We long ago settled the question of whether cigarettes are bad for you and whether auto seat belts save lives. While nothing seems more obvious now, it wasn’t always the case. When I was coming up, what is now the settled science was still up in the air. Where it would come down no one could then say.
Just what we should be pointing to as the driving force conveying originality in wine isn’t a public health issue upon which lives hang — but it’s an intriguing question that, despite what you might hear, is still up for grabs.
What makes one wine different from another? One way to address the question is to appeal to the grammar of wine marketing. How is originality explained by people actually selling it?
In the U.S. and most of the New World, mass market producers find that identifying their wine by constituent grape variety (usually restricted to a handful of the most recognizable, such as Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot) gains the most traction with consumers.
This approach is in contrast to the European penchant for organizing and identifying wine based on its place of origin. In this scheme, wine is represented as associated with a defined geographic area which may be as large as a region (Alto-Adige, say), or as specific as a single Grand Cru vineyard.(Corton-Charlemagne, e.g)
It’s true that many rules govern the production of wine under appellation law besides those that stipulate where the vineyards may be located — but these are largely opaque to the consumer. It’s the delimited place of origin that’s foregrounded.
A third approach de-emphasizes both varietal composition and place as primary identifiers and instead highlights an individual estate or, as is increasingly the case today, a single individual. Top Bordeaux châteaux s are especially good examples of the former. Among the latter, Sicily’s Arianna Occhipinti and California’s Steve Matthiasson come readily to mind. I like to borrow a term from film studies and call this wine’s version of auteur theory.
In this view, it matters less where the fruit is sourced or which cultivars are in play — their roles are overshadowed by the sheer force of the personalities involved and their acknowledged skill in making memorable wines of whatever materials they choose to work with. Winemaker-as-artisan-hero on a quest to realize a personal vision isn’t without legitimacy as a partial explanation of what makes one wine different from another.
Indeed, none of the partially contradictory/partially complementary explanations offered so far is illegitimate, per se. But each does suffer from a drawback common to all marketing rhetoric: over-simplification that risks falsification.
The stubborn and slightly embarrassing truth is that though we have some clues, a complete picture of how to account for wine and its multivarious permutations still eludes us. But should this really come as any surprise? We still don’t know what makes humans tick.