Wine
marketers must envy colleagues who work on car campaigns. A quick-fire round of word association fixes
a car brand to any number of prompts: “fast”, “reliable”, “luxury”,
“economical”. As I wrote in Meaningless brands from Meaningless
Differentiation, consumer car knowledge is almost entirely mediated by brand
familiarity.
Tellingly,
when the BBC raided Top Gear to find Oz Clarke a co-presenter they chose
James May, the nerdy serial-victim of Clarkson’s goading. The producers of Oz
and James’s Big Wine Adventure obviously felt that May’s geekish tendencies
could be made to stretch to the point where Clarke’s own geekery would take
over. May bridged the gap between the audience and Oz; a sort of boozy,
tri-lingual Vulcan intermediary who could scrutinise his co-host’s Klingonese
for sense.
Car
production has a brief history when compared to wine, particularly if we
include caveman’s fluffed attempts to store grapes through the periglacial
winter. On wine’s elongated timeline Henry Ford is one of us, and “Fordism” a
thoroughly modern matter. The Model T came with a slogan: ”Any colour you want
as long as it’s black”. Mass production and mass marketing interpenetrated one another.
Post-war American men, it’s often said, were more familiar with the Ford logo
than they were with the clitoris. Advertising understands the value of
substitution and the affirmative nature of desire. A Ford, after all, would never
say “No!” to a man.
Let me
make it clear from the outset: I’m not writing this piece out of some general
disillusionment with the digital age and marketing. My position alternates
between scepticism and usage, because I market myself, albeit in a fairly
impoverished way. My online persona is purged of negativity; and these criticisms
are being made from within digital space.
One of
the advantages of the digital community, unlike the cemetery, is that it swells
without taking up more space. The Côte d’Or is similarly paradoxical. In Cultural
Terroir, I analysed the concept of terroir in terms of divisionism. Wine
production always has the potential to split - one can become two - and the
elements formed through this division are held in a relation of proximity and
difference. Accordingly, terroir becomes a network of differences dispersed in
space, but always with the potential to split again, adding more folds to an already
involuted organisation. Identity is subordinate to difference, and unstable.
Gilles
Deleuze writes of classification: “It is always a matter of bringing together
things that are apparently very different, and separating the very close.” The
terrain of the Côte d’Or is segregated into vineyards, which in turn are
classified all the way from generic up to Grand Cru. If the region hadn’t become such
a monument to the historical process of division then one could imagine an even
more detailed plan; after all, Aubert de Villaine speaks openly of the
differences across Romanée-Conti.
However
we divide terroir’s antecedents between man and environment “separating the
very close” is the creative force active within the concept. Moreover, this
splitting has an elevated sensibility at its centre. Kant writes in Book III of his Critique that
aesthetic judgements should be “disinterested”, which in the context of 18th
Century rationalism means something like “resulting out of nothing but
contemplation of an object”. Whether the
Cistercians were trying to map the workings of God is there for genealogical investigation
to decide, but their achievements on the Côte d’Or testify to a regime of hard
labour and Kantian-style aesthetic absorption.
Eighteen
years ago, Mike Paul told a room full of MW students that Romanée-Conti, Château
Latour and Rosemount Chardonnay were all brands. At the time I remember feeling relieved that
Mike had offered a definition of “brand”, albeit via a process of extension and
inclusion. In that same lecture we were introduced to Brand Australia and Strategy
2025. The Australian wine business wasn’t shy about its vision for the future.
Strategy
2025 was my first encounter with aggressive wine marketing. For those still
drinking mother’s milk back in the 80s, believe me, the hostile strategy was
delivered with a smile. Australia was set to distance itself from what it saw
as the failed model of European wine production through a process of
enlargement and customer-focused brand creation. Brands would be developed
specifically with the end consumer in mind, with grape variety taking
precedence over geographical origin on wine labels. The paradise of the common
man was to become brand utopia. If the UK trade didn’t get on-board its fate was
sealed. We were like twitchers talking-up birdwatching in a world whose avian
interests only extended as far as chicken McNuggets. How remote from the consumer
was it possible to get!
The
themes of Strategy 2025 were already familiar to those of us who were working
in the trade at that time: terroir was denied; French fruit wasn’t ripe; and all grape varieties had found their ideal habitat beneath the
tall Australian sun. At the time this take on the role of environmental influence
wasn’t presented as one possibility among others; it was hostile and denying of
terroir, dismissing its claims as pernicious “marketing”. The truth of this encounter is that marketing
only tolerates knowledge and expertise that can be used to enhance its own
commercial position. So entranced was “Brand Australia” by the idea that
marketing was the only genuinely creative means of establishing value and
identity within wine that it chucked its own modus operandi back at France as a
slight on terroir. The contrast between disinterested aesthetic judgement and
the sort of commodified knowledge delivered via brands was stark. One only has
to see the level of invective that’s turned on wine education by some of
today’s marketers to appreciate how a broad understanding of wine can be
anathema to their narrow commercial requirements. “Consumers want wines they can
understand” sounds reasonable enough, but when it’s forced into a false
opposition with “not education” we begin to see the hostility to what I’ve been
calling, after Kant, the “disinterested” perspective.
I’m
thinking of the above struggle in the light of Mallarmé’s assertion that all of
life eventually reduces down to aesthetics and economics. I realise that I am
consciously trying to draw a line between the two by clinging on to divisionism
and contemplation. Capitalism’s innovativeness lies in its ability to identify and
exploit value in hitherto unforeseen areas.
We’re familiar with thinking of “coal” and “oil” as commodities, but
what of “expertise” and “trust”. What is the PPI scandal other than the
exploitation of trust through the creation, development and marketing of
financial products? Wine is not unique in fending-off economic encroachment
into its own realm of expertise, yet for many of us it’s worth protecting
precisely because it provides an area of contemplation – like books, music and
film – where one can escape from the economic flows and connectedness of everyday
life. Freud, who was himself a hoarder, maintained that millionaires often resort to collecting
not to realise the eventual exchange value of their collections, but because possession
and contemplation of these aesthetic objects reversed the transient nature of their
monetary accumulation.
The
fine wine market has joined the mass of other of winner-take-all markets that have
come to characterize the early 21st Century. Millionaires have been
replaced by billionaires at the gates of DRC. Relatively small differences in the
absolute quality of wines are magnified into large differences in price. Such
markets are a reflection of the increasing concentration of wealth, and in the
case of DRC, this inequity is exacerbated by limited supply. The latest round
of wealth consolidation began in the US in the mid-70’s, centuries after the
vineyard-by-vineyard division of the Côte d’Or was begun, and together they’ve
led to an inflationary storm that’s left wine merchants and drinkers looking
elsewhere. Personally, I doubt whether critics or marketers have an adequate response
to the forces of economic determinism that have swept through Burgundy and
Bordeaux in recent decades, but to blame individuals seems to me to miss the
bigger macro-economic picture.
The integrity
and independence of critics has never been in greater demand than today, and as
far as new wines and regions go we are genuinely living in exciting times. If I
can’t afford DRC I won’t be forced to drink Aligoté. Gary Farr is making Pinot in
Australia on a calcareous Richebourg-like clay that’s every bit as exciting as the
best Burgundy. Because, in truth, the nightmare vision of brand utopia never
happened.
Strategy
2025 no doubt still exists in some revised data rich form, but the heartening part
of this story that began back in 1996, is that Australia itself became resistant
to all the marketing platitudes that were being generated. Farr, Cullen and
Grosset drew the line between aesthetics and economics that the plotters behind
the plan seemed so keen to erase or re-evaluate. Wine, like novels and string
quartets, can be an inclusive point of departure from the tedium and habit of
the daily round.
Of
those original 80s Australian brands, only a few like Penfolds survived. Grange
is still an interregional blend, which offers a point of difference in a fine
wine market that craves particularity. It’s ironic that the wine that was
supposedly going to blaze a trail for profitable, blended still wine brands now finds itself singled out as the anomaly.
Mallarmé maintained that life separated into aesthetics and economics, but I’d also add sex. The
Unbearable Lightness of Being is proof that great art and abundant sex are
possible under the most ascetic of economic regimes. Could it be that things were just
so much more intense before the intervention of brands, when the Ford badge wasn’t there to distract you?
