"Wine is Food"

I am woefully behind on the NYTimes so I only just read Tuesday's article entitled, "Want to Pick Better Bottles? Repeat After Me: Wine is Food" by Eric Asimov - aka the New York Time's wine critic. Maybe its because I'm a cook at heart, but his assertion that wine should be thought of as an integral part of the meal resonated.

The article touched on a number of the topics we've discussed in class - authenticity, organic/health, choice, etc. It is, however, less so about the role of wine in a meal than it is about the lens through which the consumer should think about wine. Asimov argues that thinking about wine as "food" will change the industry. Three points that stood out to me:

1) If consumers think about wine as food there is a good chance that the wine industry would experience the same shift towards organic that produce has experienced in the last 20 years. This would result in elevating the quality of wine across the board.

2) One way to start this revolution is to require wine labels to list ingredients as Asimov argues, "The wine industry has long argued that consumers would find ingredient labels confusing or incomprehensible. That may be true, but it's irrelevant. Who among us understands the ingredients that go into, say, a mass-market breakfast cereal?"

3) A side effect would be that discovering good wine becomes easier. Just as people who care deeply about their meat outsource choice to a trusted butcher, so too should wine lovers outsource their wine choice to a trusted merchant rather than trying to discern quality on their own.

I had one major objection to the article (reflected in many of the comments) - what are consumers to do in the meantime before ingredient education becomes industry wide? How do they choose?

His assertion to trust the wine merchant rings a little bit hollow to me. Having spent the summer with bar owners, I'm aware of just how pushy beer and alcohol reps can be - I doubt it is much different in the wine industry. Wine merchants - no matter how much they love their product - are subject to pressures to buy what their reps are selling and pass on those bottles to the consumer. Can we really expect wine merchants to rise above this system? Similarly, if the vast majority of consumers are uneducated, aren't wine merchants incentivized to promote and sell less sophisticated but more mass market product? I've found that before a wine merchant will give you "the good stuff" you need to prove your worthiness - what mass market consumer has the time for that?

While I would love to wine merchants to be the answer to the choice, authenticity, and health questions we have tackled in class this quarter I remain skeptical.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/dining/wine-is-food.html