Kitschy

By Taylor Cram

I am stuck in a thought.

Normally speaking, I am able to reach a decision and be at peace with considerable confidence. Now I am not resolutely tied to my decisions and opinions and will always reconsider if and when necessary. When it comes to wine, my palate, decisions, and ideas carry the same confidence and conviction. Personally, I know what I like. I am confident in assessing the overall quality of a wine. Blah blah blah . . .

This week, during one of our tasting meetings, I have been stumped by one particular bottle of wine: the Big Red Monster. Its label is kitschy, brash, and pretty ugly. But has that undeniable love or hate aspect to it. There is no winery, rather it is just a marketing wine that has been put together to simply make money.  It does not support a winery or a family. The only “professional” reviews thus far have been from the ever important Wine Enthusiast (does anybody take them serious?), Playboy (I swear I read it for the articles), and from the who-the-heck-are-you Atlanta Wine School (huh?).  Professional reviews are about the least important factor that we would ever use to evaluate a wine. Rather I am using it as hyperbole. Or to make my point! This is a no-name wine that really shouldn’t warrant significant attention. Let alone a blog post.

So if pretty much nothing is going right for this wine so far, why is this wine causing the wheels in my mind to become all gummed up?  The answer is tough to admit (more hyperbole.) The wine is pretty good. Actually it is better than pretty good. It is a fine bottle of red that would, in normal circumstances, be a no-brainer for us.  We would sell the heck out of it and customers would be thanking us. But look at that label?  Nobody is going to take it serious. Nobody is going to want to have it on their dinner table fearing it might spark nightmares for their little ones, or turn off their neighbors for lack of prudent good sense. Ahh, catch 22, the rock and the hard place, or any other over used cliché about being stuck in the middle should be applied right here.

Is this post really about Big Red Monster? No, of course not. It is about asking a simple question that I can not seem to answer.  Should the producer of this wine take itself more serious and package the wine as it deserves? Or do I need to get off my really high horse and understand that kitschy is ok, that not everything in the world of wine needs to be taken serious.  If this wine was from “TC Cellars” and was called Hilltop Cuvee, we would be screaming and yelling for everybody to take a bottle, or more appropriately, to take a case. So, are we being too judgmental and assigning our expectations to your future purchase?  While much of our job is to filter out wines that are not up to standard, should we be so critical of the label in spite of the wine?

Originally, I was going to get up on my soapbox and hammer away at all these kitschy and critter labels out there. How they unquestionably discount what’s in the bottle. But then this darn lingering question kept creeping in; am I right? I am unable to answer the question with any reasonable confidence. Labels matter. A lot. But the juice matters more. The Big Red Monster is just another example of what makes the diverse landscape of wine even more interesting. Pitfalls and all.