This past week Eric Asimov’s Wine’s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head? reigned as the number one emailed article at the New York Times. It’s #3 as I write this, and is quite simply a superb article, wrapping so much into 1700 words. Makes me a little jealous, since it’s a great model for what we do here, both in content and style.
Here’s Asimov’s opening hook, “The mind of the wine consumer is a woolly place, packed with odd and arcane information fascinating to few. Like the pants pocket of a 7-year-old boy, it’s full of bits of string, bottle caps and shiny rocks collected while making the daily rounds of wine shops, restaurants, periodicals and the wine-soaked back alleys of the Internet.”
Asimov then takes on recent reports of wine that reduced it to expectations and over-rated prices—the “normal people like the cheap stuff in blind taste tastes” kind of thing. “In press accounts of two studies on wine psychology, consumers have been portrayed as dupes and twits, subject to the manipulations of marketers, critics and charlatan producers who have cloaked wine in mystique and sham sophistication in hopes of better separating the public from its money.”
Asimov proceeds to do something unusual for most journalists, he digs deeper into the actual data. And what does he find? Significant variation. Sure, novices do like the cheap champagne, but the experts prefer the Dom Perignon. So there is no such thing as the “average oenophile.”
