No sects, please – more toleration and an end to "isms".

Impressionism, cubism, fauvism, expressionism, surrealism. What a lot of ‘isms’ the art world has been through. Many painters have passed from one movement to another; rejecting old notions and, often, old colleagues and friends as they espoused new theories, becoming disagreeably didactic as they embraced the new, the one true visual religion.
So too with music. I remember with utter clarity my own Damascene conversion from ‘Mouldy Fig’ to ‘Modernist’ – eight bars of Dave Brubeck Octet’s ‘Love Walked in’ and out went the hairy sweater, the sandals and the banjo-fuelled 78s. In came the sharp zoot suit, the silk polo neck, beret and shades. Not, alas, the Thelonius Monk goatee which failed to sprout on an 18 year-old’s chin!
Wine also has its own partisan sects. Terroirists – hard-nosed bigots who believe the most important thing about a wine is that the grapes squeezed into the bottle can be traced back to a specific windswept quartz-encrusted plot on some godforsaken hillside. Abvists – those who condemn any bottle marked 14% or over as the work of The Devil. The flagellant Blanchistas who’ll drink nothing but white wine, or if they do scourge themselves. Attributing Monday morning’s lack of wellbeing to the consumption of a glass or two of Aussie Shiraz on Saturday night they get out the old whip and hairshirt. Nothing to do with the thirty fags, three G&Ts and the litre and a half of Chardonnay of course, it’s all satanic red wine’s fault.
Picasso and Braque initiated the Cubist movement when they followed the advice of Paul Cézanne, who in 1904 said artists should treat nature “in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone.” The Cubists were mega-analytical and I suppose their vinous equivalent would be the Anorakists who have persuaded themselves that wine (as distinct from the making of wine) is a subject fit for serious academic study. Maybe it is but give these boys a soapbox and they can bore for Burgundy. Many Anorakists are charming, even fascinating people and to hear a real expert lecture on the evils of reductivity is not to be missed. Trouble is, like all charismatic movements, Anorakism attracts a fringe element of pedants, bluffers and utter chancers.
The Anorakists do have an achilles heel however; a romantic nature that set them at odds with The Technocrats, an austere cult who stole the Anorakists’ clothes while the latter were gazing, misty-eyed at Le Montrachet. Technos are wine’s Futurists, the Italian-based largely Fascist art movement that embraced and enobled the machine. The Technocrats believe, to put it at its most basic, that the guy who owns the chemistry set rules the world – of wine, at any rate. I have many friends among the Anos but the Technos, I’m afraid, are utterly unlovable.
Sandwiched between the Impressionists and the Cubists were the Fauves, the “Wild Beasts”, so called for their unrestrained slap-it-on approach and their wild use of colour. Wine’s parallel would be The Untouchables, the guys who buy utter crap at e5.99 a pop and spend Saturday night talking it up. The same people lurch northwards in their MPV on a mission to buy crates of Budweiser. Living proof that vinegary wine and sugary beer rots the brain. Another mob, The Flat Earthers are convinced that if you venture beyond Gibraltar in search of a bottle you fall off the edge of the world. Then there are Nihilists, who hate every wine you serve them at dinner parties and who pass on the bottles you take to theirs to the local church fête.
Lately a new strain has emerged, the Ambientists who have issues with the temperature at which you serve your wine. They dwell cocooned in padded cells with the central heating turned up full bore – this they call ‘room temperature’ and when they come to dine chez toi they expect the reds to reach this daft peak of perfection. Between mouthfuls they stoop over the glass, which they cup in both hands, willing the Pomerol to metamorphose into lukewarm soup. In contrast they drink their whites at temperatures that would rip the enamel off your teeth. And, though they don’t actually stone you to death for it, the admission that you’ve never actually owned an ice bucket provokes howls of derision. Though the ones I’ve outlined represent mainstream Wineism there are various minor sects. Like the Evangelists who take backlabelspeak for holy writ and, given a captive congregation, never pass up the opportunity to preach “We should all love Mogadon Vale Chardonnay because it’s fresh, fruity, full-flavoured, blessed with the kiss of oak, has complex layers of butterscotch and marmalade and teams well with red meat, pork, chicken and fish.” And the Negativists who say “I don’t like Port – as though there were no difference between ’63 Fonseca and the bottle of ruby Auntie Mary gets out every Christmas.
Where do I fit into all this? Well, there’s a touch of the Anorakist in me. There must be, I own more wine books than I can sensibly house and I’ve read most of them cover-to-cover and dipped into the rest. I’ve done the tours, even before I got paid for so doing. I can’t join the Technos. You see, faced with yet another row of stainless steel fermenting vessels my eyes start to glaze over. Hence I failed the entrance exam.
I’m not a Negativist, nor a Blanchista, I’ll drink anything. Even Pinotage. My sworn enemy is the Ambientist. We drink red wine too warm and white too cold, in my opinion. I’m certainly not a Flat-Earther, given my insatiable appetite for Aussie Shiraz and, latterly New Zealand – you must try try the Felton Road Pinot Noir, by the way.
Anyhow, for 2005, a bit less dogma, please. And if, like me, you recognise yourself in any of the foregoing, a lot less.