A wine of one's own

Saturday, 30 November, 2024
TimAtkin.com, Charlie Leary
When you live in the tropics, it changes your perspective on wine.

“The closer you get to the equator, the warmer it becomes,” says the Wine and Spirit Education Trust in explaining vinous geography. So true. When you live in the tropics, it changes your perspective on wine.

And the thing about wine marketers, critics, winegrowers, sensory analysis experts, and wine writers is that they nearly all live in temperate climes, usually in or near regions where wine production occurs. Generally speaking “wine appreciation” happens within a limited climactic range and cultural setting. This makes for tunnel vision.

In fact, back in 2013, three professors at Texas Tech criticised the industry for tending to only focus on selling wine to other “wine producing countries.” This remains the case today. The wine industry seems to have a hard time realizing that “even though they do not produce wine of their own,” such places “may comprise lucrative markets for export.” Wow! What a novel idea: attract wine drinkers in the world’s regions and cultures that don’t make wine. Wine producers, especially the makers of entry level to mid-priced wines, need to relax and broaden their horizons.

Earlier this year, Rob McMillan, author of the annual SVB Wine Industry Report told me that “in the past,” in the United States, “we never had an excess [of wine] to deal with” so no one really cared about exporting to the “developing markets” where people might have completely different approaches to and perspectives on wine. Well, that’s changing now that headlines in the San Francisco Chronicle read, “Desperate California wine growers are slashing prices on grapes. No one is buying.”

Arbitrary norms

I’ve now spent over four years living in Panama City, at 8.98°N latitude at sea level. This has lent me some new perspective on how relative, or perhaps completely arbitrary, the norms of “wine appreciation” are. We are taught precise prerequisites for how wine should be enjoyed. Drinking at “room temperature” provides a good example.

Whose room is this, anyway?

Even the numerous wine publications will tell you that “room temperature” is not really room temperature. Red wines are suggested to be served at 15°C + (say, 60°F to 65°F), whereas most people in developed countries live in rooms of 18-22° C. For me, “room temperature” is about 28-30° C, depending on the time of day. Chilled wine heats up at an extraordinary pace, seemingly defying the elementary laws of physics.

“Room temperature” is thus a totally relative concept, as is “normal” humidity. Here in Panama, my stainless steel sink rusts, a chilled glass of wine will through condensation attract as much liquid outside as inside the glass within a matter of minutes. My glasses fog over the second I leave an air-conditioned car. Parrots swoop comfortably through the air year round in the adjacent public park. Mangoes grow in abundance.

Carbon footprint aside, you can use air conditioning to replicate the temperature of Bordeaux in June or the humidity of the Napa Valley in July, but dining al fresco quickly takes you back to reality. The climate never resembles that of a wine region.

So why do I bring this up? To make two inter-related points.

Embrace variety

First, all ways of enjoying wine should be acceptable and appreciated as valuable. Wine is too much tied to a geographically proscribed heritage of appropriate “wine culture.” This is the 21st century, not the 18th.

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