The Appropriation of Wine Discourse

One stated intent for this blog is to employ a socio-historical perspective to shed light on the appropriation and skewing of popular journalistic wine discourse on behalf of the small percentage of affluent elites. For our purposes, I define these as persons with ample disposable incomes who can comfortably afford to produce or purchase wines that are conspicuously unaffordable, even occasionally, to the great majority of wine drinkers.

This process of appropriation has produced more than a mere imbalance of focus.  It has successfully reshaped the very societal perception and understanding of what is most important about and central to the nature of wine as a widely enjoyed beverage and component of a commensal way eating and living.

Why Appropriation?

I have chosen ‘appropriation’ not for its current Campus/Crit vogue, but because it best describes the effect of the skewing and reshaping cited above:  an unwarranted process by which the focus of content among the highest profile, most cited, most influential producers of cognitive materials available to and known by consumers has become and remains selectively weighted toward the interests of the affluent.

The all-too-evident effect of this appropriation is emphatically not limited to the establishment wine magazines and rating publications, although The Wine Spectator, The Wine Advocate, and their ilk certainly stand tall in the ranks of those implicated. Rather, it takes place across the broad range of cognitive vehicles — magazines, books, apps, websites, reference works, retail shelves, popular entertainment, online courses, and actual classrooms — to name the most obvious.  Its primary orientation is neither professional nor technical, though there is some necessary overlap.

Changing Patterns of Function, Distribution, and Socio-Economic Consumption

Wine has, for millennia, been an affordable home accompaniment to meals, to relaxation, and to social interaction for countless generations of ordinary people fortunate enough to live in or near to grape growing regions.

Over the last 150 years, ever-accelerating industrial-technological developments in production, transportation, distribution, marketing, and merchandising have made affordable wines available to buyers living far from wine-producing areas. The overwhelming majority of these consumers also drink less-expensive wines that suit their incomes, tastes, and foodways.

During much of that period and before, a tiny segment in non-wine-producing areas — the wealthy, the traveled, the collectors, and the frequenters of elite restaurants in the most affluent cosmopolitan areas — did learn about to limit their selections to the ‘fine’ wines of the ‘noble’ producing areas: Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, and the top German estates.  Until the post-WWII era, the lists in those elite restaurants and the racks in private cellars reflected the tastes of that class.  And due to the paucity of demand, those wines — though far too expensive for the mass of wine consumers to buy [and even more so to embark upon the process of learning about and accessing] — were by present-day standards, stunningly inexpensive.

Nonetheless, a preponderance of the benighted knew only the home-made wines, non-grape ‘wines’, inferior domestic fortified wines of all sorts, California jug wines, New York state ‘Champagne’, and inexpensively produced imports such as straw-flask Chianti and Liebfraumilch and the like.

Wine and Class Since the 1970s

In the last four decades of the 20th century, American society underwent a major change in its relationship to wine. Until then, the regular consumption of table wine had been limited to the upper and lower ends of the income scale.  At the lower end were immigrant, ethnic [meaning mostly Southern, and some Eastern, European], low-income, working-class households.  At the upper end, were those in the primarily upper-middle professional, managerial classes [who consumed any alcohol at all at meals] and those of the upper class who could afford the imported noble wines cited above.

But beginning mainly in the Seventies, affordable California wines of quality and a broader range of imports transformed American tastes and preferences for and in wines. It became possible for mainly college-educated middle-class wine lovers to search out the occasional lower-classified or unclassified Bordeaux, Burgundy, or German wine or the more increasingly widely available ‘estate bottled’ Californians.  Soon wine consumption boomed.

This was the situation that prevailed after the booming post-war economy had made possible exploding college attendance, world [especially European] travel, and upscale explorations of more hedonistic lifestyles.

The Boomers / Yuppies Get into Wine  

The children of the upper-middle class, who had flocked to the campuses and foreign flight terminals came home to a land of opportunity, fawned-over rebels and anti-heroes, and TV cooking shows.  Soon, the eldest component of the campus left began their grand — and always carefully self-justified — metamorphosis from counterculture/ hippies to yuppies; from saving the world from America to consuming it, most comfortably, in America. These now-boomer/yuppies, with or without trust funds, got the good jobs and the incomes they yielded, most of them in metropolitan hubs of the production of taste, trends, and information and in university town/research centers [frequently state capitals as well].  Soon, an estimated $11+ trillion avalanche of depression-era parental savings-become-boomer-inheritances provided yet greater funds for bigger homes in enclaved, elite zip codes, for more travel, and for the pursuit of more rarefied consumption patterns.

Inevitably, many of these moved into the expensive wine-and-vineyard-buying class spurred more by affluence than by real connoisseurship. The now-affluent, antinomian occupiers of campus hotspots and devolved Eugene McCarthy/McGovern supporters now found themselves, of all things, ‘occupied’….but in this case by the serious need for reliable guidance in selecting what wines to cellar, to invest in, to talk about, to appear to have thought about, and to order as accompaniments to the geometricized thimblefuls of elaborately presented, extortionately priced, frequently bland nouvelle cuisine then regnant in trendy restaurants.

A New American Wine Intelligentsia Is Born

The yuppies needed easy access to reliable wine-buying recommendations based on the broad and thorough tasting of each new vintage rather than on producers’ reputations alone. They needed  an easily accessible wine intelligentsia.  And, behold, the need was met mainly by two publications from the West and East coasts — like nearly all dei ex machina ideations serving our post-60s elites — that had already been in operation since the mid/late 70s:  The Wine Advocate [Robert Parker] and its slightly older California-based cousin, The Wine Spectator — both utilizing easy-to-remember 100-point rating systems for devotees to inflict on retailers and sommeliers; and both sharing a preference for highest-rated, super-concentrated, super-expensive fruit bombs;  often, in those days, super-oaky as well.

These recommended wines became ever-more-expensive as insistent demand for 90+ ratings increased. Armed with certified lists of the ‘best’-scoring wines [regularly not the best-tasting now; good only for cellaring for a few years or much longer], yuppies and their subsequent-generational equivalents needed only the wealth to afford the soaring prices.

And now they had it and would keep getting more.