DROPLETS: The Week in Natural Wine
Vital natural wine counter-propaganda. This week: EU parliamentary elections. B Corp greenwashing. The problem with "non-alcoholic wine." The 3rd best restaurant in the world. 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. LET’S MOVE TO THE COUNTRY
Chants outside our window in Paris kept waking the baby last night. It was impromptu “keep up the fight”-type sloganeering from some local left-wing voters, who had watched in dismay as the National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen protégé Jordan Bardella, trounced its way to 31.37% in the European parliamentary elections yesterday.
“The electoral map is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” notes political commentator and translator Art Goldhammer, who reliably provides the best English-language analysis of French politics. “The protest vote for the far-right was massive and ubiquitous, with the few centers of resistance limited to urban agglomerations.”
The National Rally dominated rural zones throughout France with a platform combining pushback against EU environmental policy (including green energy transition) with fairly vigorous xenophobia.
I spend a lot of time in rural zones throughout France and can basically understand the party’s appeal. There is a widespread suspicion that the economic benefits of both substantial immigration and unsightly new wind and solar farms flow chiefly to urban elites, while those living in the countryside contend with a vanishing sense of community and feel unfairly punished for their unavoidably car-based lifestyles. (It is no coincidence that the Gilet Jaune protests of 2018 were initially sparked by fuel prices.) It is very unfortunate that these legitimate concerns tend, in France as elsewhere, to congeal into an axis of racism and unabashed embrace of synthetic chemical farming treatments and fossil fuels.
I am not well-versed in these things, but there might be other, underexploited ways of addressing concerns about immigration and demographic change, for example by somehow rendering rural lifestyles more attractive and rewarding to the hordes of French young people presently cramming into major cities seeking sedentary work in overcrowded sectors of debatable societal value like marketing, finance, photography, film, art, etc.
One wishes there were some popular and symbolically powerful agricultural product - a beverage, perhaps - that had the potential to make headway on this.
2. LET’S BE REALISTIC
Writing for Vitisphere, Alexandre Abellan interviews Frédéric Chouquet-Stringer, founder of the non-alcoholic beverage commercial agency Zenotheque, soliciting an entertaining counter-argument to “non-alcoholic wine” naysayers like myself.
“We’re arriving at a moment where [stories of wine and vignerons] show their limits,” he says. “The majority of mass-market wines that we find today in supermarkets have a marketing problem and are already industrialized, let’s be realistic.”
Chouquet-Stringer suggests that estate owners replace their outmoded, idealized marketing of industrialized wines with the comparatively honest venture of marketing frankly industrialized non-alcoholic “wine.”
“Whether we call it wine or not, the goal is to offer a new outlet for the wine industry,” he says. “If we, the wine sector, don’t provide non-alcoholic beverages to adults, others will do it in our stead.”
Why stop there? If we, the wine sector, do not produce opulent fruit salad sculptures for weddings and corporate events, others will do it in our stead. If we, the wine sector, do not train carnival elephants to tap dance, others will do it in our stead.
There are, admittedly, bucks to be made. I suppose it is for vignerons and estate owners to decide whether competing on the terrain of non-alcoholic beverage giants like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Unilever Plc is salutary to the wider public image of winemaking or not.
3. TABLE NUMBER THREE
My former workplace, Paris restaurant Table de Bruno Verjus, was recently dubbed the 3rd best restaurant in the world by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards.
As a writer - someone who prizes the articulation and the justification of opinions - I have always vaguely resented the World’s 50 Best Restaurant organization for waging a vast, attention-sucking publicity campaign for the sake of a vapid aggregated-ranking listicle. And also for being a transparent PR vehicle through which terrible mass-market champagne and liquor brands attach their names to those of fine restaurants (often enough with the latter’s complicity).
Chef Bruno Verjus, more farsighted than me, has no such qualms and in my experience has always taken great pains to show supreme hospitality to anyone connected to the World’s 50 Best organization. Et voilà, it worked!
With any luck, Verjus’ recent accolades (which also include a second Michelin star) will inspire new generations of chefs and restaurateurs to follow in the footsteps of his exemplary culinary career path, which involved first making astronomical fortunes in unrelated entrepreneurial ventures in China.
All kidding aside, I have fond recollections of my brief stint as Verjus’ sommelier. His knowledge of gastronomy and culinary history is breathtaking; it would unfurl in a service-long monologue every evening. He could also be exceptionally droll, as one hapless Greek vigneronne learned one day during a tasting of her rather high-acid wines, when she happened to inquire what was contained in a large glass demijohn standing on the restaurant’s kitchen bar.
“It’s vinegar, madame,” replied Verjus. “Us, too, we also make vinegar sometimes.”
Subscribers can scroll down for 7 more curated links and quick takes, on topics including B Corp certification; what we mean when we talk of farmyard aromas; the French wine industry’s looming about-face on hybrids; “e-tongue” technology, and more.