Lou Wine Shop

Some folks in the wine trade apply the term “premium” to certain wines. Invariably, this evokes a gasoline pump in my literal mind, and indeed, industrial producers make the bulk of all wine, which they manufacture as industrial commodity that could be dispensed by a metered pump. “Value,” and “luxury” are other terms of parlance, but they evoke little — “value” is nearly devoid of signification, other than the SuperValu supermarket chain (RIP); luxury, for some reason, evokes a velvet-lined coffer holding a horde of effulgent gems that only the few, the elect may pour through their hands with a smug cackle. These are economic categories with price points attached to them: a value wine is under ten dollars on the shelf, whereas a luxury wine will set you back fifty or a hundred dollars.

But the quality of a wine is not a static value, not the donnée, and there’s rarely a strict correlation between price and quality. If you hold a Franzia bag-in-box aloft and guzzle straight from the box, lips attached to the spigot and declare it to be the best damn thing you’ve ever put in your mouth, who can argue with you—you do you. I do not feel lousy because I cannot drink all the fine, aged Burgundy that I know, just know in my heart that I truly deserve. I am not a rich man. But what I do get to drink is good Beaujolais, traditional Lambrusco, Loire chenin, Austrian furmint, Langhe nebbiolo, etc., etc. with regularity. And I love these wines. So, when if ever do I pause and regret that, darn it, I am missing out, “I’d really rather be drinking a ’69 Lafarge Volnay”?

Now, back in the day, Europeans required wine as it provided a significant source of calories to an oft meager diet. Today, despite Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that wine is a necessity of life, no one need drink wine. To be sure, for nearly every human being on earth a twenty, or even ten-dollar bottle of wine is an impossible luxury. That said, with some simple and reasonably priced wines, depending on the context in which you drink them, the phase of the moon, is it a root or fruit day, the vagaries of your neurochemistry, life history, etc., the hedonic pleasure-o-meter’s needle goes to ten, and the amp does not go to eleven. You could die a happy person at that very moment as you drain the bottle (but please don’t, I like having you around).

With these admittedly simpler wines, the pleasure may be profound, and you confront a central mystery of wine: how yeasts and bacteria transmute what would otherwise be simply a delicious fruit juice into something that can contain multitudes.