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Jensen, Mills, and Ryan. They are three names which denote the single vineyards responsible for the exquisite pinot noirs of the Calera Wine Company. Just 90 miles south of San Francisco and 25 miles inland, the vineyards near Mt. Harlan are the source of rare, but not impossible to find wines. The labels describe the exact weeks of planting and harvest, the precise number of cases, half-bottles, magnums, and jeroboams. There’s little copy to sell you on the wine, and the data they provide is strangely satisfying. It leads you to think back on your life during those weeks, and imagine that the wine that makes it to your lips this year was all the while growing and maturing at 2,200 feet above sea level, in limestone-rich soils.
I’m a sucker for this, and apparently based on the meteoric rise of wine sales in this country, I’m not alone. You don’t need to attend a class to learn about wine—the Internet is filled with information, from the inventory of elite personal collections right on down to Gary Vaynerchuck, changing the face of wine with a little bit of him and a little bit of us (and terabytes of video bandwidth). Where wine and “web 2.0” really meet is in the terroir of authenticity, and a generation starving to death for experiences which are authentic, transitory, and the sensory soundtrack to our memories.
Recently I bought the last bottle of 2004 Calera Jensen available in one of Cole Valley’s local gems, Say Cheese. They brought it from the back, where they cellar their own beloved collections and the handful they’re willing to part with. “We won’t see another bottle of that wine,” they told me. “That’s the last one we’ll get.” Soon we were waxing on the impermanence of wine. Having romanced me into a case of various bottles, Bob, one of the shop’s human institutions, said, “You won’t believe how crazy people get when we say we can’t get any more of a particular wine. They don’t understand when it’s gone, it’s gone.”
It’s true. Americans have long been in love with the idea of an endless, stable supply of brand name products they love. What do you mean I can’t have another bottle of that pinot? I had it last week! Wine, though it is not entirely alone in this distinction, embodies an idea that is fundamentally counter to post-WWII America’s consumer expectations. With generations that suffered Depression Era deprivation and true supply-side wartime sacrifice, one slice of paradise was McDonalds-style quality homogeny and ubiquity. One wonders if a curious subtext in American consumerism and brand loyalty of the 60s, 70s, and 80s was the subconscious desire to attach to safe, stable, dependable brands that would always be around, unlike fathers who died in wars and brothers and sisters who came back from Korea and Vietnam, altered forever.
Good, bad, or indifferent, it seems that relative American prosperity and stable Cold War enemies reinforced the superpower perspective that we could enjoy what we enjoyed infinitely (as long as we protected that right with military might), or that what we loved would only be improved with time, resurrected in more miraculous forms. The Internet may be considered the culmination of this ideology—geographical inconveniences and barriers to information now seem ridiculous to many. Between Google, YouTube, iTunes, Amazon and Wikipedia, what restricts me from having whatever I want, when I want? This is through the “white market” channels—beneath the surface, KaZaa, PiratesBay, or BitTorrent, the thriving “black market” distribution channels pour forth with a few well-chosen keywords and a little help from Comcast and AT&T.
What pours out of the pipes is referred to as content now, and to sit in marketing and media meetings, you’d think that content was as infinite and dependable as Big Macs and Budweiser. What makes up the “content” is often secondary. Its variety and dependability is infinite. A few broadcast networks begat 30 cable channels begat 500 satellite channels begat YouTube, and—just like that—there’s an assumption that if you cut open the vein of distribution, does it not voluntarily bleed content? Isn’t the source of our personal entertainment infinite? It would seem so.
Or at least it used to seem so. On November 5, 2007, the Writers Guild of America East/West went on strike, and then we learned a little bit about our aversion to origins and the American infinity myth. As Americans, we are often fond of filet mignon, but do not like to visit the slaughterhouse. It did not take long for Hollywood’s butchers to run through their remaining stock and come up with month-old meatloaf reruns. In short order, we’re finding out that our most stable and infinite forms of mass media entertainment seem inexplicably tied to authors. Did we not build an entertainment industry just to avoid these inconvenient truths? Why have they failed us!
Like great wine, stories take time, and they are at the heart of our pleasure. The “first draft, best draft” myth of the Beat Generation as embodied in the YouTube paradigm leaves us with a cheap taste in our mouths. It is a fantastic, sprawling, manic, violent and beautiful mirror to our niche interests, but it falls so far short of our deep need for story and character that we’re left craving a Calera pinot while sipping Cisco “Red” from a Dixie cup. Culturally, we have a craving for both, but it is unlikely we are willing or able to subsist creatively or economically on one alone.
The current Hollywood strike is the first creative coup in the era of new media. It proves that content can run dry, and the media properties whose existence depends on the symbiotic (or parasitic) attachment to advertising is not the permanent sunshine of prosperity. Carriers and platforms don’t matter if the content isn’t flowing to begin with. As David Levy, president of Turner Sports and Turner Entertainment Sales & Marketing says, “Ownership of content is key.” But the question of ownership goes deep, to origins. It goes to the vine, the soil, and limestone—the writers’ mind.
Jensen, Mills, and Ryan. Single vineyards, but they could as easily be the last names of writers. Entertainment, even prime-time television entertainment, is not the Big Mac it once seemed. Though you may quibble about its cultural value, it seems time for America to question the American infinity myth as it applies to entertainment. What we’ve come to expect from the glamour machine is a particular product, with all the necessary ingredients of dramatic suspense and glistening production values. Well, damn if it doesn’t seem to depend in part on a particular batch of grapes growing high above our heads.
**to read more articles by this author, click on the name under the headline**
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