A rant against marketing: Why can’t wines be simple?

Bear with me on this one. First, a bit more about my pre-culinary life. I was a journalist, yes, but I also was forced to write some marketing copy at my first job. Perhaps “forced” is too strong a word, as I wasn’t exactly churning copy for Kim Jong Il. But it was a requirement, and I despised every minute of it.

The hippies got it wrong: money is not the root of all that is evil, marketing is. It’s essentially the legal form of lying, designed to get people to buy things they don’t need or that are of crappy quality. Snake oil salesmen were famous for it, cigarette companies perfected using marketing for evil in trying to hook kids on cancer, time-share salespeople are annoying experts at it, and Hitler was a master at it, using propaganda to blame everything on the Jews.

And winemakers do it, too.

Wine-producing countries are obsessed with classifying their wine in different ways, and all the different ways are seemingly designed to be as confusing as possible. Italians have myriad classifications, Germans ramble as only Germans can with their precise eno-definitions, and the French … well, the French are the French.

Now, winemakers are certainly better than greasy-moustachioed salesmen hawking swampland in Florida, but they still sometimes market one thing as another, and rename willy nilly to make a simple wine seem extravagant.

France – One of the granddaddies of wines, the Premier Cru, means something completely different in several regions. In Burgundy, it could mean a high level of wine quality from a single vineyard. However, if there is no vineyard name on the bottle, it could also mean a blend of wines from several vineyards. In the Bordeaux region, it is the highest within a separate classification of wines called the Grand Crus.

Italy – Ever one to be provincial, Italians seem stuck in the city-state mentality when it comes to wine. In the north, wines adopt Germanic labeling (i.e., they go on and on about which winemaker, the name of the owner, his zodiac sign, etc.). In the south, they go crazy and label wines pretty much however they like. Case in point, Chianti. Now, these wines should be simply from the Chianti region, but because in the early 1900s Chianti became a hot wine, the region was “expanded” to include wines from neighboring regions. Then, because the Italians were worried the Chianti name lost its cache, they renamed true Chianti as Chianti Classico. Got it?

Spain – The Spanish try to use a number of names to pump up the importance of their wines. They might call a basic Rioja an “Imperial” wine, or a sherry as an “Entity.” Very weird, and ultimately it says nothing about the quality of the wine, just the Kappaesque attitude of the winemaker.

United States of America – U.S. classifications are plain vanilla. A domestic wine may list the state in which it was bottled, the state in which the grapes were grown, the region, the winemaker or simply say a product of the United States of America. Caveat emptor.

Due to all the marketing mumbo jumbo, I end up sticking to a few regular wines. Failing that, I just pick up a bottle of whatever, drink it uncritically, and ramble on much like good ol’ Orson here. I suggest you just find a wine you like, stick with it, and do the same.