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2010 trend : wine critics don't determine, they confirm

The modern wine industry is a conundrum. 

    Here you have a product that has always been most esteemed for its subtle, individual characteristics. Every tool of marketing is utilized to emphasize the qualities that set one wine apart from all the rest. But wine is a global commodity. To be successful a wine has to appeal to broad taste.     

So, you read all about the care of production and the expression of individuality on the bottle and you taste, more and more often, a wine that is generally appealing. The characteristics that have made wine fascinating and enjoyable for centuries are giving way to a competitive pressure to appeal to ever expanding markets. 

    

Consumers who actually prefer, and have developed their tastes by drinking mass-produced soft drinks, bottled waters, juices , dairy drinks, lager beers and distilled spirits are being pursued by the wine industry with big production, industrial products. One cannot fault them for doing this. It’s business. But the paradigms of wine quality are refuted by large production. The marketing arm of the wine industry continues to sell artisan individualism. The ‘story’ of wine is used to sell the reality, even as the story grows more estranged from reality. 

    

Thus: conundrum “a riddle”, a “puzzle.”  

   

 Thus, I say wine journalism has a responsibility to peel back the story and tell the truth. Difference may be more important than scores, as Hugh Johnson the English wine writer has asserted but, the reality is that difference is fading, categories are broadening and idiosyncratic individuality is losing its cachet. A wine that few understand is a useless anachronism. Understanding modern wine is not as complicated as it used to be. 

    

Human perception is every bit as complex as it has always been and that’s part of what must be emphasized. Wine journalism has to encourage people to go back to their perceptions , to reverse the polarity of wine discourse from 

           wine - critic- consumer

to

wine-consumer-critic

Use the critic or the writer to confirm assumptions and clarify perceptions not to set tastes. 

wine list organization as a model for retail wine

In working on a way to organize the displays at a wine shop it seems that most shops adopt a combination of varietal and regional organization. So, they'll have sections for Chardonnay, Cabernet, Pinot Noir etc. as well as sections for France, Italy, Spain, Germany and so-on.  

The goal of every retail set-up is to promote and sell across the entire range of products selected. In the typical set-up, if a customer is looking for Pinot Noir it's very difficult to lead them over to the part of the French section that has the red Burgundy (Pinot Noir) displayed. If someone asks about Malbec, it's tough to lead them to a related wine like Cabernet or Cabernet Franc. I hear from my retail customers all the time, "My South African wines don't sell at all," or "I can't sell French wine to save my life." Part of this is certainly that the customer service staff are not clear on the varietal links of familiar grape types and European regions. It is also the result of dividing varietals across sections while maintaining varietal sections that look complete to the average customer. They're not seeing the full selection but they think they are.

So I advocate a scheme of organization that riffs off wine list organization. Use varietal signs to identify where all the wines of a given varietal can be found together. Given that price points will merge and offer choice, it then becomes less of stretch for a customer looking for Pinot Noir to try a red Burgundy, for a customer looking for a German Riesling to try one from Washington state or for a customer asking about a Cote du Rhone to be informed that other Grenache based wines, from other places might offer pleasing alternatives. 

This kind of scheme has built in challenges but they are all good for the store's purchasing disciplines, for sales, for staff involvement and for customer satisfaction. It's still necessary to find strategic spots to keep most of a region's wines shelved together; so, the Italian whites could be shelved alongside the "Pinot Grigio" section, the Spanish reds could be next to the "Tempranillo/Garnacha" section and so on. The varietal signage can be arranged in such a way as to accommodate the most common blends. Thus Bordeaux wines, Claret and Meritage wines would fall between the "Cabernet" and "Merlot" signs. 

The wines of the world are varied and there is literally no system that can make it entirely simple. I know of several retailers and restaurant owners who are so concerned with seeming stuffy or high-minded that they choose to be satisfied with leaving out important categories or allowing them to languish, lost to staff knowledge and customer awareness.

A trend in the next decade is the re-emergence of helpful/knowledgeable retail sales ... and I would add restaurant sales. Consumers realize that ratings and recommendations from national publications are of limited practical use. This opens the door for people with passion to reinvent customer service and set up an organizational plan that will gently encourage exploration and product movement. Consumers still want and need guidance but they are finding it more in friendly face-to-face interaction. Price sensitivity occupies center stage with the consumer but there is a large segment, larger among consumers under 35, that wants to find the new and the different. I believe a scheme that integrates varietal and regional organization is the way of the future. 

a critic attempts ...

 I have always held on to a quote from Baudelaire concerning criticism, that the critic’s job is to “understand the intention “ of the artists and to “communicate this understanding to the reader” while attempting to “evaluate if possible the artist’s success or failure in achieving their stated goals.” In other words, don’t judge an artistic work by your own standards, try to look at it through the eyes of the artist. This protects the validity of aesthetic individualism but not at the expense of internal logic and rational vision.  

    

The only quote from Baudelaire I can find that relates to criticism is, “To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.” This quote asserts the critic’s right to be subjective but it retains the inherent duty to open the reader to the “widest horizon” possible, to give an opinion that is passionate and thoughtful but to elucidate the intention of the work as well. 

    

Then, I see words like violence, ugliness and aggressiveness applied to the painting of Matisse and Picasso in the early years of the Twentieth Century. Although these words were applied by contemporaries, I wonder if we can understand that perspective fully? Pre-WW1 Paris had not witnessed the overwhelming violence and ugliness that was to come and even the most aggressive paintings of those years seem exuberant, adventurous and perhaps jarring to some sensibilities, but ugly?   

    

If you look at two pictures from 1906-07. you get an idea of the point-counter-point that Matisse and Picasso were taking part in and you can see the clear contrast between two intentions. Matisse did his bucolic and sensuous painting Le Bonheur de vivre (the goodness of life) in 1906 and showed it at the Salon des Independants in March of that year. It was fundamentally, apparently, received as a summation and a repudiation of painterly tradition, mocked and howled at by the crowds that attended the salon (as Matisse’ picture of his wife in a large colorful hat had been mocked the year before) and noted for its clashing of colors and tension of line, figure and space. What Matisse did in this painting very successfully and for the first time was to make color the equivalent of light rather than a description of it.     

    

Contrast Le Bonnheur with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon which was done the following year as a sort of response to Matisse .… or, at any rate the two paintings have been juxtaposed by critical tradition. There are enough similarities between these two large canvases to make comparison fruitful yet they are clearly from two different creative universes.  

Vedanā

This little word means something like "raw sensation" in Pali, an ancient Indian language. It is only through observing physical sensation that a person can observe one's self and one's emotions and mind. And it is only through the observation of body, emotion and mind that one can understand the truth of things.

this is fundamentally what artists do. Observe. And I like to think this word captures everything that makes up what we call "art" along with our conceptions of it and the world .. which is everything. Sort of.

“Evil is done without effort. It is natural and the working of fate. Good is always the product of an art.”

    “Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation”

    “The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find”. 

    “The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated”. 

    “We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose”.

    “Champagne, with its amber hue, its éclat, its sparkle and its perfume, arouses the senses and produces a cheerfullness which flashes through the company like a spark of electricity. At the magic word "Champagne", the guests, dull and torpid with good feeling,awake at once. This lively, ethereal and charming beverage sets in motion the spirits of all; the phlegmatic, the grave and the philosophic are surprised to find themselves amiable; in the wink of an eye (or the pop of a cork) the whole banquet has changed its physiognomy”.

     Charles Baudelaire