Brave New World?
Brave New World?
Or, how Affirmative Action infiltrated the mundus vini
‘And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, “The old is better”’ (Luke 5:39)
‘There might be reasons for considering wine a poor choice of the only working life you’ll ever have. It’s an alcoholic drink, after all: addictive for some; damaging for all if misused; necessary for none. Wine brings pleasure, but you can’t call it art; wine softens life’s edges, but it’s not first aid, nor does it constitute primary care. You don’t make the world a better place, nor society more just, with wine… [but] what matters, in the end, is that we value wine as one of the most beautiful of human artefacts, and one whose being reflects, with shocking fidelity, the unconformities and irregularities of our earthly home.’ So says Andrew Jefford, one of the more Romantic wine writers. His is a wine weltanschauung that Byron and Keats would have felt at home in, with the reverence and reverie that the subject demands. There is, however, a problem. Wine, as we shall see, is undergoing a debasement — a lowering of standards, and a crisis of identity.
It is not my mandate in the present article to defend the practice of drinking, but it will suffice for the moment to say that much good has and may be done under the influence. Scruton had at least the presence of mind to drag drinking from the nasty grasping hands of the Woke moralists, and back into the realm of the living, showing ‘that wine is compatible with virtue’. Indeed, civilisation, which is at least in part a communion of the virtuous, demands wine at its table. It is my aim, if little else, to convince you that wine is something worth taking seriously — and, more importantly, worth enjoying.
Winos are similar in some ways to proselytes, whose faces beam with truth long-kept from themselves but attainable to all, should they only listen. By contrast, bad wine and its proponents, not to mention abolitionists beside, remind us all too well of Dawkins and the New Atheists, whose sophistry betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the subject matter writ large and the very beliefs of their opponents. They don’t really want you to enjoy wine; theirs is the ‘the wine of Dionysus… the coarsest vintage, intended to blind with drunkenness rather than enliven whimsy’, to return to Bentley-Hart. It is a dull and baffling existence. Settling for mediocrity — let alone encouraging it — is not only unnecessary, but harmful. ‘Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.’
Where, though, has all this come from? The road to hell is paved with good intentions: to save consumers’ money, to provide something for everyone, even — and this is where ‘affirmative action’ principles start to seep in — to draw attention to ‘underappreciated’ places (whatever that means). But this isn’t really what wine is about. The hard truth is this: bad wine is not worth drinking. It isn’t really — teleologically, if not materially speaking — wine. If you are sozzled and blotto, wine is nothing but a carrier for alcohol, and there are many cheaper and more efficient means of achieving intoxication than wine. I contest, too, the notion that cheap wine is any more agreeable to the palate than, say, spirits with mixers, if this is your purpose (which I shall not criticise). We must, I argue, reject this debasement of wine, and instead encourage good standards. The vintners will listen.
Wine, however, does mark our boundaries. If there is a divide of ‘class,’ it is not one rooted in wealth; for we know that money cannot buy taste. The Deanos demonstrate just as much: it is unproblematic to leave them to their Peaky Blinders wall-art, or framed football shirts, each precariously set on the wall of their new-build Deano Box. Let the gleeful Turkey Teeth gleam like the shield of Achilles. But do not let them pretend to taste, as if a parallel category where sententiae non disputandum might really be true just for them. Like Visigoths left to wander the empty halls of the sacked palaces and mausolea, not quite sure what to do with themselves or their newfound endowment, they are happily left to Jaegerbombs and Barefoot spritzers, ‘for,’ as Cavafy writes, ‘such things amaze the barbarians’. And so long as we maintain the respect of the noble savage, there will be peace.
On the verso, we ought not to pretend that wine is the sole property of the elite; it does not belong to them, nor does our possession and understanding of it socially elevate us. Scruton asks, with some self-awareness, ‘how do we sneak into the upper echelons without looking ridiculous?’; the venerable PAW suggests, ‘middle class ppl b in favour of an open bordeaux policy’. We find ourselves locked out of the party by our own admission.
This demands a reimagining of wine, rather than ourselves. No self-respecting wino ought to look upon the Veblenian practices of elite drinkers with envy; their cellars impossibly stocked with bottles untouched save by dust. Perhaps it might be nice to try a Lafite, should the opportunity arise, but we know that such things are not worth the cost. So, we must set our sights lower, and dig deeper. Learning about wine reveals that ‘all that is gold does not glitter’, and that great wine will be found at affordable prices. This will, invariably, although our path may be winding, take us back home to the Old World. Snobbery it may be, but gatekeeping it is not.
As mentioned, the drive towards the New World is, in part, based on price. Industrial producers make low-risk wine in vast quantity; large-scale merchants peddle the stuff by the case, shipping gallon after gallon of crap wine into our homes in the name of convenience and cost. And Greta, if you’re reading, apparently it’s also bad for the environment. In any case, the drinking world, for some reason, has convinced itself of the need for a low-standard, easy-drinking, reasonably cheap booze-up. Most people will spend around £5-6 (and perhaps £8 at a push) on a bottle of wine, which is really not enough to get anywhere interesting, though the market rewards it. We’re left there with this sort of Marvel-esque, uncritical, commodified slop. £5 Cava thus rules the day, and convinces the average consumer, even the comparatively wealthy average consumer, that this is as good as it gets.
A 2023 article from Bibendum Wines usefully details the neekonomics of wine in Britain:
With the recent budget announcement, duty remains frozen across all alcohol, with duty on wine remaining at £2.23 per bottle. So, when buying a £5.50 bottle of wine in the UK, only 21p pays for the wine itself. This is considerably less than the £2.48-worth of wine you get with a £10 bottle or the £6.67 with a £20 bottle. Not only do you get better quality for your money when you spend more, but this value rises at a much faster rate with bottle price.
‘Utility’ is, of course, an inherently personal and subjective concept; but, if we look beyond the alcohol content (which is, of course, basically consistent), this points strongly towards only very weakly diminishing returns as a bottle of wine gets more expensive — quite the opposite of what many naturally assume to be true.
Given this basic economic reality, no one should be surprised that, at least in Britain, the price floor to purchase anything even remotely acceptable in taste is rather higher than many would like to admit. I have been puzzled by the response of normal drinkers when I suggest that, at a bare minimum, you ought to spend £10-12 on a bottle; and that really you ought to be spending at least £15-18 on your standard bottle of mid-week wine. Depending on how much you drink, this is not a tremendous cost — and if it is an expense twice, thrice, or more a week, I invite you reconsider what place wine takes at your table, versus harder spirits or kindlier beers, depending on your inclination. Certainly, a Madri would do a great deal more for your Men’s Mental Health than a rancid, overpriced pub wine, or a £5 bottle of toilet cleaner from the offie.
The biggest lie of them all is the feeble retort that expensive wine is no better than cheap wine, and that it’s all in the branding. As the economics alone would strongly suggest, this is manifestly untrue; and indeed, this is proven as much by the practice of blind tasting. Tasting different wines in comparison, though not the most enjoyable way of drinking — I happen not to believe in wine pairing either, which is a controversial and somewhat philistine position to hold, but one that I just can’t shake — is a useful exercise for various reasons, chiefly because it institutes hierarchy. I think it unlikely that anyone would say that all the wines in a flight are different but equal, and that diversity is the strength of the lot. Rather, we affirm that this wine is better than that, for this reason or another. Even if we’re playing with strong contenders, it stands to reason that preference will prevail, to make value judgements based on what we know intuitively to be good, well-made wine — and such a practice will help us to refine our palate and build our repertoire. This does not require us to abandon preference to subjectivism, and say that because everyone likes something different, there is no point trying to compare or assess wines. You might say that you prefer Alma-Tadema to Waterhouse, but that doesn’t give Gauguin the right to slip through the door.
However, some wine reviewers do seem instinctively drawn to review cheap wines, like bored literary critics who turn their eyes to bold, brave, tenuously legible poetry from the streets; output, I can only imagine, that they are only pretending to enjoy. It is a bit, perhaps, like having a celebrity guest judge a children’s art competition. Eccentrics like Luca Maroni can give a £6.50 bottle of wine ‘10,000 points’ if they really want, but that doesn’t make these wines actually good. Many wine writers are quick to come to the defence of cheaper wines and say, for instance, that screw caps don’t really mean anything versus natural cork — which may be true — but aren’t they dull? The gawping desire to defend low-effort practices gets consumers nowhere: no joy, no ambition, no way out — just mediocrity all the way to the bottom.
‘Ah!’, you might say. ‘The Judgement of Paris proved all this Old World bigotry wrong.’ The ‘Judgement of Paris’, for those readers who are less acquainted with wine history, refers to a famous 1976 wine competition in Paris in which Californian wines outcompeted French wines in a blind taste test by French wine tasters. It is true that American wines have outscored French wines on peculiar occasion, but this example is an historical abnormality. It was, really, the Cool Runnings of wine tournaments. No small wonder, too, that the controversy takes place among the most competitive and unaffordable entries — wines that you and I, dear reader, almost certainly could never afford to stock in our cellars (but if you can, please do get in touch). Cali Cab, which most clearly overperformed in 1976, is decent, clean, inoffensive stuff, if well-produced, but to get to the really expressive wines, you need to go big — and if that is the price of entry to find a genuinely competitive New World wine, then so much more the indictment on it.
Back on planet earth, there is little competition. California is infamous for its ‘recipe winemaking’, a complaint grounded in the uncanny valley. Recipe winemaking appeals to the lowest common denominator, making wine that tastes like something, a sickly-sweet alcoholic fruit juice perhaps, but it is utterly deracinated and detached from place (this word terroir we like to throw about). This sort of wine could be made from grapes, or it could be methyl anthranilate. It could be oaked, or it could have been fermented in a Traeger (and while their output is by no means the worst, the Americans are singularly responsible for the abominable, Canaanite practice of ageing in Bourbon barrels). It could be from Napa Valley, or it could be from Jonestown. In the artificer’s hands, the wine goes completely out of control, ramping up the alcohol to 100-proof, with more volatile acid than Glasto. The immortal words of Peter Koff MW ring in my head: ‘this is the full fucking catastrophe’.
The imprecision of wine tasting and description is not to its fault, but rather necessitates the adoption of a technical language system that is understood as such, in relation to prior experience. Redi describes it as being ‘something easy of perception, / but by no means of description’. Still, I can easily see why, if a perspirant Italian sommelier with a dubious DBS status begins to describe to you all the notes of red berry, pencil shavings, and Swarfega that a wine allegedly possesses, you might assume he’s talking out of his arse. To some extent he is, and particularly if this description goes on for more than three or four dominant notes; but to give him credit, he has a mighty challenge in approximating flavours to real world data. For a laugh, try reading the description on the back-label of a cheap bottle, and see how that lines up with your experience: I’d have thought ChatGPT could have written some of them (and perhaps it has, but that is a scandal yet to break if so). Or, perhaps check the Vivino reviews for something abominable like ‘19 Crimes’, the Deano Wine par excellence. ‘19 Crimes’, a quasi-novelty wine that isn’t even particularly cheap, informs us that ‘…in 1700s Britain, the sentence for 19 crimes was “Punishment by Transportation”: ship passage to Australia’s penal colonies’. Apparently, that wasn’t enough. If the information on the back label is in English, or if its syntax forms more than a simple sentence, it is probably not worth reading.
By contrast, read the back of a bottle of Claret. It might have something of a poncey French air about it, which is to be forgiven; but, importantly, it tells you this: where the wine is from (beyond a vague national designation), what’s in the bottle and in what percentage (the cuvée), and what they’ve done with it (ageing, oak-treatment, biodynamics, etc.). Rather than asking a Young Adult fiction writer to describe what they think the wine might taste like, the Old World instead gives you a description of what the wine actually is, and trusts you to understand what this means.
Old World tradition thus achieves two important things on the back of a bottle, based on particulars and universals: first, it helps you to understand what an individual wine is like immanently; and second, it trains you to understand what other wines from that pedigree are like in general. That is, I know what a particular wine from Bordeaux tastes like, and this helps me to understand what Bordeaux writ large should taste like. When I come to the next bottle, I see that it is from Bordeaux, and I can use that prior data to make an informed guess about what the wine probably tastes like. The more data given, the better: when I read that it has been aged for eighteen months in French oak, not only do I learn something about the attention of the winemaker, but also about the notes that, all being well, I can expect from the wine. Seldom do they tell you what you should be expecting to taste, which is the great fault of the lesser houses, since all that does is give you a list of flavours to imagine are there as you drink, practicing recall, rather than discernment.
You may wonder whether wine is really worth getting so worked-up over. I would argue that it is a fairly reasonable stage for a reactionary response against the culture of compromise that seeks to suck the joy out of all that is good and beautiful. The anti-kalokagathic inclinations of the Woke will continue to infiltrate and undermine such things; after all, will there be sympotic discussions on the tobacco scene among those born after 2009? Unless we take such things seriously, they will eventually come for our pet hobbies too.
To conclude, the Editor has asked for a few recommendations, to which I am pleased to oblige. At three different price points, but all highly affordable, there should be something for everyone. I’ve neglected white wine out of personal preference, but for beginners, you’re fairly safe with Riesling on the lower end, and Chablis on the higher.
Castillo San Lorenzo Rioja Reserva 2015, Spain (£8.25, Tesco). If you absolutely insist on gratuitously ignoring all that has been said in this article and continuing to buy sub-£10 wine from supermarkets, Tempranillo (the most important grape in a Rioja, which refers to a wine region in Northern Spain) is by far your safest bet — in fact, it is the only wine I’d buy away from a merchant.* It is generally of a higher quality (nb. ‘Reserva’ here) than other wines at a similar price point, and they tend to sell it older, too — something to keep an eye out for.
(*At a push, if given no other choice, I’d also buy Viejo and Diablo. Waitrose is somewhat of an exception when it comes to supermarkets, but even then, their selection looks great on paper (good age, interesting names, etc.) but is deceptively sanitised.)
Ch. Vincens Prestige 2020, Merlot/Malbec, Cahors, France (£14.99 at a merchant). The 2016 vintage of this wine was my first love. It taught me, as a clumsy fresher, that wine could in fact be interesting, with its smoky oak notes and confident tannin structure. At this price, it really punches up, and might just convince you too.
Château Fonréaud 2017, Listrac-Médoc, France (~£20-25, Waitrose or merchants). This, for my palette, reaches perfection. Médoc — on Bordeaux’s left bank, with its slightly cooler environment owing to its proximity the Atlantic — is stunning, and gives you tasting notes that you would be ashamed to mention out loud. Fonréaud is the most bucolic expression of it that I’ve found, shamelessly showing green olive on the nose and liquorice in the back of the mouth. It is profoundly serious, but very comfortable in itself, as if quietly unbothered about having been removed from its cosy Bordelaise cellar.