As a critic I regularly receive wine samples, which I diligently taste and spit into the kitchen sink, then re-cork and bring downstairs to a table in the hall for the neighbors–and the mailman, the UPS guy, and anyone else of legal age who may wish to help me with my recycling, or with whom I might share some love.
But I’ve been known to keep a few behind for myself, especially if I’m intrigued by the wine and want to see how it performs with food, or over the course of an evening. That’s how I arrived at the home of my friends Mark and Rita, with a couple of open Napa reds under my arm, a bottle of Shafer’s new Cabernet, ‘One Point Five,’ and a Cab called Coup de Foudre.
Like my wife, both Mark and Rita have worked in the television industry–and however banal it is when you watch it, the field attracts some incredibly bright, insatiably curious people, so it’s always a pleasure to go to their house. You never know who is going to be there (that night, musician Kevin Hunter was there with his newly-wed, videographer wife, Heather), or what we might end up discussing (whether it’s the last few episodes of Weeds, the relative merits of Wire Train’s first few albums, or the disturbingly addictive internet game called ‘Second Life’).
Before dinner, I re-tasted each bottle to make sure they were sound. The Shafer was near to what I expected; a ripe wine of modest intensity but perfect composure and balance, with black cherry flavors finely dusted with espresso, a vinous depth, and lots of black, silky tannins.
Next I poured the Coup de Foudre: It smelled like sweet perfume, a maraschino cherry dipped in chocolate, and then dipped in vanilla. The wine was thick as syrup in the mouth, plump and rich with a creamy, custardy mouthfeel, with tannins so slight they seemed almost sheer. It offered not a clue as to where it came from, what grapes were in it, or what statement it was trying to make. It was the sort of California wine that’s now becoming classic, in its way; shapely, beautiful and empty.
To me, comparing the two was kind of a joke: the Shafer was drinking like a Cabernet. Coup de Foudre was sort of like sucking on Cabernet candy.
We sat down to a minor mountain of protein and I poured around the Coup de Foudre first. In French, coup de foudre is an idiomatic expression akin to a rush of blood to the head, or the thunderclap of love at first sight, and that, in a sense, is the sort of reaction that this wine inspired. To put it mildly, the wine stopped traffic. People put down their forks and placed both hands around their glasses — even Heather, who didn’t really care much for wine and was just sipping to be polite.
‘I’ve never had a wine like this,’ she said, taking a greedy gulp.
‘This is special,’ said Mark.
Soon we could talk of little else. I tried to pour the Shafer into an empty glass or another, and people ignored it, or downed it quickly so they could return to the first wine. Eventually everyone wanted to know what I thought.
‘Not really my cup of tea,’ I blurted, realizing as soon as I said it that honesty wasn’t going to make any of this easier. I mentioned–diplomatically, I thought–that this is the sort of wine Robert Parker would love, a wine he’d call ‘hedonistic.’ I pointed to its abundant sweetness, its utter lack of shape, and the fact that the flavors of bright cherry, chocolate and vanilla led me to believe that it wasn’t really a meal, being more like a dessert.
‘Not that there’s anything wrong with dessert,’ I said. ‘Unless what you really want is a steak.’ Steak was on my plate after all. I continued to mount a rather mild attack, but my protestations sounded more and more feeble. Almost in desperation, I resorted to name-calling. I used the word bling. I called the wine a bimbo.
‘Who cares? It’s delicious,’ said Rita.
And I couldn’t really argue with that. The wine was completely irresistible, and here I was, asking people to resist it. So what was my problem?
I’m a red-blooded American male, and I love a bimbo as much as the next guy. And all but the most virtuous of us have some version of what may be called a ‘bimbo instinct,’ the cesspool of base desires that everyone in the world, it seems, is marketing to.
But I also love wine for a lot of reasons besides its taste. I’ve come to expect a Cabernet to taste a certain way because Cabernet has certain markers (not least being its structure) that help me to interpret its overall quality, even its greatness. The fact that most American Cabernets are sweeter and riper than they used to be ten or fifteen years ago isn’t the problem. As far as these new-ish, cult-ish Cabernets from Napa are concerned, my critical opinion rests on how gracefully they can balance expressive fruit with impressive structure (something I think the Shafer Winery does exceptionally well, I might add).
Placing the Coup de Foudre in the context of other Cabernets, of which I’ve tasted thousands, was something I had no choice but to do, and here was a wine with so much flesh and sweet buxom fruit that I couldn’t see its bones–and at least to an extent, Cabernet is Cabernet because of those magnificent bones. I was forced to wonder: what is a Cabernet without structure? An enhancement? Or an abomination?
Of course much of what we eat in the 21st century is enhanced–a consumer must choose between the heirloom tomato or the genetically modified supertomato, which will certainly look better than any heirloom whose genes are scattered, literally, on the wind. The perfect proportions of the supertomato no doubt excites our bimbo instinct receptors — until we bite into it and realize it has almost no flavor.
Of course with a beverage, you can enhance that flavor, either by bringing out its inner bimbo or masking the things that might detract from it. Starbucks has convinced tens of millions that coffee isn’t coffee anymore without some flavored sweetener to leaven its inherent bitterness — and charge accordingly (a strategy that is certainly at work in Bordeaux and Napa). To me, these products possess a certain cynical quality; they are plainly concocted to appeal to our basic bimbo instincts, to seduce and do little else (well, to do one thing more — to sell).
A luxurious experience like Coup de Foudre may be an admission to the kind of hedonism that most ordinary wine-drinking Americans don’t often gain entry to. But for better or worse, I’ve tasted enough wines not to be easily fooled.
On the other hand, contradictions abound within me — I love the complex music of Thelonius Monk and John Adams, and Johann Sebastian Bach makes me crazy — but I love a good pop band too. Take Coldplay, for example. No one would mistake the music they make for rock and roll, and in comparing their music with the adventurousness of Yo La Tengo, or the restless energy of Sonic Youth, or the intricacies of another great stadium band, Radiohead, Chris Martin and his mates come up quite a bit higher on the bimbometer.
And yet I love Coldplay for what it is, a wildly successful band that packages its songs in a formulaic, sweetly irresistible pop recipe. Nearly all of their songs start out whisper-soft and swell to a gaudy, cymbal-clanging, synthesized string section crescendo of easily deciphered emotion, with soaring vocals, cascading keyboards, and sonorous rhythm guitar. And we eat it up. It’s worth noting that their breakthrough album, their emotionally expansive, rock-candy-mountain masterpiece is called A Rush of Blood to the Head–practically a dictionary definition of coup de foudre.
Of course the success of Coldplay has inevitably spawned a dozen Coldplay wannabes who have put out albums that subscribe to exactly the same formula — and in my humble opinion, they all suck. (Even Coldplay has had a tendency to copy itself, which tends to dilute even the best intentions.)
I guess this suggests that even the formulaic can ring true or ring false, depending on what you’re bringing to the headphones. Who knows, perhaps Mark and Rita and Kevin and Heather and Laura all found a note of truth in the wine that evening, one to which I was deaf.
Or maybe Coup de Foudre has rendered the tone so fuzzy that people hear what they want, no matter what the note. There’s no question this is a winery working with a recipe. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But if mastering the formula is their only concern, then a big part of the process has been missed. People may not be able to resist, but with fine wine, that should never be enough.