Stuart Pigott on Why _I_ hate most wine...

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It is always the guys who import / write about German wines who have the most to say on Terroir (see Terry Theise!):

The latest issue of Slow, the Slow Food Movement's magazine, has THIS wonderful musing from Stuart Pigott:


.... The borderline between enough and too much is a crucial aspect of the wine drinking experience. Today it is not at all uncommon for wines to make a pretty plausible and superficially attractive impression in the first moment — sweet and fruity aromas, then a soft, round taste — but after only a glass it starts to tasting like unbearably gooey kitsch. The wine has not changed, rather the drinker has realized that the liquid in his glass is all make-up and silicone, possibly lacking any real body beneath these cosmetics. I call this taste 'fluffy white bunny' because this type of wine appeals to our BABY-TASTE. Unlike adult-taste which is culturally-determined and therefore a serious obstacle to trans-cultural wine brands — the undeclared goal of the handful of huge companies who today dominate global wine sales — baby-taste is the same the world over.

The truth is though that hardly any wines naturally have a 'fluffy-white-bunny' taste. Nearly all of them acquire this in the cellar where the technical possibilities for the manipulation of wine are now almost unlimited. Only computer-generated virtual reality is more completely malleable, which means that in these corporations' industrial production facilities the taste of vine biodiversity, of place and of regional wine traditions all become part of the COLLATERAL DAMAGE in the global wine sales war. WAR really is the right word, because, currently, the global over-production of wine is around five billion litres; currently, the big wine corporations are in the process of finding out how hard it is to make big money with wine in an over-saturated market.

There are other descriptors for this NOWHERE-PLANET-WINE taste which is determined by marketing plans and quarterly figures. Reinhard Lowenstein of Heymann-Lowenstein in Winningen/Mosel calls it 'Plastico-Fantastico-Viagra', making clear how the enormous success of this wine style is based upon artificially stimulated desire. The strategy of the big companies is: 'nobody needs wine, but we can persuade anyone whose not anti-alcohol to want it by hitting the right buttons in their nervous system'. It is all about shifting units through tapping into the lowest common denominator of human taste; a policy shared with the food industry that is leading to a global dumbing-down.

Of course, there are people who genuinely prefer the cosiness of security-blanket flavours, just as some people actually prefer the Pamela Anderson-type sexuality to more exciting but challenging alternatives like the Julianne Moore variety: sadly my sexual imagery is too obvious to stand a chance of qualifying as poetic, but that doesn't make it less appropriate a description of the situation. I wish them every happiness in their Brave New Wine World with their SOMA-BAY-WATCH-WINES. But I also feel sure that the reason many of them are still consuming this infantile kitsch-goo is because they've not experienced the vinous equivalent of Julianne Moore; wines with the bold originality and haunting eroticism of the dry whites from Heymann-Lowenstein which reflect the remarkable places where they grew and the remarkable people who crafted them. Many consumers have simply been unlucky to get caught in the net of global wine marketing and are stuck in it. If only I could help them escape!

— Stuart Pigott, “Professionally Drunk”