A Modern Proposal
With indefatigable pain and study, having perused soporiferous discourses and analysed scientific treatises (which thereupon I consigned to the eternal discretion of my fireplace) I have come to the conclusion that Fine Wine does not exist per se, but is withal an imposture, being the invention of a peculiar confederacy of poets and crackpot journalists, those solemn notched and cropped scriveners who suck their quills as it is said to derive inspiration in order to fill page after page with their idle musings.
Moreover, these men and women have disguised the non-existence of Fine Wine by cunningly differentiating and according schedules of marks to Factitious Bottles and exciting us to believe in the pre-eminence of certain wines by the use of Profound Numbers and Subtil Gradients.
To these systems of marking have been tagged various subaltern doctrines, those being articulated thus by the illustrious self-appointed wits, namely that the public interest is served by sewing confusion, so cheap wines are deemed good and expensive wines are bad, except when that is not the case, that tasting is subjective, but a critic’s advice is wisdom born of Crystalline Objectivity, and that Pinotage and Pleasure can inhabit the same sentence.
In accepting that appearance is more important than content, arbiters determine that wines are garlanded with a list of trophies to attract the attention of customers, who, like eager magpies with eye for Glittering Bauble, will pluck the bottles from the shelves and return triumphantly to their nests for we are but Compliant Monkeys dancing to the organ grinders of Contemporary Fashion.
I therefore beg to introduce several Modest Stratagems with utmost deference to the great and profound majority: firstly, that the aforementioned labels be enlarged listing all the Grades, Achievements and Critical Panegyrics of that wine for customers do not wish to know what the wine is, but need to be reassured that others believe it to be worthy of consumption.
Secondly, as we are always being encouraged by the grave Divines to accede to the virtues of good husbandry, and pursue the course of least resistance, we may surely dispense with the luxury of real wine in the bottle. Henceforth, I propose that all wine shall originate from a single vast alchemical factory (transmuting base grapes into base wine) in the former Colony of Australia and that solely to provide a potable assemblage of Artificial Fruit Flavourings, added ethanol and appropriate citric acids. Thus when the poets describe the flavour of wine, their Divine Treatises will not be some Imaginative Whimsy, but statements of unvarnished fact tho’ the wine itself smacks of varnish pure and simple. And no longer will the Credulous Public suffer from the Green-Eyed Gazungas and worry about having to keep up with the tastes of the Jones’s. The wine shall have some amusing nomenclature such as Great White White or Wombat Creek Red for it is proven that people set great store by such Meagre Frivolities and will fall upon such product like ravening hordes despite that a regular intake of such fluids has proven to Rot Gaskins and render a Miasmic After-breath.
The Australian Wine Juggernaut Examining The Pygmy of French Tradition
And I have heard it affirmed that the rational inhabitants of Australia, being of scientific disposition and low cunning, repeatedly reinvent the wheel and sell it back to us under a new guise. I believe, if I am not mistaken, that once they planted grapes on the surface of the sun in order to ripen and gave us Sublime Alcohol for our pleasure. Now they have discovered the dark aspect of the moon for a cool climate makes a Paregoric Potion agreeable to critical taste. Surely this ability to adapt to the gentle Commercial Zephyrs displays the vigorous principle and philosophical inclination of a country of great genius and rightly do its dwellers smile at the Anticks of the cracked-brained daggled-tail French Cacafuegos who it is rumoured mutter incantations to their vines to animate the sap and claim to have invented The Phenomenon of Terroir, an Arcanum that these gilded Antipodean Wranglers rightly dismiss as Aeolian Flummery (except where it suits them to use it to advertise the distinctive qualities of their own wines) and that the disposition of vines on certain soils is but a fortuitous concourse of Atomies. These bushwhackers beguile us importunately with the solicitation that no man may resist the logic of (their) invention for invention’s sake. Since I calculate that within ten years Australia shall be One Gigantic Vineyard criss-crossed by busy tractors, yielding a Wine Glacier which will melt and raise the sea level by several feet of Chardonnay, it would be stark insensibility to disavow the elegance of their arguments.
Moreover I read an article in an august local pamphlet wherein a self-effacing young man, a noble modern Paracelsus, meekly derogated the wines of France, saying that they were worthy only to cook with and adducing as his evidence for this contention the vastness of the Antipodean Continent as to calculate inbred superiority for he said one might journey a thousand miles and taste Identical Chardonnay as if the wine had been made by The Great Universal Artificer himself. I have heard such sentiments articulated on many occasions by eximious men who are carried to their views by pure instinct such as rats are drawn to the best cheese or wasps to the fairest fruit (or so my friend JS assures me).
To return to my discourse I humbly submit that the benefits of Industrial Refinements shall be many. Possibly one life every century may be saved in the steep-sloped vineyards in Germany as when a worker who tries to harvest the last inaccessible nobly rotten berry plunges screaming to his death in the foaming Rhine below. Moreover, the hideous and distressing dissipation of wine during wine festivals and tastings will be eliminated for these institutions will no longer exist, allowing exhibition centres to be employed for more gainful employment such as mass displays of Pornographic Equipment. For the sake of the environment, tankers, which formerly carried oil, will be adapted to convey Riesling (and run on Riesling) from the vale of Clare for it is a noted characteristic of that wine to mimic Petroleum, and, should they run aground, the intoxication and consequent ardent spirits of a few thousands Penguins or Turtles is not too savage a price to pay. Finally, corks can be returned to the trees from which they were initially liberated and the aesthetically pleasing Non-Biodegradable Plastic Enclosures may be recycled to make Sculptures to win The Turner Prize.
My Lucubrations have furthermore revealed that just as one might extract sunbeams from cucumbers and gold from base metal, that Critical Pomposity, a substance more ethereal than the vapours of a Lawyer�s Breath, may be converted into beneficial matter, that the utterances of the canters are sufficient as to drive hundred score of Wind Machines to create the electricity to power the divers utensils required to manufacture wine. Thus I have arranged for all the critics in the world to be placed in one Talking Shop as it were and each to be given a giant echoic spittoon to bombinate in.
And there shall be grand occasions to mark the Exequies for Bordeaux which, though it may have entered our millennium in through the portcullis, will leave through the oubliette, its dropsied reputation mourned by only a few Crusted Ancients, and also grand occasions to read the last rites for Sarsenet-Textured Burgundies not to mention the hyssop-scented consanguineous wines of the Rhone and the Languedoc et&c. For tradition and quality may be viewed solely as encumbrances, two Phylloxera-Belching Albatrosses around the single neck of the great French Regions.
I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I believe that all that is great and good is the product of Scientific Contraptions and without recourse to Newfangledness we would all still be Jut-Browed Dwellers in caves beating our brains with the Jaw-Bone of an Ass, for Nature is a rude abomination to be broken like a wild horse just as imagination and intuition and spirit are faculties lower than reason and need reining in. Reason also dictates that diversity is madness, that people seek a simple truth in their lives and that for efficiency’s sake we must demand the most consistent wine at the cheapest prices. There can be only one future for wine: one where Science remedies Nature’s Defects, where liquid is made to defer to the Great Taste of the Public. I present with easy conscience my modest proposal for wines as FLAVOURED ALCOPOPS and urge my friend, the advocate, Master Robert Parker, to write a Compendious Manual extolling their merits.