why write about wine?

To start with, wine is above all a shared pleasure and what better than to write amongst friends about what is good and what is worthy of the spitoon. Most writing about wine collapses into simple description - an attempt, always extremely difficult, to render into language the non-verbal subtleties of taste. But of course taste in wine is deeply personal and extremely dependent on context. To set something so ephemeral down in the black and white of prose often ends up looking a pretentious failure. Written on the wind (hic, sic wine).

But wine writing does matter. Look at the example of Robert Parker, a passionate enthusiast, who has dominated the market, literally, because of the eloquence of his taste. His words have huge economic impact, can make or break certain vineyards, triumph key vintages. But, of course, his taste is as partial and limited as any single one man's must inevitably be. Without being personally offensive lets look a little deeper into the Parker bouquet - its perfume of mystery as the French might term it. His palate is for red over white, and for the dark over the light. He tends to look for and praise wines that aim for a purple darkness they might as well be black. He favours the heavy fruit and the strong use of oak. In otherwords, he seeks to pull wine towards his own yardstick of success. To the dismay of many, winemakers throughout the world are only to happy to follow such prescriptive writing, creating wines in accordance with an internationally accepted standard. This can create hollow parodies of wine - reds seeking to dress themselves up in the colour and texture of another wine, desperately applying large amounts of oak to give the appearance of depth and character.

Therefore to inaugurate our wine blog I'd like to propose a brief anti-Parker manifesto. Let wine be itself - let us not seek to homogenise or construct some table of taste. Our blog aims to celebrate the local and the different and the authentic. At the risk of sounding over philosophical what matters about wine is the meeting of history, culture and pleasure in the single instant - everything that has gone into the bottle before the bottle has gone (and lingers well afterwards). History - 'the terroir' - what has grown there in the past, what grape varietals the land and climate suits, as well as the history of its own past successes and failures; Culture - the type of wine grown, its place and purpose - in other words the relative ambition or modesty of the wine made, its relation to its owners and the nature and the size of their business (family owned or multi-national conglomerate); Pleasure - that of course wine drinking is a highly libidinous activity, a pleasure released and shared each time a bottle is opened.

Now my fellow drinkers all that must be worth writing about.