You can tell a lot about a business by the film it chooses as representative of its customers. In the case of wine, the everlasting popularity of Sideways among professionals never ceases to amuse me. This is not a critique of its merits or demerits as a work of art (I recall I found it rather pleasant), but of its enduring appeal among the pros. Sideways, you see, is not a wine film, but an anti-wine film. Wine sellers celebrating it, is like US Army recruiters endorsing Full Metal Jacket.
I do get the underlying attraction, I think, and it is not just that it allowed agonisingly mediocre New Zealand Pinot Noir to command upwards of £20 per bottle. In a business where service often collapses into servility and dubious authority is omnipresent, the depiction of committed, opinionated amateurs as life’s natural losers has something rather comforting about it. All professionals hate their most involved customers a bit, but the wine trade seems to go for active disdain. I guess better the entirely uninformed, the enthusiastically gullible, or the very, very rich, aka the somm’s special. (“I’ve poured wine for some of the richest people on the planet” is a dubious flex, not far from boasting you’ve knitted underwear for the world’s biggest arsonists.)
That said, for years I used to tell people there was one quote from Sideways that had it right: the day you open the big wine, that’s the special occasion. It sounded appropriately passionate, suitably insider-y. It whispered that if talismanic properties are assigned to an otherwise mundane object, adulthood and the real world can be kept at bay, a promise apparently very appealing to young men. So, I said it to myself, repeated it to others, and held it as a kind of self-evident truth. And yet, I never pulled a Château Palmer cork on a Wednesday. I never felt the urge to make a Saturday a Great Occasion by opening that old Rinaldi. When I eventually compelled myself to put my practice where my mouth was, and sacrificed the lovingly cellared miniature icons for the sake of a protracted experiment, there were no fireworks. Friday was still Friday. A nice Friday, don’t get me wrong. A nice Friday with some very nice, maybe even exceptional, wine. But a Friday. I gave up.
This lesson comes back to my mind every time I hear that the festive season is not the time to open your best wine. It sounds like the type of advice given to the Sideways guy. In fact, it sounds like the type of advice that made him the Sideways guy. Because when are you meant to open the good wine, if not at the good times?
The silliest counsel is that you shouldn’t open good wine at a party. Not because it is wrong of course, but because it is obvious, at least if we are taking the definition of a party to be lots of…
