liquid memory
You shoul read it
Why Wine Matters
In short, I am a wine enthusiast - though not a wine snob and never, I hope, a wine bore. I know my vintages and rarely mistake a Burgundy for a Bordeaux.So I’d heard about the big controversy that has been roiling the wine world recently. It’s about tradition versus modernity. It’s about subtly complex wines versus “fruit bombs.” It’s (supposedly) about big money versus ethics. Above all, it’s about globalized taste versus something called terroir.
What is terroir? That is not easy to say. It is a French word, and everyone agrees that it is untranslatable. The disagreement is over whether it exists. To its defenders - notably the Old World winemakers of France, Italy and Germany - terroir refers to the ineffable way that soil, light, topography and microclimate conspire, over generations of human stewardship, to endow a wine with its unique soul. It’s a sense of place you can taste. To its detractors - especially the New World winemakers of the Americas and Australia - terroir is a marketing slogan dressed up as a poetic reverie. In other words, it’s a hoax - and they should know, since they’ve had precious little luck getting any terroir into their own wines.
Nobody has done more to keep this debate on the boil than Jonathan Nossiter - filmmaker, former sommelier at various New York restaurants (including Balthazar) and son of the foreign correspondent Bernard Nossiter. Like his father, Nossiter takes pleasure in goring sacred cows. A few years ago he made a subversive documentary about the wine world called “Mondovino,” which was nominated for a Palme d’Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Now, in “Liquid Memory,” he extends his brief against the global cabal - made up of power-mad wine critics and consultants, arriviste vintners, pretentious restaurateurs, greedy marketers and rich collectors with Americanized palates - that (he thinks) is destroying the tradition of terroir.
This can be an irritating book. It is full of little eruptions of pomposity (”Wine is bedrock truth, blood of the earth”) and self-regard (”I sensed that I’d made the right choice in opting . . . for taste over power”). But it can also be extremely entertaining, especially when Nossiter’s hackles are raised, which (happily for the reader) is a lot of the time.
In among such adventures, Nossiter makes a passionate case for the cultural importance of wine. Disdaining “winespeak,” he uses literary and historical metaphors. A Bordeaux wine, for instance, is structured like “a hefty novel,” whereas a Burgundy has the “staccato lyricism” of a poem. Here is what he likes: wines that are low in alcohol and high in “wild, exhilarating acidity”; wines that are light and aromatic; “skanky” wines that are “unpredictable” and “ornery” wines that “provoke an emotion”; wines “fully expressive of a place and its history.”
Here is what he hates: rich, fat, sweet, super-concentrated, overripe, jam-dense, high-alcohol, oaky, inky-colored, vanilla-y wines with no sense of place or identity.
What’s wrong with liking rich, jammy wines that “make statements” in preference to subtle, delicate ones that “ask questions”? But Nossiter insists that this is not just a matter of subjective taste. Terroir, he submits, is an objective value. Nossiter didn’t completely win me over. You could find it here.
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