Thoughtfully posted by John on Tuesday, March 9, 2010.
Last week a parcel was on the front porch and I forgot that I ordered I Drink, Therefore I Am, by Roger Scruton. By the title alone, you would think it is a self-help book for alcoholics or some sort of tell-all by a lead singer from an '80s hair band. I save those books for the beach, but I Drink is a philosopher's take on the meaning of wine as not only an "accompaniment to food," but also as an "accompaniment to thought." A few critics have written the book off as an overly-romanticized take on wine. Although it might be, I am digging this read because I agree with Scruton that wine is not only important to winemakers and drinkers, but as Scruton writes in the passage below, wine often represents culture and place - though he believes that the what, where and who of wine might be less important to the wine drinking public today.
"From the moment of my fall, I was a terroiriste, for whom the principal ingredient in any bottle is the soil. By 'soil' I do not mean only the physical mix of limestone, topsoil and humus. I mean the soil as Jean Giono, Giovanni Verga or D.H. Lawrence would describe it: nurse of passions, stage of dramas, and habitat of local gods. The deities from which the villages of France take their names - whether pagan, as in Mercurey and Julienas, or Christian, as in St. Amour and St. Joseph - are the guardians of vines that have acquired their character not only from the minerals that they suck from the rocks beneath them, but also from the sacrificial rights of lasting communities... But the concept of terroir has now become highly controversial, as more and more people follow the path to perdition that I trod those forty-five years ago. Poetry, history, the calendar of saints, the suffering of martyrs - such things are less important to the newly flush generation of winos than they were to us lower middle-class pioneers. Today's pagan drinkers are in search of the uniform, the reliable and the easily remembered. As for where the wine comes from, what does it matter, so long as it tastes OK?"
"From the moment of my fall, I was a terroiriste, for whom the principal ingredient in any bottle is the soil. By 'soil' I do not mean only the physical mix of limestone, topsoil and humus. I mean the soil as Jean Giono, Giovanni Verga or D.H. Lawrence would describe it: nurse of passions, stage of dramas, and habitat of local gods. The deities from which the villages of France take their names - whether pagan, as in Mercurey and Julienas, or Christian, as in St. Amour and St. Joseph - are the guardians of vines that have acquired their character not only from the minerals that they suck from the rocks beneath them, but also from the sacrificial rights of lasting communities... But the concept of terroir has now become highly controversial, as more and more people follow the path to perdition that I trod those forty-five years ago. Poetry, history, the calendar of saints, the suffering of martyrs - such things are less important to the newly flush generation of winos than they were to us lower middle-class pioneers. Today's pagan drinkers are in search of the uniform, the reliable and the easily remembered. As for where the wine comes from, what does it matter, so long as it tastes OK?"
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