Every generation of wine writers declares that it wants to remove the mystique from wine: to demystify it. I say, enough. Demystify by all means; but I will stand up for mystique. Remove that at your peril.
What is mystique? (I learn from Wikipedia that it’s a Marvel Comics character, but please, let’s leave that aside.) It has connotations of mystery, but is not quite the same as mystification – which is why I believe we need more of the one and less of the other. That source of endless fascination The Shorter OED doesn’t have the word, clearly considering it far too French, but it does have ‘mystic’, for which it gives, inter alia, ‘secret, concealed’ and ‘inspiring an awed sense of mystery’. ‘Demystify’, which is how everybody plans to remove mystique, also doesn’t manage an entry, but let’s take it as meaning the opposite of ‘mystify’, which is, again inter alia: ‘to bewilder; to play on the credulity of; to hoax, humbug.’
Demystifying wine is clearly a good thing. It is what wine writing is all about. We do not want humbug. But ‘secret, concealed’ is not a bad thing, provided that the door is open to all who knock, which it is; and don’t we all remember the wines that inspired ‘an awed sense of mystery’?
Make wine ordinary, devoid of any mystique, and you make it forgettable and unvalued. What is unvalued is unsustainable.
We need people to understand why good wine is special, and why it’s worth their while learning about it, and learning how to judge it for themselves. Mystique, I suggest, can be the lure that leads people on: the mystery of the next level.
Mystifying, however, is what marketing departments do. It is not, as some would have it, a relic of an imagined fusty old snobbery-ridden-St-James’s-based wine trade. On the contrary, it is young, ultra-modern, ultra-slick, ultra-keen on every passing trend and ultra-unconcerned with the minutiae that make a wine great. At the bottom end the aim is to disguise the industrial nature of wine by presenting it as the product of a terroir, a passion, a mission – all the usual guff. At the top end, where price long ago freed itself from a close relationship with flavour, mystification is used to bolster the flattering sense of exclusivity required to justify that price. The wine must be presented as a philosophy, a revelation, something life-changing. And while great wine can be revelatory, such revelations tend to be personal and spontaneous, and not pre-packed.
Let’s look at big-name Champagne houses. They’re making brilliant wine, aren’t they? Trouble is, so are all their rivals. So what they need is mystification: layers and layers of it. The wine must be associated with celebrities, with art, with everything that is glamorous and unattainable. (It is to the credit of the chefs de cave that they succeed in making their voices, and the voices of their wines, heard above the noise of celebrity art, for those who want to hear.) Those of a certain age will remember Harrods’ old slogan: ‘Enter a different world.’ That’s the sort of thing. (That Harrods slogan seemed not to be used after Princess Diana entered a different world with an Al-Fayed driver at the wheel. But it was a clever slogan.)
When top estates insist on you visiting them by appointment to taste, guide you through their grand rooms and cellars and lay on a flattering degree of ceremony appropriate to your status (although more than one journalist has had a bit of a surprise in this respect), that is glamour. It is also potentially the beginning of mystification, so keep your wits about you.
Go right up the price and rarity scale and the language used seems to resemble that of neoplatonic mystery cults, with initiation, philosophical insights, visions of another way of being. (There are still exceptions, mostly in Burgundy.) A mere tasting, should you be selected for an invitation, will change your perspective on the world! It will challenge all your preconceptions! Admission to the property to taste is the first rung; then perhaps a place on the waiting list, and eventually – Oh, your heart’s desire! A minute allocation of actual, you know, bottles.
The result is that the higher up the scale you go, the more beauty and bullshit become intertwined. But maintaining a sense of awe and delight at a wine is not the same thing as swallowing the flim-flam surrounding it. We should always retain our inner bullshit monitor and our sense of the comic, we should always question assertions that sound ridiculous, and we should retain our fascination and our ability to fall in love with a wine, with a place. Demystification does not, should not, mean making wine ordinary.
The danger is that we who work in wine want everybody to love wine – all wine – and most people, even most wine drinkers, just aren’t that interested. Demystification is an overcrowded field: there is probably more demystification than there are people wanting it. The other day at a wedding I sat next to a man who only drinks Bordeaux and Burgundy. He buys most of it from Berry Bros and likes to pay around £50 a bottle. He doesn’t care much about wine (or food either, which is telling); he just wants something familiar that he will enjoy drinking. Does he want to be told to try orange wine, English wine, Austrian wine? No. Does he want wine demystified? No. He’s just not that interested. He has reached the level of the wine mystery cult that suits him, and he’s content to stay there.
When I was about eight or nine my grandmother gave me a book – The Observer’s Book of British Birds. I adored it – because it organised birds into families and gave them their Latin names and felt like a door into adult knowledge. I didn’t want to be patronised by the simplistic stuff aimed at children. When I started to learn about wine I did not want to be told ‘it’s your palate that counts!’ I wanted to see what they saw: I wanted to know why wine A was reckoned to be better than wine B.
And the wine trade – yes, that imagined fusty old snobbery-ridden-St-James’s-based wine trade – has always been brilliant at that. I remember standing next to a besuited stout gent at one of the first tastings I ever went to. We were both tasting the same wine. ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Very closed.’ Aha! I thought. That’s what ‘closed’ looks like. Got it.
Yes, he was demystifying that wine for me. But he was increasing its mystique. It immediately became more interesting, and I had taken my first step upwards in the mystery cult that is wine.
We are constantly told that to engage young people wine must be made easier, more approachable. I suggest that on the contrary, we should stress its complications, its magic; how it will repay study over a lifetime. Did any of the people who want to remove the mystique of wine come to it because they thought it was simple?
Photo by Diane Helentjaris on Unsplash