Can We Talk About Joy In Wine?
The first in my new series of essays about bringing Romanticism back into our wellness-obsessed, status-seeking, and algorithm-controlled world.
We’ve been hearing a lot of negativity in the world of wine lately. The wine industry is in crisis! Neo-prohibitionists want to outlaw drinking! More people are smoking weed than drinking wine! But perhaps the biggest whine in wine right now is that young people hate wine and aren’t drinking it—with everyone pointing fingers over why. Waaah, wine is too exclusive and gatekeepy! Waaah, wine education is too boring and uncool! Waaah, wine media is boomerish and out of touch! Waaah, wine is too snobby and complicated!
Combine all this with the ill winds that have blown across America, culturally and politically, over the past six weeks—and let’s just say I’m grateful that I’ve had the chance to remove myself from this negativity loop for weeks at a time.
Over the past year or so, I’ve been spending a lot of time in Logroño, a small, buzzing city in the heart of Spain’s Rioja region. Logroño is known for some of the best tapas in all of Spain. Every evening, I walk a few blocks down to Calle Laurel or Calle San Juan, two narrow cobblestoned lanes crammed with dozens of tiny bars, each with its speciality pintxo (what they call tapas here).
At Bar Soriano, I get grilled wild mushrooms in garlicky sauce and topped with a skewered shrimp. At Bar La Travesía, I eat amazing tortilla española topped with a spicy pepper sauce. At Bar Donosti, I order a bite-sized dish of quail egg, chorizo, and pepper called cojonudos (which means “ballsy,” which is a compliment) followed by grilled foie gras on a slice of bread. At Bar Lorenzo, I get the famed Tío Agus, a skewer of spicy grilled pork on a bun with a secret green herb sauce. At Bar Sebas, I get the pimiento relleno de carne. At Bar El Perchas, I get either pig’s ear in a spicy sauce, or a fried pig’s ear sandwich (the only two items on the menu). At Tastavin, I eat quail escabeche or rabo de toro wrapped in puff pastry. At Bar Garcia, there’s always a plate of cecina or panceta curada. All along Calle Laurel and Calle San Juan, there are endless small plates of paper-thin jamón ibérico or grilled piparra peppers or skewers of olives and tinned fish.
You get the picture: Logroño is tapas heaven. On most nights, the street is thronged with people eating with hands and toothpicks, standing at the bar or at small tables in the street, casually throwing their used napkins on the ground. And most people—young and old—are drinking wine. At every stop there’s the same basic question: tinto or blanco? If your answer is red, there is one more next question: “joven (young) or crianza (aged)?” That’s it. That’s all you need to know. You take your wine and pintxo and join the crowd.
In a place like Logroño, wine isn’t as complicated or exclusive or as riddled with issues as it is at home. For many Americans, wine tends to be something to stress about, to study, often to lose their minds over. People in Logroño have a much easier relationship with wine. Wine is not a status symbol. It’s not a topic you need to gain a certification in. It’s not a short-cut to adult sophistication. Wine is just something that’s made a few kilometers away. Wine is just something you drink.
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 deep in the wine bubble, it’s an aspect of culture, akin to art, design, or music. I respect that, and I don’t disagree that wine appreciation pays back your attention.
But if we’re really being honest, we also like the intoxicating state of mind that wine puts us in. As the philosopher John Dilworth suggests—in an essay from the anthology Wine & Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking: “The alcoholic content of the wine provides a kind of permission, or entry ticket, into a parallel world in which—in the terminology of Immanuel Kant—a free play of the imagination can take place.”
Simply, put: We like the alcohol, and what it does to us. I’m not saying we always like being drunk, but we like drinking. This is the third rail that can almost never be acknowledged among wine people. 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.
I’m not sure how to overcome this. But as I join the evening crowd of people in the streets of Logroño, stuffing our faces with pintxos and wine, I feel like leaning into just drinking—and the simple joy of it—might be the way forward.
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Thanks for this. Wine is meant to be enjoyed. That’s what I tell customers at the wine shop I work at.
Your article is the first piece I have read in a long time that captures how wine is deeply rooted in our European lifestyles. I miss that now that I live in the States. Logroño looks like a fun place to visit. Thanks for that.