Something was eating away at me; had I written this piece before? Or had somebody else?

The only result that came up after a hasty sanity check was an obscure think-piece that provoked instant nostalgia…for a time before the publishing industry decided editors were disposable (and yes, please do make a note of any flaws in the text that follows). It wasn’t, though, quite the piece I was searching for. Phew.

The topic at hand? Our ability to build our histories not only via the murky conduits of our own memories, but through the limitlessness of our devices. Cold, hard, digital knowledge, endlessly piling up. And, since we’re here, how it affects our relationship with wine.

We could just as easily take another subject matter, though. Romance, for example. Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror episode “The Entire History of You” sees a junior lawyer wrestle with the normalisation of implants which provide on-demand video, or “re-dos”, of everything the implantee has seen. One character admits that they watch “redos of like, hot times in earlier relationships” rather than spending much time in their actual marital bedroom. Work meetings are re-scrutinised – am I about to be fired? Airport security takes a look at our last 12 hours when we check in. The first time I watched it, in 2011, it seemed like science fiction. Today, just a few years later, it feels a bit close to the bone.

There are probably few more un-sexy prospects, to most people, than re-runs of old trysts in HD. We don’t always like the cold light of day, and the detail that it reveals; in fact our unprecedented ability to digitally verify what we’re told seems to feed our desire for fuzzy, nostalgic fantasies. Perhaps our trove of digitised memory means we have little room for personal nostalgia any more, so we line up to fill our cups at the fonts of quacks and showmen, populists and quasi-fascists who ladle it out.

How does our microcosm of wine cope with this overload? The American wine writer Jason Wilson recently wrote a piece entitled “Does Place Matter Anymore for Wine Drinkers”, in which he observes that  “..much of the higher-end natural wine chatter also avoids a deep discussion of place. While the best natural-wine producers are committed terroirists, a lot of the derivative, middling natty wine talk is way more about winemaking technique and philosophy..” It’s an observation that has at its heart the same un-sexiness of Brooker’s Hot Times; romance is a dish best served in dim lighting, not recorded, replayed, pored over. Places just aren’t as romantic, or idealised, in the hypervisual age, whether they be Macchu Picchu or Clos Vougeot.

Despite the empiricism of the people who make it, talk to consumers of a certain age and you’ll still find nostalgic visions in their love of wine, though – blistered hands on worn wooden presses, jolly harvests of wicker baskets, mist rolling over hillsides striped with gold. Many of them had never seen a vineyard, let alone set foot in one, before they put their first case away. Today, though, we see behind the curtain more and more; follow wine online and you’ll soon be recognising herbicide strips, delving into explainer videos on almost every winemaking process, even – as one very adept instragrammer turns out – watching videos inviting us to identify individual molecules responsible for aromas in wines, as if this were the key to being ‘good’ at wine tasting.

I do it. They do it. We all do it. Today, text is there to illustrate videos and photos – not the other way around. In this visual saturation, though, lies the great de-fuzzification, de-romanticisation of many of the things that drew us into this world in the first place; in the 1990s, no wine amateur would have found themselves being told what the flavour compound guaiacol was, or how a pneumatic press works. Today – unless OFCOM includes wine education in the next online safety act – it’s a serious risk.

The slightly uncomfortable truth is that our contemporary relationship with landscape has changed, too; carpeting of hillsides raises voices of protest inside us crying ‘monoculture’ and ‘intensive farming’, and the conquering of wilderness seems like an embarrassingly-20th Century thing to celebrate. Yet that is what any videos of traditional wine regions such as Champagne or Bordeaux will, somewhat apologetically, offer up, tempered by a saminess of cellars, barrel halls and noses-in-glasses that doesn’t really bear the photographic saturation asked of it either. In the right light, the right vineyard, or the right cellar, can be strikingly beautiful. Spare a thought, though, for the wine equivalent of ‘faces for radio’ – places to drink, but perhaps not to frame and hang.

If wine production itself is hardly mysterious any more, where’s left for a spot of nostalgia and romance?

There’s one Champagne whose perennial success mines one of the few remaining refuges – Perrier-Jouët’s Prestige Cuvée ‘Belle Époque’. It’s a wine that us critics don’t pay as much attention to as some of its peers, yet it’s often one I get asked about thanks to its beautiful, florid Art Nouveau bottle and typeface. It’s the ultimate exercise in fantasy nostalgia, in this case for turn-of-the century Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec, Satie, Proust. Dappled shade on wrought-iron chairs in the autumn sun, gents in bat-wing collars, ladies sipping absinthe. Visit the house in Épernay and it’s all there, too, down to the smallest detail. People remember it.

More than a bit of dressing-up, though, Belle Époque’s nostalgia calls up something social. Something to do with the period’s spirit (or at least its reputation) for social liberalism, hedonism and conviviality, for a freewheeling optimism which can feel almost unreachable today. No, the cholera, the poverty, the subjugation of entire swathes of society, isn’t part of the picture. But nostalgia is allowed to pick the best of something.

So no, it isn’t quite dead, yet. It just needs a few new territories to roam in. (Putting “Death” in a title really ups the readership numbers, though – according to an old editor, at least).

And it turns out that I hadn’t written this piece before (and nor, quite, had anyone else). Even if I had, though, perhaps I would have written it again; would anyone have checked?

Photo by Monty Allen on Unsplash