Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [24]
The stories come round regularly of slicked-back roaring derivatives traders running up five-figure bills as they knock back the stuff at $10,000 a bottle, bellowing with excitement and hubris as they try to outdo each other. Unlike some Chinese newcomers to the Bordeaux grands crus, these young men (for so they usually are—time travelers from the 1987 film Wall Street in attitude if not in dress) seldom if ever soften the edges with a mea sure of Sprite or Coca-Cola. But all the same, in the majority of cases it’s fair to say that the people at that table over there who are ruining your evening aren’t drinking Pétrus. They aren’t even drinking wine.
They are drinking money.
The whole purpose of the process is to display their excess of wealth. It’s an evolutionary strategy for reproduction that finds its corollary in the peacock’s tail: an unnecessary and, frankly, burdensome piece of flashiness that exists purely as a declaration that the owner can afford it.
The traders might also be surprised to learn that they are reenacting a timeless ritual that elsewhere is performed with pigs. In the Moka ceremonies of Papua New Guinea, the “big men” vie for status and power by making, and receiving, gifts of ever finer and fatter pigs. The same principle is at work in the Kula and Sepic Coast exchanges of Papua New Guinea and, perhaps most famous, the potlatch ceremonies of many Pacific Northwest tribes, including, most euphoniously, the Nuu-chah-nulth and the Kwakwaka’wakw, although the word potlach itself comes from the Chinook.
The crucial thing about potlatch is that status is determined not by what you have but by what you give away. And even though missionaries tried to stop the Native Americans from holding potlatch ceremonies (which were apparently the biggest impediment to making decent Christians out of peoples who regarded themselves as perfectly decent anyway), the practice, once you get your eye in, can be seen all over the world in some strange guises. Admire a Gulf princeling’s wristwatch and he will give it to you. Admire a man’s wife in an “alternative lifestyle” community—Cap d’Agde in southwestern France, so they say, or those strange conventions that tend to pop up in Las Vegas—and he will invite you to take her upstairs. Stories abound of tribes (usually unspecified) among whom potlatch is taken even further: admire, say, an intricate, priceless ancestral carpet and the owner will shrug, murmur, “What, this old thing?” roll it up, and hurl it on the fire, which presumably is kept blazing for just such an occasion.
In the West, though, we are more circumspect. Gifts of great value tend to be given only to those from whom the giver has at least a sporting chance of getting them back. And a Russian oligarch whose wife is weighed down with glittering jewelry might be said not to be practicing potlatch at all: he is not distributing his wealth but displaying it. There’s all the difference in the world.
But when it comes to things that are by their very nature evanescent—who would drink that $10,000 Pétrus two days after the cork was drawn?—Western culture is more liberal in its potlatch ceremonials. To give your guests a fine claret or a perfect Yquem is considered a compliment to them, and a reflection of the host’s standing. There is still the problem of price—what if your guests don’t know how much that bottle of La Tâche cost you?—and so those who are anxious that the full ceremonies be observed do so either outside the home, in a restaurant where everyone can see the wine list (or at least the bill), or with something whose price is all too well known.
And it is this position that Pétrus occupies. There can be few, even