That era ended with the first televised winter Olympic games. The ski-jumping and bobsledding were amazing, but it was figure skating that proved utterly captivating: Interpretive dance on ice — spins, jumps and manouvers that Gordie Howe, for all his rough grace, could never have managed.
Announcer Jim McKay and color man Dick Button explained that there were two elements to the competition. There were the dazzling freestyle events where athletes performed choreographed routines designed to showcase skills, but also to entertain. Then something that went on behind the scenes called compulsory figures. In that segment, competitors were required to accurately trace a set of intricate designs or figures — thus ‘figure’ skating — on the ice surface. Ideally, judges would detect no divergence of the required figure and the marks made by the skate blades.
Compulsory figures are no longer required in skating competitions, having been discontinued in 1990, but in the wine world, they’re still going strong. Collectively, they constitute the appellation system and, unlike in sport, faithful execution of the form is a matter of law.
In the rules governing the conditions which wines may present themselves as Chianti Classico, Côtes du Rhone or any one of hundreds of other approved forms, you can see something very like skating’s traditional figures. Persons wishing to avail themselves of the appellation trademark must conform their production methods and finished wine closely to the prescribed form expressed in the documents that govern production in each specific appellation.*
While freestyling in wine is not forbidden, it is relegated to an arena of supervision lying outside the scheme of approved naming protocols. Failing to grow your fruit in an authorized township, using something other than the authorized grape varieties, or deviating from authorized techniques in the cellar will mean that your Côtes du Rhône-like wine — howsoever beautifully made and delicious to drink — will instantly forfeit its right to call itself by that name and suffer demotion to mere Vin de France.
It goes further, since even if you can show that your wine conformed in every respect during production, the end result may not please the palates of a tasting panel, who may collectively determine that it isn’t a sufficiently faithful replication of the figure to be granted use of its trademark.
Appellation systems, while useful in many ways and a bulwark against wine’s long, inglorious history of fraudulent practice, offer scant encouragement to freestyle types harboring a vision that reaches beyond the current, the obvious, the status quo. And, this, it seems to me, is a significant argument against its preservation.
Still, while I’m not sure that doing away with wine’s version of compulsory figures is an entirely good idea, it may be high time the authorities took their skates in for a good sharpening.