DROPLETS: The Week in Natural Wine
Vital natural wine counter-propaganda. This week: Is natural wine in crisis? Jonathan Chait on farm work. Sébastien Riffaut's pyrrhic victory. The UK wine "boom." 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. THE CHOICE OF A NEW GENERATION
New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov’s recent piece, “One Bright Spot Amid the Industry’s Gloom: Natural Wine,” astutely notes that in New York and the USA at large, natural wine is drawing a notably younger audience than its conventional counterparts.
I agree that this is something to celebrate, but I feel obliged to point out that Asimov’s piece - like the unending zombie Wine Twitter (now Wine X, I guess) discourse that it adjoins - is premised upon a slightly misleading issue of scale. It is not really correct to suggest there’s a nationwide Beatle-mania for natural wine among the youth of today. One might revise the headline to read, more accurately, “One Infinitesimally Small Bright Spot Shines Against the Industry’s Gloom in Major Metropolitan Areas: Natural Wine.”
The industry voices responsible for constant editorial handwringing about declining wines sales among young people are necessarily Big Picture types, because they are, or are writing about or in service of, mass-market wine producers, whose production volumes positively dwarf that of actual natural wine. It’s important not to get our wires crossed by confusing the concerns of Gallo and Franzia with those of natural winemakers.
Meanwhile, if young people are responding to natural wines, it might be precisely because the latter do not instantly give the impression of being the market-tested products of an industry, like, say, Beyoncé’s new whiskey brand, a partnership with Moët Hennessey that will doubtlessly make far more money than any natural wine. It seems more appropriate to view the success of natural wine not as buoying the wine industry, but rather as exposing its shortcomings.
Asimov’s article does raise a very interesting question: will natural wine remain, as the old Pepsi slogan goes, the choice of a new generation?
I suspect many youthful natural wine fans of today will, in a few years, find themselves gravitating towards conventional wines, since the latter tend to better validate the incentive structures of consumerist society1, and often prove more crowd-pleasing in office party settings. (A similar dynamic is perceptible in Paris nowadays, even among people I count as friends.) But actual natural wine will probably continue to exert a lasting appeal on young people, whose job it is, after all, to question the systems of their forebears.
2. RIFFAULT’S PYRRHIC VICTORY
On August 22nd, Beaujolais vigneronne Isabelle Perraud lost her final appeal in the defamation case brought against her by scandal-plagued Sancerre vigneron Sébastien Riffault, who became the subject of rumors of sexual misconduct following anonymous reports emanating from Denmark in 2021. For those new to the drama, here is what happened in a nutshell: Perraud, in the context of an association she runs supporting women’s rights in the wine industry, unwisely shared an Instagram post from an account in the USA, which post accused Riffault of rape. Riffault, in apparent efforts to silence the burgeoning rumor mill about his conduct in Nordic nations, brought a defamation suit against Perraud, which he has now definitively won.
Perraud now owes him 25’000€ not including interest and court fees (a GoFundMe in support of Perraud’s legal bills has been set up here), and Riffault’s reputation has been thoroughly demolished, first by the rumors of misconduct themselves, and then by his overt instrumentalization of the courts to scapegoat a fellow natural winemaker and take her money, while in no way addressing the substance of the claims made against him. (Riffault remains the object of a continuing criminal complaint of sexual assault filed against him by a Danish sommelière in the wake of his suit against Perraud.)
Further details on the case can still be found here and here. But I can’t help noticing Riffault’s intended chilling effect has taken place: many people of my acquaintance who’ve been chronicling the affair from the start now decline to name him as the subject. (If I still feel basically comfortable outlining the facts of the case and the allegations against Riffault, it is because he once phoned me threatening to send war refugees to break my knees in front of my newborn child, and I recorded the conversation.)
It is a sorry situation: a case of French courts applying 20th-century libel laws to 21st-century media, and making a women’s rights advocate pay dearly merely for re-sharing news of the career-incinerating foolishness of an alleged sexual predator. The judicial precedent is atrocious. At fifty-five years old, Isabelle Perraud is easily among the most web-savvy vignerons of her generation. But it is not hard to envision a scenario in which one of France’s many, many less web-savvy quinquagenarians or sexagenarians finds him or herself on the hook for thirty grand merely for accidentally sharing something later deemed defamatory within France. Zut alors!
Exacting punitive fines for the misuse of social media is acknowledgement that the latter can be weaponized. What I find myself wondering, in the wake of Perraud’s loss and the steep penalty she faces, is where responsibility lies between the user of the weapon and the maker of the weapon. Surely Riffault could have taken home a much bigger payday if he’d gone after Meta, who, after all, run a platform upon which a defamatory allegation scrawled on a wine shop chalkboard in New York can, with a flick of a finger, be transmitted to users throughout the world?
Which would be a more effective way to prevent future failures of justice: configuring Meta’s platforms to recognize legally incriminating allegations and to impose standards (or at least pop-up warnings) about sharing them, or training the entire population of France to adhere to French libel law on an international platform whose other users don’t need to?
3. JONATHAN CHAIT ON FARM WORK
When I began blogging back in 2010, one of my key inspirations for NOT DRINKING POISON was the work of center-left US political blogger Jonathan Chait. I liked his publishing rhythm and his prose style and most of his politics. I don’t read political bloggers for a precise reflection of my own views, of course, but rarely do I disagree with Chait to the extent I did with an aside he made in a recent piece mocking former President Trump’s plan to lower food prices: “Donald Trump’s Plan to Lower Food Prices: Restrict Food Imports.”
Chait’s point is, on its face, correct: restricting food imports would certainly lead to higher prices for American consumers. But he dunks further on Trump’s plan in a way that becomes revealing of one of the fundamental ideological blind spots afflicting otherwise intelligent people in developed societies worldwide.
“Food tariffs simply increase food prices, for the ‘benefit’ of impelling more of your domestic population to work in agriculture,” Chait writes. “Is there a strategic, economic, or social reason to reallocate workers from manufacturing and services (or retirement) to farm work? There is not.”
You can practically hear the ideological mousetrap spring shut in the proudly self-evident there is not. Chait’s diction, too, is conspicuously loaded. Reallocation evokes Stalin-era tragedies, while the dry summary of the rest of human economic activity as “manufacturing and services” is equally misleading, as if Twitch streamers and marketing executives were performing societal functions on par with those assembling trains or working in emergency rooms.
Nonetheless, there is indeed a profound case to be made for the social value of “reallocating” workers to farm work.
This case becomes abundantly clear when one acknowledges a) the well-documented decline of nutritional value in intensively-farmed produce throughout America, and b) the decline of population and of social cohesion in America’s agricultural communities, particularly those specializing in production of highly mechanized crops such as wheat, corn, or oil seeds.
It’s not just America, and not just food, of course. These things are on my mind because conventional viticulture - even in France - advocates intensive, highly mechanized methods that broadly follow the logic of intensive food production. Their implementation creates sad monocultural hellscapes like the plains of Béziers, or certain parts of Champagne. It also generates epidemics of loneliness, which manifest themselves in deaths of despair. Sound familiar?
If as a culture we seem unable to take any action to promote the social value of farm work, it is perhaps because we express cost savings for farmers and consumers in quantifiable monetary terms, while there is no equivalent unit of measurement for the quality of a foodstuff, or the quality of a wine, or the mental health of a community. But it is also because many of our most cogent commentators reflexively disparage the value of farm work.
Subscribers can scroll down for 7 more quick takes, on topics including natural wine’s alleged “sales crisis”; protests in Cognac; cocaine shipments in Burgundy; Jura wine speculation; Pascaline Lepeltier in Decanter; the UK wine-growing gold rush; the scam of non-alcoholic “wine”; and more.