(A)musing Intro

In 2002, I was running Suburban Wines & Spirits in the New York City area. A sales rep comes into the store with six wines he hopes to sell me. These six wines happen to be from six different countries. As we taste, what stands out is all the wines are plush & lush, low acid, very easy to drink on their own, high alcohol, and are missing any distinctive flavors whatsoever.

To me, this is not a good thing. This led to a personal perception that wineries are making wines that are easy for the consumer to ‘get’, using winemaking to shift their flavor profiles, with enough juice available to be produced in bulk, and consistently repeated year after year. Continuing my hypothesizing, this meant that the natural uniqueness that a vineyard, climate and culture could offer was being sacrificed. Sense of place was being replaced by marketing non-sense, or should I say by a tunnel-vision to dollars and cents. The grooviest marketing of the hour was grabbing the consumer’s attention, and the product put into the bottle had a goal of ‘don’t offend’.

The magic in the mystery, the heart and soul in discovery, the joy of not knowing and getting to explore (ie like a child), were being replaced by a belief that consistency was what we were after. To that, I object! My basic common sense seemed offended, and my delight in the almost endless discovery available in the world of wine, shifted into a rebellion of not wanting to promote the products of marketing gone wild.