They come from the mountains or the desert, most often — wild, uncultivated places where the hand of man has yet to make much of an imprint. They are themselves of this character: roughshod, unshaven and not exactly fresh from the bath. They have bees in their bonnets. They are not in the mood for chit chat.
They are the prophets, and come among us to deliver hard truths, the kind that shake up the status quo which, as they will explain, has sunk to a shameless, unheard-of low. Things must change, they cry, or there will be Hell to pay.
But hang on a minute, here come the priests, handsomely capped, robed and slippered, the very embodiment of the status quo, and keen to put these woolly-headed fire-breathers in their place. Things are as they are for a very good reason, they assert in their calm, assuring, indoor voices. People need show, ceremony and, above all, stability, or there will be Hell to pay. We’ve seen where enthusiasm for turning everything upside down leads: the questioning of authority, the disorderly behavior, the decline in hard-won standards of good taste.
The mutual antagonism of the prophetic and priestly views of things neatly captures the heat and vigor of the age-old struggle between the urge to reform and the determination to stay the course. I find myself resorting to it when considering the current state of wine, where all is not, it must be said, as harmonious as it might be. On the one hand, prophets who openly decry the dispiriting fungibility of commercial, capital-intensive, mass market wines; on the other, entrenched authorities who assert that all is best (could not be better) just as it is. Who the betting line favors is anyone’s guess. The contest long ago went into extra innings.
To be sure, painting things this way ignores the nuances. Appellation authorities responsible for the kind of wine that is bottled under their statutory, jealously-guarded designations (Côtes du Rhône; Chianti Classico, e.g.) are regional bodies (the priesthood, in our analogy) which, given the amount of effort expended in generating a consensus around a set of rules, are instinctively resistant to messing with them. Perhaps rightly so. Still, notions of what makes a quality wine what it is necessarily vary among them, as does the level of tolerance they are willing to extend to those with a more individual vision (the industry’s prophetic wing).
It’s also true that appellation laws don’t constrain anyone absolutely, since a winemaker always has the option to go to market without the appellation designation (which has the standing of a kind of communal trademark) and let the wine stand or fall purely on its merits. We’re seeing more and more of this as consumers realize that they can safely pledge their fealty to a quality-minded progressive, estate, even if its wine bears nothing more that the humble designation Vin de Table or Vino di Tavola.
It is all quite exciting, we think. The prophets said it would be. It’s also a little confusing — something the priests warned us would happen.