Wine writing has changed a lot since I started in the racket almost 40 years ago. Although it wasn’t etched in stone, most wine scribes wrote about wines they liked, not wasting space on negative thoughts or opinions. Today, anything goes, especially if it’s destined to see light via the Internet.
A few weeks back an e-mail popped up from Mark Fisher, wine writer for the Dayton Daily News in Ohio. Fisher is an opinionated guy who likes to tilt at windmills and stir the pot. His style is more ‘what’s hot and what’s not’ than conveying a little solid knowledge about a wine for the education of his readers.
So it was not out of the ordinary for Fisher to glom onto Alice Feiring’s snarky screed on Men.Style.com, titled the ‘world’s most overrated wines.’ Feiring is an East Coast writer who authors ‘In Vino Veritas’ and is known to her readers as the ‘Wine Bitch.’
In one of his December blog entries, Fisher mentioned Feiring’s article and then, not wanting to be seen by his readers as wimping out, he threw in his own nomination as ‘the single most overrated wine in the world.” Conundrum.
Fisher claims that Conundrum is a ‘hodgepodge of white-wine grapes that didn’t belong together’ and then adds that Conundrum ‘smells vaguely like heavily-oaked Gewurztraminer.’ Oddly, he nominated Conumdrum for this dubious honor, but didn’t seem to know the price of the wine. Conumdrum 2006 is $24, Mark.
Fisher’s take on Conumdrum now had me curious about Feiring’s candidates for the world’s most overrated wines. The Men.Style. com opening page had this screaming headline, blazoned over a background that looks very much like it was lifted from a Dubeouf Beaujolais label: ‘Le Beaujolais est arrivé! AND IT SUCKS.’
Now, that’s real professional. Beneath that provocative headline was an announcement about Feiring’s nominations for wines that she thinks really suck.
Feiring spreads her criticism around, touching on most major wine regions, while granting a bye to Argentina, Germany and the Pacific Northwest. Only two brands are nominated: Sea Smoke Pinot Noir, which she describes as ‘mushy and gelantinous,’ then adding a dismissive generalization, ‘if you MUST (emphasis mine) have a bottle of domestic pinot’; and Napa’s Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon, which Feiring claims is an ‘overpriced status symbol,’ to which I say, Amen!
Feiring rounds out her list of most overrated wines with these: Bordeaux Garagisties, expensive indie wines, like Chateau Valandraud, that fizzled; Australian Shiraz, ‘overly reminiscent of Robitussin,’ a hugely unfair generalization of a wide range of stylistic wines; Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, ‘more and more of these things (sic) taste like…cat piss,” a crude example of style being more important than message; Super Tuscans, ‘no sense of place’; Clos de Vougeot, ‘some are high-priced swill’; Long Island Wine, ‘not world-class wines,’ to which I say, So?; Albarino, ‘a victim of modern winemaking and over hype,’ but what about quality?; Chilean Cabernet, ‘most taste like Coke, that’s New Coke we’re talking about.’ Cute.
Practitioners of this style of wine writing may yell, ‘Move over Gramps, your time is past,’ but I say that if this is the direction that wine writing is heading then I worry for a craft that has known its share of struggles over the decades, but nothing like this. Wine preference is subjective, of course, but to assault a group of wines in such a general and snarky way can only hurt all wine.
To comment email Gerald at [email protected].
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