Can We Talk About Joy In Wine?
Can We Talk About Joy In Wine?
An other musings, in which we get a little heady about fermented grape juice.
I guess you could say I’ve been getting a little, um, philosophical about wine over the past few weeks, particularly in my columns for The New Wine Review. I don’t know exactly why. Part of it, certainly, is that I’ve been living in Logroño, Spain, in the heart of La Rioja for past month—and there’s always that dangerous tendency of the travel writer to over-intellectualize normal everyday experience. But also, being here has allowed some distance on the current wine discourse and the many issues plaguing wine in America.
One thing that strikes me is that in a place like Logroño, wine isn’t as complicated or exclusive or as fraught as it is at home. For too many Americans, wine tends to be something to stress about, to study, to get certified in, and often to lose their minds over. People in Logroño just have a much easier relationship with wine. As I wrote in my recent NWR piece “Stop Freaking Out About Wine. Let’s Just Enjoy It,” wine here is just something to drink (preferably with tapas)":
This idea of “something to drink” too often gets lost in our wine talk. I was recently interviewed by a Polish academic who is doing a study on the way people communicate about wine. He asked me, bluntly, “Why is most wine communication so bad?” It’s a good question! I believe most wine communication sucks because, on a fundamental level, wine talk does everything it can to remove the idea of drinking from the equation. For people really deep into wine, it’s an aspect of culture, akin to art, design, or music. I respect that.
If we’re really being honest, though, we also like the intoxicating state of mind that wine puts us in. We like the alcohol, and what it does to us. I’m not saying we like being drunk, but we like drinking. This is the third rail that can never be acknowledged. To talk of drinking—for the sake of, you know, drinking—is to risk compromising wine’s perception as an object of status and culture. I also respect this impulse. But the resulting wine talk will then always have an underlying falseness. When we talk to normal people who are not in the wine bubble, when we try to explain wine to them, they can feel that falseness.
A similar sense of falseness also permeates traditional wine education. I’ve certainly ranted about this before, and even suggested it’s “finally time for a new wine education.” But in my last NWR column, “Wine Is More Vast Than You Will Ever Know. And That’s A Good Thing,” I dove a bit deeper:
We’re often taught that wine is a ladder to climb. Anyone who’s ever taken even a single wine class has been presented with the idea that wine is a series of rungs that you must endeavor to scale. At the bottom, there are so-called “entry-level” wines, and at the top are the so-called Serious Wines. Learning about wine is literally presented as a continual ascent to new levels.
But let’s be honest. There’s an underlying falseness to this idea…When we talk to normies—those who are not in the wine bubble—and we present wine as a ladder, they can feel that falseness.
I guess this is easy for me to say. I’ve never spent a dime, or a minute, on formal wine education or certifications. All my knowledge has come from the seat of my pants, following my strange passions, traveling and tasting where I could afford—and often where I could not…But it’s been a wildcat education, unstructured and self-taught…
But here’s something I know deep in my bones to be true: wine is not a ladder to climb. Not even close. Wine is a maze, a labyrinth, one we gladly enter, embracing the fact that we don’t know where it will take us, and that we’ll likely never find our way out. You can simply never learn everything there is to learn about wine. Because wine is as big as the world itself.
As an example of wine’s expansiveness, I tell the story of my dinner at Ajonegro, a Michelin-starred restaurant with a Spanish-Mexican fusion menu. My friend Laura Moreira is the sommelier, and I went to have her wine pairing with the prix fixe menu. I’m still thinking about what she poured, because it kind of broke my brain. Check out the piece to see what I drank (spoiler: I know Spanish wine pretty well, and six of the seven wines I’d never had before, including grapes I have never tasted before).
Please give both of these pieces a read, and let me know what you think.
