The Emperor’s New Clothes?

I can hear what some of my friend’s are saying out there. Wine? Why bother? What’s the point? I mean, it’s all the same at the end of the day isn’t it? A bottle of plonk is a bottle of plonk.

Wrong.

More often than not, the people who say this about wine would never contemplate saying the same thing about music. True, all wine comes from grapes. But it’s equally true that all music comes from the same basic set of twelve notes. But as you and I both know, that’s not the same as saying that everything that stems from that (sorry!) is the same.

The Music Factory

Just like music, the majority of wine you’ll find is mediocre, or at best merely palatable (respectable?). Like music a lot of wine is made for mass markets and big sales, and as such it appeals to simple tastes. If you’re drinking cheap supermarket wine, it’s odds on that you are quaffing something like a Stock, Aitken and Waterman production, and that you’re glass is the equivalent of a Mel and Kim single. There are of course exceptions – the odd radio-friendly tune that is annoyingly catchy (most of Concha y Toro’s wines fall into this “cheap and cheerful” category). But all the same, it’s never going to be great.

A little further upstream and you find yourself in the wine category that’s a little more like the albums you actually go out and buy, or songs that find their way into your top hundred singles of all time (sadly however it’s not yet possible to download wines on bittorrent). These wines by necessity tend to be a bit pricier. For the most part this is because the wines tend to be from vineyards practising crop-thinning, hand-picking, and grape selection. They also require a little more care in the vinification and maturation processes – all of which have a cost attached to them (but let’s not rule out plain greed on the part of the winemaker either!). This is where you’ll find your better wines, the ones that can transform an otherwise mundane or satisfactory experience into something extra-ordinary (personally, I would put the wines of Château Batailley here).

And then there’s the rest, the wines that can be as outstanding and exciting as a life-defining song by your all-time favourite band. Unfortunately, because this is the wine world, and because the laws of supply and demand play a part, these are way out of the price range of mere mortals such as you and I, but are no doubt the usual mid-week fare of Posh and Becks (god damn ’em!). They are few and far between and need to be treasured.

Wines and Record Labels

We can take the music theme a bit further. Think of a wine producer as a favourite record label. Sometimes they produce some excellent stuff, sometimes not, but you usually know what you’re letting yourself in for. As to the wine regions themselves, these make an even bigger difference, as these are the artists themselves. Take top Bordeaux wines for example. This is where you'll find the kingpins of wine - the Bob Dylans, U2s and Coldplays of this world. Compare this with Bourgogne (Burgundy), which as a wine region is ridiculously confusing - more like those small, infuriating records labels that specialise only in mind-bending electronica on white labels – music that is hard to fathom and equally hard to get hold of (e.g. the kind of stuff Bleep does all the time). With Bourgogne, you tend to find the groove you like and stick with it, because life’s too short to find out about all of it.

So the next time you’re down Tesco’s, ask yourself this: do I really fancy another bottle of Rick Astley, or do I fancy something a little more sublime? Take it from me, discovering wine is like discovering real music for the first time, or like finding a door in your house that leads to a completely new universe next door. You just need to open it!