DROPLETS: The Week in Natural Wine
Vital natural wine counter-propaganda. This week: Pierre Jancou departs the restaurant biz. Regenerative word games. A teinturier reality check. How bad Paris coffee drives bad viticulture. 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. JANCOU HANGS UP HIS APRON
On June 27th, the restlessly creative natural wine impresario Pierre Jancou announced that the upcoming summer season of his Padern lunch bistrot Café des Sports will be his last hurrah as a restaurateur.
“After thirty-five years in the industry,” he wrote on Instagram, “…I have decided to concentrate on my new passion and work as a winemaker.”
The Café des Sports is now for sale: anyone interested in the challenge of running a natural wine bistrot in an isolated Languedoc village of 142 souls (as of 2021) can send Jancou a DM. Just under an hour’s drive from Perpignan, Padern is now home to three natural vignerons - Fabrice Monnin of La Mazière, Marius Long, and Jancou himself - so there’s no shortage of reasons to visit this summer if you want to catch the maestro before he hangs up his apron for good. (Listen to my 2023 podcast with Pierre Jancou here.)
2. NONE MORE BLACK
In the New York Times, Becky Cooper highlights wines from teinturier grapes in an article bearing the conspicuously hopeful headline, “Is Black Wine The New Orange?”
Unless you are Eric Asimov, it’s really not easy to secure a wine writing commission from the Times, let alone one concerning an obscure, unsexy wine subcategory - so it’s hard to blame anyone involved in the article for doing whatever it takes to jazz things up. But given that Jenji Kohan’s renowned TV series about a women’s prison has, to my knowledge, nothing whatsoever to do with wine, the headline can’t help landing like a huge non-sequitur in service of the suggestion of a falsehood.
Is black wine the new orange wine? Is yellow spray paint an effective breath freshener? Is a medium-sized white onion the new King of England?
In reality, orange wine still scans as a novelty to droves of consumers, causing the present boomlet and inspiring wine marketing impresarios aplenty to take a sudden, highly sincere interest in the history of winemaking in the Caucasus. “Black wine,” conversely, is a phrase limited almost entirely to historical marketing of the wines of Cahors. It is not in the common parlance: no one sidles up to a bar and requests of glass of “black wine,” and for good reason, since in our era of extreme racial sensitization the request would invariably be misunderstood.
The other reason no one requests “black wines” at bars or restaurants is they’re very hard to love. Scattered examples of teinturier greatness come to mind (Erik Rosdahl’s “Escombro,” from alicante, or Deirdre Heekin’s habitual hybrid successes), but the truth is many these varieties were considered blending varieties for a reason. Alone, they’re often wiry and opaque. They also tend to leave you with black lips, black teeth, and a black tongue, making them suboptimal beverages for first dates, office parties, birthdays, or basically any social occasion when lights are on.
3. REGENERATIVE IS NOT ENOUGH
An amusing exchange occurred on X (formerly Twitter) the other day between two British wine writers, one of whom, Simon Woolf, had just published a worthy piece unpacking the rising use (and misuse) of the term “regenerative” in viticulture.
The other, Jamie Goode, who in 2022 self-published a book entitled Regenerative Viticulture1, immediately piped in:
“I think it's a mistake to tie regen[erative viticulture] to organics. Many farming regene[rative viticulture] will be organic, and in regions with dry growing seasons and no downy mildew, organic is the way to go. But organic isn't always the most sustainable2 way to farm, and to insist on it makes regen[erative viticulture] just a niche.”
“I disagree,” Woolf replied, “because there seems to be ample evidence that farming without synthetics leads to better outcomes in terms of carbon capture/carbon sequestering - a key plank of regenerative [agriculture].”
The exchange neatly illustrates just why the term has become fraught.
When used in conjunction with organic agriculture (as in “regenerative organic agriculture”) the word “regenerative” has meaning. It refers to a subset within organics practitioners who emphasize the regeneration of soil health according to certain metrics, such as carbon capture rate and the restoration of soil organic matter. Such farmers are seeking to improve upon organics, which as a system is often undermined by the dogged pursuit of high yields and profit.
When deployed alone, as in the title of Goode’s book, the term “regenerative” is effectively greenwashing, in that it implies a rejection or renegotiation of the basic organic principle of the non-use of synthetic chemical fertilizers and farming treatments. Whatever “regenerative” benefits that a vineyard treated with synthetic chemical fertilizers and sprays might accrue along those same metrics are, in such circumstances, outweighed by the negative externalities of synthetic chemical fertilizers and farming treatments, the effects of which reverberate rather farther than the rate of carbon sequestration in a given vineyard.
Goode, like most proponents of agrochemical farming, couches his position in terms of open-mindedness and optimism about future scientific breakthroughs. Sure, this argument goes, the history of synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides since the end of the 19th century may indeed have been one long procession of false assurances of safety accompanied by mass environmental spoliation, the degradation of nutrient content in foodstuffs, and soaring rates of cancer and developmental disorders within agricultural communities. But maybe these pharmaceutical companies will get it right with the next new molecule!
Goode is not an idiot. It pays to be optimistic about the efforts of pharmaceutical companies. But that is another reason we should question optimism on this subject.
Subscribers can scroll down for 7 more curated links and quick takes, on topics including the French legislative elections; Gérard Bertrand’s orange wines; how bad Paris coffee drives bad viticulture; Corsican vineyard stasis; Tavel rosé, and more.