German Catalog 2006 USE THIS ONE.qxp - Michael Skurnik Wines

106
the matter of “globalization”
The matter of globalization in wine seems to
put certain people on the defensive. This is
regrettable, not least because defensive people
often lash out, and a dialogue which ought to be
able to be conducted civilly ends up being conducted
evilly. Robert Parker’s recent essay, posted
on his website, contained many reasonable
and persuasive points, the value of which was
diminished by an intermittent tone of invective.
All intellectuals aren’t “pseudo-intellectuals” (I
wonder how he tells them apart) and all persons
taking views contrary to his aren’t guilty of membership
in the “pleasure-police.”
I’ll try to summarize the positions of the two
camps. Critics of globalization in wine are actually
suspicious of a uniformity of wine-styles
they perceive has arisen over the past roughly-20
years. For the sake of brevity, let’s call these people
“romantics.”
Proponents of globalization—let’s call them
“pragmatists”—argue that wine in the aggregate
has never been better, and that good wines are
hailing from a larger number of places than ever
before. They do not perceive a problem, and
think a bunch of fussbudgets are trying to rain
on their parade.
Romantics would counter that the sense of
multiplicity is misleading, because it’s actually
the same type of wine hailing from all these
new places.
I cannot reasonably deny the validity of the
pragmatist’s argument. There are certainly many
more competent and tasty wines (and concomitantly
fewer rustic, dirty or yucky wines) than
there were twenty years ago. Yet I can’t help but
wonder; certainly the floor has been raised on
overall wine quality. But has the ceiling been
lowered? That, I interpret, is the romantic’s argument.
But not all of it.
Baseball fans are cruelly aware of the steroid
scandal threatening the basic integrity of the
sport. We are sometimes less aware of the role
we ourselves have played in bringing this about.
We seem to want to wish it all away. We enjoy
the prospect of herculean demi-gods bulked up
on chemicals hitting baseballs 500 feet. This is
becoming our Ideal, and players embodying this
ideal put butts in the seats and command the
largest salaries. They are also the envy of other,
less “enhanced” players, some of whom seek to
climb on board the gravy train.
I see a metaphor here. There is no doubt
that the prevailing recipe for modern wines
with commercial aspirations effectively seems
to churn them out; ripe, sweet, softly embedded
tannins, large-scaled and concentrated. The
pragmatists care less about how such wines get
that way than they do about being entertained
and thrilled by juiced-up sluggers hitting the
ball 500 feet.
I’ll yield this argument is properly conducted
in shades of gray. Parker has often expressed
his esteem and admiration for moderate, elegant,
temperate wines. He typically scores them
in the high 80s, and has told me he wishes more
people prized and drank such wines. Yet he
must be aware the commodity called a “Parkerscore”
in fact damns such wines with faint
praise. And though he admires these wines well
enough, he reserves his love and expressive
emotionality for their bigger, more hedonistic
cousins.
Thus a particular idiom becomes the prevailing
idiom, because everyone wants the
scores and the financial success they engender. It
is the singular persuasiveness of this monoidiom
against which the romantics struggle.
They—we—are innately wary of uniformity, as it
is contrary to nature. We are also alert to an
insidious effect such uniformities can create. We
risk becoming passive, infantilized, dulled.
When all things are one single way there’s less
need to pay attention to them, for they no longer
can surprise you.
Pragmatists will claim I am overstating the
case; none of them argues that all wines should
taste the same. Fair enough. Yet they themselves
often accuse romantics of wishing to return to
some imagined Eden of dirty, weird and rustic
wines (which, they sneer, we excuse by citing terroir).
The dialogue threatens to reduce to a war
of straw men.