| Disorientation and Diversity | | | | By: Alder Yarrow |  Page 1 of 2 next >> |
The dialogue about wine in popular American culture usually fails to rise above a whisper. This is to say that most people don’t think about it or talk about it at all.
For those to whom a conversation with friends about wine might not be the strangest thing in the world, much of the conversation I overhear in cafés and bars continues to reverberate with movie quotes from Sideways, coupled with either genuinely snide or tongue-in-cheek character assassinations of Merlot. Despite what seems to be a growing interest in wine, the majority of American wine consumers don’t bother with the news, intrigues, and current affairs of the world of wine. These good people, bless their hearts, just want to drink their wine and enjoy it.
Sometimes, buried neck deep as I am in my stew of RSS feeds, e-mail newsletters, live harvest cams, newspaper columns, and stacks of wine magazines, I thank the stars above that most of the wine drinking public isn’t party to the discussions that race through the bulletin boards and pages feeding the insatiable appetite for wine information: they plague those for whom wine is either a career or an obsession.
The latest tiresome issue, growing like a thunderhead above the savannah where we primitive tribes of wine critics and professionals have just descended from the trees, centers on what people are referring to as the ‘globalization of wine.’
The wine world, like most markets everywhere, is firmly in the grips of the global economy. Sitting in the sidecar of this trend — one that is barreling down the highway faster than anyone imagined — are a small group of wine critics and professionals, led by Robert M. Parker, Jr., who through hard work and popular acclaim have reached a point where many people make buying decisions based on their scores and opinions.
This trend, spotted a long time ago (and correctly assessed by most attentive and studied people outside the wine industry as a necessary inevitability), was the “chunk of sky” that whacked filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter upside the head and sent him running to the movie screens of the world with his three-hour documentary polemic Mondovino.
Globalization is a long word with lots of syllables, and plenty of people have written whole books trying to explain exactly what it is, and neither I nor Nossiter will attempt to duplicate those efforts. Suffice it to say, however, that Mondovino describes its effects in the wine world as causing wines to increasingly taste the same due to the rise of large, powerful industrial wine producers, and because of the rise of large, powerful critics and consultants who shape international standards for what is a ‘great wine’ and what is not.
While Nossiter was not the first to express some concern, his poorly constructed (but still worth watching) film seemed to legitimize and encourage an additional flock of Henny Pennies and Turkey Lurkies who are now on the “globalization sucks” bandwagon, including the editors of many of the Serious Wine Publications.
I just opened the November “World Wine Awards” issue of Decanter to find both the editor and publishing director’s columns focused on what they describe as the “disturbing” and “depressing” idea that for many wines “individuality and regional expression are slowly being chipped away at in favor of a blanket, points-garnering style…,” and on the other hand many wines are “being stripped of all character so that they appeal to a mass market.” Yet several pages later, coverage of the magazine’s awards for the best wines in the world included medals for wines from Greece , South Africa , Slovenia , Moldova , and Hungary . Moreover, the awards for the 31 best wines in the world were swept this year by Australia and South America, who pushed out France , Italy , the United States , and Spain for top honors in many categories traditionally dominated by these major nations. This was an impossibility 20 years ago, and though it does not mean that the concerns about Robert Parker’s power as a critic or the size and influence of big wine companies like Constellation Brands are invalid, it certainly seems to diminish their threat to the world of wine.
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