What is Wine?

It's been a few months since I posted here, and Kim suggested I write about wine.

Well, there's a loaded subject. I'll just start here with an interview with a real winegrower:


Now, I put this here because I just want to get something out of the way:

Most "wines" that we run into in the U.S. (the ubiquitous brands in every liquor store/ wine shop) ain't wine. They're food-processed beverages manufactured by multi-national, publicly traded marketing companies that trade on the "traditions" of wine. Real wine is the product of careful agriculture, and honest winemaking, and rare these days.

The history of wine follows these 4 points:
1: Wine, 2,000, or 1,500, or even 500 years ago, was something to drink that wouldn’t kill you (like the water could).

2: Wine was also a source of calories that could be raised from soils that wouldn’t support other crops; grapes make their best wines in hard, stony soils that couldn’t support, say, wheat, and were unsuitable for pasture.

3: The alcohol in wine also offered a means of preserving those calories for some measure of time, stretching out the fruit of the harvest.

4: The grapes nurtured in any particular place in the “Old World” tended to make wines that “tasted good” with the other foods the local climate, soil types, and culture could provide.

If we look at those four factors together, it’s relatively simple to see why wines in the the Middle Loire Valley in France are delicious with cream and butter sauces, while wines in Provence are better at handling foods laced with olive-oil. Middle Loire wines evolved in a place that wasn’t warm enough for olives, but was just dandy for farming cows for dairy products.

In the modern world of marketing, wine is a "product," like toothpaste and toilet paper, churned out in massive quantities to protect "brand positions," and the techniques and manufacturing processes scare the hell out of consumers when they're made aware of them. I won't go through them here, but if you're interested, you can follow these links:
Chemicals used in industrial "winemaking"
Fake Oak in "wine"
Hyper-processing techniques, and, of course, everybody's dirty red wine secret.
These are just some of the reasons why "writing about wine" for a general audience is so difficult. Wine (as my brother once said), is a "simple pleasure, but a complicated subject."

The only simple thing I can pass along about wine is this:
Never by wine from a winery with a marketing department. By wine from real winegrowers.