DROPLETS: The Week in Natural Wine
Vital natural wine counter-propaganda. This week: Pete Wells on hospitality tech. Rachel Cusk's mouse encounter. Tesco's hybrid wine. L'Amitié Rit reborn. Olivier Grosjean's wine flaws. And more!
DROPLETS is a roughly bi-weekly round-up of quick takes, clapbacks, shout-outs, and other miscellany related to natural wine, wine-at-large, and the restaurant scene in Paris and beyond. It’s a smorgasbord of natural wine counter-propaganda to the Anglophone and French wine media. The first three topics in a given week are free, with access to the full deluge of ten topics limited to paid subscribers.
1. PETE WELLS CAN’T PUT HIS FINGER ON IT
Departing New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells goes out with a moving lament about the dehumanizing effects of tech innovation on the New York restaurant scene. He cites the Blackbird app’s “checkless exit” feature (for customers having paid in advance for their meal via the app) and the rise of bots in speculation on restaurant reservations, suggesting they comprise, among others, “a series of changes that have gradually and steadily stripped the human touch and the human voice out of restaurants.”
I agree with Wells’ description of the symptoms of this malaise of modern hospitality, but I wish he had attempted to diagnose the underlying condition.
If we wish to understand why the New York restaurant scene (or that of London, or Los Angeles) has become mired in tech innovation of questionable merit, while its counterparts in, say, Paris or Milan or Perpignan have not, or not to the same extent, it behooves us to ask how the social conditions that determine the contours of the hospitality industry differ in these locations.
In the aftermath of the late-2000s financial crisis, the editor Tina Brown famously both-sided the behavior of “money-machine CEOs with suck-up covers on Fortune,” quipping, “There is a name for New York minus the excess. It's called ‘Philadelphia.’”
For the sake of our inquiry, we might adjust Brown’s formulation, and ask what you call New York minus the excess, with free healthcare, free higher education, rent controls, and affordable childcare?
Europe contains quite a few cities like that, actually. Places with much smaller economies, in which restaurateurs are not required to raise immense capital to open restaurants, and in which they do not feel obligated to sign up for every new wingnut app service in the name of supreme efficiency, or because one of their investors is also an investor in said app. These are places where restaurateurs retain the freedom to practice hospitality on a human scale, if they are so inclined.
“Tiny pop-up restaurants and micro-bakeries are still riding a wave of popularity that started during the pandemic,” Wells notes, getting warm, as they say, while still missing the issue. “A large part of the appeal of these places is the chance to meet the person who baked the croissant or cooked your Vietnamese bun cha. We may value the chance to meet these vendors even more because we’ve lost so many of the personal exchanges we used to have in restaurants.”
The popularity of small restaurants and bakeries did not, obviously, begin during the pandemic. And these things persist in many parts of the world. If we have lost personal exchange in restaurants in major cities in the USA and the UK, it is due to overcapitalization of restaurant real estate, and the consequent large-scale elimination of owner-operators.
Everyone who has travelled in post-Communist countries knows it can be hard to dine well where there is no culture of spending money. As Wells testifies, it turns out it is also hard to dine well in the opposite circumstances.
2. UK SUPERMARKET BRAVELY STOCKS AWFUL LOW-COST PRODUCT
On August 5th, UK supermarket Tesco released its first varietally-marketed hybrid wine,1 from the floreal grape, reports Jamie Goode, who calls Tesco’s release of a floreal wine “an important and brave move.”
On some level, it is. But the aptitude of floreal and other hybrid varieties to produce appreciable yields in the absence or near-absence of anti-fungal treatments is only a net positive for the environment if farmers actually refrain from such treatments. The Tesco wine in question is not certified organic, which effectively indicates it was produced with synthetic chemical treatments and fertilizers.
Incidentally, here is the wine’s ingredients list, which also indicates quite a bit about how it was farmed: Grapes, Concentrated Grape Must, Preservatives (Potassium Bisulphite, Sulphur Dioxide), Acidity Regulators (Tartaric Acid, Malic Acid), Stabiliser (Carboxymethylcellulose), Packaging Gases (Carbon Dioxide, Nitrogen), Sugar.
When farmed intensively and destined for heavy enological correction, the aptitude of floreal and other hybrid varieties to produce appreciable yields in the absence or near-absence of anti-fungal treatments is, in practice, totally ignored in favor of these varieties’ parallel aptitude for producing staggering volumes of characterless grape juice that can, after much processing, be bravely, importantly sold as wine “grown in idyllic French vineyards” by Tesco.
3. RACHEL CUSK ENCOUNTERED MOUSE
In fact, she was something of a pioneer. I borrowed the Outline trilogy author’s 2009 Italian travelogue The Last Supper from a friend recently, and was amused to note that in it she records a frightful experience of mousiness. It was not, it should be said, mousiness in wine. (Any interaction with Italian wine is, by some measure, the book’s second most glaring absence, after the total zero-ing out of father of her children, who throughout the book hovers as an unnamed presence to whom no dialogue, even paraphrased, is attributed.)
“The truffle paste makes me think of something horrible,” Cusk recounts. “One day, while eating it, it occurs to me that it is like eating puréed mouse.”
For those interested in the spectrum of mousiness outside of wine, oxidized truffle products are one avenue of investigation. Oxidized black olives are another (the type that come halved and pitted in cans, and / or those which sit exposed to air for hours in salad bar troughs.) You can also find mouse in olives that remain unharvested on branches in Provence in February. The Japanese, I’m told, liken the aroma to that of water in which green beans have been boiled. That of peanut skins and peanut shells is also mouse-adjacent. As Calvin said to Hobbes, “It’s a magical world, ol’ buddy. Let’s go exploring.”
Subscribers can scroll down for 7 more curated links and quick takes, on topics including chef Kailey Hoyle’s new Montreuil project; Olivier Grosjean’s new book; Maison Emmanuel Giboulot’s call for investment; keg wine; Ewan Lemoigne of La Cave des Papilles, and more.