I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine by Roger Scruton

I’m slowing devouring this between other books, taking in a chapter or so at a time. Describing itself as a good-humoured antidote to the pretentious clap-trap that is written about wine today it’s a brilliant meditation on the philosophical pleasures attendant to wine. Provided you’re drinking the right stuff, of course.

Scruton appears to be a stickler for terroir. From very early on in his wine drinking career, he took it upon himself to investigate wine through the hallowed names that adorn the labels. All French, of course:

I learned thereafter to love the wines of France, village by village, vineyard by vineyard, while retaining only the vaguest idea of the grapes used to make them, and with no standard of comparison that would tell me whether those grapes, planted in-other soils and blessed with other place-names, would produce a similar effect. From the moment of my fall, I was a terroiriste, for whom the principal ingredient in any bottle is the soil.

The problem is that as wine has become more available, the consumer has become a little less demanding:

But the concept of terroir has now become highly controversial, as more and more people follow the path to perdition that I trod those forty-five years ago. Poetry, history, the calendar of saints, the suffering of martyrs – such things are less important to the newly flush generation of winos than they were to us lower-middle class pioneers. Today’s pagan drinkers are in search of the uniform, the reliable and the easily remembered. As for where the wine comes from, what does it matter, so long as it tastes OK? Hence the tendency to classify wines in terms of the brand and the grape varietal, either ignoring the soil entirely, or including it under some geological category like chalk, clay, marl or gravel. In short, the new experience of wine is that of drinking the fermented juice of a grape.

Oh dear, guilty as charged at 120 Units. Scruton is emphatic about the importance of terroir:

There in the glass was the soil of a place, and in that soil was a soul.

He illustrates his point by quoting Napoleon:

“Nothing makes the future so rosy,” Napoleon remarked, “as to contemplate it through a glass of Chambertin”, and we instantly respond to the sentiment. But suppose he had said, “nothing makes the future so rosy, as to contemplate it through a glass of Pinot Noir”? The word ‘contemplate’ would have lost its resonance, and the remark, no longer associating the greatest risk-taker of his day with a tranquil plot of earth in Burgundy, would have been flushed clean of its pathos and its spiritual truth.

And for all my dalliances and flirtations with Chilean Merlot and Bulgarian Cab Sauv, I have to admit that he’s right.