© Robert Mondavi Private Selection | Mondavi's
"quirky" offering still hinges on using a familiar grape.
Por Oliver Styles
En la
década de 1940, el escritor argentino Jorge Luis Borges escribió una historia
corta llamada "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote". En él, Borges habla
de Menard, que deseaba ir más allá de la traducción de Don Quijote y se había
sumergido en el mundo de Cervantes y Cervantes, que pudo recrear la novela de
Don Quijote, palabra por palabra. Esta "recreación" por una persona
diferente, en un momento diferente, pone en tela de juicio todo tipo de
cuestiones relacionadas con la autoría, el "significado" de una obra
de literatura y la naturaleza de la escritura y la crítica.
The idea of recreating wines in a laboratory
offers opportunities and unintended consequences.
By Oliver Styles
Back in the
1940s, Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story called
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote". In it, Borges talks of
Menard, who so wished to go beyond a translation of Don Quixote and so immersed
himself in Cervantes and Cervantes' world, that he was able to recreate the Don
Quixote novel, word-for-word. This "recreation" by a different
person, in a different time, calls into question all sorts of issues around
authorship, the "meaning" of a work of literature and the nature of
writing and criticism.
And like
with Borges' piece, if you want to understand a lot about the nature of wine,
your best starting point is to immerse yourself in the world of fake wine. In
this instance I'm taken with the possibility of "recreating" great
wines from scratch, synthetically reproducing them, as it were.
The
reception this story garners is interesting. Firstly, within Meiningers'
original piece is the reference to one of the originators who used to work in a
natural wine bar – a line reminiscent of the flip, reported to happen in some
people, from the extreme Left of the political spectrum to the far Right. Many,
from Orwell to Chomsky, have found this a curious phenomenon. I'll leave that
there.
Secondly –
and similarly – is the apparent acceptance of this as a potential reality. It
is almost jaw-dropping that many beacons of the wine industry, those quick to
castigate illicit forgery or to protect the names of "Champagne" or
"Sauternes" and the sanctity of Burgundy Grand Crus, find themselves
amused by the potential to whip up some knock-off vintage bubbly or a Pinot
Grigio by 21st Century alchemy. No, this sort of thing is a geeky diversion, a
curio. I wonder what those cheeky boys will get up to in that lab...?
But if wine
professionals are okay with this development, you have to wonder where they
draw the line? Cooked, ground-up cockroaches in jellified bricks like we see in
the gut-churning scene of the film Snowpiercer may be a bit beyond the pale.
Rudi Kurniawan with three different vintages of DRC (Domaine de la
Romanée-Conti), an oven and the blood of a virgin – or whatever it was he used
– also too much. But three geeks in a garage in San Fran? There could be
something in this.
What's
equally galling is that they've raised $12.7 million – enough to get them a
half-decent vineyard in Burgundy, or something in Santa Barbara – and we're
rooting for them to make a lookalike wine with a lab?
The real
tragedy – as is the real tragedy behind all wine forgery – is that the
lookalikes already exist. Yquem is not the only vineyard in Sauternes. In fact,
Sauternes isn't the only sweet appellation in Bordeaux. Want a knock-off Yquem?
Get yourself to Sainte-Croix-du-Mont. It's good and reasonably cheap and tastes
enough like Yquem. Sure, it's not Yquem, but if you really, really want Yquem,
go buy Yquem.
© Aquitaine
Visite | A bottle of Sainte-Croix-du-Mont, a worthy alternative to Yquem.
That there
might be a market for knock-off wines is an illustration of the tacit failure
of both classic and social media to fight back against the developing luxury
market and some of the marketing in wine. What has happened is that hype and
concentrated wealth have combined to produce wines that are an apogee, wines
that everyone talks about and then, through the envy/ostentation/narcissism/sycophancy
vortex that is social media, and the headline-obsessed real media, we get a
concentration of paradigms. Everything else doesn't register.
No one
wants a Sainte-Croix-du-Mont because no one is interested in what these wines
actually taste like. You can't "like" that. Personal experience can't
be retweeted if it doesn't have a label. If you're not a critic, do the
experiment yourself: publish an image on Instagram of a $20 bottle of wine and
say it was your wine of the year; then publish an image of a bottle of Krug or
an Ao Yun and compare the difference in "likes" or reposts. I did it
myself last year – it's actually sad to witness first hand. Popularity creates
its own momentum.
What's
further tragic is that, if you look at the new trend of "gimmicky"
wines (Penfolds blending wine with Beijiu or Mondavi ageing Chardonnay in
Bourbon barrels), you have further illustration of the failure of our
communicators (from marketeers to the nominally unbiased). For instance, imagine
yourself in the Robert Mondavi boardroom when this came up:
A: Hey,
Ted, sales of entry-level Chardonnay are slipping, maybe we could give the
customer something different?
B: What
about Viognier? Or, hey, I hear there are some pretty interesting – and cheap –
Italian varietals coming online in enough quantity and quality to make some
good stuff in good volumes – would be a good tie-in with our Italian
heritage...
A: You mean
we have to market Fiano and Arneis to the consumer?
C: What
about putting Chardonnay in whiskey barrels?
A: That's
more like it.
Which only
goes to prove that, if you're on the board of directors, the only wine you're
really concerned about is the wine you drink, not the wine you sell.
And sure,
we can put this down to R&D – to innovation, if you will – and the
inexorable march of progress. But the circumstances that lead to these
decisions are interesting – and perhaps hopeful. Because for all the existential
angst on Twitter that opposed those who saw gimmicky wines more a curio than a
concern (and there has been a lot), their very presence indicates that there is
a consumer segment that is tired of the current, workhorse offering – they are
ready for something different. That the marketing departments of these
companies consider it easier to take that poor old horse, superglue a cone on
its nose, give it a spray paint and kick it back onstage than they do to say:
"what about a zebra?" shows just how desperate it is to market
anything that isn't outside the 12 main grape varieties. But the germ of hope
is there.
We
fetishise gimmickry and idolise wines that are already great, leading us to
trickery and fakery in all sorts of shades without realising that it is
unbelievably easy to find brilliant mimics without buying forgeries and without
owning a fortune – you just have to decide whether you wish to aggressively
smash your Instagram feed with it or go a bit Al-Quaeda and go off the grid for
the experience.
Furthermore,
if you're tired of workhorse offerings please, take yourself to a natural wine
bar. Or buy a wine made from a grape you wouldn't find in France. And while,
honestly, I'm ambivalent about Beijiu in wine – sure there's a cynicism to it
but... whatever – if the wine/spirit blend is your thing, Sherry and Port are
categories that could do with your support. Treasury Wine Estates (the owner of
Penfolds) has a turnover of Aus$2.5billion – about four times the export value
of the entire Port industry (around US$500m).
By all
means call me a Luddite or a reactionary, but I remember going to Jerez as a
journo, tasting phenomenal wines only to sit down to dinner one evening and
have the owner of a Sherry house hand out cocktail recipes for his blended
Sherries. Sure, it was just blended Sherries, but you didn't have to look into
his eyes. I did.
Fuente: Wine- Searcher
