Contemporary wine producers, have a perpetual urge or even addiction to document everything we do for marketing purposes. We present you grapes, as if you’ve never seen them before. Forfklifts unloading trucks, lees oozing out of a barrel, someone with a university degree pressure washing the floor, the hairy-legged man half-submerged in a ferment ostensibly performing an operation that is critical to wine quality. Without context (even with context) all that detail is actually very raw, messy and can verge on obscene.
This form of communication perhaps grew alongside the natty wine idiom, perhaps as a backlash against what came before it. The Chateaux, family crests and mythologies that were the apogee of communicating about fine wine in the past. And so, we landed, naturally, in a world of documentary, where the only reality is reality itself. But presenting reality is only helpful, interesting and illuminating if one inhabits a world of fiction. We all intrinsically understand how meat, precious metals, cheap clothing are produced but we don’t consciously inhabit those realities when we consume. We are confronted with them only occasionally (and willingly) but then revert back to the comfort of our fictions.
Polish filmaker Krzysztof Kieslowksi, who began his career as a documentary filmmaker famously swore off the genre sometime after Hospital, an account of 24-hour shift in the surgical department in Warsaw. In his endeavour to confront the fiction of the socialist utopia in 1970s Poland with blood and tears in an overcrowded, under-equipped hospital he felt as if he’d crossed a line.
"I'm frightened of real tears. In fact, I don't even know whether I've got the right to photograph them. At such times I feel like somebody who's found himself in a realm which is, in fact, out of bounds…” (Kieślowski, quoted in Zižek’s the “The Fear of Real Tears.”)
A hospital is not somewhere anyone endeavours to end up, but the mythology of the place is that one leaves it in better conditon than how we entered it. What happens in between challenges this, and perhaps doesn’t need to be the central narrative. I’m not quite sure where this leaves wine communication, but, in some sense we’ve hit a similar point. We’ve let the messy, sticky, dystopian reality of wine production become our fiction. Our only path forward is to delve further into the realm of the obscene and pornographic. Or we rebuild our fiction (so we can challenge it later!).
