DROPLETS: The Week in Natural Wine
Vital natural wine counter-propaganda. This week: Alicia Dorey rewrites natural wine history. Fear of sweet wine. Friedman on AI farming. Provençal grape ketchup. Politicizing natural wine. And more.
DROPLETS is an irregular 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. NEVER LET ME DOWN AGAIN
This month saw the release of French wine journalist Alicia Dorey’s 100 Vins nature qui vous decevront jamais, or “100 Natural Wines That Will Never Disappoint You.”
I don’t know if Dorey got to choose her book title. (I didn’t get to choose mine.) It’s an odd pronouncement for someone who has earned a reputation as a defender of natural wines, since it implies a consumer expectation that most natural wines will disappoint.
That this situation could have more to do with consumer expectations, parameterized to the characteristics of filtered, heavily sulfited wines, than with the genre of natural wine itself, would seem to comprise the occupational challenge of anyone in the business of writing about natural wine.
Alas, Dorey’s selection of natural wines - visible in her table of contents here - includes wines from scores of winemakers with nothing whatsoever to do with the natural wine community (Domaine de Clovallon, Marcel Deiss, Albert Mann, Henry Marionnet, Mée Godard1…), alongside dozens who represent its most conservative wing (Château Le Puy, Maxime Magnon, Château Yvonne…), and just a tiny handful of actual bona fide natural winemakers who do not add anything to their wines (Jeff Coutelou, Le Petit Gimios, Bruno Schueller…) and / or who do indeed play a role within the contemporary natural wine community (Nicolas Carmarans, Hervé Souhaut…).
It does actual natural winemakers a disservice to suggest readers might appreciate their wines in a line-up beside the heavily sulfited wines of Marcel Deiss, or the filtered wines of Clos des Mourres. Those readers might well find themselves, God forbid, disappointed, upon encountering entrapped CO2, a touch of residual sugar, a hint of volatility - all occasional, unobjectionable hallmarks of actual natural wine.
In her introduction, Dorey calls the question of low versus zero sulfite addition a querelle de clocher, or a petty squabble. I wrote something similar a few years ago in my own book, saying “for now these debates are mostly limited to highly developed natural wine markets, like Paris, Copenhagen, or Tokyo…”
Dorey’s ahistorical, big-tent approach to the notion of natural wine in her book destined for readers in Paris and France has, I suppose, proven me quite wrong, at least with regards to my characterization of the Paris natural wine market.
2. RE-POLITICIZING NATURAL WINE
Back in March, French events coordinator, wine writer, and publisher Antonin Iommi-Amunategui published a perceptive opinion piece on the state of natural wine in Libération. He correctly diagnoses a banalization of the subject of natural wine among consumers, alongside a concurrent drift towards embourgeoisement among many of the historical actors within the community, and speculates that these two phenomena contribute to a present market-wide slowdown in sales.
The solution he proposes is to re-politicize natural wine, by which he means to recapture the initial energy of the scene and emphasize its fundamental difference with the rest of the wine world.
“To those for whom natural wine is not just any commercial product, and first and foremost to the natural winemakers and independent retailers concerned, who indeed struggle more than ever: open up, engage yourselves, federate yourselves, run the risk to displease individuals as much as collectively…” Iommi-Amunetegui writes. “And repoliticize the pinard. I reckon it will give it a second wind, which the field vitally needs.”
Presumably due to editorial policy, Iommi-Amunetegui’s piece makes no mention of several recent examples of the politicizing of natural wine within France. The author himself is a frequent collaborator of Beaujolais vigneronne Isabelle Perraud’s Paye Ton Pinard association, which aims to bring attention to episodes of sexism (and worse) in the wine industry. Former Paris wine agent Fleur Godart made a lot of noise around the turn of the decade with a series of negociant natural wines bearing feminist labels. Meanwhile, American expat natural wine retailer and bookseller Nathan Ratapu of Rerenga Wines makes great efforts to associate his shop with just about every far-left position presently covered in academic literature.
With the exception of Ratapu, whose shop is by all appearances doing fine, the political efforts of these personalities have as many detractors as fans within the natural wine world, with the result that I’m not sure they are necessarily moving the dial on wine sales.2 (Not that this is the only measure of success, obviously; I only cite it because it seems to be Iommi-Amunetegui’s reasoning.)
But perhaps I am being too literal in my reading of Iommi-Amunetegui’s piece. I certainly agree that the energy surrounding natural wine as a genre has suffered from misrepresentation by winemakers, retailers, and wine personalities (see above) who would prefer natural wines to integrate seamlessly into conventional wine appreciation and sales networks. Putatively natural wines that do integrate seamlessly into conventional wine appreciation and sales networks are usually compromised in some way. Sometimes they are even the work of winemakers who made far more interesting and uncompromising natural wines earlier in their careers.3
3. HATERADE
In her Aug. 27th piece for Decanter, “Why the hate for sweet wines?”, Eliza Dumais avoids the common-sense answer to her titular question for over twelve-hundred words. It might not be her fault. Decanter publishes articles expressly intended to obscure straightforward winemaking issues with a regularity that suggests an editorial ban on discussion of winemaking practice.
It is true, as Dumais notes, that lay consumers request “dry” wines reflexively, often with a conviction that surpasses their understanding of what the word means in wine parlance, or even what defines its opposite, sweetness. Interestingly, this phenomenon is as common in France as it is in the USA. What could have happened to make several generations of wine drinkers on both sides of the Atlantic internalize a fear of sweet wines?
We don’t think about it much nowadays, but sweet wines produced without mutage (the addition of alcohol) or pasteurization (as in vin cuit) were somewhat rare in the mass market before the generalization of sterile filtration technology, since the only other way to ensure some degree of stability in wines with residual sugar (i.e. to ensure that the bottles don’t recommence fermentation and explode during transport) was to carry out extremely long, costly aging periods. Sterile filtration technology, first developed commercially in Germany in 1927, became widespread in Europe and beyond only following World War II. (Check here for an interesting history of sterile filtration.)
By no coincidence, the same post-WWII period saw the heyday of mass-produced sweet wine brands, which must have seemed miraculous at the time. Wines like Black Tower Liebfraumilch, Riunite Lambrusco, Sutter Home White Zinfandel. It wasn’t just brands, either: sweet wine appellations sprouted in force during this period, from Moscato d’Asti to Clairette de Die.
Such wines were young, fruity, sweet, and perfectly limpid: beverages without precedent. They were the entry into wine drinking for many newbie wine drinkers of the era. Those same drinkers never forgot the walloping hangovers they endured after pounding down unwise amounts of mass-produced sweet wine. The ensuing wariness of sweet wine became a cultural memory, passed down from one generation to the next.
The thing is, the wariness is well-founded. Mass-market sweet wine production - the type dependent upon sterile filtration - is a system ripe for abuse. Unscrupulous or indifferent producers harvest overcropped grapes before ripeness (to ensure maximum yield) and chaptalize to reach a desired sugar level. Fermentation begins with added yeast and sugar and ceases with massive sulfite doses and sterile filtration.
This is a recipe for indigestible sweet headache juice. Yet it remains de rigueur in the sweet wine world. In the EU, sweet wines may contain up to 400mg/L, while dry white wines and rosés top out at 200mg/L. (Here it seems important to add, for context, that an unsulfited natural wine will generally contain only 0-15mg/L of naturally-occurring sulfites.)
It may be an article of faith in natural wine circles, but the issue of whether sulfites cause worse hangovers remains the subject of debate in the wider wine scene. That heavily sulfited sweet wines traumatized several generations of wine drinkers would seem to be a strong piece of circumstantial evidence for one side of this debate.
Subscribers can scroll down for 7 more quick takes, on topics including Tom Friedman on “illiterate” farmers; the problem with joy; Oakland’s Snail Bar’s founders’ move to Padern; Milan Nestarec on Martin Vajčner; Andrew Jefford’s boomerism; Provençal grape ketchup; and more.