Here we are nearing the end of this book, and I’ve provided few definitive answers to some of the knotty questions I posed back at the beginning. Well, let me rephrase that—very few easy answers. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it goes. I’m not going to try to assert something that I know is not true because it makes people feel more comfortable. Wine is not an easy subject to master, and anybody who insists otherwise is simply after your hard-earned money. Luckily, mastery is not the goal; ease is what we’re after.
If you do indeed experience some form of wine anxiety, it should feel liberating to understand that no handy magical key will unlock the mysteries of wine. It means you’ve done nothing wrong, you lack no physical gifts and no specialized vocabulary. It’s not your fault!
Yet the mainstream American wine culture has led many people to believe that they themselves are somehow responsible for the anxiety they feel. No, I don’t mean that wine educators or wine writers are out there intent on making you feel guilty. But the underlying suggestion that wine can be demystified and made simple eventually leads people to blame themselves when they find they still don’t get it. They believe they haven’t studied hard enough, or have not sufficiently developed their olfactory senses, or simply don’t possess the proper equipment.
By now you can see the inherent contradictions in these dual notions. On the one hand wine can be demystified and made simple. On the other, wine requires one to behave like a professional, with a specialized vocabulary, an intensive education, and possibly the sorts of physical attributes that can be measured statistically on athletes and porn stars but with wine lovers depends solely on how insistently one pushes a point of view.
These twisted, contradictory thoughts about wine can’t help but cause anxiety. It’s a double bind that, either way, results in consumers feeling they are wrong. By turning wine into a specialized field, requiring critical omniscience and demanding pronouncements at every turn, American wine culture ignores the simple emotional relationship with wine that is the basis for a lifelong attachment.
Drinking wine is an elemental, natural pleasure that for too many people has been gilded with nonsense. My friend Jim’s father was a Sicilian immigrant who drank wine with dinner every night when he returned home from work. In his formative adult years in the 1960s and ’70s, American wine culture as we know it now did not exist. Glossy consumer publications did not publish hundreds of scores and notes on wines from around the world, and indeed, Jim’s father would not have been interested if they had. The idea that he would try to parse out the aromas and flavors in his glass to the assembled audience would have been ludicrous. He kept a gallon jug of red wine in his refrigerator and poured himself a glass or two the way other people might pour water or orange juice. Nothing complicated about it. It was habit, born of the culture in which he grew up back in Sicily.
Frankly, I would never want to drink the wine that Jim’s father so enjoyed. It was a cheap bulk red that, because I care about these things, I would have found repellent. But I would never have dreamed of interfering with his pleasure, and I admired his complete lack of self-consciousness about the wine.
He did not see wine as an element of style, transmitting to the world a coded indication of his personality. Of course, he didn’t feel that way about his shoes, either. In any case, his chosen beverage neither disturbed nor offended me. Honestly, what could possibly be wrong with enjoying this sort of wine straight from the fridge in juice glasses, the way Jim’s father did?
Back when Jim was a kid in the 1960s, the bulk wine his father bought was probably the nearest equivalent to the sort of village cooperative wines that his family used to drink back in Sicily. Those wines in the old country had the benefit of being local produce. In Connecticut, Jim’s father had to take his wine where he could find it.
What would Jim’s father drink today if he were still alive? Probably the same big gallon jug, the sort of bulk-production wines that, believe it or not, continue to make up a high percentage of American wine sales. Or maybe he would drink the equivalent of Two-Buck Chuck or Yellow Tail. I’d like to imagine he would select one of the excellent French or Italian country wines that you can now find in bag-in-a-box packaging, the sort that will stay fresh in your refrigerator for weeks as you draw your nightly glass or two from the tap. But I doubt it, because, frankly, Jim’s father did not care all that much about the quality of what he was drinking. He was mostly interested in the price.
The point is that throughout history, the act of consuming wine has essentially been one of uncritical enjoyment. It’s a simple pleasure, first and foremost, the beverage equivalent of bread on the table. This, of course, ought to be the fundamental basis for any continuing interest in wine. Do you like to drink it? Not If I’m facile with a wine list it will improve my job prospects or I’m going to collect bottles like sports cars or pieces of valuable crystal.
You might ask, with good reason, who am I to pass judgment on anybody’s rationale for pursuing an interest in wine? Truly, that’s not at all my intention. People can do whatever they want. I’m simply saying that if you really want to experience the pleasure of wine it’s best to be honest about your motives. Clearing out the extraneous rationalizations is the best way to tap into a direct emotional relationship with wine. Once you can establish to your own satisfaction that you enjoy wine for what it is rather than what it represents, then it becomes a question of how much time, energy, and money you want to devote to enhancing that pleasure.
Not long after I began as wine critic, I stated in a column, “If you don’t love Beaujolais, you don’t love wine.” I rightly took some criticism for that, because I was trying to convey a truth with a statement that was too easy to take only literally. The idea was that Beaujolais, probably more than any other wine, connotes the sheer, elemental, joyous pleasure of wine for wine’s sake, rather than any of the other reasons people buy wine, whether for status, religious observance, as an investment, as an intellectual exercise, as a social lubricant, or simply to get drunk. The truth is, it didn’t have to be Beaujolais. Substitute any juicy, straightforward wine, and you get the idea.
This is the fundamental idea I want to convey, the answer, even if it doesn’t seem like an answer. If you love wine, all the sense of fulfillment, pleasure, and satisfaction that you hope to get out of wine can follow. But you need to answer that essential question. And to answer that question, it’s especially helpful to understand that many of the so-called truths about wine that we accept blindly are in fact no such thing. Instead, they are assumptions that, like the conventional wisdom about politics, crumble when examined closely.
Some people seem to understand these things intuitively. Joe Dressner was a wine importer who died too young, at sixty years old in 2011, after battling brain cancer for three years. I would not say we were friends. In fact, he was an irascible sort who once made a good friend of mine cry through sheer orneriness. We had a good business relationship, though, and I liked him because he was such a singular character: blunt, acerbic, uncompromising, and provocative, and not necessarily in control of his ridicule, but also principled, honest, articulate, funny, and wise about wine.
His import company, Louis/Dressner Selections, which he ran with his wife, Denyse Louis, and a partner, Kevin McKenna, offered a wonderful array of producers from some of the least heralded regions of France and Italy. Cour-Cheverny, Gaillac, Saumur, Jasnières, and Coteaux du Loir are just some of the oddball appellations in France where Louis/Dressner found great vignerons and which Joe Dressner helped put back on the mental map of wine lovers. How did he do this?
Joe never went to a class to learn how to deconstruct a wine into esoteric aromas and flavors. I never saw him try to identify a wine blind, as if that were ever a sign of useful knowledge. He had no formal training. He simply drank a lot of wine. With time he learned to distinguish between what he liked and what he didn’t, and he was sufficiently curious and resolute to work out the reasons for those differences. It turned out that the wines he liked had much in common. They were generally made by small producers who worked their own plots, who did not use chemicals in the vineyard and kept their yields small, who harvested by hand rather than by machine, and who used no additives in the cellar but merely shepherded the grape juice along its journey into wine.
These were the wines he grew to love and sell, made by people whose personal histories often involved generations of dedicated grape growing. Even as these wines came to be known as natural wines (a term he occasionally used and often disdained), and wines like these came to be a hot-button topic among the wine lovers of the world, Joe would scorn the notion that he was involved in some sort of movement. In fact, while he certainly had his core beliefs he was not dogmatic about them. One of the principles of Louis/Dressner was that wines should be made with indigenous yeasts that were present on the grapes and in the winery, rather than inoculated with yeasts selected by the winemaker. Yet the wines of Didier Dagueneau from Pouilly-Fumé, one of the shining domains in his portfolio, are inoculated with yeast. Joe couldn’t argue with the wines.
“It’s a taste and sensory preference,” he once told me. “It’s not being purist, or that we follow this guru or that guru, but that we feel the wines taste better.”
Joe would regularly bring a crew of his vignerons from France to the United States, where they would meet members of the trade, offer consumer tastings, and raise hell after hours. These visits were important to him. The personal contact with consumers and the trade helped sell wine, of course, and Joe was a salesman. In fact, one of the most endearing qualities about Joe was that he did not sell wine to make himself or his family rich. His priority was to sell enough wine, at a high enough price, to make it possible for his vignerons to keep doing their job without unremitting financial anxiety.
Remember, most of his producers were not from glorified regions. Outside of the exalted golden circle, making and selling wine for a living can be like any other agricultural pursuit: difficult and uncertain. Along with other great importers I’ve known, like Kermit Lynch and Neal Rosenthal, Joe cared tremendously about the producers with whom he worked. He believed that it was crucial for the public and the trade to see for themselves that wine—good wine—was made by people who had a vision and a philosophy as well as warts and flaws.
Regardless, the men and women who traveled with Joe, and their wines, represented a culture that was a far cry from the way most Americans have come to think of wine. They were not there to glorify wine into something overly complicated or turn it into a fetishistic object. Their wines could not be reduced to scores and tasting notes, nor did they strain to demystify wine for their audience. Wine was a mysterious pleasure and a joy. It belonged on the table, to be shared with friends and family along with great food. But Joe was not a holier-than-thou preacher. His attitude was, if you want to drink wine he regarded as wretched along with awful food, well, that was your business.
Joe didn’t mind living in his own, marginalized world. He had no interest in proselytizing, beyond creating the markets he needed to sustain his growers. In fact, he feared growth. “The Natural Wine Movement,” he once wrote satirically, “does not expect the Wine Industrial Complex to be won over to natural fermentation, low sulfur and what-have-you. Even if it were, it would still be making unfathomable, undrinkable stuff.”
He did not spare those who would proselytize, either. “The Natural Wine Movement abhors earnestness,” he continued. “Humorless activism to promote wine is an oxymoron. Getting smashed, eating well, and laughing with good friends are key to our movement.”
There you have it, indelicately.
Clearly, Joe Dressner and my friend Jim’s father lived in different worlds, and in different times. Though Jim’s father was a Sicilian immigrant he never in a million years would have shelled out $40 for a bottle of Arianna Occhipinti’s fresh, striking, complex Sicilian wines, which happened to be imported by Louis/Dressner. Nonetheless, even though these two men would have found each other completely alien, they did share an important quality. They were at ease with wine. They each got what they wanted from it without fussing or, if I really need to say it, feeling inadequate.
Part of me would like to think I could have introduced some better wine to Jim’s father and that he would have enjoyed it. Since the mid-twentieth century, we have come to understand that good food depends on good ingredients, and if you care about food, why wouldn’t you care as much about wine? Not in the sense of connoisseurship, but simply in wanting the wine, like the food, to be made from good, wholesome ingredients rather than from processed junk. But the formula isn’t always cut and dried. Jim’s father loved to eat—his wife was a wonderful cook—but my guess is that he would not have wanted to pay a premium for great ingredients or for great wine. Just as people his age grew up smoking cigarettes, they valued the convenience and cheapness of mass-produced foods.
Even today, most people choose not to spend the extra money or the time necessary to gather local or organic ingredients. Food and wine are simply not important enough for them to pay the price. People like Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Alice Waters, Mark Bittman, and Ruth Reichl have all made the argument that one’s choices in food are political acts. I happen to believe this, too. But one’s choices in food, and wine, also clearly express a cultural divide as well.
On one side is a mainstream, mass-market world in which the salient issues are not the methods of production, the wholesomeness, or the nutritional value. They are cost and convenience. It may be cheaper to go to the grocery store to buy a three-pack of tomatoes or ground chuck in a plastic-and-foam wrap than to find a farmers’ market or to grind some locally produced beef yourself. It may seem easier and cheaper to get dinner at Mickey D’s than to think about where all that meat comes from and what’s done to it. Or it may be that food is not so much of a pleasure for some people, but simply fuel.
The fact that we even have a divide over food demonstrates our cultural resilience. By the 1970s the industrialization of the food industry was well on its way to wiping out small farms and regional distinctiveness. But from the last two decades of the twentieth century on, the battle was rejoined. Writers like Calvin Trillin and Jane and Michael Stern paid tribute to the last vestiges of regional cuisine in the United States, inspiring new generations to seek out those foods, giving incentive, small as it might have been, to businesses that could cater to the meager but growing demand. Localized farmers’ market movements across the United States created ways for small farmers to survive, and for people to obtain top-quality, seasonal ingredients. Greater awareness of what good ingredients could taste like, along with rising political consciousness, helped to create an economic and cultural network for supporting the small, local production of ingredients, whether from coffee roasters, farmers, butchers, cheesemakers, bakers, urban gardeners, or those engaging in other small-scale efforts.
You can see a parallel in the American craft-beer revolution. By the 1970s, huge mass-market breweries made virtually all the beer consumed in the United States. Most of it was homogenized, denatured, pilsner-style beer. Yet a cultural awareness that something greater once did exist inspired a very small number of people to seek out what had been lost. With no other means for satisfying their yearning, they were compelled to brew their own beer. Thus were the seeds of the craft-beer revolution planted as over the next few decades many of these home brewers went on to start small breweries, making the sorts of beers that, in their imaginations or in their travels, they discovered they loved. Nowadays, the United States has the most vibrant beer culture in the world, even as the consumption of craft beers still only amounts to a small fraction of all the beer consumed by Americans. For the most part, beer drinkers live in one of these two worlds, the mass-market or the craft, even if occasional crossover occurs.
Wine is in a very different place than food or beer. Centuries-old traditions in wine, embodied by small, family estates, never completely died out to the extent that they did in beer and food, for which I am profoundly grateful. Because of the slow cycle of viticulture, it might have been far more agonizing to revive dormant or faded wines.
Not that these sorts of revivals haven’t happened. Across Spain, from Priorat to Ribeira Sacra, as I’ve said, ancient vineyards that were consigned to nature have been successfully reborn, and new markets created. It’s happened in France, in Italy, across Eastern Europe. It’s even happened in the United States.
But for the most part, the raw material for making great wines has always been there. All that’s been missing is the market, and now the market has been revived, too. Wines that for so many decades and centuries expressed local cultures are now available for a global audience.
That is why I believe we are now living in the greatest time in history to love wine. Though I’ve said this many times, it bears repeating: More people around the world have more access to more great wines from more places than ever before. It is indeed the Era of More, and if more is not always better when used in the sense of bigger or more powerful, more is indeed a good thing when it comes to variety.
Paradoxically, it has also been a time of dire warnings about the future of wine and this wonderful variety that I treasure. Fear of a monotonous, monochrome future for wine has fueled such good-versus-evil efforts as Jonathan Nossiter’s polemical documentary film Mondovino, and Alice Feiring’s The Battle for Wine and Love, or How I Saved the World from Parkerization. Both works raised the specter that the soulless forces of homogenization—Robert M. Parker Jr., Wine Spectator, and so on—were turning wine, an authentic emblem of individuality, community, and culture, into a bland, indistinct commodity.
While I believe this threat has been overstated, I do believe it exists. But it’s not so much a question of good versus evil as it is an overlapping of cultures. The solution is not to condemn people or institutions. They after all are advocating what they think is right. They believe that the soul of wine may be best expressed in scores and tasting notes. They have elevated wine into an obscure field, suggesting it requires years of training in order to enjoy. They have cast wine adrift from its cultural moorings and treated it like a laboratory specimen. Their beliefs may even be rooted in their own interests, because they’ve built businesses founded on these beliefs.
Fine. I have my own interests, too. I want continued access to the wines that I love and to wines that I don’t even know I love yet but am sure I will discover in the future. I believe that I can maintain access to these wines by encouraging a demand for the sorts of wines that I love. And I believe that demand will rise from a growing audience of people who can see beyond the points and the notes and the blind tastings. These people instead see wine as the expression of culture that it has been for centuries.
That doesn’t mean that taste aligns with understanding. People who view wine from a similar perspective may prefer decidedly different styles. That’s to be expected and encouraged. All producers who rise organically from centuries of tradition may not necessarily be to my taste. The point is not to insist on one style of wine. It’s simply to encourage a more relaxed relationship with wine, one of ease and pleasure, free of anxiety, in which one can explore one’s tastes without fear of being wrong or of lacking some crucial skill or equipment. Wine does not need to be simplified, demystified, appreciated, or elevated. It does need to be loved, though, for without love what’s the point of learning any more about it?
I am not proselytizing, however. I’m not out to convert everybody to my point of view. I believe we can all exist quite comfortably in our own worlds, where our attitudes and beliefs can be very different except for small, overlapping segments. I do believe, however, that another point of view must be stated, that American wine culture cannot be passed down as an assemblage of assumptions and conventional wisdom. The rest I leave to you, because nobody is obliged to love wine. If you want it, though, a beautiful world awaits.
Written by Eric Asimov in "How to Love Wine", William Morrow (an imprint of HarperCollins) USA, 2012. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.