So
PK and I are down at the recent Liberty Wines tasting in South
London, and it's packed with wine types, buyers, restaurateurs,
know-alls, hangers-on, plausible youngish men in trousers the colour of a rash,
as crowded as an Egyptian train station, in fact, and there are more
wines on display than you can begin to imagine: only for once
I don't feel crushed by my own boundless ignorance, but instead,
weirdly empowered. How can this be?
Because
this is one of those tastings where the wines are grouped by grape,
rather than region. Which is incredibly good news for at least two
reasons. First, it means that there is no producer/importer pouring
out the wines in surgically tiny amounts while probing you for
insights which you don't have. Everything's jumbled together, so you
help yourself - which allows a tradecentric wine fair to become
something more like an immense and slightly heartless drinks party
where you don't know anyone.
Secondly,
the process of identification is simplified a millionfold.
Charismatic bottle with pungent, design-studio label, surrounded by
others just the same? Could be anything. Identical bottle, on a table
with the word MALBEC written on a placard on a stick? I'm home and
dry, already confident that I don't like it. CHARDONNAY posted above
a table the size of a garage door, covered in heartbreakingly blonde
botttles? I am all over it, especially since the first thing I see is
a perfectly-chilled Chassagne-Montrachet which tastes every bit as
Catherine Deneuve as it looks. 'Life is good,' I say to PK, who
merely grunts and ducks his head as he moves purposefully towards the
distant CABERNET SAUVIGNON.
After
four years of Sediment
and many humiliations and much queasy ignorance, something has
lodged. Over here, I spot the SANGIOVESEs containing, yes, a couple
of nice Chiantis. Feeling a need to stay Italian, I scout around for
a Vermentino, and there it is, VERMENTINO, a whole trestle of it, and
some of is delicious, just the way I'd hoped. PK and I then cuff some
PINOT NOIR about a bit, noting with blithe pomposity how hard it is
to get Pinot Noir just
right.
Next to someone who knows their wines, I am still an idiot, a tabula
rasa.
Next to someone who really
doesn't know their wines, I am starting to sound like someone who
knows their wines.
'How
did you
learn all that stuff?' I guilelessly quiz PK, who is,
of course, no use to me, claiming to have once had a youthful
Epiphany as a consequence of which he dedicated himself in priestly
manner to Bordeaux; but he won't say when it was, or what
it was, which I find sinister. Add to this the problem that my trying
to learn anything these days is pretty futile; committing finished,
actual wines, with names, to memory, is like trying to remember the
Periodic Table - a sequence of impenetrable symbols and
nomenclatures, arcana
I just don't get. I am old.
On
the other hand, learn-about-wine courses do like to begin with grapes
and go from there, so there must be a reason. I once had to spend half a day in the bristling
company of the then Chairman of the Wine Development Board, who
harangued me and some drunken women about Cabernet Sauvignon in the
basement of a hotel in St James's; I wasn't any the wiser by the end,
but the occasion as a whole sticks in my mind. So grapes are good.
Like cities on a map, they're the entities around which you mentally
structure your progress towards the smaller, cuter, subdivisions, the
townlets and villages, the wine makers and the chรขteaux. Some of this (therefore) must
have become internalised over time, in spite of the fact that my head
is basically filled with kapok.
And
here's a thing: what if the big supermarkets stocked their booze by
grape variety? How cool would that be? Shiraz/Syrah mixes over here;
Sauvignon Blanc over here; Pinot Noir (including champagnes) over
here?
Yes, it would create limitless problems of supply and display and
generate a catastrophic amount of human error. But the clarity, the
almost divine sense of order if it did
work:
instead of having to make sense of the whole phonebook of wine, the
undifferentiated rabble, Australia to Zimbabwe, we would have a
strong, simple, memorable taxonomy, the benefits of which would be
miraculous - and I can think of two, straight off. One: if (like,
let's say, PK) you wanted to pursue the noble Cabernet Sauvignon
across the globe in all its manifestations, your job would be made
massively easier and more satisfying. Two: it would become blindingly
obvious to all supermarkets that they had five hundred times more
examples of Pinot Grigio than anyone could possibly want. And that's
just for starters.
CJ
Pinot Noir including Champagnes... What about Blanc de Blancs? Would you need a separate Glera section for Italian fizz? Also, Sauternes would be intermingled with Aussie Semillons, and hidden among the zillions of tedious Pinot Grigios would be the one lone lovely Alsace Pinot Gris.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds utterly baffling. I love it. At least supermarket shopping would have an amusing side-show to offset the otherwise horrendous Saturday morning experience.
Well since you put it in those terms, I can see that, yes, there are a few grey areas to sort out...
ReplyDeleteBut I don't think I should give up on the project just yet. Once I've got Tesco on board, the rest will follow...
There are actually interesting precedents, of a sort - a few wine lists in the poncier parts of the capital are now duplicating wines and cross-referencing. So the same Touraine would appear in both the 'Loire Valley' section and the 'Sauvignon Blanc' section, allowing people to search both ways.
ReplyDeleteMany American submarkets do sort by grape, at least for domestic wines.
ReplyDeleteJarrel and Benjamin - Well, this is interesting. Maybe it's not such a hopeless cause after all -
ReplyDeleteThe Sampler does things by the grape. However as someone who _does_ know something about wine I find it endlessly irritating to have to wander around the entire shop to find all of the Italian wines (for example), I find it much easier to find wine by region, and this way I'm more likely to find something new and interesting instead of falling back on the same old, same old.
ReplyDeleteI'll bet you anything you will still have some dull spark asking why the Chablis is under the Chardonnay section...