What wine should be

Wine is many things to all of us. To some it is pure joy, to others an utter mystery. Some find it intriguing and worthy of study and exploration and then, to others, it plain boring and over-hyped.

There are many things that wine comes to mean to all of us but we never really try and question wine itself. We never ask wine to be anything else.

When I say question wine, I don’t mean the liquid inside the bottle. I mean the people behind the liquid and the label; who are responsible for the dreary image of wine since the history of wine itself.

First it was the monks with their religious sanctities and boundaries, then the kings and feudal lords and now, the winemakers and marketeers. Here are a few things I would like to see my wine being.

Like the Singapore Zoo: interactive. I have not yet been to another place, let alone a zoo where man and animal were in such close proximity. At the Singapore zoo, visitors and animals almost co-habitate, overlapping and intersecting at all points. It is as close as we humans can get to understanding the habitat of these creatures without visiting them there. Wine needs to be like that: accessible in a way that we can feel it and taste it and familiarise ourselves with it.

Like a Carnival: fun. Wine is so boring that most people think it an enduring exercise to have a glass. I don’t blame them. Between having wine and going to the fair is hardly a choice. What wine then needs to do is to learn from the carnivals and try and be more fun oriented. Horns, round red noses, mascots... whatever is takes.

Like the Internet: Accessible. Wine is so hard to get your paws on that most passions just burn out in trying to find it. The net only became a rage once it went mass.

Fast food: Affordable and hassle-free. Funny, how we take under a minute to order a burger and fries or a pizza with choice toppings and inversely long to order a bottle of wine. Wine lists seem hard to decipher and that already makes the exercise tough. Add to that the prices that outlets expect us to pay and few are left who can reason and afford a bottle to themselves.

Gossip Magazines: Engrossing. You do realise that the comics section and the gossip columns get more hits and reads than the mainstream news and journalism.

This is a seemingly unusual yet common trait. In a country where hunger and poverty still triumph, we manage to spend more on acquiring gossip than in giving in charity. But I am not here to sermonise. My point is simply this: wine writing needs to be a lot more fun and lot less technical and jaded. Fun people attract attention, and usually it’s the right kind.

There are many things we expect a wine lover to be. Not just others, we even expect ourselves to change when it comes to appreciating wine. But I think it wouldn’t be entirely wrong to ask the powers that be — winemakers, importers, hotels and restaurants, legal  bodies — to assist in making wine more generically relevant.