18TH OCTOBER 2023
by Peter Pharos
If you are wondering why Threads has not caught up with Twitter yet, the answer is Direct Messages. A lot is made of the performative nature of social media posts, but the real action is in the hushed comments in the stalls. The wine world is particularly good at creating opportunities for those. Wine news tends to be unexciting and formulaic (a land purchase here, a new label there), but wine people’s pronouncements flirt with the vaudeville with wonderful frequency.
Life is such that in all its walks everyone is a fraud to an extent. Yet, in wine the decoupling of words and actions is now almost entirely complete. I think of it as living in wine’s Postmodern period.
The Classical period is easy to recognise. It had a fixed set of rules, which were generally shared, easily understood, and occasionally observed. It was big on stories, usually stories of eccentricity and charm. It had a uniform aesthetic and a rigid hierarchy, drawing in equal parts from tradition and mysticism. It also had a finite corpus and a bounded canon; you could learn anything worth knowing in a few weeks, and drink everything worth drinking in little less than a year. Developments were few and easy to follow, and so were the gatekeepers. This is also the period, by the way, that still informs almost everything the layperson thinks they know about wine.
Then, somewhere in the early 1970s, the first Modernist tendencies appear. Wine modernism was techno-optimist: it believed technology and, on a good day, science, were the answer. It too had a set of rules, indeed more than before, but it claimed to strive for consistency and rationality in those. The aesthetic framework and the accompanying hierarchy were also largely agreed, but they were more diverse and more amenable to change.
That was partly because wine modernism was inquisitive and open to the new. But it was also because it was more businesslike and money driven. The economic aspect of its rationality considered that the customer is always right, and the one that proves right the maximum number of customers while making the most profit wins. To continue reading, click here
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