The Wine World Must Break Free From Cliché. By Walter Cusmich, wine enthusiast

There is an immense amount of literature dedicated to the subject of wine, not to mention all of the journalistic coverage, which has grown exponentially in recent years since the wine culture has become so fashionable.
It is an established fact that there has been a recent frantic rush of people trying to gain an understanding, some more and some less profound, of wine and everything related to it. Unfortunately, this rush has become a race with the wrong goal: to make others believe that one is knowledgeable about wine.
When one speaks of pleasures, knowing them does not always mean understanding them.
In Italy, after just three organized courses, one can become a “sommelier”, or an expert with the authority to tell others what wine is. After three Kamasutra lessons does one become an expert in sex?
In my opinion, the ignorance of the past, or the technical and abstract knowledge of wine today, equally create the same thing: clichés.
Wine (just like sex or food) has been imprisoned in our minds by rules and classifications based on conjectures extrapolated from chemistry and abstract sensory theories that do not reflect the subjectivity that each individual possesses.
The pleasure of tasting wine in this manner becomes standardized, taken for granted, predictable. In other words: arid!
Of course it is true that for some abstinent Catholics wine has simply become an indispensable liturgical element, or for orthodox Jews wine represents a rule whereby the number of glasses drunk strictly corresponds to the religious occasion. Fortunately for me and for many others wine can be a celebration, an irrationality, and an intemperance.
For us it signifies a minor god of Hellenic memory which can be felt concretely in one’s own body.
Too often, today’s wines are forced into predetermined combinations with set foods, in the name of codified chemical and ceremonial rules, too often they have been imprisoned by these ill-famed “food/wine marriages”.
Again, I repeat that wine must not be a means of displaying one’s knowledge or cultural orientation, but its true meaning should express itself through a free and authentic sensory experience. The adulterous food/wine relation, if it happens, becomes a more pleasant and intriguing experiences, as is the case for all transgressions.
It is not a simple drink, but neither is it an earthly sublimation of the holy spirit. It is not a substitute for something nor does it have the duty to be so, whether it be a man or a food.
Wine was not created to remove the grease from one’s mouth, or to clean the palate like a vacuum cleaner, or to disinfect the gums.
Millions of articles in so-called specialty cuisine magazines have reduced wine to a mere gargle.
Wine does not succumb to food nor does it overpower it. One can drink wine without eating and vice versa. Amen.
“Wine is the most civilized thing in the world” stated the great Hemingway, and this phrase can teach us all how important it is to liberate the chains that bind the wine world we live in to the above-mentioned clichés.
Liberate it from beliefs that feed upon incorrect parameters, from biased geographical interests, from absurd classifications and finally, from the so called market logic.
Let’s confront wine and let’s speak about it without any mental prejudices.
- Grape vines do not belong to anyone, they grow everywhere except in deserts and tundra. Wine is stateless.
- In a “blind” taste test, there isn’t a single person who can tell, just by using smell and taste, the difference between a red and a white wine. For over twenty years I have enjoyed putting both average drinkers and great connoisseurs to the test ( this does not include, however, those people who may be allergic to one of the hundreds, even thousands of substances present in red grape skins).
- Wine is either good or it is bad. Apparently banal concepts, but which can become a good basis for dismantling part of the complicated yet at the same time artificial framework of certainties that has been constructed around wine.
It would already be a good start to discover that there exist wines which are limited to just being really good, balanced, without sensory flaws, in one word perfect, but all equal.
It would be a step ahead to know that there exist many bottles that arrive from the most unimaginable locations which contain unique flavors and which offer special and original sensations, associated with their place of origin. Bottles which have been abandoned by the fashionable wine critic but which offer great joy upon discovery.
A smile and a good glass of wine can be the most important thing in the world, bellies aside!

Walter Cusmich