Tom Wark on a "Cry from the Heart", discuss

WINE TALK
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http://fermentation.typepad.com/fermentation/2010/06/a-fascinating-cri-de-coeur-over-wine.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Here’s the thing: most consumers don’t drink the wine they buy in the vineyard. It’s essentially an elitist point of view that one can only ‘get it’ if the wine is tasted in the cellar or vineyard with the winemaker over your shoulder telling you what you should taste and how various techniques have made the end product. And you probably see where I’m going: tasting at the producer’s shop will introduce bias. Critics froth at the mouth it seems when given the opportunity to taste En Primeur at the invitation of the Bordelais. Is their understanding enhanced by tasting hand selected barrel samples or are they being biased and manipulated?

I’m not arguing against context, however. There is no one truth, and context is so very important for understanding any wine. A Parkerized wine viewed in vacuum is an odd beast, like a shark grafted to a rhino’s shoulder, but when you understand that its purpose is to battle head to head in a war of 1-2 oz. pours of cocktails, then its exaggerated form makes more sense.

I absolutely agree it is important to understand where wine comes from and its suitable context as a table wine, cocktail or otherwise. Probably the most sensible way to better connect people to the terroir and culture is to drink locally. You can experience the culture surrounding it, and reduce the carbon footprint as well. Ttravelling to the vines in Italy is expensive, impractical and has a massive carbon footprint.

Roberto, I’m sure you’ll be the first to volunteer to drink locally with SoCal wine [wink.gif] . It reflects its culture in terms of its excess, conspicuous consumption, aspirational nature and general shallowness!

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In terms of Atkin’s comments as quoted, I think it’s nonsense. Imagine the result if you substitute consumers for critics:

"Consumers who drink wines without visiting the country they come from are insane and insulting… "

If you take his comments to their logical conclusion, no one should ever export wine unless you can guarantee that the consumer has visited the wine region of origin. Which is a remarkably silly proposition, I think.

Bruce

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Well, my take is that it is a responsibility of both critics and importers (and the retailers / restaurants who buy from them) to both understand and communicate that context for wines that, stylistically, speak an entirely different language than “mainstream” wines while aiming at entirely different targets.

MANY such wines are made by vignerons who do NOT go out of their way to sell outside their own markets but have been discovered by importers actively looking for something “different” and sometimes “REALLY different” (Jura, Tazzelenghe, LDH Rioja, Barolo Chinato) and may have even had to be courted / hounded to AGREE to export.

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While Atkin’s prose is comically antagonistic, his point about a critic basing their ‘opinion’ on research, not just samples, is well warranted. He’s an MW, for God’s sake, whose trade tools are undoubtedly grounded in research and well built on accurate frames of reference for the wines/regions he reviews.

It is critical that tasting, evaluating and communicating your review has to be from within an appropriate frame of reference - the market (i.e. trade and non-trade) relies on a critic’s sound interpretation of a wine’s complexities, nuances and significance vis a vis other producers/wines/players from the same market. Plus, the market is constantly changing and evolving, having a bidirectional impact on the cultural contexts from which these wine emerge. I just had a

I’m just hoping these types of academic discussions will translate to generating a hunger among a greater mass of peeps for the types of wines that scream place rather than points.

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One of the challenges here is that I didn’t attend the underlying conference, so I didn’t hear the entire speech. So the “context” for “context” is a bit unclear. In that regard, reading Tom’s quotations, I’m having a hard time finding the exact quotations in the linked article itself…

Reading the comments referenced in the linked article, I think taken as a whole, I agree with a lot of what Mr. Atkins is quoted as having said on the subject of the fine wine market as a whole. I certainly agree that people should broaden their horizons for “fine wine” far beyond the limits of Bordeaux, for example.

Anyway, back to context. I don’t think a critic (and let me stick with critic here) needs to walk through countless vineyard after vineyard simply to absorb “context” for tasting and evaluating wines. After all, you can’t really tell what the resulting wine will taste like simply by walking through a vineyard. From my perspective, the most important “context” is to taste a wide variety of wines from that region made from the same grape or blend of grapes, and to constantly update that tasting comparison.

The “context” that I think you are referring to is more the food/wine context–i.e., the idea that certain wines are produced specifically to pair with the unique foods of the same region. You may have an “oddball wine” (to use your phrase) that doesn’t play well with a wide variety of international dishes, but that does work well with certain unique regional dishes. Of course, marketing that wine to an international audience, especially one that may not have access to (or a preference for) the regional cuisine presents a different set of challenges. In any event, walking through a vineyard per se doesn’t help you with those food/wine pairing challenges.

Bruce

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“The “context” that I think you are referring to is more the food/wine context–i.e., the idea that certain wines are produced specifically to pair with the unique foods of the same region. You may have an “oddball wine” (to use your phrase) that doesn’t play well with a wide variety of international dishes, but that does work well with certain unique regional dishes.”

Bruce, often you can find the same elements of that regional cuisine in ANOTHER regional cuisine. This is why Friulian whites are so good with most Japanese food or Spanish Rosados rock with Oaxacan mole. It is sussing out THOSE global connections that allows them to be sold to a wider market.

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Something must be in the air, Matt Kramer on the same idea:

http://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/42838" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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From Kramer’s post…

After all, I had already tasted a lot of them. But I had no clue about why the wines taste the way they do, which is to say no real “knowing” of the culture that creates them and how that culture itself is changing. And how, in turn, that cultural evolution might transform the wines yet again.

This is why you can never understand a wine until you’ve seen where it’s grown. It’s why you can’t truly understand someone until you’ve met their family and visited where they were raised. It’s no different with wine—fine wine, anyway.

I think this is true (and he notes earlier that you can become expert in wines without visiting, but tries to differentiate that from understanding why they are the way they are). However, I don’t think the kind of understanding he’s talking about is something you can get from a visit here and there. I’ve spent, perhaps, 2.5 or 3 months in Italy over the years, yet do I deeply ‘get’ the Italians? No. I’m not fluent in Italian, I didn’t grow up there, my sensibilities are different. If I lived there for a year or 2 i’d come much closer, but still…

So, in Kramer’s terms, most of us will never get “why the wines taste the way they do… [a] real “knowing” of the culture that creates them and how that culture itself is changing” for the regions we buy wine from. At the end of the day, this seems like a nice thing to aspire to but, being unobtainable for most people, a bit irrelevant to the fine wine drinker.