Recently, my brother-in-law gave me all of his father’s collection of home-made fruit and Southern grape wines. Hundreds of bottles under the house. He said he was a “wine snob” and there was “no way he was going to drink that stuff.”
As a hobbiest vintner with a muscadine vineyard of my own, there was no way I was going to turn down such a gift. Stay with me here: there’s a point to this.
When a guest walks through a museum, any museum, she comes away with the flavor of it, a taste of its content. The guest will compare this with other museums he’s been to and rank it accordingly. Maybe on a scale of 1 to 10, or “poor” to “excellent,” but often just on the overall impression, the flavor (or “finish”) left when he or she gets back in the car. They don’t know it — and I’d never tell them — but they are museum snobs.
There are as many variables to making even a mediocre museum palatable as there are influences in making wine. To truly appreciate and evaluate one bottle against another, — even two sitting on the shelf side-by-side — or one museum against another (even in the same market), a real aficionado has to deeply understand the influencers.
In wine, the grape or fruit you start with is a critical first step. Similarly, the type of museum, its subject foci and collections are important. Like a vineyard or orchard, it’s what makes that museum unique. From there, the variations grow: a board’s vision, a community’s needs, availability of staff talent, and access to new audiences. These are analogous to a museum’s “terroir,” its setting, its soil and atmosphere. Then, there are the variations museum management brings to the flavor, the vintner’s contribution. Decisions on funding priorities, which staff to hire, even maintenance and cleanliness standards all affect the product. Just as timing can make an average bottle of wine stellar, a museum that embraces its youthfulness and is allowed to mature gracefully can be a hidden treasure. Decision about whether to grow or to hold, how to steer the brand, how often to change up content (akin to turning that bottle down in the cellar!) all influence the final flavor guests “taste” at the end of a visit.
As a wine maker, I’ve learned to appreciate all of what has probably influenced the bottles in my cellar and on my table and embrace the differences. The knowledge greatly broadens the range of what I would classify as excellent and outstanding wines. So, too, excellent and outstanding museums.