Liquid Memory, Scott’s Book Report

To give myself a little break from all this writing, I asked Scott to write a little “report” on Liquid Memory, a fairly controversial book by Jonathan Nossiter (see 11/17/09 The Pour Posting). I haven’t read it myself yet, but my guess is, I’ll just love it, as I found Mondovino, Nossiter’s film, a wonderful glimpse into the international world of wine. Mondovino felt like a parody on the industry, and while I just giggled through many parts, or shook my head in disbelief at the obnoxious egos flying around the world, you can imagine it was not well-received in the industry. The same way a Michael Moore  film is met by the industry he exposes. So I’m very curious about Liquid Memory.

Well, I guess I forgot to ask Scott to state his opinion of the book, because what we have here is a bare bones synopsis (now I know why he got his PhD in chemistry and not philosophy: less writing). So to give more insight into what Scott thinks of Nossiter, I’ve included his two comments to The Pour’s 11/17 posting. One more than the other is somewhat out of context on its own, but if you’re interested, you can go and read the whole string, which I hope you do.

Scott’s Comments

#16, Scott’s comment

I’ve watched Mondovino twice, the second time quite recently, and I don’t think one should take Nossiter too literally. True, Nossiter probably does mourn “the larger loss of local cultures”, i.e., wine grown from land and made by a person of that very land, all with originality and uniqueness by the very nature of their locale and person-land relationship. Nossiter is worried about losing this “local culture” because of the inherent fundamentals of globalizing economies, e.g., the biodynamic Arbois winemaker saying “I want to sell more of my wine to those rich Americans (or Chinese or Japanese or…), and if I can sell more then I will expand to make more money, and if I expand I will have more wine to sell, and if I have more wine to sell I will need to “appeal” to more palates”, and you can see where this slippery-slope is going…That is what Nossiter fears and that way of thinking is rife in the wine industry. I’m sure the biodynamic Arbois vigneron wouldn’t do that but there are many, many out there that would and will do it.

With the obvious caveats there is a time and a place and a consumer for most wines on the market these days because most wine folks know how to make “technically correct” wine, and most of us know that these many possible technical interventions in the winemaking process are regularly exercised at all price points, and even at the very high end. Why is that – because everybody wants to appeal to more and more palates and globalization makes available billions of palates.

Whether you’re making wine or building widgets you still need to make a sale, but there’s a big difference between building a widget how you see fit versus building a widget to please others. One gives us the individual and the other leads to homogeneity.

And the second one:

#21 Scott’s comment

#19 & #20 – Of course overall and categorically wine quality has improved over the last number of decades because the cumulative scientific understanding of the winemaking process has translated into technologically driven process changes in the winery. The wine quality improvements are especially noticeable at the lower price points – there is much less “plonk” out there because people know how to create technically correct wine. But do you know how they do that? Add sugar, add water, remove water, add acid, remove acid, add color, add tannin, remove tannin, add oak chips, add oak flavoring, and all kinds of chemical alteration through reverse osmosis options. And that’s an abbreviated list of what can and is done. That might be all fine and dandy for wine at the lower points (and high volumes), but that kind of manipulation happens to wines at ALL price points. Why? Because either they are starting out with inferior grapes (those gave us plonk), or the winemakers (or whoever makes these decisions) are trying to achieve pre-determined flavor profiles to appeal to more palates or to achieve higher scores (and in turn appeal to more palates). This has given us homogeneity.

It’s much more than just about the “crackpot” idea of tradition. Wine in its truest and purest sense should tell us about the year in which the grapes grew, and the plot of land they grew from, and the farmer/winemaker who was there to see it all. That’s the whole point of wine – a finite time and place and set of human circumstances. That may sound traditional because that’s how it was done in the “old days”, but there’s no other “product” out there that has the chance of being so unique and memorable to our senses as wine. And one of those “senses” is our intellect to think back and wonder

And now his book report:

Liquid Memory book report

by Scott Elder

January 3^rd, 2010

There were 4 main messages Nossiter drove home throughout the book:

1) there is a struggle between power and taste

– powerful entities (e.g., global corporations) gain and use their power by influencing en masse. The individual taste is either an outcast or is brought into the fold.

– this has led or is leading to a loss of culture – loss of the individual and collective individuality

2) Terroir is a combination of a geographical place, individuals, culture, and history. It is living. It is specific. This terroir should be THE cornerstone of wine.

3) Wine matters because it is an expression and culmination of terroir. Wine provides us an account of or memory of terroir.

– when we drink wine of true terroir it is much more than just about the sensorial pleasure, it is a way for us all to experience an “individual other.”

4) People, all of us, need a terroir for themselves. They need a place, and a culture, and a history to call their own or to be from.

And there you have it. Until I can get more out of him, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite random quotes from Mondovino, NOT that there is anything you should read into, it’s just pretty funny:

“Good sons-in-law aren’t always good husbands. Good husbands aren’t always good lovers. Good lovers are rarely good husbands.”