Who cares about wine?
I have some questions.
I had been absent from the wine blogosphere through much of August and the first part of September. We moved and that always takes much of one’s time. Packing, unpacking, setting up the new place, finishing remodeling and dealing with plumbing emergencies leaves little time and energy for creative thinking or writing.
Each day went by in a flurry of work. Sweat and dust and new cuts and bruises marked the passing of time. The completion of yet another task marked progress. Somewhere in there, I had to do my day job (the one that actually results in a paycheck). I found that having a home office is fraught with some difficulties and can be scary when the network goes down.
At the end of each day, tired as I was, I would grind my teeth thinking about all the things I did not get to do and how much I was falling behind with my blog, web site and OWC commitments. I didn’t drink very much wine, either. Not even for the pleasure of it. I was just too damned tired.
And now that things have slowed down a bit, I look back on the past month and a half. I realize that nobody with whom I came in contact had anything to do with wine. As far as we were all concerned, no such thing may have ever existed. Sure, some of the people that passed through my life in the last month and a half may know of wine. But it is not integral to their lives and their lives do not depend on it.
And that leads me to these questions:
- Who really cares about wine?
- If a majority of the population either doesn’t drink it or doesn’t understand it beyond occasional casual consumption, how did wine survive all these centuries?
- Should anyone really care about wine beyond the scope of occasional enjoyment? (and would the answer be different for those producing it or making a profit from its sale and distribution?)
- Does caring about wine impart on one the responsibility to protect it - its nature, character, style and integrity?
- Can one care for and about wine, preserving its traditions, and still satisfy market demands?
I’m very curious to know.
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October 1st, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Great question. Having recently moved myself, from California to a place where wine can’t even be shipped to you directly [Mississippi], I have failed at finding a community that cares about wine.
A discussion that I had in class this week had a similar tenor. I’m an English grad student and we asked, “Who is in charge of what we read [that is, the canon]?”
The heft of the responsibility fell almost entirely on critics and scholars.
It seems that that’s the heft of your question as well. “Who is in charge of what we drink?” I think the answer is very similar In literature, serious literature, casual readers have a small (though significant) influence in this issue and the serious readers (students, professors, etc.) carry the bulk. In wine, we have our “scholars”(usually the magazines, no? or people like Parker? though I use the word scholars with a handful of salt). But we also have our serious drinkers: bloggers, wine stewards, wine clubs, etc.
It’s all very democratic and a result of user participation. Thus it is a crisis to find that there aren’t many users. Here we come upon the thin ice: how do we persuade others, based on the way we feel about wine and what it has done in our lives, to incorporate it in a serious way into life in general?
I have not answered any of your questions, perhaps, and might have only deepened the abyss. But, again, I share your sentiments and was urged to comment upon them.
Welcome back, by the way.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I like your line of reasoning, Arthur. Moving seems to put you in a contemplative mood. Then again, maybe the thought of moving and certainly the aftermath illustrates a good example of why we drink.
I’m not sure people don’t care about wine, at least in the way I think you mean. I see it more as those that care about wine don’t necessarily need to have others know how much they care. This disqualifies as you rightfully point out, those in the trade. They may have cared about wine before they got paid for it, but certainly care about it now, lest their children go hungry.
I like to think that the beverage has become such a mainstay in life that no fanfare or neon sign need go above anyone’s head who happens to be drinking it, nor would any of these people feel the need to protect it. In that case, Joseph is on the money when he says that’s the job of the “serious drinker.”
And to his point, I’m in a writing class where the subject of genre fiction versus literary fiction came up. I wondered whether any of the writers working on their books thought of themselves as writing anything other than literary fiction. It seems to me that the two terms were made up in publishing house conference room, where the powers that be annoint those that will win awards and those that will hit the NYT Best Seller list (hopefully)…
Wine can be discussed by those that care but perhaps it’s best enjoyed as a compliment to something better going on, say, conversation.
Me thinkith I may have deepened the abyss as well…
October 18th, 2008 at 12:21 am
I don’t know much anything about wine, but when I started to discover about wine pairings, my interest with wine became broader. I think everybody really cares about wine, we have to admit it that a lot of people don’t have the chance to buy a great wine, but for sure everybody is dying to have one. Wine industry wouldn’t survive if people don’t care.