philipmartin’s posterous

LITTLE ROCK — Wine is not something that can be understood in the manner of Bernoulli’s principle or even Schrodinger’s cat experiment. There is little about it that can be proved and nothing about it to refute the authority of individual taste.

Wine is like music in that we like what we like. And while learning and exposure can lead us to appreciate that which we otherwise might not have, all of us have at our core a set of possibly immutable preferences that resist intellectual exercise.

Given this, you might think that people would simply be able to relax and drink what they like - and in the real world, this is what people seem to do. People happily consume white zinfandel and light beer, they eat chicken nuggets and watch American Idol, and they don’t much care that there are snobs who think these things declasse.

But people who drink wine seem especially attuned to brand names and the opinions of critics, so much sothat a wine writer like Robert Parker can amass enormous power simply by publishing his opinions. Parker seems to like wines with big fruit, high alcoholic content and low acidity, and he’s critical of “industrial” wines with little flavor and character.

In turn, Parker’s critics charge him with receiving what they consider fundamental flaws in wines - especially excessive oak and alcohol - as distinctions. Worse, they allege Parker is so powerful that winemakers - who stand to gain or lose millions of dollars or euros based on his reviews - purposefully make wines suited to his taste. The resultant “Parkerization” of wine has resulted in what some see as a homogenization of fine wines, with big, jammy reds with a kick as the dominant style.

Jonathan Nossiter is not a Parker fan.

Nossiter is a film director (with a film in production right now, Rio Sex Comedy, starring Matt Dillon and Charlotte Rampling) who has become one of the world’s leading exponents of a tricky idea called “terroir.”

Some people don’t believe in “terroir” and dismiss it as a primarily French marketing technique. The word itself refers to a confluence of factors, including but not limited to type of grapes, age of vines, climate, soil, elevation and sunlight, that go into producing a genuine first-class wine.

Nossiter is a true believer in terroir - his 2004 documentary Mondovino, whichwas nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, was basically a brief for terroir, which Nossiter argued was being threatened by greedy globalists softening tannins by means of microoxygenation.

(While terroir is a mysterious concept, almost everyone who has a serious relationship with wine seems to believe in it to some extent. Even Parker, who seems dismissive of the idea when interviewed in Mondovino, pays it some credit. “No great wine can come from a terroir that’s not very good,” he told PBS chat presenter Charlie Rose a few years ago. “This is why you don’t have vineyards growing in the Sahara, and why you don’t have great wines being made in Arkansas. There’s no really good terroir.”)

Nossiter went on to expand Mondovino into a 10-hour TV series (which will be released on DVD later this month, suggested retail price $59.95).Now he has published Liquid Memory, a sort of memoir of wine that carries forth his case against the dark forces.

Part personal history (Nossiter began consuming wine “by the finger drop” at the age of 2), part subversive circuit of the most pretentious Paris wine shops and restaurants, and part heartfelt (and sometimes irritatingly self-aggrandizing) ode to the living creature that is wine, Liquid Memory is, well, quite a book.

Nossiter prefers leaner, more acidic and eccentric wines. He hates that Parker and his (slavish) followers have effectively dumbed down the market. Nossiter dislikes Parker’s proclivity for the big fruity boomers, but he really hates his famous 50-to-100 grading scale.

“To assign numbers to a wine, given that a wine is fully living and infinitely mutable,” Nossiter writes, “is almost as repugnant to me as assigning numerical worth to humans.”

Now, some readers may remember that - in my movie critic guise, I ripped off Parker’s grading scale for this newspaper’s film reviews. And you might also remember that I regularly complain about the inadequacy of the grades, and the absurdity of taking them too seriously.

As Parker himself has noted, often the grade itself is more an indication of the emotional experience than the actual quality of the product - what I might assign an 88 one day could be a 90 the next. We use such ratings for the same reasons we suspect Parker does - because people generally expect a verdict.

Yet while Nossiter’s criticisms of Parker strike me as valid, his apparent pathological distaste for the man strikes me as frightening and hilarious. Nossiter doesn’t like anything about Parker, he detests his writing style and his house. He probably hates the man’s dog.

Some of this may be understandable, given the vitriol that was heaped upon Nossiter after the release of Mondovino. (Parker didn’t like the way he was portrayed in the film and neither did a lot of Parker’s fans.) But it’s a little unnerving. I mean, I hope Nossiter doesn’t see this piece, or if he does, that he likes it.

Anyway, did I mention how much I liked his 2000 film Signs and Wonders?

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style, Pages 55 on 11/01/2009