The cute verse is from the site OEDILF.co, where an editorial team and a host of contributors were once busy compiling a complete English dictionary, each word defined by means of a limerick. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of words appeared there before the site somehow disappeared.
Limericks are a bit like their even lower-rent siblings, knock-knock jokes. The scheme is perfectly predictable, the rhythm infectious. Once we recognize that ta TUMP-itty TUMP-itty TUM we know what’s coming. The expectation that the five lines of verse, once underway, will shuffle their way to an amusing or at least clever conclusion is the greater part of the fun. Alter the familiar meter, add or subtract a line, fail to adhere to the rhyme scheme and you risk losing your audience. ”Hey,” you’d say, “that’s no limerick.” And you’d be right.
If you were to make an analogy to poetic forms, a wine made from Barbera (a popular red grape variety that makes a kind of people’s choice wine and that doesn’t often rise to heights of grandeur) would be a limerick; while Barolo (a Nebbiolo-based wine from prestige vineyard sites in northern Italy and always spendy) would be more like an epic poem, a serious theme expressed in a classic form. Think here of Longfellow’s pulsing hexameters (This is the forest primeval); or maybe Shakespeare’s march-cadence blank verse (Yond Cassius hath a lean and hungry look). But the idea is that each has a time-honored tumpitty-tump of its own to guide us along.
In the world of viticulture, we have something called appellations, a collection of forms into which wine can be poured, you might say. Appellation law, wherever it exists, earns its living providing a set of familiar, approved patterns to which winemakers can conform their output and corresponding naming protocols to help identify them.
The idea is that when a consumer hears Côtes du Rhone, for example, it’s like hearing someone say “knock, knock.” What comes next will be pretty predictable. Should a winemaker disregard traditional harvest dates, add an unauthorized grape variety, or employ novel cellar technique (all outside the prescribed pattern), consumers might react with surprise or indignation at the result. “Hey,” you’d say, “that’s no Côtes du Rhône.” And you’d be (largely) right.
The appellation system works smoothly for winemakers and wine drinkers alike until someone comes along for whom the rules feel more like a hindrance than a help. The impulse to jump the fence and explore fresh territory is more likely to come from the vintner side of the equation than from consumers, although consumers can become willing co-conspirators when they, too, grow disenchanted with same old thing.
From the start, the FK Wine Corner has harbored a healthy respect for outstanding examples of approved-model winemaking — let’s call it wine that rhymes — but also takes delight in the kind of fence jumping and form bending that results in bottles that either refuse to scan in the usual way or bump along at an idiosyncratic pace we’re not used to. There are any number ways for winemakers to go walkabout in this way. Let’s quickly look at four.
Low to no sulfur wines. Additions of sulfur dioxide made routinely at various stages of winemaking are aimed at maintaining bright fruit flavors, aromas, and colors and suppressing unwanted bacterial activity, but without it wine can take on a divergent character. You may call what results faulty or just alt-y, depending on whether or not you enjoy it. Wines made this way may not show enough typicity(conformation to approved standards of taste and appearance) to be passed by appellation judging panels, and thus may be denied the designation they would otherwise qualify for.
White wines made like reds. In conventional white wine-making fresh grapes are pressed and the juice fermented apart from any solid matter. Red wines are made by crushing grapes so that fermentation takes place in the presence of all the solid matter (skins, pulp, seeds, sometimes stems). The tannins and pigments this latter process extracts are what make red wine what it is. Give white grapes the red grape treatment and what you get is something more like an off-white wine showing unconventional flashes of color, texture, and grip. Tasting what are nicknamed orange wines (for the amber hue they often assume) can be a real paradigm shifter.
Wines in non-standard packaging. At this point, there’s nothing terribly new about bag-in-box, TetraPaks and cans, except this: We’re at the point where we’re seeing what we would call quality wine appear in these formats. The disconnect for the consumer comes when long-established ideas about glass bottles and cork closures being the one true and unfailing guarantee of quality meets this new reality.
Lower-alcohol wine. Historically, everyday and even better-than-everyday winewas a slender affair. This was especially true after the Romans carried the vine into the more northerly reaches of Europe, where attaining Mediterranean-quality ripeness was often just not possible. Recent decades have brought a rather dramatic escalation in alcohol levels, but that era seems to be on the wane, we’re happy to say. Stylistically contemporary wine is taking on a distinctly bright, up tempo beat that’s both more gastronomically tuned-in and digestible. The truth is that lower alcohol wine (let’s say below 12 percent) can be both satisfying and delightfully drinkable. The current popularity of feather-weight, chillable reds proves the point.
Wines that don’t rhyme can be a little demanding, requiring more time and patience to sell, and requiring consumers to reset some expectations. While not every wine shop or consumer is willing to make the effort, we do, because, in the end, we’re convinced that wine, like poetry or any other human effort, has the obligation to progress — even if that only means replacing one tumpitty-tump with another.