ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN “FINE WINE?”

There was talk recently about whether the term “fine wine” had about it a stench of exclusivity, as though the very wines themselves wished you to know you weren’t cultured enough to suss their esoteric gifts.

It’s a symptom – yet another symptom – of the current wine malaise, in which all of us are casting about feverishly trying to figure out how to make wine enticing again. Anything smacking of <ulp> connoisseurship is clearly infra dig, at least for persons who do not demur at displaying their own anti-snobbism and regular-guy preenings.

Be that as it may, I think there’s a conceptional (or linguistic) problem with throwing dirt at “fine wine,” and I’m going to explain why.

Stripped down to the fundamentals, there are really just three types of wine.

The first is schlock wine.  This type of wine is mass produced, designed to be sold cheaply and drunk heedlessly, and it is nearly always contrived by marketing people to appeal to a certain audience. A possible effect of the wine malaise may be to shrink the existence of such wines, or even to eliminate them entirely. Personally I would not weep if that were so. It would be a shame for all the workers in that industry – accent on industry – but one may hope (and wish) that many of them will find something more worthwhile to do with their lives. Schlock wine is the fast-food of the wine world. It isn’t too implausible a metaphor to say that such wines are made from “feedlot grapes.”

You will note that I’m not casting abuse on the people who consume such wine. God must have loved philistines; he made so many of them. But even philistines deserve their quotient of dignity, and there is in fact a way for them to have wine the way they like it without having to endure schlocky garbage. That way is to graduate to the next level which is:

Good wine.  There is a lot of good wine, and a lot of it is quite affordable and undemanding of the sensibilities of the purchaser. That is because good wine can also be produced in volume. Not the mega-volumes of the schlocksters, but enough to enjoy economies of scale, and to be widely distributed.

Good wine also issues from the producers who make fine wines, in which their entry-level wines are good, and sometimes very good. But they do not demand attention (though they often reward it), nor do they cost a lot.

An example of a good “commercial” wine might be Duboeuf’s Beaujolais Villages. I know, we like to sniff haughtily at such a thing, but let’s be serious; it is false to call it “bad” wine. It is a dignified ordinary wine I might find mediocre, but that’s a decided step up from schlock, and it demonstrates a principle I wish to introduce now.

To consider the distinctions among categories of wine, we need to pay less attention to how they “taste” and more attention to the purpose with which they were made. And paramount in that understanding is to ask whether (or to what degree) does the wine respect the drinker. When you ask that question, instead of asking whether the wine meets your standards of quality, it becomes clearer to know which category a wine belongs to. Consider Kendall-Jackson’s “Vintner’s Reserve” Chardonnay in this light, and you will learn something useful about your tastes and your judgments.

I respect large-production wines when they are good and when they demonstrate respect and appreciation for their customers. But even if you quake at large-production wines, you can obtain a world of good wines by looking at the “basic” wines from fine-wine growers, not to mention all of the wines from growers of conscience in terroirs not conducive to making aesthetically “significant” wines.

We now arrive at the top category – fine wines. And once again I ask you to put aside the question of how they taste (and whether you are a worthy judge, or god help us, an “expert.”), and consider two key elements in this category. One is, such wines can almost never be made in large volumes. (We can debate whether the production of classed-growth Bordeaux constitutes “large” volumes. Guess which side I’m on….) They require focused and time-consuming attention by their producers, and they can’t come from land not conducive to issuing markedly beautiful or fascinating wines.

We’ll return to the matter of quality-of-flavor in a moment, but first we must consider the purpose of the grower/producer in making such wines. What does (s)he want to do? What is the aim of all that work – because it is a lot of work. What justifies it?

Nearly all of the vintners who seek to make fine wine will tell you they begin by a desire to do full justice to the vineyards. They have learned what flavors and what qualities are possible from their land, and this is the first thing they want to offer you. They are confident that by succeeding in that, they will also create wines of absorbing and lovely flavors. There are even growers who won’t make this claim explicitly, because they take for granted that this is their purpose.

If we ask about any given wine, not “how does it taste?” or “does it taste lofty enough for the likes of me?” we learn very little, but if we ask instead “Why was this wine made?” I’d argue we not only learn more; it also makes us more reasonable and humane drinkers.

But forget about wine for a moment. Wine is so <cringe> dangerous. Let’s think about hamburgers instead. Fast-food hamburgers are schlock food. Crappy taste, saturated in salt and grease, horrid animal husbandry, all the things we know. Now trade up to – let’s say – an Applebees burger. It’s probably  made from bad-guy beef, but it’s cooked to order and tastes a lot better and it will do the job and you don’t have to feel cheap afterwards. Now let’s consider the “smashburger” from the place whose ingredients come from local farms who treat their cows like actual sentient creatures. This person cares a great deal about every step in the process; the animal treatment, the farm, the one-at-a-time attention the kitchen shows to the burger they send to your table.

Would any of us claim the eater of the best burger is some kind of snob or elitist? Yes, burgers are different from wine; for one thing they’re not fighting for their continued existence. But one of wine’s impediments is not inherent to wine itself: it is the attitudes people bring to it. And yup, got it: we wine folks have a role to play in inculcating such attitudes, but the current moment is our wakeup call. Let’s not let this crisis go to waste.