HOW WINE BECAME MODERN

A couple of weeks ago I attended the SF MOMA for an exhibit called How Wine Became Modern. All my family, including my younger siblings are really into wine, so I was pretty excited to see it. The exhibition was designed by the well known architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro and it was organized as a suite of gallerias. Upon entry, the visitor was greeted by the sound of clinking wine glasses, a peculiar doorbell timed to ring every 3 minutes.

Further into the exhibition,visitors will encounter a huge wall on wine labels and brand identity, glassware, and artful decanters. A gallery will be devoted to the new, global, wine-related architecture, including wineries by Santiago Calatrava, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Herzog + de Meuron, Renzo Piano, and Alvaro Siza. The exhibit showcases a map of the would pinpointing all the places where the wineries are located, the most significant wine-related buildings, incluiding Herzog & de Meuron’s Dominus Winery, Gehry Partners’s Hotel Marqués de Riscal, and Michael Graves and Edward Schmidt’s Clos Pegase.

Ridel decanter

At the end of the exhibit, you'll encounter the smelling section, a wall with suspended flacons teaching you how to identify and name each smell. White is not the color of the grapes used to make White Zinfandel. Red is. Noble indicates "stature and breed," wrote Michael Broadbent in Wine Tasting, first published in 1968. A decade later, when UC Davis professors Maynard Amerine and Edward Roessler released Wines Their Sensory Evaluation, class-based terms such as "distinguished" and well-bred" were rapidly displaced by more phenomenological seemingly democratic language. Petrol is often attributed to wines made from Riesling grapes. While many connoisseurs prize this smell, the world plainly lacks popular appeal. When the German version of the Aroma Wheel was created in 1997, the German Wine Institute eliminated this word, along with entire category of related chemical terms.

Hamster cages is fighting words. First usde to elaborate a French Syrah's warthy nose, the term provoked outrage among conservative tastemakers, who responded by denouncing the young bucks' linguistic excess. One wine merchant acidly remarked: "If they continue like this, we'll soon have customers requesting wines that smell of a sumo wrestler's thighs."

Suspended flacon on smelling wall.

This pretty much covers the whole exhibit. Too bad they didn't have a Tasting Wall...LOL