Lost in the Deluge of Commonality

“The uniqueness of America would prove to be its ability to erase uniqueness.” Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience.

When I started writing this post a few days ago I was going to feed off of this quote. My plan was to essentially speak to how it might apply to the homogenization of the wine industry that is reducing the availability of the individual wine. About the traveling winemakers who add to it. About mega-vineyards and mega producers adding to it. Of the selling out to big business and then the consolidation of brands adding to it. Maybe I would’ve hinted at singular palates—yes, the RP effect—and their influence adding to it. Would’ve shared some trade secrets about how, unbeknownst to consumers, different labels are used for the very same wine and how all of this factual information points to wine commonality now more than ever before. Then I would’ve finished it off with a resounding, “America needs more of its own wine that’s uncopyable and individual!” or something like that, to continue the idea at another time.

But then I read The Pour’s latest post, False Demons, where Eric (Eric, we’ve never met, but may I call you Eric?) critiques a new wine book, Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters as well as its author, Mondovino’s Jonathan Nossiter, and in effect dismisses a big claim Nossiter hangs his hat on about wine, claiming instead that unique wine is out there, more readily available than ever before.

On Eric’s post I found a link leading me to a wonderful quote of Jim Holt’s, a reviewer of Nossiter’s book for The New York Times. Holt boils down Nossiter’s point of view, explaining that Nossiter’s anger towards certain wine industry factions stems from the belief that “global homogenization…is erasing local identity and historical memory.” This reminded me of another of Boorstin’s quotes from his same book, The Americans: The Democratic Experience: “Here, as never before, the world would witness the “equalizing” of times and places.” Erasing, equalizing…to me, these two quotes speak to the wiping out of what makes a person, a place, a time, a WINE, unequivocally unique while the industry marches on making wine for the people, not wine for the individual.

Both quotes made me think about what is truly being lost in the democratization of wine taking place around the globe, and particularly here in the US: that gentle and unique reflection of a single person, a time, and a place encapsulated in glass. The consuming work of a vigneron includes hopes and dreams for their vines that are as large as any parent’s for their child: that their child be a person of the world, but always true to her/himself. And that never, EVER let the individual one was born to be get erased in transit and lost in the deluge of commonality.

I can’t wait to read Nossiter’s book.