23
Progress Trounces
the Wine Snob

In a piece for Food and Wine magazine published in June 1980, M.F.K. Fisher described the two things she believed were revolutionizing the American food scene: good jug wine and “new” cuisine (assumedly fresh and European inspired). Despite her love for a “nouvelle cuisine salad,” she seems to appreciate the influence of pleasant jug wine on her dinner table just a little more.

HOW FINE IT IS TO FEEL CHEERFUL! TWO thousand years ago Pindar sang that the best of healers is good cheer, and even this late I canagree with him, and ignore the many centuries of pessimists who have found a sunny person as obnoxious as the common housefly. Prophets of doom are a dime a dozen, and cheery people are plain bores, which no sane person likes to be.

It is insane, therefore, to feel as optimistic as I do about a couple of things that have happened in the last decade on our sensory scene. Not only do I risk ostracism, but actual poverty! So … whistling, chuckling a little, smirking quietly, I do so, and state herewith that the two best things that have happened to American gastronomical patterns since 1970 are the social acceptance of jug wine, and “new style” cooking … a carafe of decent honest white from the icebox, and a reasonable facsimile of a nouvelle cuisine salad.… I honestly think these vital advances in our way of life have been liberating, in many obvious as well as subtle ways.

Perhaps the acceptance of good jug wine has been the more difficult, in our culture. Jugs got a bad name during Prohibition, at least in areas where wine was available. They were filled and sold from under the kitchen sink, and more often than not held nothing but a despicable gut-rotting mixture of cheap grape juice and dubious alcohol, with a dash of vanilla extract to make them vaguely “sacramental” and therefore legal.

I was lucky: my father did not believe in prohibition as such, and he knew several good winegrowers within driving distance of our ranch who would sell him what they drank themselves. I often went with him toward San Gabriel or San Bernardino, to sit like a good girl in the kitchen while he tasted the new raw vintage and then last year’s batch, and we all ate bread and cheese and salami. Then we would drive home, the whole car gurgling. He explained to me with an oddly Jesuitical logic that it was not illegal to transport alcoholic beverages in unopened containers, and that the Barinis or the Palducinis used excellent corks.

Jug wine did not have this rustic chastity about it in more worldly places, and usually it was poured under the counter as miserable thirsters brought their flasks for it. It was mostly dreadful, I have been told. People who drank jug wine in big cities were about as low on the alcoholic ladder as they could sink, and they were cheated blind … and even blinded by what they bought.

It took some three decades for reputable California vintners to realize that an increasing number of intelligent citizens liked to drink good plain table wine every day, and that they would buy it in jugs and keep it correctly and use it with respect. Even in the sixties, though, good wine men fought this trend, and kept on pretending that what they sold in gallons and half-gallons was inferior stuff.

About then I proposed to the Napa Valley Wine Library, as a fund raiser, that besides our annual tasting of prestigious local bottles we sponsor a jug-wine evening, complete with sturdy glasses, local sourdough bread and cheeses, and red-checked tablecloths. There was an air of shock, dismay, and downright disapproval from some of the leading wine men. They felt that though they admitted to marketing honest jug wines, they might lose prestige by touting them. The idea was grudgingly approved, but then fell through, purportedly by acts more of God than man. But since then some of the vintners who were most adamantly repelled by the proposal have become the best possible purveyors of top-grade bulk wines, and are proud of it.

Jug wine is now accepted both professionally and socially as a part of our good living. It is bulky to transport by hand, of course, and is not something to take on Greyhound or Amtrak, but it has come out from under the kitchen sink, and up from the sneaky cellar.

All this change makes me cheerful—we have escaped the snobbism of thinking that good day-to-day wine must come out of an expensive bottle, and we have chosen to eat more simply than our gouty granddads did. Progress is not all bad!