Why are there so many exclamation marks in the world, and so few hyphens?
What spurred this reflection was a menu: a dish featuring ‘Grilled line caught John Dory fillet’. And an unrelated Instagram post enthusing about exclamation marks! They’re such fun!! Aren’t they!?!
Well. Exclamation marks are generally unnecessary and mostly silly. Hyphens are essential for clarifying meaning. In that hyphenless dish, the reader infers that the fish was line-caught, rather than caught by a grilled line; but we infer it because it’s the most likely meaning. It’s not what it says, but common sense tells us that’s what we should infer.
In wine, how much is inferred and how much is clearly conveyed? When Vignoble des Cabottes says that it now has one vineyard worker for every 1.6 hectares, compared to the one per 3.6 ha it used to have, you think, gosh, that’s good. Vineyard workers are like exclamation marks, for those who like them – the more the merrier!!! We infer careful work, attention to detail. But winery workers are like hyphens: one, or maybe none – who knows? – suggests minimal intervention, and that is good, because it conveys the meaning of the vineyard more clearly. Surely?
But what is that meaning that we want to hear and taste so clearly? Go to the Whistler show at Tate Britain and you will see evocative scenes of the Thames at twilight, or at night. Yes, you will say – that’s just what it looks like. But it’s not, because the picture is a swish and a blob, and from that you infer all the detail you have seen for yourself, in the flesh. Painting, and not just Impressionism, relies on inference. Zurbaran, in a show at the National Gallery, paints fabrics you can feel: you infer the texture, the heft so clearly that your fingers almost tingle. Look closely, though, and has he actually painted the stitches, the weave? No. Not remotely. It’s called art.
We all – critics, wine-lovers – say we want to see the place reflected in the wine. Good tasters can work backwards, in a blind tasting, to identify the place from the taste. Pedro Parra, soil consultant extraordinaire, identifies the soil type from the flavour and then runs through the places he knows with that soil. (So his colleague Alberto Antonini tells me.) And we all know there are all sorts of things that obstruct that clear conveyance of information: overripeness, underripeness, too high yields, too low yields, too much winemaking, too little winemaking, aromatic yeasts, too much oak… it’s a long list.
And it brings to mind the old question of whether wine is art or science. Whistler was clear that ‘Nature is very seldom right’; he reckoned the best plein-air painting was done back in the studio, and he used many different techniques to achieve his effects: artifice to convey truth.
Wine relies on colossal artifice, dressed up as Nature. Vineyards are not natural. Growers now want to recreate a natural, biodiverse universe in their essentially unnatural vineyards, but it’s a universe of their choice, not one where phylloxera, esca and downy mildew gang up to slaughter their vines and return those hectares to natural brambles and nettles. The place the winemaker wants you to see via the wine is the place the winemaker sees or imagines: the contours, the subsoil, the bedrock, the rain and the wind and the sun. Some of these, things beneath the surface, are largely unseen. From an English sparkling you must infer the chalk and the flint and the dew and the hedgerows, the skylarks and the blackcaps – never mind that a friend in Tillington in Sussex tells me (anecdotally) that since the great expansion of vineyards there most bird life has lessened. Most winegrowers, if they’re honest, must admit that they’re with Whistler when it comes to Nature, even if some of them now are prepared to make sacrifices to get those skylarks and blackcaps back.
As an aside, I have just visited a Welsh vineyard of which none of this is true: Paul Rolt grows his vines (Solaris and Rondo) at Hebron in Carmarthenshire up willow trees: the soil is never broken, the grass and docks and red campion grow waist-high, and the vines even higher to form arched pergolas overhead along the trained willow branches. Willows, he says, work with both endomycorrhizal and ectomycorrhizal fungi in the soil, whereas vines only work with endo endomycorrhizal fungi; those, and the grasses, and the insects and the birds (plenty of them, by the way) form a proper ecosystem. Does it reflect the site more precisely than bare soil and avian silence? It’s certainly intended to. I would love to taste the results of such viticulture from, say Riesling or Pinot Noir, on sites known to give a particular character.
The manipulation of nature makes winegrowers artists, does it not? Art is ruthless. Nice, gentle, sweet, it is not. (I remember a weekend painter saying to my artist husband, ‘Oh, painting is so relaxing, isn’t it? He was too dumbfounded to answer.)
Winemakers, you might say, want you to do more than infer place in their wine: they want to convey it clearly, punctuation and all. Growers in Sancerre say they don’t make Sauvignon Blanc; they make Sancerre. Some even do. Even if they say they stand back and become invisible, they chose the grapes; they decided if the wine would be still or sparkling or pét-nat; they decided what fermentation vessel to use, and when to bottle. They’re still doing a Whistler: they’re still correcting nature in order to portray her more accurately, even if they do spend a lot of time listening to her first.
All the hyphens are in place. In food, do they matter so much? They don’t affect the flavour of the dish, though they might affect what you expect on your plate. ‘Skin on chicken breast’, for example, is faintly unsettling.
Photo by Rishabh Dharmani on Unsplash
