Yes, I know, we have some pending business. But the New York weather has been so gorgeous recently that I can’t help thinking about German riesling. Every spring, when the weather really begins to turn, I start thirsting for German riesling. This year, though, I was thinking about dry rieslings because I’ve had a fair number of really good ones in the last few months. You can read my column on dry German rieslings in the newspaper on Wednesday.
Now, let’s get back to our discussion of “The Wine Trials,’’ the forthcoming book by Robin Goldstein that has drawn so many comments in the last week. As I mentioned last time, Robin was kind enough to send me the galley and now I’ve read the book. To a certain degree I regret my original post, because I hadn’t read the book yet. But I jumped in because of the Newsweek article that grabbed my attention. I don’t regret assailing the article, which took a gotcha tone toward wine lovers, but I think the book itself is considerably more nuanced, as I suggested last time.
Now, I’m not going to review the book in depth, but I will offer a few opinions. First, the most useful component is an in-depth listing of 100 wines $15 and under that scored well in the trials. These are all bottles that should be widely available without having to find a specialized store. They represent a cross-section of mass-market wines that many people who don’t spend all that much time thinking about wine – the book calls them “everyday wine drinkers’’ – can drink happily. My favorite parts of the listings are something I’ve never seen before, design critiques of each label.
Is this useful to anybody who is more than a casual wine drinker? Not really, and that is one of the contradictions of the book. “The Wine Trials’’ makes the case that people’s buying decisions are influenced by many factors, including price, marketing, power of suggestion, etc. The book suggests that if you take away all of these factors and make buying decisions strictly on the grounds of what tastes best in the glass, everyday wine drinkers prefer cheaper wines to more expensive wines.
Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Let’s say first out, that the study shows that everyday wine drinkers prefer cheaper mass-produced wines to more expensive mass-produced wines. None of the wines considered would fall into the artisanal, natural or hand-crafted categories.
Second, as hard as the book tries to make the tastings objective, to eliminate outside influences, one unaddressed fact is the mass-tasting environment. It’s a completely unnatural way to taste and to judge wine. Rather than drink wine in a natural environment with food, wines are pitted against each other, sipped and spit, one after another. I personally think wine is experienced in a different way when it’s consumed with a meal over time, and that’s one reason why, in this blog, I do not write about wines that I’ve only sipped in tastings.
Journalists have contradictions, too. I participate in mass tastings with the wine panel even though I don’t believe they are the best ways to judge wines. It’s a compromise because it may be the only way to judge large numbers of wines as we are often called upon to do. These are old arguments that I don’t want to go through again now.
More to the point, “The Wine Trials’’ makes it clear that what appeals to everyday wine drinkers is significantly different than what appeals to wine experts, which the book defines as those who’ve had some sort of training or professional experience with wine. The experts in general preferred the more expensive bottles, and the book suggests that the tyranny of the experts may be unconsciously compelling everyday wine drinkers not to follow their own preferences and to waste money doing so.
Meanwhile, the book assails publications like Wine Spectator and Robert M. Parker Jr.’s Wine Advocate for consistently giving higher scores to more expensive wines. These publications are directed to people with more than a casual interest in wine, so is it really that surprising that these critics would have such a preference? Especially since the preference was echoed by the more experienced wine drinkers who participated in the book’s tastings?
Several other things bother me about “The Wine Trials.’’ First, I think the book is way behind the wave in overstating the power of Parker and the Spectator in shaping the sorts of wines we drink. “Fueled by the magazine critics, who often seem to reserve their highest ratings for big, concentrated wines, the New World style is poised to wipe the Old World style off the map in the realms of both expensive and cheap wine,’’ we are told.
And this: “Parker is famous for preferring Bordeaux to Burgundy, and his power is such that many top Burgundian wines are currently marginalized in the marketplace when compared with top Bordeaux wines. As a result, even in Burgundy there is now a push to make wines in a more concentrated, oaky style, which is totally antithetical to the region’s historical character.’’
Marginalized in the marketplace? Try looking in the sale bins for a good Burgundy. The Burgundians are doing great! If anybody is marginalized it’s the small vignerons all over Europe who are trying to compete against the mass-produced wines that are promoted by this book. By the way, Parker’s critic for Burgundy these days is David Schildknecht, who is very much respected in Burgundy and everywhere else in the wine world.
Frankly, the notion of a Manichean wine culture was overstated in the movie “Mondovino’’ and it’s overstated here. Of course there is tension between corporate marketers and the public. One wants to separate the other from its money, and isn’t too particular about the tactics it employs. “The Wine Trials’’ uses Dom Pérignon as its prime example of a wine that has been vastly overvalued through marketing. It’s not a bad example, yet the book misses the point by suggesting that Dom Pérignon is popular with everyday wine drinkers. Please. Dom Pérignon is well known to everyday wine drinkers, but very few have actually tasted it, unless by everyday the book means wealthy conspicuous consumers. Veuve Cliquot would be a much better example of a Champagne that is wildly popular because of advertising and marketing, but that seriously lags in quality.
In my opinion, the solution is not the $11 bottle of sparkling wine from Washington State, as good a value as it might be. The solution to the conflation of wine with luxury goods is right there in Champagne, with the momentous movement of small grower-producers who are not only changing the public perception of Champagne but changing the way some of the bigger corporations are going about their business. Similar self-generating solutions exist in many other regions.
The bottom line is that wine is a far more complex picture than the one painted in “The Wine Trials’’ – at least it is for people who love wine and are seriously interested in it. For those whose interest stops at picking up the occasional bottle for dinner, there is little need to complicate that picture.
Think of visiting a museum of modern art. Those who don’t study art, and rarely think about it, will have a much different reaction to, say, a Jackson Pollock, than somebody who’s greatly interested in modern art and knows a bit about Pollock and his contemporaries. Many people might have to do some reading and research on their own, or even take an art history course, to begin to understand what critics and art historians saw in Pollock. Some might conclude it’s all hogwash, but others might gain a deep and rewarding appreciation.
I’m not saying wine is the equivalent of art. I do say that wine can be appreciated on many different levels, but that nobody should ever feel obliged to appreciate wine on any level. In the end, the book seems to divide wine consumers into the casual buyers who are pushed this way and that by forces they don’t understand, and the wealthy conspicuous status seekers who also are not quite aware of capitalism and marketing. Unacknowledged are the serious wine lovers who are knowledgeable, experimental and passionate, and who, yes, are in control of their own destinies. The book may speak to the first two groups, but not to the third.
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