Compare and contrast if you will.

Quote A

'Most winespeak – in any language – is designed not to enlighten or enchant but to exclude, bully, and belittle.' Liquid Memory P4

Quote B
On Burgundy

'In their intangibility and their deceptive resilience, they're closer to the experience of poetry, particularly as practiced by the ancient Greeks and, say, the classical Chinese or, not coincidentally, by the modernist poets since the turn of the twentieth century who've sought inspiration in the staccato lyricism of the Greeks and in the mellifluous indecipherability of the Chinese.' Liquid Memory P53

Further comment would be superfluous except to say that the publishers of Liquid Memory missed a trick in not selling small dolls of Jonathan Nossiter with a plentiful supply of pins so that exasperated readers could stick pins into tender parts of Mr Nossiter's anatomy instead of hurling the book at the wall.

The family house@Domaine Charles Joguet

As promised a further posting arising from Jonathan Nossiter's Liquid Memory sparked by his comments on Charles Joguet and brands.

'So why was I so anxious? Because the potential drama that underlies Yvonne's estate had already been played out for real with Joguet. Without any children to take over, and deeply in debt, Joguet had sold the winery in 1997. The name of a vigneron who represented the apogee of artistic individuality had become reduced to a brand when the new owners kept the name. When I recently spotted a young man in a Tokyo wine shop with a bottle of 2002 Joguet in his hand, I thought, "Another innocent victim, ten thousand miles away." The wine drinkers across the globe, from Paris to New York to Tokyo, who now buy the wines of "Charles" are in fact buying nothing more than the branded representation of the artisan, an increasingly common problem in every facet of life.'

Did Nossiter seriously imagine that those who bought the Charles Joguet estate would immediately change its name? Charles' name and reputation would have added considerably to the value of the estate, which already had some very good parcels of vines. Surely under Charles' tutelage 'Charles Joguet' was already a brand – albeit a very good one.

Nossiter continues: 'However, it is important to point out that having tasted them numerous times, I wouldn't say that the wines now labeled "Joguet" are bad. But without the touch of the artisan-artist, the Joguet Chinons have become banal. Which may be more dangerous.'

Over the next couple of pages Nossiter keeps referring to the post-Charles Joguet era wines from the Domaine Charles Joguet – 'Joguet brand imposter' and 'the counterfeit Joguet wine'. I do think that the Charles Joguet wines declined after the sale in 1997, although they are now returning to form. But I find Nossiter's view naive and silly – after all wine estates in France do change hands quite frequently and quality levels rise and decline. Why are the Charles Joguet wines now 'brand imposters' and 'counterfeit', when the estate was doubtless properly sold in 1997.

I'm not surprised that Liquid Memory has enraged some reviewers, notably Mike Steinberger in Slate (30th October 2009) in a post entitled In Vino Pompousness.

Have recently received a review copy of Jonathan Nossiter's Liquid Memory. Jonathan is best known for the good but flawed film Mondovino, which I found over-long and with further editing would have had a sharper focus.

Having just started into the book, it is already clear that it will be a stimulating but occasionally irritating read. Irritating because Nossiter uses unqualified, bracketed asides such as 'political correctness is nothing less than a voluntary suppression of one's own tastes', which sounds initially impressive until further inspection shows it to be vacuous. Or this – 'But the biting cold of a recent November morning doesn't remind me of my childhood. This kind of extreme temperature is the pure product of twenty-first century global warming. Nossiter may be right but I'd be surprised if metrological records didn't show some very cold November days 50 or a 100 years ago.

He does, however, have some interesting things to say about terroir – talking both about Burgundian terroir and that of New York. Nossiter dismisses wine guides. 'This book is not a guide. I'm against wine guides and against a culture that induces us to submit our own tastes to the perverse rule of self-proclaimed experts. After all, would you leave your sexual tastes in the hands of a guru?'

This dismissal gives Nossiter a problem as he is just 19 pages into a 262 pages book on wine and why it matters. His declaration 'So you could call this an involuntary guidebook, from not so much a reluctant guide as a guide with no pretense other than to offer a tour of his personal experience' doesn't entirely get Nossiter out of his self-constructed hole.

I will make further posting on this book, in particular his comments about Charles Joguet and the notion of branding.

Jonathan Nossiter: Liquid Memory – why wine matters, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $26, hbk, ISBN: 978-0374-27257-9