Monthly Report - September 2020

What a combination – prawn and smoked salmon creamy pasta with our Marsanne

​

Visual White Noise…

Why is presenting and promoting wine on video so awful? It is not through a lack of effort or thought by the presenters, and some are genuinely really trying to pass on their enthusiasm with every excited adjective – but it just comes across as flat.  As a tack.

Now don’t you dare try and bring up the “infectious excitables” like Oz Clarke, Gary V or whomever you noted waved their arms or voices trilled a bit – I think you just liked the personality (or look) of the character, and the wine is just fluff [you can test this – name the wines that your “infectious excitable” was drinking in their past few videos?  Tres difficult if not impossible].  Thus, within the realm of tasting wine on camera, it is unfortunately all very forgettable.

And now before you raise your hand and say “…the vineyard stories and scenery are lovely” – well yes, they are, but they do not promote a wine, they promote a place and if you are half lucky, a character.  Vineyards look pretty much the same anywhere you go in the world, rows of vines set across landscapes dominated by the regiment – you often use the background forests and topography to define where you are, and this is invariably the more attractive images before you move to some character standing amongst the vines which is generic (unless it is Tasmanian winemaker Peter Dredge cross dressed in a red dress in heels discussing his genius… but I digress).

There have been some attempts to have a “mockumentary” or “road trip” feel to wine videos and presentations.  I think there was a show called “Plonk” which attempted to inject humor into a series of Australian wine region / winery visits, and Oz Clarke did a couple of wine tours with James May of Top Gear fame and found a reason to drink wine continuously on the road with the aim of “educating” us.  Nothing else really comes to mind … it all seems a bit meh.

So why is this?  We have one trillion billion food shows (Am I exaggerating?  Am I really?) and it creates a lot of discussion and lots of personalities.  In fact, the Margaret River Gourmet Weekend, though sponsored by the wine industry down here, has become a foodie weekend with the wine being an attractive free bonus as you wander (and eventually stumble) about.  Now, this is where I have a theory, an interpretation that dawned on me recently.

Wine is words – Food is imagery.

I do enjoy “reading” about wine – be it through reviews online, reviews in books, wine stories in books, discussions about wine related matters, compendiums on regions – they are all generally pretty good.  Have I ever bothered to read anything much about food, apart from following a recipe?  Nup, hardly at all and when I do it is a sort of perverse pleasure of seeing a review smashing down the pretentiousness of a restaurant.

Why is it that we still have the Halliday guide come out and still sell tonnes and tonnes of its red stars in the physical form?  If EVER there was an example of what would suit a search engine this is it – but folk buy the paper and thumb through with glee.  It is the physical nature of being able to skim backwards and forwards, catch a glimpse of something of the new and drill down, to be able to ruffle the pages and sate the urge to hunt your quarry.  I have a regular skim through the brilliant “Pomerol” by Neal Martin just for the pleasure of reading crafted paragraphs about a wine that I adore.

​