An Explanation of the Nature and Benefits of a Long-Range Social Historical Approach
I have lived through the entirety of the more than half-century span of transformative change in the wine industry and its consumer base. Many of you who read this will be younger, but most will have lived through enough of that period as adult wine drinkers to have directly experienced some part of what has been a continuous process. That continuous process is wine’s long history, and it will continue as it becomes its ever-developing future.
At the risk of putting off readers before I begin, I have decided to begin this series of posts on ‘The Complex Future of Wine with an explanatory preface; one more concerned with the historical perspective I shall employ than with wine changes themselves. By inclination and education, I comprehend any major human activity from the perspective of long-range social history, which sees significant societal changes as aspects of ongoing processes — many of which are centuries-long and still unfolding in expected or unexpected ways.
Our Ahistorical Age
But we live in an unprecedentedly ahistorical age. Most wine writers — be they professional or amateurs, columnists or bloggers, journalists or tasters/scorers — lack the conceptual background to do little more than offer lip service to the need for long-range thinking and understanding. Nor do widely accessible publications of any type encourage a focus on broad or long-range, multi-factorial transformations.
Wine is a complex, present-day commercial product about which most people need advice and help in acquiring a better understanding. It is no surprise, then, that nearly all consumer-audience wine writers discuss the state of wine today and its likely future in frameworks only within the context of the most recent, fifty-or-less-year processes.
Even if editors, owners — and readers —supported broader thinking, such frameworks require knowledge and historical sense too broad for most under-sixty-year-olds in the field to have acquired through the ever-narrowing, needle’s-eye, range of topical concerns and priorities deemed worthy of historical study by our educational elites since their mid-1970s ascendancy.
Such writers, and the research upon which they base their work, do exist, but they tend to write for industry groups, regulatory bodies, financial/investment entities, and trade policy groups in reports and specialized features, frequently in expensive subscription publications or buried in official sites and portals.
Academics tend to ultra-narrow specialized areas of expertise, and they spend much of their intellectual capital on even narrower research projects that leave little time — and rare grant funding — for broad speculation
The resultant absence of historical memory and thus of complexity — made worse now by the expanding outright politically-driven expungement of entire areas and topics from discourse, syllabi, curricula, and even texts — have made us more receptive to the shallow ‘recentism’ of current explanatory understandings of change and transformation.
[I prefer ‘recentism’ to the more commonly used ‘presentism’, which historians use to describe both the current intellectual trends of imposing contemporary valuations on past events and the shift of historical interest towards the issues and events of the present day.]
The ‘Recentist’ Approach and its Pitfalls
For wine, a recentist interpretation of the past, the present, and the processes that will be most important in shaping the short-term future might go something like this: “The last fifty years of major transformations have profoundly revolutionized the modern world of wine and created rapid access to previously unimaginable sources of data and predictive models about present and recent trends and about new or mounting external influences. From all this information, we can create data-based projections of how those trends and factors will interact to change the wine world of coming decades.”
As far as it goes, this is correct in emphasizing the way things work today and our access to better and faster data. If, however, we wish to understand why and how wine’s present situation got here and where and how it might move beyond what recentism allows, we must first avoid intellectual captivity to the tyranny of the contemporary. Among other things, that means that we must make the important distinction between what is genuinely ‘new’ and what is the mere ‘now’. Doing that requires knowing, or at least being aware of, relevant — and a lot of less self-evidently relevant — history in much greater depth. It also requires understanding that most historical processes do not simply produce some ‘new stage’ or ‘higher plateau’ and, with time and changing conditions, reach a point at which they become perceived not as the outcome of change but as its target.
The Genuinely ‘New’ and the Merely ‘Now’
Longer-term historical changes are ongoing and non-linear configurations of confluent processes that collide and produce unanticipated, often unintended, consequences — continuously. At any point, people will and do see the ‘present stage’ of things, which they can and do explain by factors or forces at play in ‘recent history’; and so history goes. At only a few of these transitory points will those forces align in a manner to represent much that is genuinely ‘new’; most will be more recently updated versions of merely more recent ‘nows’.
Even when we consider it in all its economic, social, technological, and cultural aspects, the history of wine remains that of only a single, processed, agricultural product; one much narrower than that of grains, fruits, fermentation, agriculture itself, the development of technology, the rise and multiple elaborations of nation-states, and other truly large-scale historical activities. But though it is narrower a subject than grand large-scale themes, it does involve and touch on a very broad range of other historical processes and on so many aspects of modern life that — with its eight or more millennia history — it is usefully treated as a subject of medium-scale, but certainly long-range, historical analysis.
Coming in Part 2
[In Part 2 of this Preface, I will continue this explanation of long-range historical analysis and expand a bit on its formal origins in order to illuminate my own approach and conclusions to the question of what will happen to wine in coming decades.]
The Wine Tribune 