It’s what he calls “this profoundly modern, compellingly individualist approach,” which stands in utter contrast to tradition. And what better time to trash tradition than today, when everything we’ve known for so long seems to be coming undone?
Steve Heimoff’s Wine Blog is on the top 5 of my most visited websites. One of his most recent posts, titled “Dymystify This!” provides his point of view on the contemporary movement to ‘dymystify wine.’ While I agree that wine should not be put on some pedestal, the fact is that quality wine deserves praise and the romantic details of tradition.
I am constantly asked the question of what my opinion is of screw cap wines, for example. My mind teeters between practicality and tradition. I don’t have a problem with screw caps, and they eliminate the problem of cork taint in the wine. In fact, I really love screw cap bottles when I’m grabbing a bottle off of a store shelf with grocery cart in hand, and am going home to slice some cheeses and crackers. Yet, I am also the first person to say that wine and cork go hand in hand, and the tradition of the pop of a cork, nice wine openers, and that slight possibility of getting a TCA infected bottle, is something I would never trade or encourage a complete move away from.
While I side tracked a little bit above from Steve’s article, his points about maintaining tradition in the headlights of a new era of the wine industry are what I would really like to highlight.
Trying to defend a system whose time has come, they say. Refusing to recognize that ordinary consumers no longer want or need “experts” to tell them about anything. And whenever I rise to my defense (and the defense of wine critics in general), I’m answered with something like this: “You’re just an industry gatekeeper, pushing back out of fear against the new world wherein every wine drinker is entitled to his own opinion.”
That’s how the well-known M.W., Tim Hanni, has been putting it, mostly lately in this article, in today’s online Guardian, out of England. Tim once again criticizes the “snobbery” and “prejudice” of those of us who dare to make wine suggestions and recommendations, a sin he believes “costs the wine industry billions of dollars a year” (for some undefined reason). Along the way, he also “debunks” one of wine’s most cherished assumptions: that certain wines and foods pair well together while others don’t. “’Matching’ wine and food is lazily unchallenged bunk,” the Guardian writer paraphrases Tim as saying. And, a little later: “For years, Hanni taught that wine had unassailable, objective absolutes; that certain foods are best eaten with certain wines – oysters with muscadet, say, or chablis.” There followed for Tim, in the mid-1990s, “an epiphany or a nervous breakdown” that made him reconsider “everything he had formerly believed.”
Well, I’m not big on epiphanies, although I’ve had my share of surprises that have made me reconsider lots of things. But I can’t imagine anything that would make Zinfandel taste good with oysters. Or a big, oaky Cabernet Sauvignon. Can you? Uggh.
Sure, it feels great to reassure people that they can drink anything they want with any food. People love reading that. It frees them from the very real tyranny that too often surrounds the wine-drinking experience. Tim argues that his mission in life is to liberate consumers from formulae, including pairings that are very old and well-understood. It’s what he calls “this profoundly modern, compellingly individualist approach,” which stands in utter contrast to tradition. And what better time to trash tradition than today, when everything we’ve known for so long seems to be coming undone?
Click Here for the rest of the article (“Dymystify This”)
Joanie Hudson, Director of National and International Marketing, Santa Barbara Winery / Lafond Winery & Vineyards
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