It may have escaped your attention, but wine is getting more than a skosh too complicated. This wonderfully civilizing elixir—really, nothing more than a bunch of grapes caught in a squeeze—has evolved to the point where doctoral dissertations are written over the distinctions between various clones of, say, Pinot Noir grapes. Not only that, but consumers are so confused that they are only now learning that Zinfandel can be red! Imagine that. Comes in two colors! (Okay, three if you count roses, but that's way too complex.)
Nearly thirty years ago, I worked as a tour guide at a Sonoma Valley winery. Prior to the tour, if the weather was nice during the late summer, I'd take my group across the street from the tasting room to the edge of one of the winery's vineyards. "Let me explain how wine is made," I'd say, picking a cluster of grapes. "You crush the grapes in your hands, and wait patiently for five days . . . it's wine! Any questions?"
Sadly, due to what seems to be a conspiracy of pretentiousness from some of my colleagues, led by what I call the "prismatic luminescence" school of wine writing, we seem to be in greater danger than ever before. Fortunately, Hinkle's Laws form a formidable breakwater against the tsunami of overwhelming and pride-filled preciousness. Better still, none of these "laws" will insist that you need fourteen different sets of crystal in order to enjoy that number of different wine types. Neither will they insist that reds go only with meat, nor will they urge that whites are fit for fish alone (nor even solely for sole).
Hinkle's First Wine Law: "There are only three categories of wine: 1) I like it; 2) I don't like it; 3) I'll drink it if someone else pays for it!" The genesis of the first law is the utter silliness of invoking 100-point scales to judge and categorize wine quality. As if the fermented juice of ripe grapes could be reduced to such cold, numerical enumeration. Bah and humbug. Great wines, like refined folk, possess qualities so diverse and so wondrous that even a thousand-point scale would not do them justice. Instead, we are best reduced to language which culminates, with the very best of the world's wines, with the likes of "oooh" and "ahhh," and the ever popular "wow!"
Hinkle's Second Wine Law: "Great Pinot Noir inspires one to create new sins . . . and wish to commit them!" Mere numbers are especially incapable of describing the wholly sensual textural qualities of the finest French Burgundies and scintillating California and Oregon Pinots. We use words like succulent and juicy, fleshy and decadent, but even these only scratch the surface of the hedonistic nature of these extraordinary, ambrosially bawdy delights. They must be tasted, touched, felt and savored before one truly understands and appreciates the innate sensuality of artfully grown, craftily made Pinot Noir.
The French, in their ever wondrous display of sensual vocabulary, immediately hew to feminine analogies when rhapsodizing over the textural delights of the red Burgundy. They even draw upon religious icons, suggesting that a fine Burgundy "slides down your throat like the good Lord Jesus in silk trousers." Hey, they're French. If they can get away with that, even in these politically correct times, more power to `em.
Hinkle's Fourth Wine Law: (In the Jeopardy format) "ANSWER: Gewurztraminer! QUESTION: What do you say when someone sneezes?" The theory, of course, is that anybody who can twirl their tongue around gesundheit correctly can certainly master "geh-vurtz'-trah-mee-nair." (Maybe if you blurt it out quickly.) Gewurz is that spicy, delicately floral white wine in dire danger of dying out if Americans don't learn how to pronounce it soon enough to order a bottle before it's gone. (If you're wondering, Hinkle's Third Wine Law isn't much, I'm not proud of it, so there's no need to repeat it here.)
Hinkle's Fifth Wine Law: "It is better to suffer with wine than to suffer without wine." This is not to enter into the great philosophical debate on the ennobling qualities of suffering. No, the notion really points to the idea that, when faced with absolute and irrevocable necessity of enduring evil and its offshoots, you may as well temper the experience with a glass of the bubbly, a goblet of the Gewurz, a tumbler of the Pinot, a thimble or three of the Port. Unless you're into enhancing your pain through masochism —I'm making no judgment here, one way or the other—it just seems sensible to put the pain in perspective with a judicious dose of Nature's own best medicine. (There was an article some years ago, in Scientific American or the like, whose thesis was that if alcohol had only newly been discovered, it would be hailed as more important even than penicillin for its natural tranquilizing capabilities. Interesting notion, eh?)
I was thinking of coming up with a sixth law, but there's not much point in trying to make something simple if you're just going to work your way around to complicating it again. Still I have a notion of something along the lines of, If it's a gaggle of geese, is it a murder of Merlots? A pride of Pinots? If we were to have some T-shirts made, we'd certainly need more than just two or three laws, wouldn't you think? Plus, I've always been intrigued by the incipient humor in collective nouns, as applied to wine. So, would that be a clutch of Chardonnays? A raft of Rieslings? A flock of Fumes? A covey of Cabernets? A zoo of Zinfandels? (Blurt it out! Quickly!) A gaggle of Gewurzes? Beats me.
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