The whiskey/whisky thing and all the laws around barrels are just totally wild categorization things that are similarly mostly arbitrary. There’s obviously regional value, and regional ingredients — the terroir, like wine, that changes things. But even barrels are just a matter of convenience and/or job protection, not some special sacred human tradition with its own inherent value that must be upheld.
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The Scotch Whisky Association has also had some very public battles with Scotch blenders who make some absolutely amazing blends for daring to be transparent about what’s in them. Not the distilleries themselves mind you, who can simply veto the blenders by not selling to them, but the SWA which, although it serves a useful purpose, is a little drunk on bureaucracy IMO.
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There are tales of people re-bottling cheap wine in vintage bottles and fooling supposed wine experts, so I will keep buying inexpensive wines and not care what the experts think.
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The article itself is an op ed about embedded bias in the industry (which is massive). It refers to a lot without unpacking or detailing a lot.
But one of it’s core points is that these products in large part didn’t. Many of the “traditional” products, grape varietals, methods etc we think of today only date back a couple hundred years and were developed as part of a rising industrialized wine business. Rooted as much if not more in modern innovation and marketing than regional agriculture and custom. Often by openly discarding or disdaining custom.
Meanwhile you have wine regions outside Western Europe where things are legitimately done in much older fashion. Like Georgian wines are still aged in bees wax lined clay vessels that are basically Amphora. Which they’ve been doing since before grapes grew in France at all. That doesn’t get to be part of the “traditional”, “natural” “old world” wine culture we fetishize.
It’s not an article that misses that point, it’s one that interrogates it.
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It’s been frankenwine for over 100 years.
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In the EU, foods and drink like Champaign, Scotch Whiskey, Cornish pasties etc. that are associated with a specific region, are protected under specific legislation.
Of course, how the fuck any of this will work after brexit comes into effect on 1st Jan is still completely up in the air, but it’s entirely possible that you’ll be label anything you like as ‘Scotch Whiskey’ with no issues outside the UK.
Sunlit uplands amirite?
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There’s definitely something interesting about the blends vs single malt world. Even “aged” whiskeys are, technically, just a commodified marketing tactic. There’s not necessarily any hard evidence that keeping this single malt aging past a certain amount of time will demonstrably “improve” its flavor. It’s more that, people want to try it. And it feels cool.
(There’s also the fact that most consumers misunderstand aging terminology — that a “16 year” is not necessarily from 16 years ago but rather that all of the, say, Macallan 16 year was one specific scotch aged for 16 years, and which will continue to be THAT Macallan 16 year for the next decade until they come up with a new one.)
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Very minor correction. A Mac 16 is, at least in theory, made up of at least 16 year-olds of a single-malt, but can legally include whisky from older casks of the same single-malt. I say in theory because some whisky producers and bottlers have been caught cutting age-statement bottles with younger whisky. And independent bottlers, while often an excellent and unique value, ought to be purchased cautiously.
In the end for most of the more mass-produced whiskys it comes down to economics and popularity cycles. When demand is low, supply buffers builds up; when it’s high, supply dwindles the buffers. Hence the rather precipitous rise in Scotch whisky prices the past half-decade or so, and the movement of some highly respected distilleries to non-age-statement bottlings.
While I don’t find longer aged whiskys to necessarily superior, they do tend to be different, and not always for the better. They certainly tend to be less expensive. But there’s so many variables at play that there’s no one age at which they all peak.
Tomintoul’s 14 year, for example, blows away their 21 year. 
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I’ve read that UK sparkling wine (some) is as good as ‘Champagne’ and only going to get better as southern UK slopes are starting to get the sort of weather Champagne has had for a while, and Champagne’s weather may be getting less optimal for grape vines. The old vine line (north of which Europeans made/drank beer and south of which, wine) may be moving. I wonder if anyone’s published a serious study of that?
(Fully expects another BBer to arrive in 3…2…1… to link to one.) 
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Which is damn shame. I’ve had some seriously great Georgian wine. Sadly only when someone from over that way brought some with them.
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And what about the Melton Mowbray? Cheddar?
We’ll fight them at the checkout, we’ll fight them at the WTO, we shall never surrender our Scotch (unless Scotland leaves the Union - in which the Jocks are on their own and we’ll start a thriving ‘scotch’ whisky industry in Hartlepool.)
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That’s going a bit far. There’s pretty obviously a difference between white dog right of the still and barrelled whiskey, and no one has yes found a practical way to do it without the barrels. Newly developed methods using wood chunks, staves, vacuums and shit definitely create a noticeably different product. And while they can be faster they aren’t currently much cheaper.
That certain point where you can’t peg an improvement is pretty long and the argument would be more if the wood is still contributing or if it’s just evaporation and oxidation. It’s also possible to ruin whiskey by over aging it. But most of the innovation on that front is purely about doing things faster rather than finding a better method.
So the marketing/social end of it is that the 25 year whiskey might be actively worse than the more affordable 12 year.
There’s certainly job protection going on in terms of barrel requirements, like the US requiring the use of new barrels on each go for Bourbon and some other kinds of whiskey.
Not neccisarily. You’d have to make a really big batch of MacCallan to make that work. It just means that it spent 16 years in a barrel, or that the youngest whisky in the bottle spent 16 years in a barrel. And I don’t think there is a broad misunderstanding that it was produced 16 years to the date you buy it. (Though there are “vintage” whiskeys labeled by their production/release year).
There is a mass misunderstanding about what “single malt” means. It doesn’t mean the whiskey is from all one batch. It means it’s an all malt whiskey, produced by a single distillery. It still gets blending with different ages and production runs, the age statement is only the minimum age of whiskey.
It’s usually called variations of “traditional method”, and in Europe has to be because using the word Champagne is protected.
Producers outside of Europe often use the French term for marketing purposes and it pisses everyone off.
The other end of it is that Méthode Champenoise is a specific list of French legal requirements needed to get the “Champagne” protected appellation. It dictates everything from pruning schedule, how closely together the vines can be planted, to label design.
Producers elsewhere that follow the letter of that regulation for cache reasons will label it Méthode Champenoise.
So there’s 2 things, there’s the base production method. And there’s the French law. If memory serves the production method was originally formalized and named after a British Academic and wine merchant. It was promoted as a sort of whole industrial package, especially by firms selling newly developed cork and cage closures.
So like really modern.
There’s very little export going on.
There’s a winery over there called Pheasants Tears that’s owned by a Georgian American that is broadly distributed in the US and absolutely excellent.
There’s also a winery in the Finger Lakes that makes Georgian inspired wines, including at least one hard core orange/yellow Georgian wine. Dr. Konstantin Frank Winery, they should be allowed to ship direct across state lines as part of a wine club. And they’re distributed around the North East.
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Agreed.
Agreed. Mostly. It wouldn’t have had any merit if there wasn’t great wine(s) being produced in the region as you say. Which is what I meant by:
Which by your definition is…
That is tradition. Certainly not as old as the other processes and styles you name, but no less relevant.
The beverage alcohol industry misunderstands and misinterprets this history as much as the public. And is far more guilty of creating and perpetuating those myths, mainly because the people who do the talking (sales, marketing, tour guides, etc) don’t fully grasp the processes like the producers, who can provide nuance and historical context.
I wasn’t saying that at all. I was simply responding to the idea that…
Again, kind of. The fact is that these wines wouldn’t exist in the global market without those packaging innovations you mention. And they wouldn’t have become the de facto status symbols they are if they weren’t underpinned by wines of renown. “Better” is entirely subjective depending on what one desires, their experience and taste. I’ve had mostly boring Champagne and some bad Champagne, but I’ve also had some absolutely stellar champagne.
Awesome! Me too!
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Are wine regions colonialist bullshit? No, they are commercial categories. Wines have been branded by region and vineyard since the Bronze Age. It probably started during the Secondary Products Revolution much earlier when a lot of new fermented food products, like cheese and tofu, were developed. Since then, wine products, categories and tastes have changed, but that doesn’t make having categories bullshit. Old kingdom pharaohs might have been nasty jerks and repressive bastards, but that doesn’t change the distinctions made at the time between wines from a part of Lebanon and those from part of Canaan or the idea of being able to trust the provenance of one’s wine.
There have been carbonated wines since forever. In fact, champagne was originally developed as a result of wine industry funded research into reliably preventing carbonation. Ironically, the big outcome was a reliable means of introducing carbonation and a new product category. The process was never a secret, and carbonated wines can be produced just about anywhere grapes can be grown. Trademarking the name “champagne” to indicate sparkling wine made by a particular process in a particular region is about commercial protection. Complaining about this is like complaining about Kleenex. Anyone with access to wood pulp and appropriate processing can produce facial tissues, but, in commercial speech, only one particular company can refer to its products as Kleenex. If that kind of limitation is colonialist bullshit, stop complaining about fake products on eBay and Amazon.
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I don’t know. I’ve had some traditional Georgian wine that was unlike anything made elsewhere.
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Substitute Vancouver in. I want to visit this place as soon as the pandemic abates.
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GI protection will continue after 1 January 2021 for products currently named in:
- EU free trade agreements where the UK has signed a continuity agreement, for example the Andean Community, Chile and Switzerland
- other EU third country sectoral agreements where the UK has signed a continuity agreement
So basically nowhere. Great.
They’re trying really hard to make it sound that basically nothing will change when in reality that website might as well say “your products will not be protected anymore in 80% of the markets they enjoy protection in now”
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Commercial interests never had a role in colonialism, after all… /s
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