Over the course of the last year I have read several blogs that have written about a new book that has been published. The name of the book is Wine Trials and the premise involves 100 wines under $15 that when brown bagged and placed in front of normal everyday people they preferred them to $50 and $150 wines. I know that several people have written on this already, but none of them seem to understand why this represents all that is wrong with the majority view of wine in this country, and our approach to understanding. I have to admit that I have not read the book and may be speaking out of my arse, and if that is the case someone please let me know, but I do not really think that I need to read it. I am pretty sure I know what it is going to say, first that normal everyday people prefer cheap wine and second that there is no correlation between price and quality. Shocker...I could have told you that without writing a book. We are all missing the bigger picture.
The first problem is that the wines were blind tasted. We know that in a blind tasting the wines that show the best are those with the most flavor. I have said it before and I will say it again...STOP the MADNESS of BLIND TASTING!!! It is ONLY beneficial for the development and refinement of your own palate. That being said, most of the 50-150 bottles of wine were probably spoofulated, so that argument only holds up if some of the wines rejected were subtle and graceful.
The second problem which Eric Asimov briefly alluded to when he wrote about this on his blog has to do with baby tastes and what all the corporations are well aware of. Novice wine drinkers gravitate toward what they understand and those are most often the sweet, fake fruits in many cheap wines. I have long been a student of Scripture and to quote St. Paul, "When I was a child I spoke as a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me." Over the years my own tastes have evolved, but this only comes with learning and understanding. At the time there were not many spoofulated wines or frakenwines so I did not have the same obstacles facing new wine drinkers today. Instead of rejecting a wine because it did not appeal to my tastes, I would try to understand it even if I did not prefer it. That approach has led to an appreciation of a broad style of wines. If you never seek to learn or understand your tastes will never evolve. This excerpt borrowed from last years Terry Thiese catalog gives us a picture of this and how it is being played out in the world of wine.
“...The borderline between enough and too much is a crucial aspect of the wine drinking experience. Today it is not at all uncommon for wines to make a pretty plausible and superficially attractive impression in the first moment—sweet and fruity aromas, then a soft, round taste—but after only a glass it starts to tasting like unbearably gooey kitsch. The wine has not changed, rather the drinker has
realized that the liquid in his glass is all make-up and silicone, possibly lacking any real body beneath these cosmetics. I call this taste fluffy white bunny because this type of wine appeals to our BABY- TASTE. Unlike adult-taste which is culturally-determined and therefore a serious obstacle to trans- cultural wine brands—the undeclared goal of the handful of huge companies who today dominate global wine sales—baby-taste is the same the world over. The truth is though that hardly any wines naturally have a fluffy-white-bunny taste. Nearly all of them acquire this in the cellar where the technical possibilities for the manipulation of wine are now almost unlimited. Only computer-generated virtual reality is more completely malleable, which means that in these corporations’ industrial production facilities the taste of vine biodiversity, of place and of regional wine traditions all become part of the COLLATERAL DAMAGE in the global wine sales war. . . . There are other descriptors for this NO WHERE PLANET-WINE taste which is determined by marketing plans and quarterly figures.Reinhard Lowenstein of Heymann-Lowenstein in Winningen/Mosel calls it Plastico-Fantastico-Viagra, making clear how the enormous success of this wine style is based upon artificially stimulated desire...”
Basically over the years instead of taking the time to educate consumers and the wine drinking public the large corporations have instead decided to create a coca-cola wine geared to those baby tastes. The problem is that unless you are making fortified, late-harvest, or Amarone wines these sweet flavors are not naturally present. To make a dry table wine with these flavors, the feat must be accomplished in the laboratory. Unfortunately these "wines" started to receive favorable scores from the critics. Because they would only spend a small amount of time with these wines, they did not see it turn into the gooey kirsch candy flavors, or maybe they did and liked it. Whatever the reason these wines started to sell and since the wine market is so over saturated, people began crafting their wines in this fashion with no regard to terrior.
If we are ever to change this we must change our approach to wine. Instead of coming to it with expectations of what we want to taste or what we prefer we must approach it as a student wanting to learn and appreciate what the land has given us. This can only be done with wines that are truly being made to express terrior. Then if we explore the different appellations and grape varietals we can begin to understand the tastes that we prefer. It is a long road, but so rewarding to those who are willing to travel it.
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