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a
by Putnam Weekley
In vino veritas.
In vino libertas. In vino vis. In vino animus.
When a spokesman for
Buy
Nothing Day was interviewed on NPR last fall, he was
pressed to say what he rather people would give each other when
"nothing" wasn't appropriate. "Experiences," he said. Not "things." One
of his examples was tickets to the opera.
'Or wine,' I thought.
"...Don't just give another bottle of wine," he continued.
'Wha-what?'
Who was this guy? I was led to believe his was a call for back-to-basics
hedonism, not moralism and prudery. How can he not know that a bottle of
wine is the most perfectly packaged experience ever invented? Tickets
are gift certificates for crying out loud. Wine is power -
In
vino vis
Then there's rich guy Mitch Albom,
demonstrating what a regular dude he is - really. In a
recent column he claimed wine isn't worth all the fussing and
blabbering some devote to it. He claimed the movie Sideways is an
expression of this pointlessness.
And he makes a few good points himself:
1) "I most certainly don't want to know how it tastes before I drink
it."
Me neither! Expectation and fulfillment are two sides on the coin of
taste. I encounter my favorite wines when I expect something slightly
different than what I get, or when I expect nothing. They surprise me.
Really good ones surprise me again
and again.* And perfect wine can never include someone chattering
Parkerese in
my ear while I drink it. That's like listening to two different stations
at once. The same principle applies to all matters of taste: art, music,
people etc. Call it the Hype Effect.
2) Wine: "It's like art. If someone has a painting of cow manure, but
he tells you the history of the artist, the history of the canvas, how
rare and expensive it all is, I'm sorry, it's still, in the end, a
painting of cow manure."
Wine is like art. And if Mr. Albom's imagination had ever been
stimulated by the taste of a wine, maybe he'd follow one good bottle
with another. Maybe he'd politely empty his glass of manure-flavored
wine served by his dilettante collector buddies and casually refill it
with something of his choice.
But how can you blame him? It is a fact that some people live their
entire lives, eating at expensive restaurants, hanging out with other
regular guys who happen to own vast wine collections, and yet never
taste a really good bottle of the yeasty nectar. I blame sommeliers.
Actually, it is surprisingly easy to encounter glass after glass of
manure in well-to-do neighborhoods. Money has absolutely nothing to do
with taste. Taste is about self-confidence and perception, qualities I
like to think are enhanced by economy, not wealth.
There is nothing at all fun or nice about not enjoying a glass of wine
with someone who is sure you should and who can hold forth at length
about why. But don't assume wine and its natural complexity are to
blame, nor that talking about it is counterproductive.
Myles, the Sideways protagonist, also confuses knowing about wine
with enjoying it. But it's not what you know - it's who you know. Who
shares your taste? Don't you like visiting with that person? A snob by
instinct, Myles struggles with the "who" question. It can't be his
social inferior, a mere waitress inappropriately named "Maya,"
can it?
Then he learns she is an even bigger geek than he is. She politely
contradicts him and declares a bottle of Andrew Murray Syrah to
be too alcoholic. She offers a soliloquy about the magic and mystery of
every unique bottle. Then - and this clinches it for Myles - she
announces that she will soon graduate with a degree in horticulture and
presumably move on to become the next Mia Klein. He's in love.
Ah well. Myles found his "who" anyway. Mr. Albom? Not yet.
3) To provoke the hapless members of the
wine subculture, Mitch Albom beats on their corked idol like a piñata.
We urinate wine, he writes, "Same as beer."
Right again! Wine is filtered through our kidneys! Yay! And, just like
wine, well-crafted beer is worth getting sentimental over,
self-medicating with and dreaming about. The only difference is that
good wine is better distributed than good beer.
I can't wait for the beer-lover's Sideways to be released. Myles will be
a fanatic for Saison and Biere de Garde. He'll deplore
American IPAs for being too manipulated with excessive dry hopping.
In a field of two-row barley, he'll caress lovingly the brilliant blond
kernels.
Albom's problem isn't with wine. As a syndicated columnist in major
daily newspapers, many in and around the rust belt, he is pandering to
Anglo-America's social anxiety about wine. Let's face it: since
the
enclosure movement in England, wine has symbolized property;
the property required to produce it and store it. Property is power.
Wine is power. Mitch Albom is a rebel.
And this anxiety is felt even more keenly by the over-compensating,
status-obsessed freaks who don't drink their old bottles, who care more
about impressing their peers than slurping down the divine nectar of the
gods. They're in the same boat, really. Nobody wants to look stupid.
4) "...if it has to be described to be appreciated, you're wasting
your time."
True again! Or at least, partly true. If it must be described to be
appreciated, perhaps you are wasting your time. You could be living with
wines that don't require description (like a Jean Foillard Morgon
or a La Begude Limoux Chardonnay.) But whether you are drinking a
wine that requires description or not, talking about it, learning its
provenance, discussing its contours with friends may heighten your
pleasure.
5) "...wine, in the end, is still a drink."
Thank god for that!
6) "...what food group besides wine gets its own list, is displayed
over a waiter's wrist and is sampled by sniffing, swishing and then
spitting it out?"
Before I answer that, let me point out that wine is not sampled by
"spitting it out." Only pros at wine evaluation marathons do that. But
to Albom's point about the curious thing called a "wine list," it has to
do with two things: fermentation and durability. Any fermented food is
worth astonishingly incremental
intellectual engagement.
Besides, some restaurants do have lengthy, separate
cigar lists,
cheese lists and
beer lists
(some even have
beer sommeliers!).
But among all fermented things, wine is one of the most durable. This
fact allows its smallest, most boutique iterations to be globally
commercialized. The wine of one grape farmer, made in quantities of only
a few hundred cases, may appear in Singapore and
Southfield. Its language is an international language. Wine has
always been and continues to be used as cultural and intellectual
currency. Don't you want to see what's on the list?
Albom's is a rebellion against an emerging social cannon. It used to be
that the well-educated and well-bred went to private schools where they
were trained in the elaborate codes of class citizenship. They learned
the great books, they learned Latin, and they learned science - this was
how a gentleman of importance distinguished himself.
Our modern elites are too large and heterogeneous to be defined by such
disciplines. Now its all about golf and wine.
At least Albom is consistent.
On the subject of golf too, Mitch Albom doesn't like it when people
use their imaginations to get in the heads of the pros. I would have
thought speculating about the thought processes and emotions of the golf
pro was one of the only interesting things about watching one on
television. I could be wrong.
Why doesn't the Detroit Free Press give
Chris Kassel and
Mitch Albom a full front page one weekend to duke it out on the subject
of sports and wine? I'd buy two copies of that paper.
Here's Mitch
Albom's own site. Buy his books folks. And if you see him, tell him
about the last great bottle of wine you drank.
How can Mitch Albom write "wine is not a religion?"
Check out these links:
Macedonian wine, religion and culture - they're a package.
The
pope and wine, a great combination
More wine and religion stuff from food cultists
Xers are going for that old-time wine religion too!
* I'd link to Matt Kramer's
excellent column on this very subject, but it's not available.
In vino vis. The pious dames of
Ipswich,
Knowing its worth and fearing lest men waste it,
Condemn its use in christening battle-ships which
Can't even taste it.
-Charles Edmund Merrill, Jr.
Previously in Putnam's Monthly:
Clos de los Siete
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