Yeats entitled one of his mid-life poems ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’. The poem is mainly a complaint, about the tangled business of running a theatre (the Abbey in Dublin) and the infuriating difficulty of “management of men”, as opposed to the pure delight of writing poetry. But the title points to something which has impelled the poet to get involved in areas that pose intractable problems. And he doesn’t mention, at least in this poem, the great satisfactions that founding and running the theatre which staged JM Synge’s masterpiece Playboy of the Western World also afforded. Did Yeats really regret all that – even though, as you may remember, the first performances of Playboy led to riots? I don’t think so.
I’ve been pondering the fascination of difficult wines. This may not seem a very appealing subject, and somehow reminds me of those courses you can take in “Dealing with difficult people”. But let’s turn things around. If you don’t like the sound of difficult wines, surely the thought of “easy-drinking wines” is much more horrific.
An “easy-drinking” wine is a wine that can offend nobody; a wine from which nearly every trace of character, of specific style and origin, has been removed. We all know the kind of thing: those bland, expressionless Pinot Grigios and Merlots which are served in Economy Class or in hotel lobbies, and are the vinous equivalent of those environments. Those environments are also the natural home of another aesthetic horror, “easy-listening music”.
But a “difficult-drinking” wine? That hardly sounds like a winning marketing formula, any more than “difficult-to-listen-to music”. Let’s delve deeper into the concept.
Difficult wines, like difficult people, can be “in your face”. They don’t hold back, they say what they think, they are what they are. They implicitly challenge you to take them or leave them. One thing they will not be is bland and inoffensive.
Take Greece’s Assyrtiko. Never was a grape variety better named. Assyrtiko is assertive bordering on aggressive. It bristles with acidity, but balances that with texture and volume. When I was helping choose wines for my tennis club, and introduced an Assyrtiko, it divided opinion more sharply than any other wine on the list. One member complained it gave him migraines. But for those who persevere, Assyrtiko brings huge rewards. For me it is not just Greece’s most interesting grape variety, but one of the most fascinating varieties on the planet.
“Difficult” wines, like difficult music, for example the serialism originally developed by Schoenberg, may pose a kind of intellectual or epistemological puzzle – a difficulty of understanding. This has been my experience with two types of wines in particular, orange wines and the Nebbiolo-based reds of Piedmont.
When faced with a range of wines made by the dean of orange wine (or amber wine as he prefers to call it), Joska Gravner of Friuli, I was initially baffled. These austere ferments lacked most of the qualities I look for in wine, especially white wine: where were the primary fruit notes, where was the florality which is a feature of certain grapes varieties (Viognier, Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Bacchus etc), where was, more generally, the enticing charm?
These wines did not initially speak to me, or if they were speaking, I was not conversant with their language. I remember commenting that they seemed to require a whole new wine writing vocabulary. But with time, and further tasting, I began to get the hang of Gravner’s very particular approach to winemaking, based, he told me, not on modern scientific methods but on the Roman viticulturalist Columella. I found they had a certain gravitas and solemnity, not unlike the character of the gnomic Sr Gravner himself.
My puzzlement with the Nebbiolo-based wines of Piedmont was similar, though less radical. These were traditionally made red wines, but it was the character of Nebbiolo itself which eluded me. That combination of palish, Pinot Noir-ish colour with a tannic structure more reminiscent of Cabernet Sauvignon, the absence of berry fruit aromas and flavours, tantalising suggestions of earth and smoke…I was puzzled, I had been set a challenge, but it was one I wanted to explore. Part of the solution was setting aside preconceptions based on classic French red wines. There’s no point approaching Stravinsky, say, and expecting his music to sound like Brahms.
Sherry is another wine, or family of wines, which many find “difficult.” The difficulty doubtless comes from two features of sherry, the deliberate oxidation and dramatically higher levels of the pungent chemical acetaldehyde than are found in other wines. It’s quite natural to be put off by acetaldehyde – perhaps in the same kind of way that a naïve listener might be initially put off by the spiky intervals and absence of conventional harmonies in Schönberg, Berg or Webern. But both with sherry and with 12-tone music, if you’re prepared to open that mental door and keep going, you will be in for some wonderful experiences.
Facing up to disruptive audience members during the initial run of Playboy, apparently offended by references to women’s underwear but more likely by the unflattering portrayal of Irish manhood, Yeats defended artistic freedom and more specifically Synge’s right to show social realities on stage. Later in an interview he said “as far as [I] could see the people who formed the opposition had no books in their houses.” We can all react defensively when faced with the unfamiliar, whether it’s an unsparing dramatic masterpiece or a wine outside our comfort zone. But it’s surely better to stay with it, if we can; acknowledge our initial bewilderment but not react against it; begin to learn.
Photo by Karla Hernandez on Unsplash