Why Our Wine Era Really Is Different

(WineSpectator) - A friend of mine recently bemoaned how unexciting fine wine is today, compared to his fond memories of the wine vibe of the 1980s and '90s. "It's all about marketing and scores and money," he lamented.

Yes, we sure do see a lot of marketing sweat out there. And yes, a disturbing number of wine producers care more about scores, it seems, than about their wines. As for money, hey, what's wrong with trying to get a higher price? This is America, remember?

But my friend—who’s American, by the way—is utterly wrong about this being an unexciting era in fine wine. If anything, it’s arguably the most exciting moment in fine wine since the starburst fireworks that heralded the renaissance of fine wine that sputtered to life in the 1970s and fully ignited in the 1980s.

That was when wine, seemingly everywhere, woke up either from a long quality stupor (Spain, Italy, France, Greece) or became alive to brand-new possibilities (California, Oregon, Washington, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina). Of course it took wine producers a good while to gain traction, so it was only in the 1990s that the full force of this worldwide renaissance became apparent to everyday wine drinkers, who don’t follow every new wrinkle. Today's abundance of wonderful wines is a very new normal.

So what's changing now? Why is this moment, of all moments, so different?

The answer lies in a gathering force that, although far from universal, is altering both how wine is made and how we drink (and think) about what we're offered. It's all about what historians call "mentality." Allow me to explain.

In France during the 1930s, a new approach to viewing history emerged. It had its own journal, called Annales d'histoire économique et sociale. (The name changed several times over the decades, but this was the original.)

A key feature of the historians who collectively became known as the Annales School was their creative, inventive methods of teasing out from vast amounts of documentary evidence what they called the mentalité of everyday lives of long-ago eras.