The wine-marketing ploy that trumps all

Blame it on Columella

One thing you can't take away from Italy: It's old.

Traditions go back for generations, centuries.  Even millennia.  And thousands of wine producers never let you forget it.  Here is a typical excerpt from an About page on a producer's web site:

Casalvecchio da Morire has been in the Da Morire family's possession since 1489.  That was the year the founder of the family, Pancrazio Mattaraio, drove indebted sharecroppers from the original three hectares and began growing vines according to the best practices of the day.  Improvement has followed improvement, triumph followed triumph till the present day, when the Casalvecchio's wines are known and esteemed throughout the province of C___ and the former East Germany for their fervent belief in the value of terroir and their strict use of autochthonous grapes, mostly.

Nice enough. Colorful. But you see versions of this all over the place.  Producer self-glorification aside, it's hard to know for certain whether the wines the producer makes are any good, and whether or not he used to grow grapes to sell to the local co-op for awful bulk wine.

I especially like the less common positioning that appeals to a more distant and august past.  You know, the producers who go for broke and claim some kind of lineage from the Romans, Greeks and even the Etruscans.  They name their products after ancient worthies, or at least use names that vaguely call up those classical peoples and their bon-vivant decadence.  (By the way, the photo is of a Roman winery near Trier, Germany.)

The Greeks, who settled our commune in 650 BC by driving out the local tribe of Uticans, began an enduring tradition of winemaking that has carried on till today.  They introduced the grape varieties that continue to make wines such as those Alcibiades praised in Plato's Symposium, and which were widely praised in the Roman era by such illustrious personages as Tiberius and Caligula.  For this reason we have named our wines Skata and Stercus.  These are Moscatos of the highest quality, the type of wine that was most highly prized in the Classical World, charmingly oxydised, viscous and round and sweet.  Perfect with hummingbirds' tongues and honey cakes, not to mention foie gras and plum pudding.

Ha ha.  There I go again.  But seriously, folks,  I don't think this sort of fanciful linkage to a wholly invented past is too convincing or helpful.  It's a form of borrowed interest that to me, as an ad and marketing guy, reeks of desperation and/or laziness.  It also demonstrates the danger of falling back on your oulde liceo education, which is still so heavily rooted in The Classics.  Another avoidance of engagement with the modern world in all its crassness -- and its commendable habit of getting to the point? 

Comments

[Amanda Lynn]

nice one, Don Quixote

[Terry Hughes]

Thanks, AL. Did Bea get fired?