"Ours, increasingly, is the age of pseudo-connoisseurship, the means by which we seek fatuously to distinguish ourselves from the main of mediocrity. To sit around a bottle of rancid grape juice, speaking of delicate hints of black currant, oaken smoke, truffle, or whatever other dainty nonsense with which nature is fancied to have enlaced its taste, is to be a cafone of the first order. For if there is the delicate hint of anything to be sensed in any wine, it is likely that of pesticide and manure. Of a 1978 Chateau Margaux, one "connoisseur" pronounces: 'With an hour's air, this wine unfolded to reveal scents of sweet cassis, chocolate, violets, tobacco, and sweet vanillin oak. With another ten years or so, this wine may evolve into the classic Margaux melange of cassis, black truffles, violets, and vanilla.' As if this were not absurdity enough, there is 'a note of bell pepper lurking in the cassis.'
How could so sophisticated a nose fail to detect the cow shit with which this most celebrated estate of Bordeaux fertilizes its vines? A true wine connoisseur, if there were such a thing, would taste the pesticide and manure above all else: he would be not a gouteur de vin but rather a gouteur de merde. But there is no true connoisseurship of wine outside of those who know that the true soul of the wine, l'ame du vin, is vinegar. It is in sipping straight those rare aged vinegars designated da bere that one truly tastes wonders: the real thing, an ichor far beyond the jive-juice of that industry of adjectives and pretense which was once the artless and noble drink of artless and noble peasants - peasants nobler and of greater connoissance than the moneyed suckers of today who have been conned into believing that the tasting of wine calls for words other than 'good,' 'bad,' or 'just shut up and drink.'"
Don't know that I agree with all that, but I LOL'ed when I read it recently in this curious little book by Nick Tosches
amazon.com |
