As wine press and merchants alike prepare to face the phalanx of barrel samples in Bordeaux, word has it that the Bordelais, faced with a severe hyperbole shortage for the 2015 vintage, have abandoned the scale of the human calendar. Instead, producers have been encouraged to make full use of geochronological terms to highlight last year’s harvest’s significance and its place in history. Expect to hear “Vintage of the Epoch, perhaps even the Eon” from some Chateau, in some cases even said with a straight face.

“No one believes us when we claim something is the vintage of the century anymore” lamented an anonymous source from a multinational conglomerate that boasts several chateau in its portfolio.

When asked if they properly understood the sheer scale of geological time, several representatives simply shrugged.

“You know an Eon covers half a billion years or more, right?”

“Really? I don’t think there were even grapes then.”

“No fucking shit.”

“Oh well… still… we’ve had to up the ante a bit. We really need folks to buy these wines. A lot of them. And they’re going to be really expensive.”

One winemaker claimed that the collapse in value of previous vintages had caused “the marketing people” to instruct the new use of language in order to wipe the slate clean of the mistakes of human history. To instead present the wine as a product of the earth, and to disassociate it from previous vintages as much as possible.

“Yeah, we’re done with the whole, ‘this is as good as 2009/10’ thing. Do you have any idea what those ‘09s are worth now? Or ‘10s? You might as well ask punters to set fire to their money.”

From most accounts, the Chateau have settled on Vintage of the Epoch as the time metric for 2015, as it gives them flexibility, should 2016 not be a dumpster fire of a harvest, allowing them to grow superlatives all the way up to Vintage of the Supereon.

“This should cover us for a couple of good years. By the time we go through the gamut of terms, we’ll be under water due to global warming anyway. Bloody Holocene. Turns out a coastal estuary isn't a great place to plant grapes during a period of heinous man-made climate change.”

When members of the wine press were asked what they thought of the term “Vintage of the Epoch” they said they couldn’t possibly comment on the quality so early, as the wines were unfinished and the samples they were tasting were not necessarily what the bottled product would taste like. That’s when this author reminded everyone of the date.

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