We’ve Never Had It So Good

“I have opinions of my own, strong opinions,” that beacon of American conservative thought, George W. Bush, is alleged to have told us, “but I don’t always agree with them.” I felt a bit like that towards the end of my claim to be living in the Post-Modern era of wine. It’s not that I don’t stand by my analysis, of course I do, it is just that it made things feel so…dismal. It is something that happens often when you try to capture the complexity of reality in neat conceptual schemata. The Curse of Theory I call it. It explains why so many rich kids with humanities degrees seem to be unhappy all the time. Or, for that matter, the nation of France.

The pessimism feels uncalled for because, objectively viewed, this is the best era to drink wine in history. By “drink wine” I don’t mean the act of absent-mindedly imbibing grape-based alcohol but taking an active interest in the beverage itself. What in times of less self-aware faux-egalitarianism would have been called connoisseurship, or, more simply, treating wine as a hobby. To verify the hypothesis, one would need to look at what wine culture is based on, i.e. the appeal of moving from casual drinking to semi-serious engagement. These conditions are well-known. Wine’s capacity for complexity is practically unmatchable; only the finest of distilled spirits come anywhere close, but even if you put the whole lot of them together, you only get a subset of the variety