On the De-Mythification of the Re-Mythification of Wine

Wine is the simplest alcoholic beverage to produce. At its most basic, wine is squished grapes sitting in a bucket, naturally fermented by wild yeasts. Unlike beer, grape juice doesn't need to be brewed (cooked) to make wine, it really is the beverage of the people. Anyone can make it in their garage rather quickly. There's a reason that the major beer producing countries of Europe like Britain, Germany, and the Czech Republic exist at the northernmost fringe of where wine grapes can grow. If they were further south, they would've just made wine.

America never got into the wine thing early on. It couldn't. The phylloxera aphid damaged the rootstocks of European vitis vinifera grapes, forcing winemakers to use indigenous vitis labrusca grapes which produced a sweet musky (aka "foxy") wine that was serviceable for home winemakers but lacked the refinement necessary to convert connoisseurs of European wines made with vinifera grapes.

On the other side of the country however, European grapes flourished. Phylloxera hadn't yet crossed the Rockies so the vinifera vines brought over by the Spanish produced quality wines throughout California and the Southwest. When that region became part of the US, winemaking was carried on and advanced primarily by Italian and Eastern European immigrants (take a look at the names of the oldest California vineyards). The United States finally began producing quality wine from European grapes on a consistent basis.

But that delay came at a price. The population centers of the country weren't interested in wine, preferring beer and whiskey. And the serious wine drinkers, centered in the Atlantic metropolises, were inclined to keep drinking the same French wines they always had.

And then there was Prohibition and any progress that had been made in American winemaking was destroyed.

All of this is a long way of explaining the process by which wine, a simple simple beverage, became the bastion of the American elite. A jealously protected symbol of wealth and refinement--for a long time "good wine" was expensive, rare, and cerebral. That perception persisted as we became reaccultured to wine and the availability of wine increased, helped by the fact that there really weren't a lot of "in between wines" available until the 1980s, wines that were neither ultrapremium nor jugged rotgut.

But as good and relatively affordable wines began multiplying, the desire to compare, categorize, score, and rank increased as well so that we could still find out which wines the discerning elite should be drinking, even as that wine-drinking elite began to number in the tens of millions.

When Robert Parker helped make wine scores a big business, a certain vocabulary for discussing wine materialized, based on nothing but the consensus of a fairly small clique of wine writers. Why "cocoa" versus "chocolate?" Why "framboise" instead of "raspberry?"

I'm not saying these aren't valid descriptors, but the homogenization of wine descriptors in the wine press has created a wine vocabulary hegemony. It facilitates the perception that wine tasting is something to only be enjoyed by the inaugurated few, who can perceive cedar and tobacco in Cabernet or leather and bacon in Syrah. Couple to that is the belief that to describe wine in a way that is more personal, using a vocabulary that is familiar and intimate to themselves, is invalid.

Fuck that.

I've had wines that taste like Jolly Ranchers, wines that taste like banana Now & Laters mixed with dirty guava. I've had wines that smell like sweaty gym socks, wines that smell like sweet musky pussy. Could I have described these using accepted wine terminology? I suppose. But I don't have any personal connection to most of the conventional wine lexicon. Maybe if I grew up amongst cedar trees or on a farm with drying tobacco I would.

Our senses of smell and taste are inimately tied to memories--who hasn't been transported back in time from the smell of a fresh fruit that used to grow in the backyard of your childhood house? From the aroma of a flower that reminds you of your high school sweetheart's shampoo? The taste of a papaya with a squeeze of lime that reminds you of.... ?

I ask.

I argue that the enjoyment from food and wine (beyond the basic survival needs) is in its ability to transport. And it can transport you one of two places: a place from your past, or a place you've never been. Either way, an impersonal lexicon of rote descriptors serves neither purpose. A bunch of words that sound good to a cabal of overweight white men in their 60s carries about as much meaning to a 23 year old Japanese woman as well, the inverse of Robert Parker's attraction to young Japanese women.

Not a lot.

The idea that you can objectively describe a wine's taste to somebody else and have that adequately reflect the next individual's tasting experience is as bizarre of an assertion as being able to describe sex with a specific partner and expect the next person's night in bed with your past lay to be exactly the same. Everyone has their own tastes and chemistry and that taste and chemistry changes not just day to day, but minute to minute.

You + your mind & body + your partner = More than the sum of those three.

You + your mind & body + your food and/or wine = More than the sum of those three.

The next time you taste wine, think back into your mental library of tastes and smells--those sips and aromas from your childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, that are memorable or meaningful, good or bad. I love the smell of toasted peanuts because of my grandma's peanut pie, I come close to vomiting whenever I smell sweet artifical cinnamon flavor because of an unfortunate incident involving Goldschlager when I was eighteen.

Can you tie those memories to what you're tasting and smelling?

It's a transformative experience, the involuntary Proustian memory, full of nostalgic sadness and bittersweet remembraces, often half-formed in the brain but fully-formed to the nth in the body, casued by applying adult understanding and adult regret to the lovingly beautiful memories of a time when everything was simple, honest, and intense: sucking on a watermelon Jolly Rancher while playing pickle with the neighbor kids on a hot summer night; eagerly and clumsily finding your way between a girl's thighs with your tongue for the very first time.

Despite the facts, nothing can ever taste as sweet and new again, but keep tasting wine with an open mind--you'll get close.