Tag Archives: Domaine Drouhin

April is the cruelest month

Attention, Millennials! Sostevinobile is counting on your business. And so Your West Coast Oenophile is issuing this challenge: find your T. S. Eliot! Seriously, if your generation could come up with a poet whose Weltanschauung was as bleak as that of The Wasteland, all this talk of neo-abstinence would dissipate in a flash! And remember, the published poem you may have read in college is the redacted version, after Ezra Pound excised three out of every four lines Eliot originally wrote. If you ever want something that will drive you to drink, try reading the original.

Speaking of redacted texts…not going there. Not to be derisive, but this blog eschews politics almost as much as it eschews the prevalent notion among San Francisco sommeliers that a wine must be imported from outside California accorded any degree of gravitas. But I have no inhibition against debunking the recent spate of pseudoscientific studies on the deleterious effects of alcohol nor the corollary reports on how the up & coming Juul-puffing generation is eschewing alcohol for a healthier lifestyle. Here’s the cold, sober fact: the legalization of cannabis will not be the death knell of wine, an elixir that has been at the core of human civilization for over 8,000 years.

For starters, rivalry between alcohol and marijuana is nothing new. Back in the day when it was considered preferable, if not honorable, to dodge military service, young people were generally divided between the hip and the square, the former eschewing alcohol as the domain of their martini-guzzling elders in favor of the occasional (or omnipresent) joint. To no one’s surprise, over time, this element came to embrace alcohol, not out of a need for a different intoxicant or social lubricant as much as a mature understanding of alcohol developed hand-in-hand with the evolution of their taste in food, their appreciation for the more subtle values of stewardship of the environment, the convivial nature of a  meal with wine, and the generally positive social aspect of sharing a bottle. Millennials who indulge in alcohol primarily for its intoxicating effects may now delineate wine vs. cannabis through the dichotomy of its aftereffects; over time, today’s 20-somethings will acquire an appreciation for the nuances of flavor, aroma, texture, culinary enhancement—and.yes, health benefits—that wine uniquely imparts. No matter how much you extract THC or manipulate marijuana via potable or edible derivatives, it can never replicate the æsthetic pleasure that a glass of wine imparts.

And therein lies the rub. As Domaine Drouhin’s David Millman noted at last week’s North Bay Business Journal Wine Industry Conference (which I atypically missed), despite the financial constraints young people are facing today “In time, they will come around.” As did we all. Whether the relative impecuniosity (and concomitant lack of sophistication) of our post-collegiate years meant Boone’s Farm and Ripple or Bartles & Jaymes or White Zinfandel or pre-Sideways Merlot, just look to where our wine palates have evolved now!