Grapes of Wrath

Several years ago, I did some reporting for a story that I wanted to write about wine and how it's advertised. I was interested in whether the wine industry would be able to reach the younger drinkers it ritually pledges to woo away from beer and liquor, so I lined up an interview with the head of an agency that had done some work for a French winemaker. He was completely no-nonsense about what the vast majority of wine drinkers are all about. Their two key concerns, he explained matter-of-factly, were to find something that tastes good and not get ripped off.

Neither of these books is written for the tastes-good, don't-rip-me-off crowd. But they've arrived at a critical time for the wine business. Depending on whom you talk to, things are either great or grim. If you consider wine to be the final redoubt of breeding and discernment in a world gone hopelessly vulgar, then the drive to transform the beverage into a mass pleasure is ghastly. If, however, you think that wine needs to evolve--as it always has, since the time of Cistercian monks in twelfth-century Burgundy--to avoid becoming something that just a mandarin elite consumes, the dramatic changes of the past few decades are welcome, even if they mean that classic styles of wine, like classic fashions or tastes in art, might suffer.

Not "Wine for Dummies," in other words. Both Echikson, a longtime contributor to various magazines--including, full disclosure, my former employer, Wine Spectator (though we never met)--and a resident of Europe for two decades, and Osborne, a New York Times Magazine contributor and author of books on everything from sex in art to obscure children's ailments (more full disclosure: I've had dinner with the man on several occasions) are writing for audiences that have moved beyond Hearty Burgundy. Or for that matter, its modern incarnations--the easy-drinking, inexpensive "quaffers" cranked out by mega-wineries in Australia and California.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.