Shut Up and Drink!

Peter Pharos at Tim Atkin’s site argues that wine has entered its postmodern period:

There is no canon, and no real rules. Traditions and hierarchies are everywhere, as a pastiche. Narratives are simultaneously historical and ahistorical. Critics have never felt more irrelevant and more ubiquitous. The discourse feels superficial and concocted. This week’s bane of influencers is next week’s promoter of big brands. Last season’s diligent scholar is this season’s ardent salesperson. There is a prevalent feeling that, as long as some money is still being made, everyone is in on the joke.

If you’re a wine writer, this is a good description of where we are and it’s appropriately called “postmodernism.”

The French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” By “metanarratives” Lyotard means large-scale, overarching stories about civilization that legitimize cultural practices and make the local stories we tell ourselves cohere. Wine too had its metanarratives and it is their declining relevance to which Peter is pointing.

Originally there was an overarching story about wine traditions—what he calls the classical period. Most everyone agreed that the best vineyards were in France and to a degree in Italy. They had been around for centuries with successive generations working the land. Those vineyards produced distinctive wines with distinctive flavors, and wine writers could write charming stories about the families behind the wines and the vintage variations that made each year unique. It was a well-organized world with agreed upon values and a common framework for discussing taste.

Then we enter wine’s modernist period. New technology and methods of viticulture improved the general level of wine quality which made it possible to make good wine in Australia, South America, and the U.S. Formerly ignored regions of the old world—Spain and Germany—increased their quality and production. With increased travel and communications, a global wine market emerged replete with Parker points to keep track of it all and an international style that sanded the rough edges off local tastes. Wine writers too became global travelers telling stories about who is up and who is down, which new tastes are authorized and which are not, and most of all tracking emerging regions, under-the-radar varietals, and the winemaking gurus that made it all happen.

Inevitably there was a backlash against all this technology and globalism, and wine enters its late-modern period. A return to the old ways is the battle cry of the natural wine movement. But you can never go home if your home has been burned to the ground. As Peter writes:

The last great wine movement, natural wine, was modernism’s reductio ad absurdum. Natural wine was simultaneously technical (you need a very solid understanding of winemaking and viticulture to make decent natural wine) and anti-technological. Simultaneously fiercely local, and unnervingly globalised. (For all the talk of tradition and terroir, its central nervous system seemed to consist of a few postcodes in a handful of the usual trendsetting metropolises.) It was ostensibly a rebuke to marketing, while having the strongest, cleverest marketing strategy of the 21st century – and partially inherently, unconsciously so. But natural wine’s real revolution was its uprooting of the conventions of wine aesthetics.

The aesthetics of natural wine spanned the spectrum of great to cringeworthy with the awful passing itself off as “terroir.”

And so here we are with all our little dramas but no way to make sense of it all. We write the same stories we wrote before “but it has all the authenticity of a Civil War reenactment. “

The new stories, he argues, are about social justice and climate change, issues the wine world can do little about in the larger scheme of things.

But, alas, unless you’re a writer don’t despair. He rightfully points out

“For all the intellectual cul-de-sac we find ourselves in, there has never been a better time to drink wine.”

This antidote to despair—stop talking and find interesting wines to drink—is not unlike Lyotard’s response to the postmodern condition. Present the unpresentable in itself. In other words, focus less on meaning and more on the materiality of the work—color in painting, timbre and nuance in music.

The ephemeral qualities of an unrepeatable event—the wine unfolding in your glass—will never return. No experience will ever quite be the same. Such events are worth savoring even if you have nothing to say about them.