Bordeaux 2014 Primeurs: Sauternes & Barsac
It was in 1996 that the Canadian-American pop-rock singer Alanis Morissette released her now famous ode to Sauternes. The track, entitled Ironic, which came from her Grammy-winning album Jagged Little Pill, is to date Morissette’s highest-charting single in the USA. It was not solely for its musical attributes that the single gained widespread acclaim, however, as it soon became apparent to anybody with a basic understanding of English, and particularly those with a penchant for nit-picking at the famous and successful, that none of the situations Morissette warbled about so convincingly were in fact ironic. The song itself almost disappeared, overshadowed by the fierce grammatical debate that ensured.
While professors of English at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale sparred over whether “rain on your wedding day” (which most of us would just call “weather”) and “a free ride when you’ve already paid” (which most of us would just call “a bummer”) are ironic or not, sadly the song’s real meaning went overlooked. It was in fact a new awareness of the trials facing those making and selling Sauternes that drove the young singer-songwriter to pen the tune. The clues are all there. “It’s a black fly in your Chardonnay” is a clear reference to the wines of Sauternes, even if the wine newbie Alanis does get the grape variety involved completely wrong. And “[i]t’s the good advice that you just didn’t take” is another nod to Sauternes, an obscure reference to her own failure to buy into the 1989 and 1990 vintages, Alanis having chosen to ignore the words of her personal wine mentor, Sauternes guru Bill Blatch.
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