Am I the strange one?

Some thoughts about the difference between professionals’ tastes and those of the general public.

At the moment I am going through quite an incredibly fertile run with books left out on the street by neighbours having a clear-out. In the past month, I’ve picked up Byron Roger’s The Last Englishman, The Life of EL Carr (just brilliant, one of the best things I’ve read in years), Jancis Robinson’s Confessions of a Wine Lover (deserves an article of its own), an old Hugh Johnson guide, a proof of a forthcoming biography of Gertrude Stein and Matthew Engel’s The Reign: Life in Elizabethan Britain. Such has been the riches that I am tempted to start a Substack devoted to found books but who has the time?

And why do it when I have a perfectly good wine blog into which I can shoehorn tenuous cultural references. I almost didn’t pick up the Engel book because I had binged on Dominic Sandbrook’s histories and thought I couldn't read another thing about Harold Wilson, the Coal Board and general decline but all the praise on the cover lured me in. I am glad I did because it might be, and I say this as a huge Sandbrook fan, better than the master himself. Engel is more concise and opinionated but not in an irritating way. There are also some wonderful quotes such as this one from John Peel:

“The underground was terribly small and very, very localised… I could never understand, for example, why it was that the Country Joe and the Fish LP never got into the charts. I said to the record company, “Why isn’t this in the charts? Everybody I know has got a copy.” But what I didn’t realise was that it was the other way round: I knew everybody who’d got a copy. So the 300 that they’d sold were all to people I knew.”

It reminds me of the great sherry revival of 2010 which mainly took place in the food pages of the Observer. All my friends were drinking Tio Pepe En Rama so I couldn’t understand why sales were still decreasing.

Are your tastes more Herman’s Hermits than Country Joe and the Fish?

It’s very easy for wine writers to get stuck in an echo chamber and think that everyone shares your tastes when actually they’re still knocking back the New Zealand sauvignon blanc like it’s 2004. Miles Morland left a very perceptive comment on an article I wrote a few weeks back on whether wine writers need qualifications. Morland is an old friend, a writer, author of a very good cookbook, a wine lover¹ and someone who by investing money in Africa has probably done far more good than a dozen NGO types in white Land Cruisers. I was going to pull out highlights of his comment but actually it’s worth reading in full and because this is my website I can just plonk it all here:

“Does getting a wine qualification actually alter how you evaluate wine? After sixty years unqualified drinking, I think it does. MWs and WSETs are trained to look for and identify things in wine that unqualified people don't necessarily care about. A parallel can be made with art critics. How many times have we all read rave reviews of a show by a contemporary artist, channelling fashionable modern vibes, and thought the art was rubbish when we went ourselves. In the same way, I may read a review of, say, a pinot noir (it's often pinot noirs) in which the professional reviewer professes to find things I have never dreamed of "bright red cherry and raspberry fruit, rose petal and a hint of tomato leaf", that from a Wine Society NZ pinot noir review. Huh? Cherry is the giveaway. I don't want cherry in my pinot noirs, thanks. Let alone raspberry and tomato leaf. And I don't want my pinot noirs to be semi-roses either. I like some body and the old fashioned red burgundy virtues of rotting leaves and wet labrador, neither of which are even identified by MWs. And as for white burgundies or modern German rieslings. Professionals love citrus, steel, and minerality because those are things they have been trained to look for. Not me. I don't want my chardonnay to taste of lemon or grapefruit or to have enough steely minerality to strip paint. Rounded and buttery with a hint of honey and ripe fruit in the nose is perfect for my untutored palate. I am a big fan of the Wine Society. Many decent wines at good prices. Try their dry Alsatian muscat. Wow. What a winner. But it amuses me how poorly reviewed the Society's Choices wines often are. They have been chosen by professional Wine Soc tasters but when they are bought by keen non-professional drinkers they often give them 2/5 star reviews because the non-pro drinker has a different palate.”

He’s right. Wine writers tend to like things that are unusual, difficult, subtle, elegant, challenging, austere etc. Wines that take a bit of time to get to know. Perhaps because we taste an awful lot of wine and have got tired of the crowd-pleasers. Or perhaps it’s the sort of one upmanship which encourages people to go down rabbit holes of obscurity. Modern buzz terms like ‘minerality’, ‘crunchy fruit’ and ‘texture’ - guilty on all fronts here - mean almost nothing to most wine drinkers.

Often I’ll rave about something only for my wife to turn her nose up at it. And she’s been married to a wine bore for 16 years. And I’d say my tastes are definitely more mainstream than most. Perhaps because I don’t spend a lot of time socialising with other wine writers. For some reason. Yet from my days working with Laithwaite’s, Britain’s largest online wine merchant, on the BBC Good Food Wine Club, I found myself in a similar position to The Wine Society’s buyers. Some of the wines I love would get an “urrggh, battery acid, poured it straight down the sink” from customers while often the wines I turned my nose up at tastings would be Laithwaite’s bestsellers.

What often put me off was the amount of sugar in the reds. I’ve written before about the increasing prevalence of such wines as has Victoria Moore at the Daily Telegraph. On the whole, wine writers do not like these wines but the public clearly does. Witness the success of 19 Crimes, Apothic and the rest. Apothic has something like 16g of sugar per litre, most reds have little or none.

Why do we dislike these wines? I think it’s because wine and especially red wine is something you have to learn to enjoy. You have to get used to the dryness and astringency before you can appreciate the perfume and complexity. Sweet reds bypass all of that and just go straight for the pleasure hit of fruit, sugar and alcohol. Wine writers, in contrast, praise balance above all. Port might be very sweet but it has tannin, acidity and a fresh floral flavour which balances out the sweetness - at least in the better examples.

Most of the public doesn’t give two hoots about balance or whether something lives up to the classic archetypes like Bordeaux or Burgundy. I sometimes think the classic models of wine are breaking down, something I’ve just written an article for in The Critic. Perhaps they never really existed. People were drinking Le Piat D’Or, an off-dry red designed to appeal to Liebfraumilch drinkers in the 1970s. Sweet reds are increasingly common though.

I can’t honestly recommend wines I don’t like but are my views completely out of step with the general public? Am I John Peel listening to Country Joe and the Fish while everyone else is listening to Herman’s Hermits²? Does it matter? You would think there would be zero crossover between people who drink sweetish reds and who buy wines based on newspaper recommendations but that isn’t the case. My neighbour likes big, sweetish reds but also likes good Champagne, English sparkling wine and Chateauneuf-du-Pape.

So I’m in a bit of a quandary. I don’t want my tastes to be too rarified or I’m just speaking to a tiny audience or a tinier audience because let’s be honest here, very few people read about wine. There’s no point recommending wines if nobody outside a tiny clique likes them. I have to keep asking myself, am I the strange one?

1. Morland’s house wine is the Lirac from Domaine de la Mordoree which I’m also a big fan of.

2. There’s some great footage of an argument between Peter Noone, lead singer from Herman’s Hermits, and Graham Nash from The Hollies about whether music should be political. Nash thinks it should be, Noone doesn’t. It’s like seeing the inflection point of the ‘60s happening right before your eyes.