When did winemakers become philosophers? Is it that if you charge more than a certain amount for a bottle of wine you have to justify it by some intellectual heft, because – as we know – flavour is, above a certain level, not the major determinant of price? Or do some producers feel that if people are prepared to pay that much for what they produce from the land, then what they produce from their heads must have some value too, and should be shared with the world?

I received what I assume was a New Year card from a Californian winery. It had the name of the winery but no mention of any reason for sending the card. Inside was simply a quote from Proust: ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.’

This is very nice, and a happy thought for the grey January day on which it arrived. It is very apt, and very true.

I can think of other producers who write whole books about their approach to life and what they have learnt on their journey. These frequently reference Rudolf Steiner at some point, though not all of Steiner’s views were particularly savoury and are best cherrypicked with some care. (The same could be said of Proust.)

Such writings, usually along the lines of ‘what people are looking for today goes beyond money and fashion’ are (quite apart from being written by people who have made money by catching a wave) very in touch with the zeitgeist, because it is the fashion that more and more wine writers judge producers not only by the flavour of their wines but by their moral credentials. Some are reluctant to write about producers whose views or practices they disagree with.

No, I’m not going to name names. But I will say that it is a question that is sometimes put to me: should one cover this country or that country, or should one write about producers who send samples packed in polystyrene, or who have a reprehensible attitude to water use or bottle weight. And it really is that broad: grounds for offence range from packaging materials to government policy.

And before I say, all that is irrelevant, and it is the wine that counts, I have to remember my tendency, and the tendency of all the writers I know well enough to ask, to want to like wines more if they are made by people they like.

Everybody adored Anthony Barton. If he had been unspeakably rude to everybody he met, and if his dog had been an attack dog rather than a lolloping red setter, would we all have liked Léoville Barton less? He didn’t philosophise at you; instead he made you laugh and passed on bits of gossip and treated you, however young and ignorant you were, as if you were worthy of his time.

You could argue that the wine would have been different had he been different: wines reflect their makers, so his would have been more aggressive, less likeable. And that is true.

But if you can want to like wines made by people you like, how is that different to wanting to ignore wines made by people you don’t admire? And if you like them because they have charm and make you laugh, is that worse than shunning them because you suspect them of voting the wrong way?

Wines need stories, we are told. It’s true, of course: quality across the board is at least decent, and 50 years ago would have been considered miraculous. But it makes it difficult for a wine to stand out. Hence the need for a story; but stories can be dangerous. The best stories carry an element of risk.

Stories have always been edited. I hope that Tim Atkin will alert me if anything I say will get me, or him, cancelled. But another word for an edited story might be ‘mystique’, and mystique is what we’re supposed to eradicate from wine. Every generation of wine writers dedicates itself to removing the mystique from wine, while the previous generation says, ‘but didn’t we do that?’

I always want the story behind a wine. Writing tasting notes interests me less than the human dramas behind the discovery of a piece of land, or an inheritance, or indeed the narrative that we all make of our lives with the benefit of hindsight. Our narratives adjust themselves over time to bring us, via twists and turns, over hill and over dale, to where we are now.

Sometimes there isn’t much of a story behind a wine; or it has been made so anodyne as to be not worth telling. Many ‘stories’ are just word salads: zero-intervention, purity, passion, complexity, terroir, expression, philosophy, ecosystem, unique, sensitive, regenerative, sustainable, belief.  Arrange those words in any order and you’ll have the contents of most press releases, and indeed of most tasting presentations.

In days of yore the stories were a bit different: I’m reminded of the 1980s, when every new and usually sickly liqueur was accompanied by a tale of an ancient recipe rediscovered in a dusty attic. (Mostly you could see why the recipe had been consigned to the attic.) Then it was stainless steel and technology. Then, in wine, ancient vine varieties began to be rediscovered, and those were real stories – where? In a hedge! Whose hedge? How did you spot it? – but now that there are more new-old vines than anyone can possibly remember, that story has become commonplace – even though it is by far the most interesting and genuine part of any story, the DNA of old vine varieties casting light on human travels, climate change and economic power.

Read The Australian Ark if you want genuine stories – of human ambition and failure, chance, tragedy and determination. But these are stories difficult to convey in a few seconds, or 50 words, and they require an understanding of context. So producers have recourse to zero-intervention, purity, passion, complexity, terroir, expression, philosophy, ecosystem, unique, sensitive, regenerative, sustainable, belief. Every box ticked. Yawn. The ‘stories’ behind wine remind one, all too often, of the labels on shampoo bottles, promising to make your hair shiny and manageable.

The philosophy adopted by wine producers is equally shiny and manageable. Nietzsche it is not. But wouldn’t it be thrilling to have, say, the owner of a first-growth Médoc château stand up and talk about the will to power? Or how nihilism has influenced their pruning techniques?

But we are all at the mercy of fashion. Fashion currently favours the virtuously anodyne. And to all those who insist on talking about their passion – or worse, asking me about mine – I can only say: this too will pass.

Photo by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash