The Impenetrable Wall Of Wine: A Horror Story
I walked into my local grocery store’s wine aisle the other day, and I was slammed with a spontaneous psychedelic revelation. (Maybe those weren’t creminis I scrambled into my eggs for breakfast?) The world split open, and my mind went blank.
I became, suddenly, a Wine Innocent.
For the first time I saw the wine aisle with new eyes… as if I had never seen a bottle of wine… as if I had lost all of my wine knowledge that enables me to automatically mentally sift and prioritize, to categorize and sort.
What I saw terrified me.
The Impenetrable Wall of Wine
I saw an impenetrable wall of sameness. I saw an indecipherable wall of text written in a foreign language. I saw an unwelcoming wall of overwhelming choices. Like the cereal aisle, if the boxes were all the same brownish-green color and the cereal names were in French.
But the terror didn’t end there. I got out my phone to look at Instagram, and lo and behold I found the same wall of wine there.
Photo after photo of bottles that all look the same. Bottle shot after bottle shot from retailers and enthusiasts, who I only moments ago had enjoyed following, were now a dizzying display of monotonous, unwelcoming, and redundant sameness.
I opened my wine apps, I went to my favorite wine review websites, and there it continued unbroken – the wall. Row after row of repetitive and intimidating tedium, like the book of Leviticus or an encyclopedia of chemical compounds writ large across my reality.
I staggered backwards in horror.
I saw for the first time what wine looks like from the outside.
Almost as quickly my wine sense returned to me. I began to be able to read the language of wine again. My years of knowledge that enabled me to parse that wall of data – like reading the waterfall of code that is the Matrix – came back and were once again internalized into the distorted prism of my wine vision.
But with it came questions.
Is there not a better way to market and present wine? Are there really only three basic bottle shapes and colors that encompass every style of wine? Why bottles? Do we really need 40 choices each of Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay when there are 0 choices of at least 40 other delicious grapes that are made into wine?
And last but not least, could we not attempt to give the “outsider” some information that would actually aid them in trying to explore wine… in a language that they understand? How does someone with no knowledge ever pick a single wine out of that intimidating wall of hundreds that all look the same?
Unfortunately, I don’t have answers.
My hope is that my vision will cause you to begin to ask these and more questions – to question the assumptions implicit in the norms of wine sales and marketing. My hope is that you can pierce through your own wine knowledge to perceive this wall of wine.
Beware though: Once you’ve become aware of it the Impenetrable Wall of Wine, it will leak in at the periphery of your reality. Like taking a trip to the Upside Down, once seen it cannot be unseen. Even after you return to the normal world the vision will haunt you.
At least I hope it does.
Mwhahahahaha!
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