Wine - A Beverage or an Intellectual Challenge?

Castello di Mongiovino, the home of the Olive University, has the good fortune of being situated in one of Italy’s wine hearts and I thought it would be useful to provide a little information about Brunello’s, Sagrantino’s, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, Torgiano Rosso’s, etc, the DOC and DOCG classifications and wrap it all up in a little wine history.  But suddenly, living in an area where, essentially, every inhabitant drinks wine everyday and where we and most of our neighbors grow our own grapes and make wine every year, I discover I know nothing.  What person in their right mind would cull perfectly good grapes from the vines in order to intensify the ones remaining?  We barely have enough grape juice for our family as it is, so the grower might say, and the cooperative isn’t going to reject our grapes because they’re not ‘grapey’ enough.1

Thinned field at Tenuta Corini, in Monte Gabione, where cost-no-object production methods are employed to produce their exceptional Frabusco.  They found it was quite difficult to convince their local Italian employees, with a lifetime of experience in the vineyards, to prune the perfectly good grapes.

Epicure versus Connoisseur

Here’s a famous story about a group of wine connoisseurs.  On May 24th, a blind tasting of eight French and twelve Californian wines took place at the Intercontinental Hotel in Paris.  There was a panel of nine French tasters with impeccable tasting credentials such as Pierre Tari, Secretary general of the Association des Grand Crus Classes and owner of Chateau Giscours, Raymond Olivier, the so-called ‘Dean’ of French culinary writers and owner of the three-star restaurant Le Grand Vefour, Michael Dovaz of the Institut Oenologique de France and Pierre Brejoux, Inspector General of the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine Contrôllée. Unfortunately for the French, disaster struck.  California white wines took three of the top four spots (a 1973 Chateau Montelena beat the French 1973 Meursault-Charmes Burgundy for first followed by two Californian Chardonnay’s).  The event’s organizer, an Englishman by the name of Steven Spurrier who ran a wine shop/school in Paris, was alarmed and told the French judges the results immediately without waiting for the reds to be tasted.3 Nevertheless, a Californian Red won also (1973 Stag’s Leap Cabernet from vines only three years old) followed by three French first-growths (1970 Mouton-Rothschild, 1970 Chateau Montrose and a 1970 Haut-Brion).  A Californian took fifth place.4 This event might very-well have been lost to history except for the presence of Time magazine correspondent George Taber who wrote an article entitled Judgement in Paris.

Suddenly distributers who would have dismissed premier Californian wine as ‘not bad for a Californian’ were beating down the doors and France’s monopoly was broken, at least outside France5 (it being to this day quite difficult to buy anything other than French wine in France).  By 2000, Britain was importing more wine from Australia than France and everybody and their brother was making a nice red (the Ottawa wine-tasting of 2005, for example had British Columbian and Ottawian wines besting their French cousins whereas Chile had won a year earlier in Berlin).  The connoisseur’s life just got exponentially harder and the Epicure’s substantially easier.6

A Man With Two Watches Never Knows the Time, or Syrah, the new Merlot

My point is this.  New world wine trends may affect the old world to the extent they are forced to compete, however, Riesling will never go out of style in Austria, Gewürztraminer will always be popular in Alsace, Merlot will forever rule in Pomerol and Sangiovese Grosso will never be replaced in Brunello.  But that doesn’t mean they won’t start fermenting in stainless steel tanks or use Hungarian oak and further, that it won’t influence the wine, but, as we shall discover in the next chapter, maybe it’s good that Bordolaise growers could never plant Sangiovese even if it is the new hot grape in California.

Move forward to December, 2005.  The European Union finally makes permanent guidelines to allow the sale of U.S. wine produced under standards prohibited in Europe.  Wine may be flavored with oak chips, water may be added, aromas manipulated and God knows what else.  The uproar is immense and the German Farm Minister says, ‘Adding woodchips to wine is unimaginable in our culture’ and proposes a ‘wine purity law’.8 Consumers, when told their wine was flavored with woodchips, are horrified and say this is completely unacceptable and yet, head to head comparisons with the same outraged consumers show they either can not tell the difference between a wine flavored with oak chips and one flavored with a barrel or preferred the oak chips.  Simply put, wine is a consumer product and image is everything.9 Also keep in mind that, although there are approx. 1,400 wineries in California, four winery groups10 control two-thirds the volume and one-half of the money in the California wine industry.

What does it all mean?  I think analyzing the wine list at the most popular U.S. Italian eating establishment Olive Garden will give you a clue.  My internet search told me their cheapest bottles of Chianti Classico is $23.00 (glass 6.25) and Cabernet is $24.00 (glass 6.50).  And the prices go up considerably.  Keeping in mind that you have to add at least 15% tip and 6% sales tax, the cheapest bottle of Chianti is pushing $28.00.  It’s no wonder that people feel a need to be an expert before ordering a bottle that probably cost $2.00 to make.  You have no choice but to make it an intellectual challenge.

But what does it mean, really?  Let me try to put things in context.  I read an article this morning mentioning that soup kitchens in France provide a full meal including cheese, wine and dessert because, simply put, that is how a meal is defined.11 When I last ate at a French truckstop, I was served a three course meal with a 250 ml screwtop bottle of wine.  An Italian will commonly tell you it is terribly unhealthy to drink anything other than wine with their meals even if they won’t have a problem diluting it with water.  Wine, for most Mediterraneans, is not a branded consumer product, rather an agricultural commodity and that commodity has been developed to accent the local cuisine.12

Of course they take pride in their local wine, but no more than in their local cheese, olives or ham.  Unfortunately, agricultural commodities sell for a fraction of the price of branded consumer goods and, with globalization, suddenly ancient wine cultures need a brand if they are going to cash in on the multi-billion dollar world wine market.13 Enter DOC/DOCG and the modern Italian wine industry which we’ll explore in the next chapter.