Tuesday, November 15, 2005
(4:10 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Knowing Stuff About Wine
I was reading this article about wine in the Atlantic Monthly, because I've heard that to succeed in the academic world, one must know about wine. The article presents many obstacles. First of all, he says that "Shinn Estate [the farm that is the topic of the article] Merlots are soft and inviting--as are California Merlots (and nothing more, the Giamatti character [in Sideways] might add)--but also structured and complex, like great wines." Structured and complex? This is a liquid that I'm drinking, right? It's starting to sound like we're moving from the initial crush to signing a mortgage together -- this is a Merlot you can really settle down with.Even worse are the asides that have nothing to do with wine -- and really, I do feel competent enough to read a middle-brow literary magazine in most subject areas other than wine; in fact, I am competent in nothing more, the Giamatti character might add -- as in this sequence: "When Shinn and Page, who owned and ran a tiny and adored Greenwich Village restaurant, bought a farm, seven years ago, the land was just affordable. Page, who has the profile of a Founding Father and a gray ponytail to go with it, is from Wisconsin; Shinn, the kind of long-limbed, casual American beauty the designer Claire McCardell had in mind when she made American sportswear internationally popular, grew up in Ohio." I did catch the Founding Fathers reference, but despite the generous assitance of specifying that this Claire McCardell person is a "designer," I really doubt that that was the most economical way of describing Ms. Shinn's physique. Should I have The Complete Idiot's Guide to Fashion History on hand for situations like this?
Admittedly, there is a certain artfulness in comparing this American winery-ist to some homegrown American product that became internationally popular, but I wonder about the exact conventions here. If the Atlantic Monthly were sufficiently highbrow, it could afford to compare Ms. Shinn to a character from The O. C., which would have the value of being both self-consciously campy and actually helpful. A middle-brow publication does not have sufficient cred to stoop that low, however (and with the Atlantic we're dealing with a definite lower-middle brow situation). To be able to afford a reference to The O. C., you really need to have a reference to Walter Benjamin to balance it out -- here, we're dealing with the plane of resolutely middlebrow references (cf. Sideways).
At this point, I feel I've done enough work to establish my superiority to the Atlantic Monthly and therefore no longer feel bad that the idea of a "structured and complex" wine is only minimally comprehensible. One is reminded of what Walter Benjamin wrote in his Theses on the Philosophy of History: "Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim." Well said, Walt.
