The Golden Age of Brutal!!!
La Sorga's Antony Tortul and friends bring their iconic, shared natural wine label back to its roots.
Since its inception in the Languedoc in 2010, the striking, red-black-and-yellow wine label featuring the “Brutal!!!” slogan (along with the “Brutal Wine Company”) has become part of international natural wine lore, appearing on cuvées hailing from Italy, Austria, Spain, Australia and beyond. As of 2021, however, perceptive drinkers will notice something different about the “Brutal!!!” labels from the meme’s creators, La Sorga’s Antony Tortul and his immediate circle of winemaker friends. (Full list below.)
“It says, ‘La compagnie du vrai vin brutal,’” Tortul explains in July, at the Beaujalien tasting in the Jura. “It’s no longer Brutal Wine Corporation.”
The letters B-R-U-T-A-L are also printed in gold, a tongue-in-cheek touch of class for a wine label that began, as Axel Prüfer once put it, as “a way to valorize experimentation” - a way to sell one’s winemaking experiments.
Tortul and his four initial co-creators - Prüfer, Languedoc vigneron Remi Poujol, and Catalan vignerons Joan Ramon Escoda and Laureanno Serres - came up with the idea after a long day’s tasting and a long night’s drinking of their own unsulfited natural wines.
They intended the “Brutal!!!” label to denote wines made without sulfites or filtration in a spirit of experimentation. And they thought the label should be shared among like-minded winemakers - which is to say those working entirely without sulfite addition and filtration for all their cuvées - via “co-option,” which is to say, anyone who wanted the label could have it. To Tortul’s dismay, the label became, in certain instances, a way for less radical natural winemakers to brand wines they weren’t sure about.
“Already, there were a lot of people who made a ‘Brutal!!!,’ who did it with zero added sulfites, but who made lots of other sulfited wines,” says Tortul. “Then the other day someone brought me an Italian wine, a cuvée ‘Brutal,’ and it was sulfited!”
Disenchanted with the label, Tortul hadn’t used it on a wine since 2014, even as Languedoc vigneron friends like Remi Poujol and Joe Jefferies continued to produce “Brutal!!!” cuvées each year. But this year Tortul re-embraced the new, gold-lettered “Brutal!!!” banner with a blend of merlot and sauvignon.
“Remi had been telling me, ‘It’s our thing, so we shouldn’t have to stop. It’s totally stupid,’” says Tortul. “So we’ll keep doing it. But we’ll put things straight again.”
“The point really about ‘Brutal!!!’ was that it was a zero-additions-producers flagship, so having a load of people making a brutal who add things in other cuvées does grate a bit, frankly,” says Caux vigneron and longtime “Brutal!!!” practitioner Joe Jefferies, over email. “So I’m all for the change. Plus I think the gold-embossed wording is a masterstroke.”
The new gold-lettered “vrai vin brutal” labels will be limited to wines from the original five friends, and the fourteen other estates that immediately followed the idea.
“We’ll stay like this for a while,” says Tortul, who drafted something like a hasty, on-demand press-release for the change earlier this year. “If we bring in new people, it’ll be people like Raphael Beysang - the true ones, who make good wines, who only make zero-added-sulfites wines.”
It remains to be seen what effect Tortul et al’s label change will have on the other zero-zero natural wine estates who have seen success with their own ‘Brutal!!!’ labels, notably Gut Oggau and Christian Tschida in Austria’s Burgenland, Tom Lubbe in the Roussillon, or Jean-Marc Dreyer in Alsace.
Anyway, all this wouldn’t be natural wine - and it certainly wouldn’t be “Brutal!!!” - without some further complication.
“The only one who has a derogation to use a different ‘Brutal!!!’ label is Axel Prüfer,” Tortul adds, after a moment’s reflection. “Because he’s always had his own ‘Brutal!!!’ label. He does what he wants. But he was there at the beginning!”
FURTHER READING
Part 1 of Alice Feiring’s story about the “Brutal!!!” phenomenon. There doesn’t seem to be a Part 2.
Alice Feiring’s 2018 tasting of eight “Brutal!!!” wines.
An excerpt from Tortul’s note announcing the changes to “Brutal!!!”:
