The State of the Industry

"This ain't no sideshow." I am going to remember that reference.

One of the benefits of tasting at least a few of the Most Famous Wines is to discover for your self just how much of the premium in price is anything more than the fashion of the day and personal taste. For my taste, most of the difference is fashion.
 
originally posted by Doug Padgett:
Last week, a high-end Cali Pinot and Bordeaux drinker smirked at me when I gushed a bit over a recent 2005 Morgon.
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There was probably a lot more pedigree to your Morgon than to his "high-end" California Pinot Noir!
 
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
Gee, Jim. I've tasted through, often sold, and occasionally posted on Palmina, ESJ, Dashe, Vare, Rhys, Wind Gap, Lioco, Scholium Project, and others. So I think I've done my fair share of heavy lifting in the category.
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Which is why I did not want to start some kind of definitive list - it makes it easy to point to the names and say "been there." There is a lot more coming that's worth a look.
That said, I think that when it comes to exciting and unusual wines, California doesn't even come close to Italy.
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Good point.
Best, Jim
 
originally posted by Cristian Dezso:
Levi,

we, the people, are waiting for the specific producers for each grape listed above, as we are looking to expand beyond nebbiolo and sangiovese. Are they being imported in the US? Except for the big-name aglianico producers, and the sicilians I learned through his board?
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I am afraid I don't really have the time to be the guide you want.

The wines are in America, and there are plenty of them.

I built a whole 400 selection list around them in Tudor City, and that list is available online for your reference.
 
originally posted by Rahsaan:
originally posted by Doug Padgett:
Last week, a high-end Cali Pinot and Bordeaux drinker smirked at me when I gushed a bit over a recent 2005 Morgon.
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There was probably a lot more pedigree to your Morgon than to his "high-end" California Pinot Noir!
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Absolutely. And it's not even as though this guy has bad taste when it comes to, for instance, Chablis or Barolo. It's just that his sense of wine's possibilities is so limited.
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
It's an interesting thing about repros of art. They are good, of course, but I think there might still be something different about being there. If I'm right, then witnessing great art becomes expensive again (airplanes, hotels, ground transportation...).
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I agree, you have to be there, and that's expensive. It's one of my pet peeves that books, posters and magazines (and now computer screens) have made us predominantly consumers of images, so that we are programmed to look at artworks as primarily that, neglecting their materiality. My greatest satisfaction comes from the tactile experience of artworks, even if one can't actually touch. Not incidentally one of the reasons for opening an exhibition space instead of an art publishing house.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
I'm a little weary and can't expand too far, but it's related to the question the smart kids are debating over in the Kant thread. VLM keeps promising to tell us how to figure out objectively which are the Greats, but he hasn't yet come through. In the meantime, there is a lot of accumulated historical marketing that is a big part of things. Other regions, backwaters, far from markets, have great terroirs but less fame. Of course, also less investment so maybe they aren't quite realizing their full potentials. But you can still see that there are great wines that aren't yet famous.
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Until I can convince Luca to work on it with me, there is no way. I still have a full time job, after all.

I have never, ever, anywhere in the history of the wine intertubes argued that there are not interesting wines that aren't from the canon.

In fact, I have written many a paean to "little wines" or "quite wines" as I sometimes think of them.

I am just sad that young people coming into the wine business today do not have some of the same opportunities that I had as a young ITBer. If you think that being able to sit down over an evening with a bottle of Monfortino, or Bea Sagrantino, or Rousseau Chambertin doesn't lead to a more complete understanding of wine then we just disagree on the premises. In addition, I think it helps to understand that some "important" wines are not really all that interesting outside of the context of large tasting where they are dramatic and stick in folks heads. It is important to understand the difference between these types of wines.

There certainly is a wider availability of excellent wines of serious interest right now, so young ITBers today certainly have lots of things to discover and enjoy.
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
originally posted by Joel Stewart:
I never said throw the baby out. The initial premise was that it's too bad many of those wines are priced so high that people ITB can't afford to educate themselves on them. If museum ticket prices reflected historic value of artworks, most people would never see the work...that would be lamentable.
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And I agree that no one needs great wines all the time.

It's an interesting thing about repros of art. They are good, of course, but I think there might still be something different about being there. If I'm right, then witnessing great art becomes expensive again (airplanes, hotels, ground transportation...).
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I am aesthetically committed to your being wrong at least in principle, which, alas, doesn't make it so. But there are reasons in principle as well as empirical ones to think you are. The main reason in principle is that there is nothing about the materiality of artworks that would make them, in principle, perfectly reproducible. And in fact, reproductions are of a very high order, sometimes only differentiable by issues of provenance and scientific means of measuring. More impressively there are artists known to produce works in the manner of certain artists so well as to have had those works accepted as works by those artists. This may entail fraud and falsification of the historic record. But aesthetically, it reminds us precisely what the difference is between an art objects materiality and its art-ness (just in case Duchamp didn't nail down that difference, not to mention art forms that are mechanically reproducible).
 
What's interesting about this whole debate is that Levi's initial contrast was between things (in different categories) seen as canonical and those that aren't and are therefore nose-thumbed by people with a modicum of knowledge (a little learning, eh?). Howeverand this has come out in the subsequent discussionthe "real" issue is expense, not reputation or "points," as I believe Levi mentions at one point (can someone do a quick search?).

And in that sense, the comparison with non-canonical literature is absolutely ct de la plaque [something that misses its target, like a frying pan you set down next to the burner]. Anyone can consume literature or art (though Jeff Grossman has rightly pointed out that if we consider reproductions to be on the order, say, of Bordeaux Suprieur, the true cost comes out in travel and lodging, etc., to visit foreign museums. Unless there's a kind of retrospective and the local museum borrows... oh, all right, end of parenthesis). Not anyone can consume $$$$ wine.

I have learned a lot from the priciest bottles. And yes, some of the learnin' was: wow, that isn't worth it.

But other of the learnin' was: this is what heights such-and-such an appellation or grape can attain.

I don't drink that kind of thing often, and epiphanies come in all sorts of packages. I love a wine that makes me go OMG OMG OMG OMG.

But the classics are important.

I will not give back my taste memories of 87 Monte Bello or 93 Rousseau Chambertin or 62 Vega Sicilia Unico. However, you can take my 89 Petrus and...
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
More impressively there are artists known to produce works in the manner of certain artists so well as to have had those works accepted as works by those artists.
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Do you own any such? I don't.

At best, they may take something from my travel costs, but not my conjecture.
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
More impressively there are artists known to produce works in the manner of certain artists so well as to have had those works accepted as works by those artists.
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Do you own any such? I don't.

At best, they may take something from my travel costs, but not my conjecture.
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No, I don't own any. They are too expensive because they have been taken for the real thing and even those that have been discovered are still expensive as examples of aesthetically achieved fraud. In any case, these cases all do not quite disprove your point because they are creations of individual artworks and the question is merely one of attribution. My point here was that "merely" has more to do with evaluation as subjective perception (in the way Oswaldo has argued) then we generally allow.

What does dispute your point is the very real quality of widely distributed reproductions. High quality reproductions are still expensive of course, though hardly prohibitive if that's what you want. But the next question is how high the quality needs to be. While personally I've never seen a version of the Wedding at Cana that comes close to the experience of the real thing, I'd rather see a decent slide of the Mona Lisa as a way of looking at it than trying to see it through the various layers of crowds, ropes and glass at the Louvre any day. Even for the Wedding at Cana, I've never been able to take it all in live. To see the details, I have to have various detail illustrations. And to judge from the difference between seeing reproductions and originals of artworks I know in both forms, I'd say that knowing art from good slides is probably closer than say knowing novels from good translations.

The only things I own, by the way, are either original paintings by completely unknowns or very well known reproductions.
 
Speaking of canonical, I wish I caught the Rolling Stones 30 years back instead of the money-making machine they have been in recent years. Likewise Martha Argerich, Tom Jobim, Bill Evans; the list goes on.

I still haven't had a non-flawed bottle of '45 Haut-Brion, and don't think I'll ever have '49 La Tache, to name a couple of examples. I think access to the canon is important for those who wish to make a living out of wine, because it provides perspective (mountains and hillocks, again).

For myself, what I really want out of wine is a ride to inebriation. Sometimes I prefer driving a Lotus to being chaffeured in a Rolls, and sometimes it's the other way round. Does it make a difference to have also driven a Bentley? I believe so.
 
If by high quality reproductions we mean photographic reproductions, they may be capable of reproducing the image extremely well, but never the materiality, so they will always be inadequate to the task.

If the artwork being reproduced is a sculpture, the gap will, of course, be huge. If it is itself a photograph, it will be smaller, but there is still a degree of (to me very attractive) materiality in a gelatin silver print or cibachrome, etc.

If by high quality reproduction we mean a new cast from an existing mold (e.g., Rodin, Boccioni) or, harder to cope with, something in the style of so-and-so by a master faker like Elmyr de Hory, then Jonathan's point opens a Pandora's Box that, once, opened, is impossible, I think, to close.

I have this Sherrie Levine photograph of a Man Ray photograph that raises interesting questions beyond the critique of authorship that is implicit in all (serious) artistic appropriation. For it, Sherrie took a picture of a reproduction of a lovely Man Ray photo of Paul and Nusch luard found in a Sotheby's auction catalogue. So the Sherrie Levine artwork is a high quality reproduction of a low quality reproduction of a high quality reproduction. I just love the slipperiness of this particular Russian Doll. Of course, I won't tell you if what you see below is an image of the Sherrie Levine or the Man Ray (and the fact that it is signed MR is not a clue!).

Manray-1.jpg
 
But you're forgetting that Nusch left Eluard for Man Ray... oh, wait, that was Gala who left him for Max Ernst. Nix that.

More seriously, to a certain extent there isn't as much physicality to photographs, no? Or perhaps the grain, the live texture of older ones?
 
originally posted by Yixin:
Speaking of canonical, I wish I caught the Rolling Stones 30 years back instead of the money-making machine they have been in recent years. Likewise Martha Argerich, Tom Jobim, Bill Evans; the list goes on.
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i'll repeat a recent quote i love:

"it's like this, either you saw hendrix play live, or you didn't"
anthony bourdain
 
originally posted by scottreiner:
"it's like this, either you saw hendrix play live, or you didn't"
anthony bourdain
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I did.
In a venue in St. Petersburg, FL, so small that I could see him sweat. He was staying local and asked the owner of the bar if he could play there. The owner said he couldn't pay him but the stage was his.
Two hours after he started, the line to get in was around the block. When he started, the owner, the bartender and I were the only people in the room.
A true harmionic convergence.
Best, Jim
 
originally posted by Florida Jim:
originally posted by scottreiner:
"it's like this, either you saw hendrix play live, or you didn't"
anthony bourdain
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I did.
In a venue in St. Petersburg, FL, so small that I could see him sweat. He was staying local and asked the owner of the bar if he could play there. The owner said he couldn't pay him but the stage was his.
Two hours after he started, the line to get in was around the block. When he started, the owner, the bartender and I were the only people in the room.
A true harmionic convergence.
Best, Jim
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that is fucking amazing...
 
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