In addition to classic categories, remembering to unconventional parameters can guide us to enjoy even more fully what we pour into our glass.
The primary supplier of raw material of any form of communication has a specific identity: it is called “change“. And this is even more true in the world of wine: if there were not a continuous fervor made up of innovation, technological progress, rediscovery of ancient viticultural and winemaking practices, recovery and deportation of ancient grape varieties, wine communication would not even have a reason to exist. Instead, between old and new players in the world of production, a frantic chase has been going on for the past few decades made up of accelerations, sprints, overtakes, sudden braking, the search for alternative paths and, more often, shortcuts.
This has led to an abnormal multiplication of supply, not only in terms of labels on the market, but also of wine types, so radically dissimilar from one another that it would not be improper to even speak of different “commodity types.”
The macro types of wine
The trouble is that the placement of these new typological “personalities”, is not defined, clear, mappable in both geographic and economic terms, and in regulatory terms. However we catalog the wine, by price, by appellation, by geographic area, within that category we find all the macro-types that have emerged in the market.
And the same happens if as a theater of inquiry we use the producer: whether it is a small, medium or large winemaker, a social winery or a bottler, a boutique winery or a multinational, in its catalog, we will invariably find, in most cases, a plurality of types placed side by side without any logic, without any strategy, much less a business philosophy, behind them.
The overall photograph
The good rule of a careful observer is to stop now and then, to reason and perhaps draw conclusions, to print an overall picture, to go up from the particular to the general And understand what direction we are going in. To improve the very work of the observer, provide critical tools to those who produce, lend a hand to the consumer who has a thousand reasons to find himself at least disoriented.
Years of attention to what stirs, both on the glittering surface of set tables and in the darkness of cellars, leads us to delineate the presence, in the marketplace, of six macro-types, each with its own well-defined technical and commodity raison d’être: wine-alcohol, wine-sugar, wine-fruit, wine-wood, wine-earth and wine-image.
In the next “installments” we will describe these very personal types of ours, and see if you agree with us.
Article from “RuvidaMente,” courtesy of author Stefano Milioni:
The 6 Faces of Planet Wine – RuvidaMente by Milioni
