Red, White And You
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Region,
type, age, label, pairing... When it comes to wine, the only rule that should
matter is how much you enjoy it
A YEAR AND a half ago, I
noted, on these pages, that the wine boom had finally hit India. This was not
to say that India was making terrific wine. (Some Indian wine is very good, but
lots of it – especially the overhyped stuff you tend to read about – is
rubbish.) It was not even to say that we were all drinking wine now.
All I meant by my
assertion about the wine boom was that people were being offered wine more
often than before. There was more pressure to order wine at restaurants – if
not from the waiters then from other people at the table who wanted some. Wine
was making an appearance at parties. And people who would once have drunk only
vodka, whisky or beer were beginning to order wine.
So, in an effort to
satisfy the general curiosity about wine I offered a basic guide – grape
varieties, regions, ordering etiquette, etc.
Judging by the responses
that column evoked, people were hungry for information about wine. But I
couldn’t help feeling I’d left something out. And then last week, while reading
a 2012 book by Eric Asimov called How To Love Wine, I finally realised what it
was. Asimov is the wine critic of The New York Times and he reckons that, more
than ignorance, there is just one factor that prevents people from enjoying
wine. He calls it Wine Anxiety. And, of course, he is absolutely right.
As he writes: “Wine
causes a sense of dread and suspicion... A sense of obligation and anxiety,
with its feeling of inadequacy, is the biggest single obstacle to deriving
pleasure from wine... No other field of pleasure comes saddled with the same
sense of obligation... The primary purpose of wine is to provide pleasure and
refreshment... With a mission so seemingly simple, why is it that wine and its
trappings seem so often to breed a feeling of inadequacy?”
It is a good question.
You may or may not know a lot about food. But when you order, say, a tandoori
chicken, do you care where the chicken was bred or how large the tandoor was?
When you go and see a movie, does it matter to you what camera was used or
whether the actors shot it on location or in studios?
My guess is: no. You just
enjoy (or don’t enjoy) the damn thing. So why is wine so different?
Why do you worry about ordering the right bottle? Why do you
say, apologetically, “I’m afraid I don’t know much about wine?’’ Why do you
regard the wine list with suspicion and dread? Why can’t you just enjoy the
wine? I could relate to Asimov’s experiences because he grew up in America in a
period when most people did not drink wine at home. (Unlike, say, Europe, where
everyone grows up drinking wine.) Most of us in India are in the same
situation. But then, we didn’t all grow up eating sushi. Yet we don’t treat it
with dread. We didn’t grow up with smartphones. But we are not suspicious of
them. We had hardly heard of Netflix till a few years ago. But now that the
service has come to India, we try to embrace it without any doubt or feelings
of inadequacy. So why is wine so different?
For most of us, I
suspect, it is because we regard wine as something complex, difficult to
understand, expensive and foreign. Well, yes. But then so are smartphones. And
so, I guess, is sushi. But they don’t intimidate us in quite the same way. But
there is something about wine that makes it particularly intimidating. And two
sets of people have made money out of our inadequacy. The first are the people
who treat wine as a branded product. They will tell you that they only drink
Cristal champagne or such famous red wines as Domaine de la Romanée-Conti or
Château Latour. They will drop these names in the same way that snobs brag that
their watches are by Patek Philippe, their suits from Savile Row or their bags
from Hermès.
But never forget this:
wine is not about snobbery. It is about taste. It is about fun. If someone only
drinks big-name wines, then doesn’t that only prove that he is so inadequate
and so unsure of his own tastes that he has to fall back on brand names and
snob value? A person who says he only drinks famous (and expensive) wines is
even more wine-anxious than you or me.
The second approach is
the American mission to ‘demystify wine’. This route, pioneered by the likes of
Robert Parker, the wine writer, involves giving marks to wine. This marking
system always confuses non-Americans because it is based on the US practice
where you get 50 out of 100 for just showing up. So if a wine gets 80 points,
that doesn’t mean that it has got eight out of ten or a distinction. It means
it is mediocre. The good wines all get 90 or above. Yes, it’s a strange system!
The problem with marks out of 100 is that it reduces wine to bogusly objective
absolutes. Would you ever mark food the same way? Can you really give a Big Mac
a 95, a Whopper 97, a Fat Boy burger 86 and so on? Of course you can’t. Food is
subjective. I may prefer a Big Mac to a Whopper. There is no objective way of
saying I am wrong or of giving them marks. So it is with wine. But the
demystification (or idiotic simplification) of wine is, at least, easier to
understand than the system of tasting notes, which can be gibberish. Asimov
quotes one review from the Wine Spectator: “The wine is still tightly wound,
with a brooding core of mulled currant, warm fig sauce and maduro tobacco,
liberally laced with tapenade and lavender notes….” This is just nonsense. When
you drink wine, do you really want it to taste of maduro tobacco or tapenade
(an olive paste)? You can’t really ever put taste in words, no matter how
flowery you make them.
Try and write two
sentences describing the taste of Coca-Cola. You’ll see how it is nearly
impossible to turn taste experiences into sentences.
Ultimately, wine, like
food, is no more than an enabler. The point of enjoying wine is not the wine
itself. It is you. And the only thing that matters is how much you enjoy it.
·
Vir Sanghvi
HTBR7FEB16
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