Pungent

It is a running joke amongst my friends that I don't drink New World wine. It's not true, I don't discriminate against any wine simply due to its origin. However, like anyone else, I have acquired my own taste in wine, which has come largely from being given various French wines to drink by my family throughout my formative years. This means that the big bold jammy flavours that dominate much New World wine don't really chime with my palette. Some people genuinely like this kind of wine, perhaps many people, but I suspect that much like I have with (most) French wine, many people have learned to like this style of wine. Wine being wine though, or at least a lot of the nonsense that floats around wine being what it is, many people probably think that this kind of taste defines 'good' wine. This is obviously horse shit: whilst there is good and bad wine, much of it is just wine you like or wine you don't like. I don't particularly like big brash wine, but that doesn't mean I don't think other people shouldn't drink it if that's what they like. However I'd equally like to carry on enjoying the wine that I like, which is why I worry when I hear about French wine makers making wines in the 'new world' style. I even heard about a wine maker in Burgundy taking a load of their wine, sticking it in new oak barrels and doing all sorts of other things to give it that New World style. In Burgundy: the second most famous wine producing region in France. 

I'm sure the last sentence could easily be interpreted as snobbery (as I'm sure it will if any of my friends are reading this!) but it is actually a concern about diversity: if even the French start making wine in a New World style, who is going to make Old World style wine? The interesting thing about wine (and unfortunately much of what has traditionally helped the snobs scare others off) is its massive diversity and variation: for the inquisitive there is always something new to discover, even if you might not like all of it (and no one does). If everyone starts making the same kind of wine, that diversity goes away and wine just becomes another way of getting drunk. The success especially of cheaper Australian wine has been all about delivering a consistent product, i.e. one that will always taste exactly the same and can be produced in large batches. This is the same approach that was applied to lager in Britain in the 1970s, which resulted in a very consistent product but with a very small amount of flavour. Of course no one can accuse Australian wine of lacking flavour, but I can't help feeling that here too quantity may be a substitute for quality. 

Having lots of flavour as signifier for quality is a modern phenomenon that can be observed across all forms of drink that one can be snooty about: coffee, wine and beer all now have their big flavour aficionados. Look at the craft beer craze: to all intents and purposes it is a good thing, popularising the small brewery and brining different kinds of beers to the market, except that almost all of the beer is American-style IPA made with very strong imported hops. Certainly these days it seems as if, in London at least, you can go into a pub claiming to sell real ale and you might struggle to get a classic bitter, mild or traditional IPA. It seems churlish to complain when there are more different beers around now than there have been for many a year, but when that difference can only really be defined by subtle variations in the volume at which they shout "HERE, HAVE SOME MORE HOPS," you have to ask how much actual variety there is. Clearly very hoppy beer is an acquired taste - just like very fruity wine or very fruity coffee - I'm just not sure why I should acquire it. There are many other tastes out there that I have acquired that I'm perfectly happy with, as well as (I hope) still more that I have yet to acquire and look forward to acquiring. I object to the inference that I lack taste simply because I'm not that keen on certain very strong flavours. To me this trend towards making every taste bigger is merely an attempt to codify taste along the same lines as American fast food companies codify value: bigger is always better. It requires no independent thought or personal valuation, because the decision has been made simple for you: bad food has no flavour, so good food must have lots of flavour and the best food must have the most. 

Again I am sounding like I think all of the new food and drink movements are a bad thing, and I absolutely don't. I just think that like every other potential cultural niche, 'artisan' food and drink can no longer be of any interest to anyone for any period of time before it is instantly codified, commodified and commercialised. The various food fads that have swept through London in the last few years like forest fires, their flames fanned by the wind of blogger, social media and general Internet hype - dirty burgers, barbecue and ramen to name but a few -  are testament to the fact that barely two restaurants can constitute a movement in the scramble for the new in food just as much as two vaguely similar bands used to constitute a new form of music in the pre-Britpop NME. We have arrived at a world where enough of us are keen to taste the next exciting, exclusive, underground thing that the definitions of luxury and exclusivity have to be broadened to fit us all in, and in broadening they have to appeal to a wider audience and to appeal to a wider audience they have to shout louder, and in shouting louder, they have become much less subtle or nuanced. Perhaps this is simply the inevitable result of an ever growing global middle class: that even things that are not mass produced fall foul of the homogenising forces of mass opinion. I hope not. I hope that just because my tastes are counter to the prevailing trend, that doesn't mean that they are to be drowned out entirely by the noise of ever louder flavour. 

Peripheral vision

The other day got on a Jubilee Line train in rush hour. It was very crowded and I had to squeeze in to the space just inside the door. I quickly looked around the carriage to see if there was any space to stand in and noticed plenty of it in the space between the seats. I excused myself as I squeezed through the crowd to the empty space and rather expected one or two people to follow me, but they didn't. They didn't even look round, they just remained crushed up against each other in the space between the two sets of doors. There was easily space for three people in the space beside me, but no one was inquisitive enough to notice. 

I can't help seeing this as indicative of current attitudes in general: people are so desperate to hang on to their miserable little bit of existence that they don't even look round to see if there is a simple alternative that will be better for everyone, themselves included. 

It also shows that I'm the kind of idiot who thinks society is for observing rather than engaging with. 

Posits

The annual Long Layer talk this year between Brian Eno and David Graeber was a sporadically interesting affair. If Eno had spent a little less time auditioning for 'Grumpy Old Men' it might have been more consistently interesting. David Graeber on the other hand was that rarest of modern personages: someone trying to posit solutions. It is a workplace cliché to say "I don't want problems I want solutions", but actual solutions are fairly thin on the ground. Since the financial crisis of 2008, I have heard lots of blame apportioned and lots of assertions that it cannot be allowed to happen again, but no concrete ideas about how we might fix a clearly very dysfunctional system. There has been endless tinkering around the edges: introducing watered down laws to reduce bankers' bonuses or marginally change lending criteria. There has been plenty of blame ascribed to governments and institutions and of course bankers. At the height of the crisis some people even tried to blame Robert Peston for drawing our attention to the black hole in our financial system in the first place. Blame is great because it is always someone else's fault and therefore always someone else's problem. So the fundamental flaws in our system have been 'addressed' by assigning blame to certain groups of people and then almost arbitrarily restricting some aspect of their financial interactions. 

Perhaps I am being too cynical or too quick to judge, perhaps it is inevitable that in the immediate aftermath of a financial crisis of such magnitude there is bound to be a protracted period of hand wringing and mud slinging before people finally calm down enough to look properly at the problem, its causes and potential solutions. On Analysis on Radio 4 last week, Robert Peston presented a program about the ideas of two American economists concerning the causes of the 2008 crisis and the structural changes required to prevent them happening again. Refreshingly, they pointed out that everyone was to blame: irresponsible mortgage lenders, the banks who bought packaged debt from them and the individuals who borrowed amounts of money they couldn't afford to repay. More interestingly, they posited a change in the current system that could ensure that this couldn't just happen again. Largely this was to be achieved by switching the risk of default away from the borrower by allowing mortgage payments to decrease if the value of the mortgaged property falls. In return for the lender taking on more debt, they are guaranteed 5% of any increase in value of the property when it is sold. This is not necessarily a complete solution to all our problems, but on analysis it was heralded as radical and potentially controversial. To me this only seems to highlight the very limited set of parameters within which we consider sensible or even possible to operate our economy. An almost all pervasive conservatism has left us with little else to do but moan about a situation we daren't consider actually attempting to change. 

Because of this pervasive conservative orthodoxy, people like Graeber are considered so outlandish as to barely be considered at all. One of the interesting points Graeber made at the talk was the fact that as soon as it became apparent that the Occupy movement was not going to form a political party and join the established and manageable political process, the media quickly lost interest and decided that this was too radical to be reported on basically within mainstream media. Which speaks volumes the kind of commercial media we have now: concerned with appealing to as broader base of their 'constituents' as possible, scared that unorthodox ideas might scare them off. 

In the postwar period, the media presented the unorthodox to us as something we might want to consider, something we might want to discuss, even something we might get very upset about, but fundamentally something that was worth consideration. At some point around the end of the century, the media (along with the rest of us) were convinced that unorthodoxy was the preserve of the mentally unsound (or the poor, who are basically the same thing in this orthodoxy). So why would anyone, much less journalists who could otherwise get genuine access to the corridors of power be interested in such ephemera?

We are, as a society these days, entirely defined by our relationship to the epicentre of the mainstream. Teenagers are no longer able to have tribes that exist entirely apart from their peers or their guardians, and so are unable to experience the taste of truly independent thought. Everything we do is in relation to an ill defined but entirely conservative epicentre (and yes I do mean that I terms of the dictionary definition - Google it). 100 years ago, your average intellectual would have many friends with whom s/he disagreed entirely, yet they were able to form a friendship based largely on debate. These days, we form our wider social networks solely out of people we agree with entirely, and we wonder why our society gets steadily more crap. If we are not prepared to even countenance the (few) voices of genuine change in our world, then we deserve entirely the future that even the prophets of the orthodoxy have predicted for us.