Sinking Craft

“More depends on what things are called than on what they are.”

 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science 

Being a neurotic parent I can’t look at my daughters without thinking they’re destined to carry variants of my mistakes with them through time and space, seeding the future with updated versions of past calamities.

In June, 1981, my mother rescued me from The Stonehenge Festival. The humiliation I felt slinking through a cordon of Hell’s Angels to her Vauxhall Chevette remains with me.

The past repeated itself this summer when I collected our youngest daughter from The Secret Garden Party - in a Lexus. On the way home she told me the blatant drug taking had upset her, and she’d had her fill of conversations that revolved round brands rather than bands. When, in the 80s, Huey Lewis sang, “It’s hip to be square”, maybe he was foretelling the kind of future my daughters now inhabit, in which stoned, privileged kids boast to one another about gin brands, parental trips to Waitrose and other people’s Rolex watches. In marketing’s emotional economy drugs and brands amount to the same thing.

Dickens observed that gin gave the wretched and defeated a temporary fix of oblivion from their despair. Gin houses were a symptom rather than a cause, though Dickens recognised that in offering an escape from life’s brutality alcohol advanced its own insidious form of capture. As long as there was poverty, gin houses would continue to exist.

Gin survived the last decades of the 20^th Century as Gordon’s, but like deep-ocean bacteria that cling to hydrogen sulphide vents for breath, the brand lived out a woebegone existence at the back of G-Plan cabinets, or else bottles were inverted and hung in dingy rows of optics.

In the 90s, I attended the launch of a Gordon’s Gin commercial. The ad was aimed at a ‘younger demographic’, but as a result of EU directives restricting TV advertising of alcohol it was scheduled for cinema distribution only.  Despite all the fizz and clink no one there believed the ad would achieve its brief and recruit a new generation of revellers to Gordon’s. The more the presentation addressed this separation, the wider the chasm grew. Spirit brands needed to be able to bypass EU interdictions, or find new markets and new media that were less inhibited.

The advent of digitalization and mobile phones changed both the way we view the world and way the world views us. The cultural theorist, Ian Buchanan, makes the point that twenty years ago we were in the middle of an ADHD epidemic, yet for the past decade parents have been yelling at plugged-in kids to be less attentive, and turn their phones off. As with Dickens’ gin houses, we escape one problem by stumbling into another.

Digitalization, according to Bruno Latour, “finds more complexity in the elements than the aggregates.” The extraordinary capabilities of today’s search engines allied to our propensity to share likes and dislikes creates strategic opportunities for Google, Twitter and other social networking platforms. I see myself as autonomous, resilient, and centred, but Google sees me much more open-endedly: as one possible intersection of people, services and products that can be reshuffled and built upon.

As a case in point, while writing this post, I searched and re-read Bruno Latour’s paper, ‘The whole is always smaller than its parts’, only for Google’s algorithm to return my inquiry back to me in ads for single men and wine tours. Google deduced enough about my lifestyle from ‘Bruno Latour’ to try and top-up my R&R network of people and places. Digital marketing develops opportunities virally from the bottom up. It can create new and inclusive aggregates by enhancing, occupying and expanding upon individuals’ existing connections.     

Latour volunteers the Mexican wave as an example of viral behaviour. There is no preplanning: a man stands and raises his arms, and sometimes this builds into a spontaneous rhythmic motion, and sometimes it doesn’t. Similarly, ants don’t work to a master plan when they build a nest. The interaction of one worker ant with another means every ants’ nest shares certain features, yet each nest is a unique structure. Both examples start with the individual and their immediate connections. Rather than seeing society as ordered from above, Latour urges us to think of aggregates loosely overlapping other aggregates, but these assemblages ultimately depend upon the connectivity and agreement between individual elements in order to emerge and persist.

Another example may help here. If we enrich the combined data set of Conservative and Labour Party supporters by including members’ published attitudes towards Europe then, potentially, we can search and cut across old alliances and realise a new social grouping – ergo, UKIP. The connection between Nigel Farage and Arron Banks gathered up and united political opponents, eventually disrupting what most of us thought was an inevitable, self-replicating structure of governance.

UKIP may prove to be as short-lived as a Mexican wave, but it is a useful, if simplistic, model for showing how digital analysis can break-up and realign existing organisations. We can think of aggregates (in this case, political parties) as unstable isotopes whose atoms keep bonding in different ways to produce new, fragile forms. Whether assemblages bring about order of disorder, individuation or cohesiveness depends on how they overlap with other assemblages, if they overlap at all.

Crucially, Latour doesn’t look upon the ‘the digital’ as epoch-making, instead he believes that digitalization helps reveal a structure that has always been there but until now escaped our scrutiny. Aggregates and elements are fundamentally equivalent.  The reason we think of them separately is because when it came to complex assemblages like societies we simply lacked the empirical muscle and data to see how the elements behaved, so a separation was fudged between the macro and micro, society and individual.  

I think Bruno Latour would approve of my daughter’s use of ‘a thing’. According to her UKIP is ‘a thing’, and craft gin is ‘a thing’. Urban vocabulary captures the coalescing of people, places, time and products in a way that subverts the established vernacular of thing-hood as existing independently from us. Furthermore, ‘things’ overlap and build into lifestyles. In Cecily’s example, she needed to endorse Rolex-Gin-Waitrose to gain access to, and the approval of, her peers. Apple, remember, implored us to ‘think different’, not differently.

Sacred is the exemplar of the craft-gin-thing. The company was founded by Ian Hart and Hilary Witney in 2008. Their story brings together entrepreneurialism, expertise, networking and a fortuitous legal about-turn that meant spirit production could take place at a micro level. We also need to add Gordon’s to this ensemble, the marooned market leader that had become separated from its customer base by EU interdictions; and a youthful, connected bar community that couldn’t be bothered with gin’s historicity beyond the role it played in corroborating the costume drama of hipster lifestyle.

Ten years ago, tech media companies were regarded as the benign gatekeepers of a shared virtual space rather than as monopolists, and the digital turn seemed, for a brief moment, an opportunity for the many rather than the few. The algorithms that would turn our intellectual property into their capital were still pending, and information trafficked freely. Sacred crossed the moat before the draw-bridge was pulled-up, benefiting from uninhibited and rapid access to the early adopters and influencers in their market; underscoring the fact that with every success story there’s an element of right place, right time, right thinking.

Today, both digital space and the craft gin market are much more crowded than they were back in 2008. Vlogs are the latest trend to air. Watch a well-produced video and you’ll have to squint to see the joins that separate it from cinematic commercials, or our own fantasies of a better funded life; but watch a duff one – the overwhelming majority are disturbingly bad - and you sense the embarrassment of the man whose Mexican wave dies unrequited.

Sitting through crap vlogs and irrelevant ads, the realisation came to me that only with hindsight does marketing purify itself into a meta-language of success, aspiration and affirmation. Most of the time marketing muddles through life, just like us, though it’s better at hiding the flops behind the triumphs - until it began leaving a digital trail on YouTube and Instagram, that is. More generally, marketing seems to uncritically co-opt, and bandwagon itself upon, ‘the digital’, ‘the neural’, ‘the irrational’, ‘the genetic’, parading them as paradigms of future prosperity, or as smart ways out of a doomed present. As Steve Woolgar has pointed out, marketing has a revelatory structure. Like the analyst and the couch, it stages a scenario in which the consumer’s irrational motivations are brought to client consciousness; thereafter, all manner of quackery is prescribed as a fix. There has to be some useful stuff mixed in with the dross, but marketing has a tendency to swallow things whole, fearful that it might be outmanoeuvred or outflanked by them. Contradictions are inevitable. ‘Let the consumer decide’ sounds like Smithian rational decision making, but these are often the same consumers whose irrational motivations - or so they tell us on the couch - are hidden from them. If this sounds a lot like a man selling ladders to escape the snakes he sold you last week, you are not alone.

Gin brands have kept pace with the inflationary expansion of vlogs. Sipsmith and Sacred have been joined by hundreds of new entrants, and craft now accounts for 50% of the domestic gin market. Craft evokes a utopian view of gin production, stripping away the silos of bulk manufacture, and superseding familiar brands.

The philosopher, Mark Fisher, recently asked the question: which musical genre from the last 10 years will constitute the retro-choices of future generations? His point being that creativity has been the looser in the backward looking world of digitalization that finds profit easy to come by in the simple reproduction and distribution of back catalogues. Even today’s new acts sound like they’ve been plucked serendipitously from the past. As Fisher points out, we can listen to pop music from the 70s, 80s and 90s, and even if we don’t know the artist we can still make an informed guess at the year it was released. There’s was an identifiable progression and succession of musical styles that the derivative Ed Sheeran and Artic Monkeys have helped bring to a halt.  

Viewed from this perspective, craft, like vinyl and hipsters, is a demand to let history take place, but as nostalgia and retro rather than as events. It aestheticizes production, pursues the image, and abandons historicity. Images proliferate precisely because their production already includes their own obsolescence. If craft seems a precarious category it’s because it is so tied to the fate of the image and to fashion, and is therefore exposed to the compulsion for change and the relentless churn of the new.

Ten years ago, two friends of mine, Jasper Cuppaidge and John Hegarty, collaborated together on Camden Brewery. I was involved in the project in a very minor way as I did the first brew with Jasper at a friend’s micro-brewery. Jasper’s family had run a brewery in Australia, so there was a nice back story to the brand about moving away to come back home.

John is the man who got generations of kids who’d shot Germans in the playground driving Audis – ‘Vorspung durch Technik’ is his tag line – and he brought decades of branding intelligence to the project.

Camden Brewery rode the craft wave. Their beer was well-received; they did a nice line in retro-labelling (Jasper owned the rights to some of the original Australian labels); and the company bolstered its capacity through crowd funding. Camden became the poster boy for nostalgic beer drinkers who were younger and less sweaty than CAMRA. If squabbles within categories are embittered by the narcissism of fine differences (psychoanalysis uses fine, never small!)  then craft drinkers are always to found on the self-regarding side of the argument.

Seven years after that initial brew, Camden was sold to Budweiser for £78million. I was pleased for Jasper and John, but the recriminations among my beer obsessed friends were immediate. Prior to the sale they’d sought out the brand, but now they confided in me, “It was never any good, anyway.” They felt they’d been duped. Craft, for them, was a line of flight that broke free from the big breweries – they were the ‘first capitalists’ according to a beer writing friend – and now this escape route had been seized and blocked. As if this thought wasn’t bad enough, there was an even more subverting idea in play:  that Camden had set out to steal the heart from a category that was imitable precisely because it was built on sentiment rather than substance, and what substance there was could be easily replicated. The same principle applies to scale: is there something intrinsically different about small batch production, or is it just, as Latour would have it, a misplaced emotion tied to an expedient division between macro and micro?

I remember John Hegarty criticised a paper I’d written on wine branding for being too headstrong, so maybe he’d seen a seduction at work in the reinvigorated beer category that was open to leverage. Monks making Lambic beer has precedent, but surely UK production is derivative; its own form of capture, even. Moreover, isn’t there a circular argument at work here? Craft beer is interesting and good, and the reason it’s interesting and good is because it’s craft.

What goes for beer also goes for gin. All the new market entrants must be persuaded that there’s either an insatiable interest for botanicals, or that they can outcompete and undercut the categories premium market leaders and still make margin. Sacred made a timely jump across one moat before the bridge was raised, but maybe it needs a white knight to help it make the next leap. Even my kids are starting to wonder how many craft gins the UK market can sustain!

The reason John Hegarty is pertinent to this post is because John, in his dual role as Creative Director of BBH and owner of a domaine in the Minervois, has been unequivocal in his criticism of the wine business, in particular the categories’ dearth of consumer focused brands.

A Twitter exchange that followed on from Charlie Ingham’s post ‘Big Brand Wine” made me reconsider John's argument.

I 'liked' this tweet form Joelle Nebbe-Mornot:

Brands as safe shortcuts on everything we don't care about. Then on topics that grab us, we all end up seeking the niche diversity. Geek out

My experience in the supermarket reflects Joelle’s. Ten washing powders is enough, but drifting down the wine shelves I can rarely find a bottle I want to buy. I’m too involved in the wine category for the supermarket’s wine selection to be relevant; and I just buy Persil out of habit.

My supermarket basket looks the same as many other shoppers, but their avoidance of wine comes down to a lack of confidence, or unfamiliarity with the brands on offer. What John Hegarty and others conclude is that we need more relevant and recognisable wine brands to recruit, retain and up-sell consumers. Customers don't trust their own knowledge, nor are they trusting of the distributed brands to provide value for money.  Supermarket bottle spend remains low, but it could be improved if customers were offered a better choice. This line of reasoning is often underscored by a threat: ‘If wine continues to be resistant to consumer needs then it shouldn’t take its market share for granted.’

When following this argument, we again need to be aware of staging. Firstly, marketing offers solutions, but to prescribe a cure it first needs to contrive a threat that it alone is the answer for: - ‘Do it our way or suffer these consequences in the future’…. Secondly, marketing naturalises ‘choice’ to suit its own purposes and methods. What Joelle refers to as ‘geek out’ is, for me, actually what constitutes making a choice. I am in my element choosing between tens of thousands of wines. I can bring my expertise to bear and, within reason, buy what I want. By contrast, phrases like, ‘Let the consumer choose’ or ‘The customer will decide’ seen in the context of a limited range of brands is, in fact, no choice at all. By the time the supermarket buyer has whittled a category down to a few brands there’s little choosing and decision making left for the consumer to enact. What is called ‘choice’ is an oligopoly of brand interest. Finally, the whole issue of wine brands starts to look like an exercise in opportunistic appropriation. I just don’t buy into Mike Paul’s argument that what the Cistercians were really doing when they erected walls round the perimeter of Clos Vougeot was brand building. This is a pernicious example of marketing capturing the slowly built reputations of others - ‘Latour’, ‘Petrus’, ‘Krug’ - to help secure its own nebulous luxury category. Marketing is a child of the 20^th Century, not before. Lafite isn’t a brand, just as Homo Erectus pulping a Neanderthal brain with a stone axe isn’t proto-neurology. We need to be able to show a disciplinary framework - the ‘working out’, if you like –  to earn the right to claim something as ours.

Cars are the exemplar of marketing's value to a single category.  Almost every attribute and quality is communicated through the prism of brands. We experience luxury, mid-market and value through brands and their extensions, rather than as abstractions: Porsche, Vauxhall, Audi, Seat. Cars are branding’s primal element, and marketing does the job of generating and distributing new products for profit. Even the most earnest innovations appeal to consumers in ways they’d never imagined possible. Who ever thought we’d boast about batteries? And which of you doesn’t want to own a Tesla? 

What works for cars works for other categories too. Persil doesn’t fulfil me, but I’m a repeat customer. Brands make decision making easy. So why am I a sceptic when it comes to wine?

Providing a definition of terroir that fits all regions is problematic, but arguably the most obdurate difficulty facing marketing is that terroir’s spatial distribution of differences is already doing the job it has earmarked for itself. In the bottled water category, branding brings its own topology of premium and value to products with a high degree of convergence, so you’d think that wine, with its multifarious differences, would be an open goal - but it isn’t. Wine marketers are like latecomers to a game of Monopoly who find all the sets are owned, and all the hotels have been used up. The only strategy left open to them is to buy stations and utilities.

A variant of this problem faces new entrants into wine production. Australia made a bold attempt to resist terroir with interregional blends, but, with a few notable exceptions, premium Australian wine (often the most profitable part of the market) now sells on typicity and regional identity. Sure, you can corral all the exceptions into a subset and make a counter case, but this just strikes me as another gratuitous act of marketing self-purification. Exceptions, it’s said, make for bad law, but they’re very useful for marketers.

At its most hostile, Wine Australia claimed terroir was marketing, but the criticism didn’t stick. Terroir is more than ‘a thing’, despite all its inherent vagueness. History and economics has sedimented and reified the ineffable into the immovable. For centuries, terroir was compresent with God, exerting power over generations of Burgundian vignerons. We can bemoan the fact that Bordeaux and Burgundy are now winner-take-all markets, or that Pomerol is always assumed to be better than Minervois, but there’s little we can do to change things. Rejigging a Slavoj Zizek one-liner: It’s easier for us to imagine the end of  civilisation than the overthrow of the 1855 classification.  

Terroir is an encounter with historicity, rather than its faux, nostalgic shadow - craft. Frederic Jameson writes about the appeal of ‘ecologies of production’ as an escape from the uniform and standardized world of manufacture. Digitalization has only intensified this yearning, of which the flight to craft is symptomatic. According to my account, craft creates opportunities for marketing as it enables brands to populate sentiments and emotions, thus capturing and returning us back to the very cycles of production and manufacture we were originally attempting to escape. By contrast, terroir’s historicity creates an impasse to wide-ranging brand creation. As Europeans, our history is inescapable and immanent to us, yet even in the pristine vineyards of the New World terroir is passively territorializing 'luxury' and 'premium' with its own concepts and understanding.

Marketing still has a job to do in wine – a little bricolage to keep the consumer in our thoughts - but the frustrations of terroir means its in-tray is a little more prosaic than all the grandstanding seminars might suggest. Steve Woolger, has a phrase: “It could be otherwise…..” Woolgar is directing us toward the ironic structure of marketing’s reveal. Irony includes the possibility of being mistaken about something: “You thought it was this, when in fact….” John Hegarty was imploring the wine trade to change: to think and be ‘otherwise’. But what was revealed behind his threat was just more marketing: the chance to ‘think different’, as Apple put it, within a category that is already impelled by terroir to do things differently.

If terroir is a taboo, then marketing is the gratuitous pleasure of breaking it. We may not like laws and interdictions, but we’ve learnt that if we obey the taboo and take the more convoluted route it directs us down, then the pleasure we attain is all the more intense. The more we submit to the taboo, the stronger it gets, and the more it structures our experience and pleasure. Over time, terroir becomes less like ‘a thing’ and more like a universal principle, hence its power over us. In the end, what enables us to resist the instant gratifications of wine marketing is pleasure. Drink differently!

     

The Tyranny of Rocks: Terroir and Trompe l'Oeil

The walls of Burgundy’s vineyards match the pyramids for mass, but not elevation. Giza memorializes God-Kings where the shallow blockwork of the Côte d’Or recoils from the burden of the sublime. The Cistercians could find no way out of God’s maze and left us a labyrinthine vineyard  puzzle as a keepsake.

Instrumental science eventually got the world out from under God’s feet. Only at the end of the 17^th Century was curiosity no longer considered a sin, but “the mark of a finite being with infinite pretension” (Blumenberg). Copernicus’s heliocentric universe was big, measurable and predictable.

The medieval world had drawn a sharp distinction between God’s infallibility and human frailty and capriciousness. In the post-Enlightenment world human culpability persists, though the contrast is made with a secularized nature that can’t perjure itself rather than a God whose perfection was taken for granted. Commenting on William Buckland’s cross-examination of history by geology, John Forrester concludes: “Rocks don’t lie!” Buckland provides sound reasons to doubt the veracity of our storytelling, whilst Forrester inadvertently sloganizes terroir for us.

The Enlightenment cleared a new space for mankind in the world, but inherited misgivings about human frailties continued to undermine self-affirmation. In Burgundy, Cistercian submissiveness was displaced from God to nature. The magnitudes of influence remained unchanged even if they were articulated through an amalgam of aspect, climate and geology rather than the actions of a transcendental deity. Human agency was limited to spectating a non-human creation.  Burgundy producers who feel pressured to play down the impact of their daily exertions toe a deeply scored line.

There isn’t a conspiracy at work here; rather, within Burgundy the limits of knowledge are set by a past that discouraged curiosity and downplayed human expressivity beyond the elaboration of the divine. If, today, we follow our (E)nlightened instincts and use science to disentangle the individual threads of terroir from one another, we find our investigations quickly jam against a knot. In the same way that the Cistercians had imagined God’s creation to be irreducible, so terroir is presented as causative, immanent and totalizing. Roland Barthes wrote that faced with the world we vacillate between two possibilities: we can analyze and measure what is before us, or we can admit its obduracy and poeticize the “otherness” that deep-down alienates us from things.  Coupling the aesthetic with the analytic isn’t straightforward when romanticism and theory share the same object.

Terroir is depicted as a window on the world, yet the more we polish the smeary glass pane in front of us, the more sharply our reflection is returned. Writing about fashion, Jean Duvignaud observes that in societies where nakedness was customary the introduction of clothing eroticized women: “Nudity is only attractive when culture creates it”, he concludes. The desire to be side-by-side with nature, to experience things stripped bare – “as they really are” - is a persistent theme among wine critics. When I planted my vineyard I chastened myself with hand-hoeing, biodynamics and geological maps. Ten years later, and I now accept my time is best spent removing leaves and manipulating shoots. Back in 2005, the rock-strewn soil we planted looked like a stretch of wilderness, but through the repetition of tasks and my own inventiveness and toil, I now see industry and production where once I’d imagined Eden. That it even occurred to me that biodynamics might ultimately decide the success (or failure) of my start-up only illustrates the extent to which I was held captive by a seductive version of creationism.

Of course, it’s possible to imagine a time, a few centuries from now, when everything in the vineyard will be done through force of habit: the wisdom of past vintages will concertina into routines; production decisions will become second nature, so much so that the only nature that gets mentioned will be that of sun, rain and rock. The endless experimentation, failed trials and tweaks for posterity will all be forgotten as my heirs direct curious listeners toward a hidden world of geological strata that provides them with the blueprint for their activities.

Alternatively, these farmers of the future might look back at our time with bemusement, just as we now look back upon the complacent astronomers of the Middles Ages who saw measurement and skepticism as sinful.  Religious dogmatism sustained the cramped dimensions of the Ptolemaic Universe, and future generations of wine drinkers might diagnose a similar malaise amongst predecessors who thought wine quality and the expression of environmental causes approximated to the same thing. They might well point out to one another that the evidence for a wider sphere of influence was with us all the time. From their perspective, every family, village and region develops its own culture of production through time, and this helps explain the inter-regional differences between Champagne and Sherry, as well as the intra-vineyard disparities between Coche-Dury and Lafon at the point where geological and climatic explanations fail. For them, our faith in environmental predestination was just nostalgia; we couldn’t quite free ourselves from inherited magnitudes of influence - medieval sentiments - that with the benefit of their hindsight seemed to stifle our accounts of our activities more than it inhibited the activities themselves.

This last point feeds into the error I made when planting my vineyard: that of taking terroir too literally, and trying to force old imaginings into an earnest work schedule.

Feuerbach drew a useful distinction between knowledge and curiosity. Curiosity operates with few constraints, hence Blumenberg’s allusion to our being “finite beings with infinite pretensions”.  The Enlightenment led to an outburst of curiosity and conjecture, as though rationality needs the impetus of imagination to properly reset its boundaries. Human intellect doesn’t like a void, and curiosity fills empty space with its own hybridized speculations forged out of old and new beliefs. Curiosity got the better of me when I splashed out on a hoe and geological maps in the same day, but it might also explain how Jancis Robinson can neglect the immanence of human activity to millennia of production and extol wine as “Geography in a glass.”  

My hope is that my bemused farmers of the future will both acknowledge the debt they owe their forebears - all the know-how and expertise that the past has shaped and gifted them - and better understand the relationship between vine physiology and the environment. Having rid themselves of the residues of medieval prejudice they will talk openly and confidently about their own creativity and contributions, and how these entangle productively and aesthetically with nature; their words will match-up with their deeds. They will look back at early 21^st Century wrangles about terroir and natural wines as being well-intentioned, but mistaken. They won’t argue about whether Coche or Lafon captures Meursault in the highest vinous resolution because they realize nature doesn’t offer us any means of deciding between the two. The reason why we felt there was a decision to be made was because we never properly broke with the Cistercian suspicion that we were trusted observers and flawed creators.

From my perspective, our understanding of the evolution of wine style, at both regional and domain level, is enriched if we yoke the environment and man together. Just as biology has taught us that the egg came before the chicken, so, analogously, primitive production necessarily preceded any discussions of geology and climate. If we believe we can peel back centuries of doing and making and reverse the order of events so as to expose some kind of primordial purity, we are, to use Duvignaud’s insight, confusing “nakedness” with “nudity”.  I’m happy to accept natural wines on my terms, but not the rhetoric that’s served up with them.

Wittgenstein warned us against becoming “bewitched” by language. On our chilly Island, there is a long history of wine criticism and a very short history of wine production. My hunch is that with little to counterbalance our curiosity, we’ve all too readily taken Burgundian producers at their word and failed to recognize the fact that when we’ve asked How things are? we’ve instinctively been told how things were; - their answers are infused with medievalisms. Attributing everything to terroir, or saying you do nothing are just ways of clambering back under God’s feet.

Ultimately, if what producers do matters more than what they say, then no damage has been done; the wines will speak for them in their absence. Notwithstanding this, at a recent natural wine dinner the French importer told me that most of the early adopters in France didn’t have wine backgrounds, but were drawn into changing careers by rhetoric. Like me, they’d idealized terroir and then become seduced by their own creation. I lost faith when I realized that behind the hard work there was only more hard work. There was no unveiling of essence; though, unarguably, recognising my earlier ideas as trompe l’oeil must count as some sort of revelation.

As wine critics we have a duty to be self-critical. Not only should we expose the anachronisms of others, but we must be wary of projecting our own ill-founded prejudices onto our loosely jointed industry. If I don’t see any difference between replacing indigenous varieties with Cabernet and unravelling Champagne blends into climats, it’s because I see vine roots extending into the cultural soil of Aÿ and Jerez, and not just reaching into the static chalk strata below. Rocks don’t lie, but neither do they tell the truth.

Plant Life

Michael Marder (http://dx.doi.org/10.4161%2Fpsb.21954) brings an original understanding to our place within the natural environment. He argues against a long held bias within our ordering of living things that elevates man above all other life on the basis of sentience. Philosophy, Marder, maintains has shown too much self-regard for the “self”, and too little interest in life.

Away from the supermarket value ranges things have notionally improved for pigs, but one doesn’t have to go too far back in science to find “squealing” depicted as a robotic response to slaughter rather than a horrifying reaction to pain and distress.

According to Marder, recent research into plants shows that the development of a central nervous system is not an evolutionary point of departure that reaches the pinnacle of expression in human self-awareness. On the contrary, pain like responses, intelligent interaction with the environment and cohort signaling all occur within plants. Sentience does not culminate in human intelligence, but is itself the very condition of life, whether it be human, animal or plant.

The moral vocabulary of rights that vegans and vegetarians are urging us to extend beyond our own species may need to be rewritten again, but this time to include plants. In an age when ecosystems are being described at the very moment of their destruction, Marder’s thinking around the moral inclusiveness of all life is timely.

The Demon Marketing

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 18^th 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 21^st 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?