Leaving the Dream

Matt Kramer
Posted: August 12, 2004

I'm writing this on my last day in Venice. It's been seven months since I wrote my inaugural Venice column ("Living the Dream in Venice," Nov. 30, 2003).

Seven months of intensive Venice has made it, if anything, even dreamier. Indeed, like all significant travel experiences, it has been transforming.

The real effect, though, of living here is that you're lost in the taste of another era. Slowly, almost surreptitiously, you find that your eye changes. Your palate changes. Your sense of what is suitable changes. You come to realize that, in Venice, less is absolutely not more.

The city made me think about Elsie de Wolfe, an influential American interior decorator in the early- and mid-20th century. She famously defined good taste as "simplicity, suitability and proportion." She sought to sweep away the mustiness of Victorian taste and replace it with clean lines, white walls and a comparative spareness.

At first glance, you'd think over-the-top Venice, with its lavish palazzos and luxurious ornamentation, would be about anything but "simplicity, suitability and proportion."

Yet in Venice you find that what at first seems impossibly complex, like a clockwork mechanism, does indeed work. The mazelike city is surprisingly easy to hold in your mind, once you get the hang of it. Getting around by public boat is no more complicated than taking the subway. (It is more entertaining, though.) Venice makes you understand that a city, or a design philosophy, can achieve suitability and proportion without resorting to a reductive simplicity.

Wine is no different. There has been an evolution from baroque excess to the kind of simplicity de Wolfe would have acclaimed. But now "suitability" has become a straightjacket.

Once, some of the world's most acclaimed wines were made in a fashion we would today find oxidized, a bit muddy-tasting and often sweet.

Most Champagnes, for example, once were quite sweet -- demi-sec rather than brut. It was the British who inspired the creation of brut Champagne in 1876, when a London men's club's wine committee asked the Perrier-Jouët Champagne house to create a completely dry version for them. For decades afterward, opinions all over Europe were divided about this "advance."

Today, both red and white wines are increasingly made in a highly standardized fashion. This is not just a matter of oak and stainless steel, but more subtle elements such as cultured yeasts (rather than wild or native yeasts); complicated, highly technological winemaking techniques (vacuum concentrators, spinning cones, reverse osmosis); and, above all, a restrictive aesthetic sensibility about what is desirable. Happily, there's now a backlash against the received wisdom about how wine should be made.

I've become much more receptive to what I would have previously perceived as eccentric. My recent columns about wines stored in terra-cotta amphoras and "Crazy Club" producers creating new white wine expressions attest to this conversion.

This movement away from standardization is not confined to Europe. I spent months last year visiting California producers for an upcoming book. Even in commercially obsessed California there's a quiet but persistent battle underway about creating an authentically American wine aesthetic.

Not surprisingly, the flashpoint is Pinot Noir. (Isn't it always?) Burgundy traditionalists decry what they call California monstrosities, pointing to massive, Syrah-like fruitiness in Pinots from Santa Lucia Highlands or Santa Rita Hills.

California Pinot Noirs are denounced (sometimes justly so, in fairness) by some Burgundy lovers for lacking delicacy, finesse and subtlety. Yet what is emerging is, in fact, a genuine terroir expression. That, of course, is something Burgundy fanciers, above all, should be celebrating.

You know the problem: The unfamiliar is often unacceptable. These new California Pinot Noirs don't taste like Burgundies, much like brut Champagne once failed to conform.

Living in Venice was not just a delicious wallow in the taste of another time. It was that, of course. But it was also an unexpected vehicle for recognizing that we are well-served to embrace a more elaborate notion of beauty than we currently endorse.

Because after Venice, you don't want to live in a plain white box -- or drink the wine version of it, either.

Matt Kramer has contributed regularly to Wine Spectator since 1985.