“Nostalgia,” the novelist Peter de Vries once quipped, “isn’t what it used to be.” That thought came to mind the other day when listening to yet another lament about the state of wine in the world today. You know the refrain: “They all taste the same . . . big fruit bombs . . . there’s just no taste of place . . . wine isn’t what it used to be. . . etc., etc.”
Now, I’m no Pollyanna. To my mind (and palate), too many contemporary wines, especially expensive ones, do taste alike, being made in a flamboyant, fruit-forward style that can obscure their varietal and regional identities. But I’m also convinced that the nostalgic complaint that wine used to be better is pure nonsense.
As late as the middle of the twentieth century, the vast majority of wines produced in the world tasted thin and sour. Often contaminated by bacteria and oxidized by excessive exposure to air, they provided drinkers with calories and alcohol, but little sensory pleasure. That’s clearly no longer the case. To be commercially viable, wine produced in most parts of the grape-growing world now needs to be chemically sound.
It also needs to taste at minimum decent, and is in fact often quite good. Millions of people used to drink wine like we drink water or fruit juice–as a source of sustenance. Hardly anyone treats it that way anymore (which explains why many traditional wine-producing countries are faced with such a glut of cheap, un-sellable wine). Instead, drinking wine has become a lifestyle choice. And no one wants to choose the sort of unpleasant tasting wine that used to dominate the marketplace.
The situation of course was different with what often is called “fine wine.” Here too, however, things clearly are better than they used to be. For one, there is far less vintage variation. Some undeniably great wines were produced fifty years ago (think of the legendary 1961 Bordeaux from the best châteaux), but good years back then came infrequently. Moreover, even in those years, the number of truly excellent wines was much smaller than is the case today. Modern technology and expertise in both vineyards and wineries enables contemporary vintners to produce very good wines in locales and years of the sort that used to provide only disappointment. Staying with the example of Bordeaux, the sort of cru bourgeois wines from a difficult vintage such as 2007 that can provide affordable pleasure today simply did not exist back then.
Of course, the winemaking world was much smaller fifty years ago. Complex, compelling wines are being made today in every continent save Antarctica. But in the 1960s, fine wine came almost exclusively from Europe, and even there mainly from France. Imagine a world without exciting, collectible wines from the Americas, or Australia, or even most of Mediterranean Europe. That was the reality back then.
The biggest change, however (and I’m certain that it’s ultimately a change for the good), is that fine wine today does not have to come from craftsmanship in service to but one thing–locale. That used to be true. With the exception of Champagne, customarily a multi-vineyard and multi-vintage blend, the best wines almost always used to represent a particular place or “terroir.” Their distinctive aromas and flavors came both from the care taken in producing them and from qualities unique to that specific site. But over the last half century, advances in both grape growing and winemaking have enabled vintners to serve other ends–varietal expression, for example, and even more to the point, stylistic vision. Truly great wines today may well reflect their “terroir,” but they also may reflect an idea or aspiration–specifically, an idea of how a great wine made with a particular grape or grapes should taste.
The end result is more and better wines from more places. If too many of them reflect a single idea (that of quality defined in terms of power and concentration), the problem is not the idea itself but rather the lack of vision and imagination expressed by the vintners responsible for them. The world of wine today is definitely not perfect. It is, though, far richer and much more exciting than ever before. That’s why nostalgic laments for an idealized world that never actually existed are so misguided, and so tiresome.
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