Wine and beauty are funny things. Each is "in the eye of the beholder," yet there are standards, and even trends, over time. The standards, for both, have been changing rapidly lately. For the better? For the worse? In wine, that is really a judgment call. But in the beauty of women it is another story all together, for naturally-impossible standards are actually getting destructive.
First, the wine.
I wrote an essay the other day, "Blind Tasting Wine and Blind Hearing Candidates," that started out talking about different tastes in wine, and different target markets. For a very long time there were classics standards of beauty for wine. It was balanced, soft, lean, fruit and earth, tannins and alcohol, all danced elegantly together, sometimes taking turns leading, but never dancing alone.
Many consider the 1945 Bordeaux the vintage of the century. Here is a 1991 Wine Spectator review of the 1945 Mouton-Rothschild:
100 points Wine Spectator: "Wine doesn't get much better than this. From a legendary vintage, this was the best Mouton of the tasting. It started out very minty, but then brown sugar, chocolate, dried plum, tar and cedar notes kicked in to offer a remarkably balanced, complex Bordeaux that was both powerful and elegant. Still full of vitality, with the deep ruby and almost purple color of a much younger wine and enough tannins to last many more years." (05/91)
Wine is really pretty simple at its core. It is grape juice, skins, and yeast excrement. Grapes differ, one from the other, in several ways. The most obvious is the type of grape. But that is only the beginning. There are different strains of each type of grape, some naturally differing from one region to another, others intentionally cloned for certain attributes. Take two graes, two EXACTLY IDENTICAL GRAPES, and grow them in different countries, and you get two different wines. Heck, grow them in two different vineyards, one in a valley and another ona hillsidde 1000 feet away, and you get two different wines. The grape grows differently depending upon the ground (curiously, grapes grow best in poor farmland, needing rocky thin soil that forces the ain root to search deep for water), the weather, temperatures, timing of rain (rain when the berries are ripe causes fungus and can destroy the crop), hail, and perhaps even other plants growing in the area. But the core is the grape. Natural yeast resides on the skin of the grape, which is how they discovered wine in the first place. The skin and seeds conribute tannins, which give great reds their long life and their spine. And there you have it, wine.
But something is happening these days. You see, a fellow named Robert Parker Jr., an American lawyer, and probably the most influental critic about anything ever. He came up with his 100-point system, an inanity that starts, really, at about 75, and scores two different wines 89 or 90, an utterly meaningless distinction that catapaults the latter to huge sales and the former to ignominy. Parker, you see, likes "big" wines, fruit-forward oaky big-tannin high-alcohol wines. Since he came on the scene wines have been "growing," getting more new French oak or American oak with each vintage. A few vintners have fought the good fight, most notably Warren Winiarski, of Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, who kept making classic Bordeaux-styled wines even as other American vineyards ued more and more and newer and newer oak.
On the grocery shelves, and on the lower shelves of the liquor stores, the mass producers are following the trend, and using lots of tricks to do so. The high-end vineyards can "Parkerize" their wine with new American and French oak barrels. But oak is expensive. The lower end and mass produced wines use oak planks, or oak chips, or even "oak essence," powdered oak stirred into the mix. They might even add some cherry or other fruit flavors, even though they're not allowed to do so, and you will never see it on the label.
I had a glass of one of those grocery-store over-manipulated "enhanced" wines the other day and it really got me thinking. As a society, we have lost track of elegance, of beauty with any sort of depth or class. Let me show you what I mean.
Beauty. Particularly female beauty. I am old enough to remember when the almost universal answer to the question "who is the most beautiful woman in the world" was "Grace Kelly":
She was, truly, an extraordinary beauty, not just for bone structure, or hair color, or figure, but for who she was, how she carried herself, the extraordinary sophistication and class that elevated her beyond the mere physical. Even in a bathing suit, she was never less than Grace Kelly, even before she was royalty:
A decade later, classic beauty was still a universal truth. Audrey Hepburn was the new face of beauty, and she carried the same extraordinary grace of Grace Kelly before her:
So what is today's ideal? Well, let's just sy it's been "Parkerized" to the extreme:
Just like a fine wine starts and ends with grapes, but can be manipulated with oaks, flavors, and extracts, beauty can be manipulated with the goal of enhancement, but ultimately created an absurdity.
Okay, you might ask, thanks for the wine talk and the prety pictures, but why should I care? Great question.
You should care because when we went from this:
to this:
we lost something good, and gained something bad. We lost the truth of what the world and nature had to give us. We gained an impossible image of beauty, with tragic consequences.
Last month a girl, a young woman, died during breast enlargement surgery. What made a young woman, a cheerleader, popular, well-liked, successful, feel she needed larger breasts? What happened to our image of beauty? When did our children get the message that mere natural beauty was not enough, that "enhancement" was the acceptable baseline?
Breast implants are the new sweet sixteen gift, up 100% in the last four years. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons has as policy statement on breast augmentation in teens. Here is an interesting tidbit:
The Food and Drug Administration considers aesthetic breast augmentation for patients less than 18 years of age to be an off label use.
What do they recommend?
Adolescent candidates for (purely) aesthetic breast augmentation should be at least 18 years of age. Breast augmentation that is done for aesthetic reasons is best delayed until the patient has sufficient emotional and physical maturity to make an informed decision based on an understanding of the factors involved in this procedure. This includes being realistic about the surgery, expected outcome and possible additional surgeries.
Will that matter? Will teens still flock to plastic surgeons, more every year, trying to meet an impossible standard of beauty? I have not even attempted to go into the absurd standards of height and weight, in a day when the ideal size is a negative number. That I will have to save for another diary, when I write about some of the thinner summer quafs.
And now, a pair of wine reviews. Two different pinots, one naturally wonderful and the other, the more trendy one, well,
Merry Edwards Russian River Pinot Noir 2005
This was terrific. The nose was intriguing, evolving for an hour from opening. Red berries were there, but so was sage, then the sage went away and cinnamon joined the party, followed by dill. It was soft and very inviting, quite hard to just smell for a while and not drink. First impression on the palate was soft smoothness, mouth-filling buttery in texture. Very ripe cherries, some strawberry, cinnamon, and butter were all there. Tannins were soft and smooth. Finish kept going utnil I ruined it with the wine to follow. This is a terrific, elegant, sedate pinot.
Kosta Browne Sonoma Pinot Noir 2005
Just how hard are they working at this one? It was barely recognizable as pinot, with creme broulet and vanilla overpowering the nose. There was not a hint of fruit there. The palate, too, was overworked, with oak, vanilla, and pie crust so strong fruit was nowhere to be found. This was a truly "Parkerized" pinot, an intentionally "huge" wine that completely lost track of what it was.
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