Essentially? Who knows. As with any meaningful thing or concept with enough depth for real meaning to exist unto itself, you can basically make any claim you want. Is it a symbol of history, place, labor, and culture? Sure. Is it the best thing to drink with your pals to demonstrate a more sophisticated set of sensibilities as your lives snowball towards embitterment, divorce, and ultimate estrangement from your grown children? Probably.
Wine, like anything capable of true beauty, deserves better than this hell-world of ours, but you and I will be damned if we don’t discuss and deconstruct this miracle of biology until all we can taste are our own farts and tears. Go out into a vineyard towards the end of spring and find yourself one of the delicate, little un-petaled blossoms, smell it, and you might understand better why it is impossible to talk about wine correctly. What makes it beautiful and powerful is as guileful and ephemeral as a line of Shakespeare’s verse. And what ruins it is knowing that Laurence Olivier once did blackface to portray Othello. Trying to parse the beauty of a thing from all the ugliness of the world, and the terrifying weight of context, is enough to drive anyone insane, which might be the best case for forgiving wine critics.
Everyone wants to have the right opinions. Which is all well and good until you go out into the world and discover that there is no such thing. In the same way, for every column inch written in Wine Spectator about $400 bottles of Italian wine, someone is buying Mad Dog 20/20 from a gas station. Under the weight of this suspicion (because it’s more of a guess than a fact) what is one to say about what wine means? To plenty of people, wine is nothing but their preferred way to get drunk. And that’s fine. Plenty of those people are French and live adjacent to wineries and plenty more are in Arkansas and have a truck covered in decals of Calvin pissing on various democratic politicians. Nothing makes coherent sense, and insisting that it should will only push you to drinking for the wrong reasons. But hey, “wrong” is only my opinion baby, this world sucks, drown your sorrows however you can. Endorsements of alcoholism aside, does wine have its own terms by which we should give it estimation? Personally, I think the answer is “yeah”. There are parts of the world bizarrely well suited to the growing of vitis vinifera, which is, even in its most fickle forms, an all around amazingly tenacious plant. Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Riesling are all very particular in how they relate to the place they are grown and enough nut-cases go chasing down this ground that we have incredible examples of each, across a whole spectrum of what those relationships can be. Meanwhile, Carlo Rossi is more than happy to convince you that you can buy Chablis by the gallon. What am I saying? “Fuck you”, that’s what. The best you can do is figure out what wine means to you. Once you do, don’t go holding it against anyone else for whom that meaning might be different. Just keep in mind that nobody who scores wine wants you to feel good about having your own opinion. We do though, so subscribe to our Patreon.
Cork Taint 