Tim Atkin’s Blog

Yeats entitled one of his mid-life poems ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’. The poem is mainly a complaint, about the tangled business of running a theatre (the Abbey in Dublin) and the infuriating difficulty of “management of men”, as opposed to the pure delight of writing poetry. But the title points to something which has impelled the poet to get involved in areas that pose intractable problems.

Why are there so many exclamation marks in the world, and so few hyphens? What spurred this reflection was a menu: a dish featuring ‘Grilled line caught John Dory fillet’. And an unrelated Instagram post enthusing about exclamation marks! They’re such fun!! Aren’t they!?! Well. Exclamation marks are generally unnecessary and mostly silly. Hyphens are essential for clarifying meaning.

Even for opera lovers, it promises to be an odd show. Next month’s Napa Valley Festival stages the premiere of a work bringing Bacchus and Venus to 1970s Paris and Napa, mythological heroes re-enacting the wine world’s most mythical tasting. The Judgment of Paris, the opera, is the latest re-telling of the celebrated 1976 tasting pitting Californian wines against Bordeaux’s most illustrious names.

Twice a year, I help to organise a wine dinner for a group of friends. For the most recent one, in Paris, my job was to bring the sweet wines and a selection of Grenaches. In preparation, I looked at what I have in bond and had a selection delivered to my house. Coravin in hand, I set to work. A three-vintage selection of Domaine Huet Vouvray Moelleux sorted the stickies in minutes. The reds were trickier.

Riding the overground to The Wine Society’s latest panel on labour standards recently, I finished the final pages of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. If you’re yet to read it, the novel opens in 1930s Dust Bowl America and follows the Joad family as they migrate from their barren Oklahoma farm to California, where they have been promised bountiful harvests, work, and prosperity. The reality is very different, of course.

Though technically I have an account, I have steered clear of Substack, which gives me the vibe of a methadone clinic for recovering Twitter addicts. The vertiginous dopamine highs of hundreds of likes and multi-thread comments have long gone. Instead, users administer tiny amounts of artisanal interactions to one another. Humblingly, a good part of the site is Dear Diary stuff.

After a decade of social media hype, beautiful packaging and expensive publicity, is it time to call last orders on no-low? Pick up a trade magazine, open your emails or attend an industry trade show and you will be guaranteed an article on the phenomenon known as no-low, a combined category of low and no alcohol beverages that has taken the drinks world by storm. Except that it hasn’t — not even close.

If you want to understand the modern science of wine, you must eventually study carbon dioxide and the mechanics of alcoholic fermentation. To do that, it helps to look to the Scottish Enlightenment and the brilliant 18th-century chemist Joseph Black, who first discovered CO2. Without having identified CO2, fermenation would have remained a mystery.

Commercially, the wine world’s problems continue. Young people are drinking less or not at all. Those who are drinking are largely not taking up drinking wine. It remains quite unfathomable that spirits remain roughly static, or even increasing, in the decline of alcohol consumption. If alcohol is bad (although only an excess really is) then surely spirits are the worst? Within wine, the traditional categories and regions are suffering the most.

The wine market’s extremes are getting more extreme. Late last month Yellow Tail owner Casella Wines plunged to a AU$5.5 million [£2.9 million] loss, against a background of contraction in the Australian industry and US tariffs. Yet a few days earlier at Sotheby’s New York, an 1870 magnum of Château Lafite fetched $200,000.