Adam Gopnik on the crisis in criticism, Purple Drank and Orwell and more:
"Somewhere in the middle pages of “1984,” Winston Smith is being inducted into the shadowy and, as it turns out, nonexistent “Brotherhood” of resistance to Big Brother, and, to celebrate, the Inner Party member O’Brien pours him a glass of wine. Winston has never had wine before, but he has read about it, and he is desperately excited to try it, since he expects it to taste like blackberry jam and to be instantly intoxicating. Instead, of course, the wine tastes the way wine tastes the first time you taste it—a bit acidic and bitter—and a single sip, or glass, isn’t intoxicating at all. The intensity of this experience as a model of disappointment was significant enough for Orwell so that he inserted it in his dystopia right there among all the greater horrors—as though the future weren’t bad enough, that whole wine thing will go on, too.
Fifty years later, we live in a wine world where, for the first time, there are wines that do taste like blackberry jam and are instantly intoxicating, or nearly so, and how these wines came into being is the subject of a new book, “Noble Rot” (Norton; $24.95), by William Echikson. The book tells the story of the wine life of the Bordeaux region of France over the past twenty years, and, though Echikson does not quite have the narrative skills to assemble it, he lays out all the pieces of a first-class Henry James comedy about the brutality of American innocence, the helplessness of French sophistication, and the need for intoxicants that are always called by some other name and claimed for some other purpose."