Can you say....Horseshit?!?!? -- Part Deux
After sitting down to dinner last night with a bottle of Palazzo della Torre 2000 from Allegrini, I gave the aforementioned article a little more thought. At the risk of beating a dead horse, here goes:
As I said before, economics (and the study of it) are pretty cool. They can give one an idea of what is happening but more importantly, they can give one an indication of what might be. They are however, in no way the say-all and be-all of anything. As anyone who has followed American politics in even the slightest manner will recognize, the 'numbers' (or in this case 'findings') can and often are used in a way as to prove a point. More often than not, that point is a foregone conclusion.
Be that as it may, I have one basic problem with the entire premise of this 'study'. The problems with reducing wine (and all that wine entails) down to a data cell that is entered into a spreadsheet are myriad. Regardless of estate, pedigree, bottle cost, winemaker, and the collective intentions of them, wine is something more than a mere commodity. I should hope that with even the most basic knowledge of wine, one does recognize that we're not talking about pork bellies. And while I admit that I am not the biggest fan, I would afford most of the producers in California and Australia this same luxury. In the same breath, there are without question, a number of producers (and yes, even some of them French) to whom terroir is little more than a nuisance. Of course, these people/corporations are in the business of making milk, not fine wine.
And that gets to the heart of the matter. Like my Velveeta/Camembert analogy, one must differentiate the caliber of the product in the study. Do the quarterly numbers of McDonald's really have any correlative relationship to those of the French Laundry? I think not.
In the end, I think this paper is more about grabbing headlines implying that the French are effectively the two tailors in a viniferous versoin of 'The Emperor's New Clothes'.
Nice try...Better luck next time
As I said before, economics (and the study of it) are pretty cool. They can give one an idea of what is happening but more importantly, they can give one an indication of what might be. They are however, in no way the say-all and be-all of anything. As anyone who has followed American politics in even the slightest manner will recognize, the 'numbers' (or in this case 'findings') can and often are used in a way as to prove a point. More often than not, that point is a foregone conclusion.
Be that as it may, I have one basic problem with the entire premise of this 'study'. The problems with reducing wine (and all that wine entails) down to a data cell that is entered into a spreadsheet are myriad. Regardless of estate, pedigree, bottle cost, winemaker, and the collective intentions of them, wine is something more than a mere commodity. I should hope that with even the most basic knowledge of wine, one does recognize that we're not talking about pork bellies. And while I admit that I am not the biggest fan, I would afford most of the producers in California and Australia this same luxury. In the same breath, there are without question, a number of producers (and yes, even some of them French) to whom terroir is little more than a nuisance. Of course, these people/corporations are in the business of making milk, not fine wine.
And that gets to the heart of the matter. Like my Velveeta/Camembert analogy, one must differentiate the caliber of the product in the study. Do the quarterly numbers of McDonald's really have any correlative relationship to those of the French Laundry? I think not.
In the end, I think this paper is more about grabbing headlines implying that the French are effectively the two tailors in a viniferous versoin of 'The Emperor's New Clothes'.
Nice try...Better luck next time
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