepherding and lowish yields to show its quality. That means that wines made from it are almost always going to be expensive versus other varieties. Cheap pinot noir is, with very, very rare exceptions, either dismal or – pumped up by the steroidal winemaking much-employed by the industrial set, and yet the primary source of cheap pinot – grossly unrepresentative of the variety and its qualities.

Moreover, its nearly unparalleled (among red grapes, with only nebbiolo as a serious contender) ability to reflect site-specificity results – as it always has in Burgundy – in a small blizzard of single-vineyard bottlings, regular and reserve bottlings, and/or differently-named blends. In other words, where cabernet might be responsible for a wine or two at a given winery, pinot noir can sometimes fill a case. Without duplication.

So where does that leave the pinot noir producer? Holding a dozen fairly expensive wines, each produced in relatively small quantities, and having to convince an already-saturated market of their quality when they’ve got similarly-priced options of quality from all over the globe, plus a few centuries of wine culture nagging that for the same amount of money they could be drinking “the real thing”: Burgundy.

In Oregon, or in fact anywhere the grape is grown, I suspect the urge to “buy local” trumps other factors (and the ability to visit and taste before purchase helps this along). Certainly that’s what they do in Burgundy, as well as all the other regions I mentioned earlier. But selling the wine at home…that’s not the marketing challenge, is it? The challenge is selling the wine elsewhere.

For example, consider Boston, this author’s current hometown. It’s a very Europhile market, as I’ve noted before, and a lot of very good New World producers have unsuccessfully beaten their skulls against the seemingly closed door of our avid wine culture. But even for those local consumers who are willing to explore beyond their beloved Burgundy, the available options quickly move beyond staggering to merely bewildering. Felton Road or Belle Pente? August Kesseler or Arcadian? Ata Rangi or Patricia Green? Not to mention the fact that there’s always the “…or d’Angerville?” option lurking in the background. They’re all pretty much the same price here, after all, and while they all have enticing qualities, only the truly pinot-obsessed will want to fully explore the full range on a regular enough basis to qualify as a reliable source of sales. That subgroup, repeated across hundreds of communities, may be enough to escalate a few wineries’ sales, but it’s not enough to accommodate all of them.

So what’s the solution for Oregon? I don’t know (remember: Marketing ’R’ Not Us). I don’t think that grubbing up pinot noir and planting…I don’t know, lagrein…is the answer. Because the wines are quite good, or at least they can be in capable hands, and if they think selling pinot is hard…. I’m not sure that selling “Oregon-ness” is the answer either. New Zealand tried that with their “the riches of a clean, green land” campaign, and I don’t know that it made much of a difference in their wine sales (though it has helped tourism, by all accounts…and it would probably help more were New Zealand not a zillion miles from everywhere). Further, I’m not sure this is the differentiator some might want it to be. Vermont – much closer to my market – is full of crunchy earth-mother environmental goodness and beauty, not to mention a wealth of fine agricultural products, but it doesn’t make me want to drink their wines, and I don’t think the stuff they are really good at (e.g. cheese) is pushing Vacherin Mont d’Or off, say, New York shelves; it remains a niche product for a niche, local market that knows and has regular access to that product.

Also, I’m not sure tourism is the answer. Wine regions everywhere point at Napa and ask, “why can’t we have that?” Well, first, I think much of Napa would very much enjoy it if someone else would take the tourists for a while. But the obvious thing is that Napa benefits almost immeasurably from its proximity to San Francisco, just as the newer California tourist hotspot of the Central Coast benefits from its proximity to Los Angeles. Portland is a nice city, but it’s certainly no San Francisco or L.A.

The best thing a wine region can do – and this is the advice I’ve always given, when asked – is to get into the desired market and really work it. That means sending the best and brightest to whatever places have been targeted and keeping them there for a while, or at least promising they’ll be back every few months. Work the retailers and the restaurants, and maybe even the press (most of the non-national wine press doesn’t really move much wine, but sometimes every little bit helps). Do some public dinners, which I think are absolutely critical in creating demand and name recognition. Plant representatives at stores’ regular wine tastings. Do the big wine fairs, and while there do tutored tastings.

And make it about more than just the individual producers. Yes, by all means, sell the names on the labels. But everyone who makes wines from its grapes benefits if some critical mass of people who know how to pronounce “Willamette” correctly is reached, and for that to happen everyone – or at least a large enough subset of everyone – has to work together to push all the categories that need pushing: pinot noir, Brand Oregon, whatever appellations are involved, and individual wineries’ products.

This is all marketing 101, I’d think, and yet it’s surprising how hard it is to get people to leave their wineries and saturate their target market. The farmer mentality, maybe, and non-corporate winemaking doesn’t leave a lot of down time for travel. What helps is government money, but in its absence wineries – many of which make much less money than the average consumer might think – have to do it themselves. If that means voluntarily pooling resources, then that’s what it means.

Otherwise, I see little hope. Major critics have been giving perfectly fine ratings to Oregon wines for years, and yet not enough has happened. There’s going to be no Sideways 2: Wasted Weeks in the Willamette. California – hopefully – isn’t going to tip its vines into the ocean and make beachfront out of Fresno, nor are New Zealand (and Germany, and Burgundy) going away. Words, print ads, flashy handouts…they aren’t going to get it done. The wines need to be under the noses and in the mouths of potential consumers.

Oregon needs a hook, yes. But the hook it needs is the one in a hotel room, on which its best winemakers and marketing gurus hang their jackets as they make their case to a new market, customer by customer.

Idea log

[questioning brain]It will surprise no one that I’ve had a political discussion or two over the last few weeks. And it’s probably also no surprise that one of them got me thinking about wine. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the role played ideology.

There are a number of ideological stances one can take in response to wine. This is true whether you’re a producer, in the trade, or a consumer…and in fact, those ideologies often run in parallel lines through those three groups. For example, consumers with a given philosophy often patronize the wines of retailers, importers, and producers who share that philosophy.

What do I mean when I refer to wine ideologies? Here are a few common examples, though by no means is this an exhaustive list:

  • “natural” wine is superior
  • “natural” winemaking is anything but
  • biodynamic viticulture is better
  • biodynamic viticulture is mystical hooey
  • organic viticulture is preferable
  • organic viticulture is marketing
  • all that matters is what’s in the glass
  • wine is wine, no matter how or where you drink it
  • wine is meant as a companion to food
  • quality is not inherent, but is a product of context
  • there are objective standards to wine on which experts can agree
  • taste is subjective
  • quality is determined by price
  • quality is determined by terroir
  • sulfur is bad
  • the abandonment of sulfur is lunacy
  • screwcaps are the answer
  • only real cork belongs in a wine bottle

…and so forth. One immediately notices that a good number of these ideologies are fundamentally incompatible. And yet, they are passionately-held, each of them, by very serious wine folk. How can this be?

It is likely true that some ideologies are, in fact, nonsense. And that others are justified primarily by their marketability. And that still others are only held because their holder fails to understand (or denies) evidence to the contrary.

I’m not interested, here, in discussing which ones are valid or not. Instead, having been brought to this musing by considering the positive and negative effects of ideology in a political context, I’m interested in whether or not the very concept of ideology is worthwhile, especially from the standpoint of the consumer.

Long-time acquaintances are undoubtedly sputtering in their biodynamic Muscadet right now, objecting thusly: “oh, sure, you’re a fine one to talk about the negatives of ideologies, Mr. Everyone-has-a-bias, and Serious-is-not-a-philosophy, and Alcohol-is-a-conceptual-problem, and No-really-everyone-has-a-bias.” (OK, maybe no one actually talks like that. At least, I hope not.) And it’s true: I have ideologies, and while I feel I’m open about them in a way unfortunately few critics and writers are, I would never presume to deny them.

Despite this, might ideologies be a profoundly mixed blessing?

Let’s start with the positives. I’m a firm believer that wine – that is, wine worth thinking or writing about, wine worth more than a tossed-back glass after a hard day at the office – can be about more than a gut-level, caveman-like response to the pure pleasure it brings as it fills your mouth and gets you just a little bit more drunk than you were a moment ago. That, in itself, is an ideology, and one certainly not shared by everyone. But it’s a basic, foundational ideology, without which I couldn’t – and wouldn’t – write about wine for a living or for fun.

Based on that foundation, then, one can immediately see the appeal of sub-categorical ideologies. Especially those reinforced by experience. If, on balance, wines self-identified as biodynamic, or “natural,” are appealing to me more often than is the norm across all wines, I as a consumer have a ready-made shopping list, even if the brands on it are unknown. Or if I find the modern obsession with ripeness to be fundamentally deforming, I now have a ready-made list of wines, and perhaps even places, to avoid. The mere existence of these ideologies, coupled with the knowledge of how to apply them, makes my life as a consumer a more efficient one. And it reduces the number of times I’ll waste my money on something I was destined to dislike.

Other philosophies can be similarly-examined for their benefits, which accrue not just to the consumer, but to other entities as well. An organic producer has a ready-made audience, while a low-sulfur producer a smaller but proportionally more fanatic one. An importer with a portfolio of luscious liquid “hedonism” from warm, fertile regions – big explosions of velvety fruit layered with toasty new wood – has a reliable market, as well.

Of course, the temptation is – as with any ideology, in any field – to mistake preference for objectivity, projecting hierarchies outward from the person onto the thing itself. This isn’t to say that there cannot be objective value in certain ideologies; organic viticulture may indeed be better for the environment, low-sulfur wines could be easier on the body’s biochemistry, screwcaps might maintain a wine’s intended form better than other closures. But most ideologies aren’t like this. They’re philosophies that emanate from subjective preference, codified and thus eminently arguable, but no less subjective for the force and structure of them. And that’s where we run into trouble.

It is perfectly reasonable to prefer one wine to another for stylistic reasons. If those stylistic reasons are directly attributable to philosophies, and that preference reliably extends to other examples, then it is similarly reasonable to connect the preference with the philosophy, and thus to prefer one philosophy to another. In fact, I know of no one who does not do this, to a greater or lesser extent, even within the narrow field of wine appreciation.

The problem arises when the ideology becomes more important than the object of the ideology. There exist more than a few winemakers, tradespersons, writers, and consumers who cannot free their response to a given wine from the boundaries of their ideologies. Sometimes, they won’t even try a wine because of how it’s made, where it’s from, or what it represents. More often, they’ll take a taste, but final judgment has been rendered before the first sniff.

It needs to be made clear that this does not make said victim of their ideology a bad person, nor does it make them useless as an observer or commentator on wine. In fact, many of the most successful critics and writers in the wine field are absolutely laden with ideologies. But note that word: victim. The trap of ideology is that is closes the mind and the palate, while calcifying in such a way that the subjective eventually becomes canon. Wines that fall outside the strict borders of the ideology are tarred as heretical, rather responded to with reasoned dislike.

Don’t believe me? Ever heard someone dismiss a Burgundy just because it was a Burgundy, and thus already known to be a lousy value, thin, and rife with biological flaws? I hear it all the time, and with unfortunate frequency from a number of California winemakers and their fans. (Worry not: some Burgundians can and do return the favor.) Ever read a writer or importer decry a wine for using non-indigenous yeast before they’ve even tasted it? Or their control-freak opposites mocking the very concept of indigenous yeast and the oenological negligence it represents? Ever heard someone respond positively (or negatively) to a wine tasted blind, and then completely change their tune when they find they’ve been had by their ideology-tweaking friends? Of course you have. And so have I.

I think this is a shame, and something to be resisted. There are good wines out there made in a way I’d probably prefer wines weren’t made, and if I can’t leave myself open to the possibility that I might enjoy them, I’ve not only lost something important, I’ve prevented myself from ever finding that important something. There are surprising experiences left for the experiencing, but they’ll never be experienced if I refuse to experiment. There are beautiful places and people in the world of wine who I will never meet should I be unwilling to accept what they do on their, rather than my, terms.

More generally, the inability to adapt to one’s circumstances is a dangerous trait, both intellectually and socially. Should friends not be able to enjoy a wine they like without receiving a philosophical lecture in return? It sounds unfathomably rude, but I’ve heard wine ideologues who couldn’t help themselves. Should one stubbornly cart one’s preferred wines around the world, refusing to drink local wines because they’re ideologically insufficient, becoming the oenophilic version of one of those people who brings their own condiments or desserts to a restaurant?

This doesn’t mean that one has to change, or even lower, their standards. Not at all. As I noted before, I believe wine is about much more than whether or not it tastes good. It’s right up there in the header: “wine is liquid, wine is life, wine is emotion, wine is thought.” (I might add that it’s art and science, as well. And it gets you tipsy. And it tastes good.) Matters of philosophy, practice, and execution are, to someone who feels as I do, important. And if wine as anything other than a commodity is to survive and prosper, it needs ideologues at every stage of its existence.

But it’s crucial to remember that we do not drink the ideology. We drink the wine. And if we don’t, we’re drinking the Kool-Aid.

(image used thanks to a Wikimedia Commons license)

Separate wines, worlds apart

[upended bottle]I just got back from a trip to Norway and Denmark, and other than a fun night with some wine geeks in Bergen, wine was only occasionally on the menu. Not that it wasn’t available. In fact, many of the restaurants at which I dined had wine lists astonishing for their breadth and depth. Unfortunately, there was another astonishing thing about them: price.

The way wine is monopolized and, more importantly, taxed in the Scandinavian countries means that “everyday wine” doesn’t really exist as a category. Sure, the wines that would fit the bill elsewhere are technically available, but at shocking markups. $85 for Trimbach’s yellow-label riesling. $82 for the Hugel “Gentil.” And so forth. Naturally, the weak dollar doesn’t help, but even a strong dollar wouldn’t put much of a dent in these prices, and neither country is exactly cheap to begin with.

There’s a pair of silver linings on the edge of this gilt cloud, however, and one is that more expensive wines are not priced by demand, as they are in most competitive markets. Thus, the $75 Burgundy that shoots up to $300 in the States after a high score from some critic not only stays at its release price (albeit one higher than $75), but isn’t impossible to source, either. (Though there are limits to this; even in the monopoly systems, there are favored customers and “off-list” wines that end up in the hands of a chosen few.) The other is that restaurants seem fairly willing to cellar wines for a time, which means that while a 2005 version of a $20 wine may be a ridiculous $110 on a wine list, the 1990 version of that same wine may be only a few dollars more, making it commensurate – or even a value – compared to a similar wine on an American wine list.

The Bergen winos’ response to all this was to claim, only half-jokingly, that they “can’t afford to drink anything but the best.” I lived there, I’d be forced to do the same; anything else would be economically foolhardy. And it’s not like drinking really good wines is something to be upset about.

But I admit that I would miss the other kind of wine. The kind of everyday, non-intellectualized stuff that has, historically, formed the foundation of traditional wine-drinking cultures. I’m not just talking about the increasingly anecdotal jugs of local Côtes-du-Rhône that lubricated the equally anecdotal French peasantry, but about the wines both artisanal and industrial that form the bulk of what most people buy and drink on a daily basis.

I would miss this sort of wine because a daily glass (or two…or sometimes three) is, for me, a fundamental part of my enjoyment of a meal. Not all food embraces wine, and not all meals allow consumption, but its presence is always to be preferred to its absence.

Perhaps more importantly, I would miss these wines because I firmly believe they put the better bottles in their proper context. Yes, it’s possible to drink only great wines, and I know people outside Norway who do. In fact, I know people who refuse to drink anything other than the best of the best. I can’t fault them for doing so, but this behavior just isn’t for me. Not only do I enjoy the simple pleasures of humble food and wine in their proper context, but I find that I appreciate the qualities of better wine more keenly when those experiences have a broad and deep foundational perspective. The components and interweavings that make great wines great are all the more obvious when the alternatives have been internalized. And those who drink only the superstars can, occasionally, lose perspective on what they drink, fixating on the niggling details but losing sight of the fact that they are quibbling over degrees of greatness.

I don’t know if there’s much impetus to change, as both countries seem to have well-entrenched beer cultures that satisfy the needs of the lower end (and in Denmark, at least, some really extraordinary things are happening with that beer; watch this space, eventually, for information on one of them). But I do know that I was happy to uncork a bottle of something uncomplicated and moderately priced when I returned home. I’d actually drank better wines on the rare occasions I’d imbibed in Scandinavia. But there’s such a thing as comfort wine, you know.