Wine in comic books and TV series

Beyond film, literature and journalism, in this era two media are proposing ?and in many cases, winning the game? as alternatives for leisure and information: comic books and TV series. They are perfect formats for telling long stories, since, with their logical differences, they allow the story to be developed and branched to the extreme. And they allow, in addition, to touch all type of subjects, because there is no content that resists the drawing and the agile filming that defines series.

The wine world is not a stranger to these media phenomena, and has already been represented by pencils and cameras. Wine still has a shy presence, but when it appears, it bursts in with all the strength of a product with so many plot possibilities.

Now that we close April, the month of books and stories, we'd like to talk about those first steps of wine as the star of comics and series. And we start with a French comic book, an indisputable masterpiece, The ignorants, by Étienne Davodeau. It tells the story of a comic artist, the author himself, an absolute profane in the world of wine, who decides to live for a year with a vigneron, a vinegrower and winemaker from the Loire area who, in turn, has no idea about graphic art nor drawing. Between both characters a juicy relationship of teacher-apprentice is established. Each one discovers to the other the secrets of his own trade and in the case of the vigneron, he shows aspects that interest all of us in this world: the link with the earth and nature, the dependence on climate, the challenges of agriculture, the knowledge of the grape variety ?in this case the white grape called chenin?, the philosophy that encloses each bottle, the issues that surround markets and sales, the magic of wine... All this is spun in an absorbing narrative, drawn with a close style and intimate, evocative tones, at the same time very genuine and real. It is a wonderful book.

Three TV series

We also strongly recommend three series that surely many readers have followed. In them the wine does not have, a central role as in the book The Ignorants, but we glimpse how it begins to exert a certain influence. It would not be strange to watch in the near future some series with wine as the essential axis. We will see... But here and now we look at some well-known pieces of television fiction of recent years such as Mad Men, Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey. In the first one, Mad Men, which is the choral story of an advertising agency of the 1960s, alcohol is almost another character; at that time it seems that without liquors and whiskeys, creative meetings did not work. The wine is secondary in Mad Men but, as it explains the expert Alyssa Vitrano, is gaining a growing presence in the plot, as the drink was popularized in the US market throughout the decade of the 60's: "Wine in America didn't really get started until 1965, when Robert Mondavi broke away from his family and established his own winery".

 

We now go to Game of Thrones, surely the series that has attracted more fans in the last decade. Those who have followed it may have noticed that many scenes are filled with irreplaceable wine glasses. So much so, that the MovieManiacs website created a video compiling fragments in which various Game of Thrones characters appear drinking wine. They are 7 fast-paced minutes that even include a marker. Do you want to know who wins the competition of greatest wine drinker? You can discover it here.

La última de las series que presentamos es la muy británica Downton Abbey, la historia de la aristocrática familia Crawley. Sus frecuentes reuniones en torno a mesas señoriales están siempre bien regadas de vino. Y no de cualquier vino, pues lo que consumía la clase alta inglesa de los años 20 y 30 eran grandes burdeos, oportos, sherries y champagnes. Y es que como afirma Adam Teeter en un interesante artículo de Vinepair, los Crawley ejemplifican a la perfección un tipo de consumo muy vinculado a las capas más pudientes y cultas de la población del Reino Unido, que en la época solo consumía de media 2 botellas por persona y año. En esto han mejorado, como bien sabemos en Muriel Wines.

 

The last of the TV series we talk about is the very British Downton Abbey, the story of the aristocratic Crawley family. Their frequent meetings around noble tables are always well sourced with wine. And not any wine, because what the English upper class of the 20s and 30s consumed were great Bordeaux, ports, sherries and champagnes. And as Adam Teeter says in an interesting article in Vinepair, the Crawley exemplify perfectly a type of consumption closely linked to the wealthiest and most educated layers of the population of the United Kingdom, which at the time only had an average of 2 bottles per person and year. In this they have improved, as we well know in Muriel Wines.
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