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    Simple Math: Deconstructing How We Talk About Wine
    Simple Math: Deconstructing How We Talk About Wine
    Simple Math: Deconstructing How We Talk About Wine
    Ebook131 pages2 hours

    Simple Math: Deconstructing How We Talk About Wine

    By Christian Lane

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    About this ebook

    A rollicking, informative power book to help wine consumers and members of the trade remove the hot air from how we talk about wine. Interpret wine reviews, wine lists and poseur conversation. Generate your OWN language and find your "desert island" wine.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChristian Lane
    Release dateNov 21, 2016
    ISBN9781370852406
    Simple Math: Deconstructing How We Talk About Wine
    Author

    Christian Lane

    Christian Lane makes things: music, books, websites and business plans. He has a diverse background in the arts, science and business. He grew up as an award-winning classical & jazz trombonist and organic farmer with an early opportunity to implement Integrated Pest Management. He earned a BS in audio engineering from the State University of New York. His work entailed discovery in several capacities medical reference lab informatics, satellite television analog-to-digital technology transitions, studio recording and large-scale sound system automation. He pursued an MBA at the University of Utah and became more interested in process and form. He supported the arts as a performer and benefactor, growing with the culture around him. He grew with the Internet as a self-taught web designer. He’s published a few books and has developed a rich involvement in the arts as a benefactor and spoken word artist, once performing for the NAACP in an amphitheatre.

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      Book preview

      Simple Math - Christian Lane

      Simple Math

      Deconstructing How We Talk About Wine

      Christian Lane

      Simple Math: Deconstructing How We Talk About Wine

      Copyright © 2012 by Christian Lane. All rights reserved.

      Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

      For more information address:

      Christian Lane

      c/o Cognoscenti Press

      cl@christian-lane.com

      Published in the USA by

      CreateSpace Publishing

      Seattle, WA

      ISBN-13: 978-1478370031

      ISBN-10: 1478370033

      Book Design: Christian Lane

      Editor: Christian Lane

      Artwork: Christian Lane

      For Tina, without whom

      I would never have begun

      to become who I seem to be

      becoming, and for

      reminding me that the answers

      are silly to chase

      because the questions

      are never fully cooked

      PLEASE NOTE

      The material in this book is of an informative nature but is intended as subjective narrative. It should not be deemed a replacement for current practices and trends in the wine industry and does not in any way endorse or decry the hard work of countless veterans, pioneers and rainmakers.

      In addition, this book does not encourage irresponsible or underage consumption of alcoholic beverages or noncompliant shipping of said beverages as determined by local laws.

      The author celebrates wine but does not condone its misuse. Feel free to misuse the book, though, and dog-ear it if you like. Why not bend the rules?

      Acknowledgments

      Thanks must go to people who both knowingly and unknowingly have inspired this work. I suppose that here’s a place to find out how helpful you’ve been if you didn’t think you did anything all that special! It’s cozy under your wings. Paul Stachowski, who taught me how to dumb my writing down. Dave, Susan, Steve, Clem, Ron, Earl, Neil and Bob for drinking the Regularian Koolaid™ early on... Stephan, Alex, Nikki, Shoshana, Jeffrey, Petar, Clark, Greg, Christy, Dave, Miles, Diane, Jack, James, Lynn, Jay, Liz, Skip, Michael, Reta, Tom, Raj and Katherine for professional and less than overt guidance. Your under-wing areas are very cozy... all of the people who thought, well, yeah... Jon, Lou, Angela, Sid, Chase, Didier, Susan and Doyle for moral support... and mi familia, nuclear and extended. Thank you for allowing me to talk snidely about foie gras and foamed dandelion flowers as we convened in the kitchen. You knew I’d turn it into something – and you hung in there! Thanks most of all to my soul mate. Tina, you get it like nobody else does, and you got on this crazy bandwagon not knowing to whence it would careen but telling me it was a good idea. Good enough for me. You rock. Oh – all you patient tasting room staff? Thanks for the Q & A sessions. I hope this work helps YOU take a bite outta hot air and just let more wine speak for itself. If this creates one little wine revolution, I’ll be glad to have planted a seed.

      Foreword

      Are you tired of being talked to – and being encouraged to talk – about wine in such poetic and complicated terms that it makes you want to go back to beer? Does it make sense any more? But at the same time, does it feel like dumbing any conversation down might take away from what you or your audience knows about wine, or any topic? I’d like to make a proposal that it’s A-OK to talk however we want about wine to whomever we want. The exclusionary practice of using flowery language is at an end but, to my knowledge, nobody has come forth to make such a bombastic suggestion. Until now. Yes, social media has starkly abbreviated how we communicate, yet it generally entails a hyperlinking frame of reference whereby the headline is as visible as stains at a tomato-based food fight – but the essence of the sauce is only revealed if you click the link. And with so much information flying at us today, I’d venture to guess that the links aren’t as oft clicked as the status updaters, Tweeters and headliners would intend. What’s relevant? Do the links take us to a place that makes sense? In my opinion, not typically in a cyberspace (and physical and print) arena of wine communication. Often, we’re led down an opulent, lushly carpeted hallway of semi-comprehensible bullshit. That is, when our time in the fine wine space isn’t occupied by the inane, the cheap, the great deal that identifies a bottle’s contents as irrelevant in the face of the bargain-hunter’s success. I’d like to see us empower ourselves to speak in terms we can mutually understand, with no fear of sounding like either a wine professor or an oaf. I advocate the rapidfire learning process whereby we can even invent our own terminologies. As long as the point sinks in. Perhaps my utopia is dystopian. Perhaps not. I decided to put my elbow grease into this project because I have seen the mist-covered world of the future in which itinerant winos (Chablis-drinking hobos), huddle over found gravy and squirrel tenderloins, speaking in robust tones about small-production Ribera del Duero treasures in terms of dang good and kinda like a cat fart with as much gleeful freedom as they want to. A world in which there’s no wine steward or Bronze Chef smirking down from on high in a way that would make anyone feel like they’re unworthy of playing this so-called wine game. It’s a game. It’s a beverage. For crying out loud.

      I think that when you buy a Buffalo-head nickel from a coin collector, you don’t have to pay as much money or attention to your speech as when you buy the nickel from a numismatist. I hope you enjoy my parallels and feel a weight lift from your shoulders. Now, if you like that weight, the mantel of being the wordy wine expert, fine, but I do urge a certain level of openmindedness about knowing everything. I would never presume to know but a portion of what I could, but I do know what it’s like to have thousands of conversations with wine buyers, winemakers, grape growers, wine marketers, wine competition entrants and judges, wine distributors, wine company entrepreneurs, wine writers, having been all of these at one time or another. I just want to level the playing field, at least in my small and humble corner of the world.

      Prologue

      As a wine guy on both sides of the credit card, I’ve learned a dozen – no – 1001 things. Things about wine from the ground up. Winemaking, grape growing, packaging… statistics, chemistry, finance…and marketing. If you’ve built the Golden Widget, good on ya. If you want a backlog of widgets to take up space in your garage, forget everything you’ve ever learned about marketing, whether you’re the persuader or the audience. You’re going to learn something new tomorrow and the next day that may totally trump the last best reason you thought the bottle du jour should be in the spotlight. I think the main reason for this is the way we talk about wine, and as this shifts and evolves at the speed of light, so do our beliefs and understandings.

      This book is intended to look at how we talk about wine, and to present a different lens that’s perfectly OK to use – a lens which can be dug out of the grade school box of belongings as relevant and useful. This lens is actually language, or vernacular, or vocabulary, or jargon, or even slang. Whatever you want to call a collection of words is fine; the way you use it is up to you. The people I’ve talked with for several years tend to agree that, just as we don’t typically chat in Old English about zinfandel, there’s always an easier way to convey a point. I felt like a king when I bought my first cordless electric drill. However, a regular screwdriver is as good as the day it came to being. There’s nobody looking over my shoulder when I use it, looking down at me for doing so or asking me questions about the laws of physics I take advantage of when I turn a screw. I’m just turning a screw and don’t care about friction coefficients or the fundamental function of the ramp as the reason the screw goes into the wood.

      It’s the same in the world of fine wine. I contend that the use of complicated wine talk has had its day and that many producers of luxury wines would join me in the sentiment that, after a while, it’s really a bunch of hot air. By that, I mean the practice of describing wine by using numbers to discuss how it was made or by using incomprehensible words that exclude too many people. Unfortunately, wine lovers have had this language forced down their throats for so long that they use it to be an active part of the culture, often not even knowing what the hell they’ve just said!

      This is not by any stretch a textbook, or even a handbook per se – but rather a collection of suggestions as to how to get back to basics. It will be of interest to wine consumers as well as those in the wine trade because it will empower, explore and remind. It will provoke and prod. It will examine the uncomfortable perspective that we’re all probably guilty of making wine talk so friggin’ complicated when it really boils down to one simple point: YUM or YUCK.

      You won’t learn to be a wine sales rep by reading this. Nor will you get tips about how to go from mere wine drinker to wine expert. Most certainly, this isn’t the book to teach you how to be the most engaging wino at the party. This is an antidote to snobbery and part of an ongoing story about how I’ve learned to pull that one eyebrow down while still knowing a little bit about some things.

      CHAPTER

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