It is, perhaps, a blessing that nobody has claimed Real Wine as a product category, just yet at least. The intention, however, is certainly there. Natural wine might be the most prominent pretender, that marvellously implicit suggestion that anything else is, well, unnatural, but there is no shortage of similar desires to define what wine is or should be. Authenticity is one term. It sounds a lot like natural, only without the natural bit – a bit like people saying that rock is an aesthetic, not electric guitars. Typicity is a politer one, like calling your village neighbour different. It is not that you don’t like him, of course. It just that, you know, he’s not the type of person we tend to get around here.
It is usually around this point that lazy students and lazier hacks reach for the OED definition, like the proverbial drunk reaches for the lamppost (not for illumination, but for support). Let’s skip it altogether. It is likely to offer all the excitement and insight of a love letter written by an accountant. The law maker’s definition will be similarly titillating. Reading it closely is of use only to the legal teams of German discounters. And yet it is hard to shake the suspicion that not all wine out there is worthy of the name. There are some, many even, that are free-riding on the good name of wine.
Put your hand on your pearls, fondle gently, and get ready for a strong, firm clutch. I put forward that the differentiating factor is price. Starting with the plain and simple fact that baseline wine, that £6 bottle with 35p of wine in it, is not real wine, no matter what the label tells you.
There is a certain type of wine professional that professes the exact opposite. For them, definitions are set by modes and medians, and if most people buy £6 bottles of wine, then that’s the real wine. Those professionals are endlessly fascinated by the business of wine: they will invite you to consider the label and the packaging, the distribution and the profit margin. Their admiration for techniques that deliver mass appeal is so strong that it elevates volume to a virtue. At heart, they seem to be impressed principally by the production capacity of modern capitalism. I guess if you leave them alone in a supermarket, they’ll just bump into things and go wow a lot.
The thing is that what they claim they admire so much about mass-produced wine applies pretty much to any consumer item. I guess one can stand in a majestic Finnish forest, with a roll of Andrex in one’s hand, admire a mighty oak, and ponder the process of going from tree to roll. Much like baseline wine, the ubiquity of this modern item is a triumph of agricultural management, chemical engineering, manufacturing, transportation, logistics, and marketing. And, unlike wine, its importance is unquestionable. If the poet is right that…
