The Wine Savant: A Guide To The New Wine Culture - Plot & Excerpts
For many oenophiles, part of the pleasure of wine is arguing about it. In recent years, the wine world has seen a contentious debate over what can be called, for lack of a less ponderous phrase, first principles. What defines quality in a wine? How about authenticity? Is it ultimately more important for a wine to taste good or to taste true to its origins—to exhibit goût de terroir, as the French say? And if the end result is agreeable, does it matter how a wine was made? With much of the wine industry fixated on branding and marketing and technology increasingly giving vintners the power to bend nature to their will, these questions have taken on added urgency, and the discussion of them has grown ever more acrimonious, with terms such as anti-flavor wine elite and spoofulated being tossed around like hand grenades. All this Sturm und Drang over wine can seem excessive; after all, we’re talking about fermented grape juice, not war and peace. (There’s that preemptive cringe I mentioned!) The rancor of some of these debates brings to mind Freud’s famous comment about the “narcissism of small differences.”
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