On Wine Drinking as Resistance
Revenge of the wine nerds, anyone?
When I look at the world, I feel that something is being lost or actively undermined…Sometimes it feels like attention. Sometimes it feels like imagination. Sometimes it feels like…that thing you wanted when you became an English major, that sort of half-dreamed, half-real thing you thought you were going to be. Whatever that is: it’s under attack.
That quote comes from Catherine L. Hansen, an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo, as quoted last spring in a great New Yorker article entitled “The Battle for Attention.” In that piece, Nathan Heller explores the question: How do we hold on to what matters in this distracted, information-overloaded, algorithm-driven age?
A year later, that question feels even more pressing. I don’t believe it’s conspiratorial to say that this attack on our attention, on our imagination, on that “half-dreamed, half-real thing, you thought you were going to be” feels by design. As wannabe autocrats dismantle our institutions, as tech billionaires infiltrate our government and our media, as artificial intelligence influences more of our everyday lives—we are flooded daily with manipulative and degrading messages. It’s sometimes hard to put your finger on it exactly, but we can all feel that certain things that we hold dear—that were part of the “good life” we once imagined— are under attack.
Writing about wine often seems like a “half-dreamed, half-real thing” and, in this dismal era, likely appears frivolous. During these dangerous, shifting times, I sometimes feel like the main character in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, the concierge Monsieur Gustave—sipping his fictional “Pouilly-Jouvet ’26” (“so we don’t have to drink the cat piss they serve in the dining car'“) as modernity, fascism, and war swirl around him.
I think of Monsieur Gustave’s exhausted monologue after his “lobby boy” Zero has been bloodied but spared by menacing Nazi-like soldiers: “You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant…oh, fuck it.”
As critic Kailyn Kent has written: “Wine is an absurd protest against militarism, modernism, and whatever else you can say Anderson’s Nazis represent. Yet its absurdity makes its resistance all the more potent. A happy indulgence, fine wine can neither integrate with modernity nor its mercenary expediency, and is lost to time instead.”
On the one hand, perhaps it’s silly to think of wine—and all the cultural baggage it represents—as an instrument of resistance. And yet.
I remember the first time that someone suggested to me that enjoying great wine could be an act of resistance. This was over a very memorable blaufränkisch from Christian Tschida in Burgenland, Austria—which I wrote about in Godforsaken Grapes. Tschida and I were eating fried chicken and potato salad at a country inn across the street from his house while we drank his blaufränkisch. We sat outside and looked across the vineyards at Lake Neusiedl, the strange, shallow body of water that straddles Austria’s border with Hungary. In fact, where we were sitting had been part of Hungary before World War I, before Austria acquired Burgenland. During the last half of the 20th century, the place stood as the last frontier before the Iron Curtain.
As the blaufränkisch opened up, it became something entirely different than any other wines I’d tasted. We were sipping something ineffable, as if a taste from further back in time. In the dark, we could see the outline of an old stone well, and beyond that, reeds on the lake softly undulating in the breeze. “You know, as this century rolls on, with all our technological changes, wine like this will be the only real thing that still exists,” Tschida told me. “I really believe this. Wine won’t change. The real thing will still have to exist, just like in ancient times.”
There was something quietly defiant, almost heroic, in Tschida’s statement. I think of it every time I read an article about how “AI is transforming the wine industry.”
In popular culture, connoisseurship or the appreciation of esoteric knowledge and beautiful objects is often presented as a quirk of unhinged movie bad guys, from James Bond villains to Patrick Bateman in American Psycho to Rob Lowe’s smarmy character in Wayne’s World (infamously mansplaining the difference between Champagne and sparkling wine). New Yorker film critic Richard Brody, in his review of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch zeroes in on the fallacy of this cultural trope.
The French Dispatch is filled with the practical aesthetics of clothing, architecture, furniture, food, design, and discourse; it’s also filled with beautiful deeds and sublime gestures, steadfast love and physical courage, amid hostile conditions. There’s a long-familiar tradition in film of refinement meshing with evil, as with the epicurean sadism of movie Nazis and arch-criminals. It’s a demagogic trope that comforts viewers who presume that, conversely, their ordinary tastes must be a sign of their ordinary decency, too. But Anderson understands that the refinement of style can be a way of outwardly facing down the power of the world with one’s inner personal imperatives…he brings together the beauty of heroism and the heroism of beauty.
I have argued many times in this newsletter that we lose something when we try to be scientific or empirical about wine, when we focus on the broken method of scoring wines on a 100-point scale or on the tired system of codified wine education or on technological prowess.
In place of this tired way of approaching wine, I’ve advocated for what the art critic Morgan Meis calls Romantic Criticism. More than a decade ago, Meis defined and advocated for a criticism that surrenders “all great claims to authority” and “refuses to judge” and whose primary virtue is “its inherent generosity.” Romantic Criticism is not based on an infallible, all-knowing expert or unquestioned arbiter of taste. “In this theory of criticism,” Meis writes, “we don’t need the critic to tell us what is good or bad, to tell us what to like and dislike. We need the critic, instead, to help us experience. We need the critic in the way that we need a friend or a lover. We need the critic as a companion on a journey that is a love affair with the things of the world.”
This rise of a New Romanticism is sprouting up in many areas of the culture. Cultural critic Ted Gioia has been writing about a “new age of Romanticism” for a while now. A year ago, Ross Barkan in the The Guardian noted the rise of a “romantic backlash” against empiricism and technology.
The new romanticism has arrived, butting up against and even outright rejecting the empiricism that reigned for a significant chunk of this century. Backlash is bubbling against tech’s dominance of everyday life, particularly the godlike algorithms—their true calculus still proprietary—that rule all of digital existence.
Gioia and Barkan see this backlash as similar to the original 19th century Romantics who pushed back against the Industrial Revolution—Luddites burning down factories and artists declaring war against the principles of the Age of Reason. “The mechanical inventions of which it had been expected that they would vastly improve the lot of humanity were obviously making many people miserable,” is how Edmund Wilson explained it in his historical masterwork To the Finland Station.
Wellness culture—and the neo-prohibitionist movement that has sprung from it—must also face this Romantic backlash. Just look at the numbers, the hard science, we’re told. Alcohol raises your risk of cancer, we’re told. “Alcohol is the New Tobacco,” we’re told. But even the neo-prohibitionists’ science feels sketchy and manipulative. Your risk of cancer, if you’re a woman, rises from about 17 percent (at zero drinks per day) to 22 percent (at two drinks per day). If you’re a man, it increases from 10 percent to 13 percent. Meaning if you have 14 drinks a week instead of zero, your risk of cancer rises roughly three to five percent. Is that worth giving up the joy of wine? You could likely offset that health risk by taking a daily walk after dinner.
I’m trying to imagine how my septuagenarian and octogenarian neighbors in Logroño, Spain—taking their late-morning merienda as they have their whole lives, some tortilla or a bit of jamón iberico along with a glass of Rioja red—might react to the suggestion that their lives would be enhanced by skipping the wine. Likely you would be laughed out of the café.
Though to be fair, these are people who live in a region with many acres of vineyards that are even older than they are. It’s commonplace, after all, in Rioja to find 80-, 90-, 100-years-old vines. An anti-wine-drinking message would surely fall on deaf ears.
Maybe it’s delusional to view culture or politics or life as a Romantic. Perhaps it’s an indulgence of the mind to think that pleasure can be revolutionary, or that drinking wine from a century-old vineyard could register as resistance. But these are weak moments of doubt. As old Immanuel Kant told us: Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.
But Kant tells us something else, even more defiant and hopeful, in his in Critique of Judgement: “In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.” We’re all chasing our own obsessive, intimate relationship with the cultural objects we find beautiful.
For those of us who see fine wine as an element of the good life, perhaps we are all trying to quixotically keep alive whatever “faint glimmers of civilization” are left in our tech-dominated age. My nagging fear is that we are already too late. That we are destined to the same fate as Monsieur Gustave. “I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it,” says his former mentee, as an epitaph. “But I will say, he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.”
Drinking wine is resistance. If you think about it, drinking wine is knowledge of history, engagement with producers who are actively resisting climate change, tariffs and price gouging and, at the end, giving oneself the pause and courage to get out and keep resisting all the rest. At least these are my “excuses”.
Not often does an essay on wine drinking include references to both Wes Anderson and Immanuel Kant. Well done! My interest in wine has always been as much about the people, culture and tradition that produced the wine as about the wine itself. A delicious beverage in the glass never hurts, though. 🍷