Adam Gopnik - The Table Comes First

The real question is not whether wine snobs and wine writers are big phonies but whether they are any bigger phonies than, say, book reviewers or art critics. For with those things, too, context effects are overwhelming. All description is impressionistic, and all impressions are interpretive. Colors and shapes don’t emerge from pictures in neat packages to strike the eye, either, any more than plots and themes come direct to the mind from the pages of books. Everything is framed by something. Once again, the essential dialogue between the frame of our expectations and the experience of our senses is not the thing to be defeated when we talk about our hungers, but the thing to be celebrated: it is what gives shape to our sensorium.

It is perfectly possible—in fact, almost certainly true—that given the wrong frame, or no frame at all, all of our responses to wine would vanish into one big buzzing confusion. If all the grape juice in Bordeaux or Napa were poured into vats, without labels or corkscrews or prior knowledge, it really might all taste the same. Anyway, no elaborate rhetoric of compliments is meant to be “accurate”; it is meant to be complimentary. When Shakespeare compares his lover to a summer’s day, he doesn’t really mean that she (or he) is like a summer’s day in that she is hotter in the middle and cooler at the ends—though, then again, he might. Wine writing is of the same type: a series of elaborately plausible compliments paid to wines. When the French wine writer Eric Glatre declares, say, that in the aroma of a bottle of Krug “intense empyreumatic fragrances of toasted milk bread, fresh butter, café au lait, and afterthoughts of linden join in a harmonious chorus with generous notes of acacia honey, mocha, and vanilla,” he is suggesting that, of all the analogies out there, this might be one that expands our minds, opens our horizons, delights our imaginations. He is offering a metaphor, not an account book.

In this way, the intersection of French sensibility and modern science suggests not so much the limits of Parker as the limits of naïve American empiricism: numbers and honesty and transparency only get you so far in the world. Our experiences of everything are too mediated—by contexts and intentions and likeness—to be summed up in a number. It is exactly the disputable quality of the compliments we pay to wine that makes them touch the lower edge of art. Once again, De gustibus solum est disputandum . Only matters of taste are worth arguing over.

Between the rhetorical and the real lies ritual. And wine is a ritual thing before it is any other kind of thing. The history of wine provides the not surprising but always reassuring news that there is, from the very beginning of viniculture, no sorting out the need for intoxication from the necessity of ritual, the desire to drink from the debt to structure. The story of wine seems to begin someplace out in the “Transcaucasus”—today’s Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—when the first Vitis viniferas grapes got grown. The astonishing thing about wines is that they are like dogs: there is endless apparent variety we can squeeze from what is, in the end, one species. Had Darwin been a wine-drinker, instead of an English port man, he might have chosen to use the varieties of wine, shaped by man from one unchanging grape into a thousand terroirs , to make his point about variation produced under selective pressure. (Actually, Darwin did do important work in the history of wine, and not just because he was one of the first Englishmen to taste New Zealand reds. He made the essential point that the grapevine will produce tendrils, to climb with, or grapes, to reproduce with, and that this is a vestige of the vine’s ancient forest habitat, where it could “choose” either to climb higher to reach sunlight, or stop where it was and make fruit. And, not coincidentally, he helped save French wine. It was Darwinian evolutionary principles that helped French biologists discover, at the time of the great phyloxera crisis of the late nineteenth century, the one thing that might save French wine. They realized that, since the root louse causing the plague was American, the American vines on which it must once have lived must surely have evolved resistance to it—and it was the grafting of New World roots onto Old World vines that saved Burgundy and Bordeaux. Before Darwin, it seems likely that the last thing vintners would have done is go back to the same vines that had carried the plague to supply the cure.)

What we find in all the ancient wine cultures is not a slow growth from a disorganized Bacchanalia to an evolved ritual practice, from simple intoxication to information system. On the contrary, wine ritual and wine-drinking seem to have been inseparable from the very first. Wine, after all, though a natural product, isn’t a simple one: even the plainest garage wines demand a complex grasp of a multipart process; leave it in the vat and let it rot doesn’t work very well. You have to think it even as you drink it. So it’s no surprise that everywhere we turn, even in the most ancient wine writing, we find gods and demigods, vessels and special glasses—the absurd paraphernalia of the wine lover, with his tasting glasses and little fridge, stretches back to the beginning of time.

From the beginning, wine and wine culture has been a halfway house between the sacramental and the social. In Neolithic cultures there are already inscriptions and decorations on wine vessels. As the scholar Patrick McGovern tells us, at the end of Old Kingdom Egypt, around 2200 B.C., there is already a system of “AOC,” appellation contrôlée , designations of the kind that France arrived at only in the nineteenth century: wines in mortuary tablets seem to be grouped around the names of well-known wineries in the Nile Delta. They are called Northern wine, abesh wine, and sunu wine. In New Kingdom pottery inscriptions, referred to as ostraca and dated to around 1350 B.C., wines are rated as “genuine,” “good,” “very good,” and even “very, very good”—a blunter and more useful system, in its way, than the French “Grand Cru Classé” and our own regional markings. “Wine snobbery” of this sort, a compulsive need to rate and class and compare, far from being a late invention, seems inseparable from the activity itself. It is as if from the start wine-drinkers grasped that without a mental frame of comparison, without words to structure tastes, the pleasures of wine drinking would be lessened. Egyptian wine-drinkers wanted to know if they were drinking abesh or sunu , and they wanted to know if it was merely genuine or very good—and doubtless they then turned toward each other in profile and said, “They’re calling this abesh ‘very, very good’—but then, Parker always overrates abesh .”

The question about such judgments, mixing snobbishness and sense, is not whether they exist—they exist in the minds of the people who feel them; that’s enough—but what they are about . For the true wine snob, they are about the ability to make them, and this is just sad. For the French wine critic—a generalized type, but one who exists—they are about the ability to make a map inside your mind: to taste tastes and see places. For the American wine critic, they are about the ability to offer consumers a quality beverage. What they rarely seem to be about is drinking wine. Paul Draper, the great winemaker from Ridge Vineyards in California, has had the honesty to say that he wishes there were more drinkers in the wine world and less tasting. He means by this not that more people should get drunk, but that more people should accept the totality of the experience of wine as it really is, instead of amputating one bit of the whole activity and fetishizing it.