It seems we can now add Barcelona to the list of cities being loved to death. Along with Venice and Dubrovnik, Catalunya’s little jewel of a port city is now a place where the crush of day-tripping tourists make life miserable for residents and where large-scale Airbnb entrepreneurs are destroying working class neighborhoods block by cherished block. If a travel destination is just a place where people come from far way to rub shoulders with other people from far away, what’s the point?
Being loved to death is something your correspondent is all too familiar with. Not because he has himself ever suffered from a morbid surfeit of popularity, but because he has, in his superannuated way, been witness to numerous examples of wine grapes (you may freely substitute region, sub-region, estate or winemaker for grape variety in all that follows), which, having achieved a level of high-flown celebrity, subsequently crash and burn. Perhaps one day he’ll author an entry in the Oxford Book of Wine on the phenomenon, which he proposes to call Icarus Syndrome, or maybe just Gravity’s Revenge.
Here’s how the tragedy typically plays out: One day, some grape is minding its own business doing what nice grapes do when someone, somewhere decides that it shall be The Next Big Thing. The whispering campaign kicks off modestly, with just the savviest sort of consumers realizing that said grape has been under appreciated and under-valued, but very quickly a few ear-to-the-ground influencers get wind of it and so do their constituencies.
Once a critical mass of cachet has been achieved, our bottled Icarus ascends skyward. Corporate types interpret its arc through the heavens as a dollar sign and soon, very soon, they are at work debasing the category by pushing cheap, maladroit imitations of the original upon the unsuspecting and naive. Thus, our plucky aeronaut begins his precipitous, ignoble descent. In recent decades, we’ve seen Valpolicella, Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, rosés (generically), and Merlot follow this trajectory. As wines, they started out as something meaningful and worthy and then were summarily brought low. The inevitable denouement? In the hectic race to confront unreasonable and ultimately unsatisfiable demand, quality doesn’t just suffer – it craters.
Greed and cynicism play an essential role in these debacles, of course, but, asked to identify the point of failure, I would direct attention to the moment when consumers become persuaded by marketers that a grape variety is by itself an indicator of quality or status – or pretty much anything else. In fact, no grape variety is ennobled by its own biology or history. In wine grapes, as in most things, context is everything. Pinot Grigio can be well or badly grown, and well or badly made into wine, depending on the suitability of the place where it’s planted, the conscientiousness with which the fruit is grown, and the skill and good faith exercised in the cellar.
Love the wine (and the city) you love. Just please don’t love it to death.