Wine is complicated. It’s complicated to buy, to store, to open, even to appreciate and understand. That’s why so many people in the wine business keep trying to simplify it. The word one often hears is “demystify,” as in so-and-so wants to “demystify wine.” (Just google that phrase and see how many people–everyone from vintners to retailers to writers and speakers–have set this as their goal.) As Bill Citara wrote in the San Francisco Examiner a few years ago, “demystify” has become today’s wine “buzzword.”
It’s not hard to understand why. Especially in America, a country with little history of wine appreciation, taking some of the mystery and, yes, pretension out of wine would seem to make it more inviting, and so to encourage more people to try it. So forget all that gobbeley-gook wine speak. Wine is simple. Just trust your own taste buds and enjoy it. Or as “Winophobia,” a video website that has “demystifying the wine world” as its stated goal, puts it, “wine should be fun!”
Well, I guess so. But surely there are different kinds of fun, and I wonder if by so broadly embracing the egalitarian ideal of demystification we in America aren’t running the risk of robbing it of some of its most profound sorts of pleasure. Wine is capable of providing intellectual and emotional as well as physical joy. Trusting just your own taste buds can bring sensory fun, but little more.
In this regard, it strikes me as telling that the wines which provide the most varied pleasures tend to be those that we find complicated or, to use a better term, complex. They prove compelling precisely because they do not smell and taste simple. To enjoy them fully, one needs to taste them with head and heart as well as nose and tongue.
We tend to think that such distinctions come from the wines–in this corner, a simple “ordinaire,” in that corner a sophisticated cuvée. There certainly is some truth to that. I wonder, though, if the difference more often isn’t between wine drinkers. Many, maybe most, people who buy wine today want to keep things simple. As a result, the wines they drink end up tasting just that.
Demystifying wine sounds like a good idea until you stop and think about why wine matters to you. After all, if you want solely physical pleasure, there’s not much mystification to begin with. But if you want more, then as odd as it may sound, you end up wanting things to stay complicated.
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