Luxury crafts, exceptional fragrances…The Turin-born flacon Xerjoff that we advise at VitBella and that enchants the TikTok generation has, unwittingly, written the survival manual that the world of fine wine needs.
In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu showed that taste is never innocent: it classifies those who possess it as surely as it names its object. For a long time, wine was the instrument of that classification. One was born into a vintage, inherited a cellar, and learned the vocabulary as one learns a liturgy. Today, symbolic capital has changed hands, and it is a perfumer from Turin, Xerjoff, who has picked it up.
Founded in 2004 by Sergio Momo, the house was hardly conceived as an enterprise of conquest. A Slavic-sounding name, crystal-and-gold bottles worthy of a cabinet of curiosities, a proudly claimed Italian craftsmanship, and the resurrection of Casamorati, the venerable Milanese perfumery born in 1888: everything about it breathes patina. Therein lies the first lesson. Xerjoff did not invent a legend; it staged a heritage, with the rigor of a theatre designer. Wine possesses centuries of genuine history and all too often contents itself with reciting them on the back label.
The second lesson concerns price. Walter Benjamin mourned the loss of the “aura” in the age of mechanical reproduction; Xerjoff reinstates it through price, but a price that remains an ajar door rather than a wall. A few hundred euros a bottle is expensive, to be sure, yet it is an attainable luxury, an entry ticket to an imaginary world one can reach by saving, whereas fine wines today require a fortune and a certain level of expertise. Veblen would have recognized the snob effect, with one decisive nuance: Xerjoff’s price does not say “you are not one of us,” it says “you could be.” Wine wavers between the bargain-bin entry level and the unattainable Romanée-Conti. Between the two lies a wasteland, precisely where the generation that builds its identity through its choices as a consumer is to be found.
Then comes the third lesson, the most disconcerting for a profession attached to its established channels: social media. On TikTok, “PerfumeTok” has turned olfaction, the art of silence, into a garrulous spectacle. From Dubai to Seoul, from Los Angeles to Milan, creators unbox, spray, compare, and measure longevity and the compliments gathered. Xerjoff did not have to persuade: it supplied the raw material for a planetary conversation, with names easy to remember, photogenic flacons, and juices that lend themselves to storytelling. Perfume, like wine, is invisible; yet it has found its own vocabulary of image and social proof. Wine, meanwhile, still invites a smile when it speaks of “notes of gunflint” to twenty-year-olds who would rather be told who drinks it, where, and why.
The matter is urgent. Wine consumption is declining in Europe, younger generations drink less, or differently, and Bordeaux is tearing out its vines. To seek the cause solely in changing mores would be a comfortable evasion. Xerjoff thrives in a world where the young spend, desire, and share, provided they are offered an object of longing rather than a duty of culture. Wine has nothing to envy anyone in point of depth: it has terroir, time, and the hand of man. What it lacks is the daring to turn that depth into a contemporary desire. Its winemakers need not imitate a perfumer; they must understand that a legacy is handed down only if it is, once again, coveted.
Contact Guillaume Jourdan via LinkedIn
