DROPLETS: The Week in Natural Wine
Vital natural wine counter-propaganda. This week: diversity efforts and diversion; Jefford's covert op; French dinner etiquette, the future of Alsace, and more.
Back when I first began writing about wine, I made a habit of responding at length to curious or risible items in the wine media. I only stopped because I amassed an immense backlog of what seemed like more substantial vineyard visits and vigneron interviews to churn through. (Much of backlog is still there, log-jammed. I work through it whenever I can identify relevant contexts in which to place the pieces.)
The downside to this high-minded approach is it risks giving the impression I am indifferent to, or unaware of, the broader conversation surrounding wine in general, and natural wine in particular. On the contrary: I care a lot about swatting down natural wine misinformation, and I do like to highlight worthwhile reporting from friends and peers in the wine media.
To these ends, below is the first of what will become a weekly or 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. Consider it a smorgasbord of natural wine counter-propaganda. The first three topics in a given week will be free, with access to the full deluge of ten topics limited to paid subscribers. In the interest of promoting cultural exchange, I’ll also include English excerpts and paraphrases of pertinent items in the Francophone wine media.
I’ll be back in touch next week with podcasts from Copenhagen, plus more reporting from the Czech Republic, and probably some thoughts on the frost presently wreaking havoc on vineyards throughout Europe. Bon courage out there, friends.
Diversity & Diversion
Eric Asimov’s latest piece for the Times, “How an Ex-N.B.A. Player Is Diversifying Wine One Sip at a Time,” cites Channing Frye’s company’s mission of “bringing wine to communities that have long been neglected by the wine industry.”
But access to purchasing wine is not like access to clean water in Flint, Michigan. It’s not even an issue on par with access to organic vegetables. Frye’s wine company, like those of Francis Ford Coppola, John Malkovich, and Sting, is a for-profit business, in this case one adopting the language of social justice to describe the valiant act of targeting new clientele for conventional wine.
How do I know the wine in question is conventional? Both Asimov’s article and the Chosen Family website make no mention whatsoever of even the basic outlines of farming or winemaking practices. Asimov calls the wines “really good,” conspicuously empty language from a wine writer of his caliber.
“In the racial reckoning that took place after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, many in the wine industry promoted major efforts to diversify both the industry itself and its customer base. With some exceptions, many of those efforts turned out to be short-lived,” writes Asimov, without noting how strange it is to laud an effort to diversify a customer base as if doing so were a virtuous endeavor, and not the normal self-interested behavior of any business selling anything anywhere.
As someone raised in the wine desert of suburban Pennsylvania, I recognize that the pleasures of wine appreciation may seem out of reach to demographics in many parts of the world. But we do the people in those demographics a disservice when we suggest the conventional wine entrepreneurs targeting their inexperience are doing it for a higher cause.
Jefford Makes Peace With Natural Wine
In The New Statesman, Andrew Jefford justly calls the natural wine movement “the 21st century’s most significant wine development.” I like Jefford; his The New France was the first book on French wine I ever read. But his terms for peace in “wine’s culture war” remind me of what Trump is suggesting for Ukraine (i.e. some form of capitulation).
The problem with concluding, as Jefford does, that “lessons are being learned on both sides” of this war is the asymmetric nature of the conflict under discussion. Genuinely natural wine represents represents a rounding error in terms of volume of wine sold worldwide; its producers are independent small-scale farmers, not corporations. To actively both-sides such a conflict is to equate, in terms of gravity, perceived flaws in a tiny volume of wine with the industrial rationalization of viticulture and winemaking (and all the associated environmental costs) that underpins the conventional mass-market wine industry today.
Something is amiss by the end of the first paragraph, when Jefford summarizes the latter half of the 20th century thusly: “Wine globalized, too, losing its European hauteur as it did so.”
In my experience, hauteur in French wine production is largely limited to Champagne, Bordeaux, and Burgundy, which is to say precisely those regions that have benefitted the most from wine’s globalization. (I have encountered limited hauteur among the suspended sausages and overflowing ashtrays of the cellars of the Beaujolais.) “European hauteur” is a stereotype that exists mainly in the minds of Americans and Brits, and, to put it lightly, not ones of Jefford’s level of wine experience.
Similarly suspect is Jefford’s declaration that “the push for environmentally respectful viticulture was universally desired,” an elision of the word organic that he follows with a knock against the use of fungicides in organic agriculture. Here in turn he elides the important health and environmental distinctions between the contact treatments used in organics, and the synthetic systemic fungicides deployed in conventional viticulture. Even if environmentally respectful viticulture were sincerely “universally desired,” there is a world of difference between the organic and biodynamic natural wine estates actually practicing such viticulture, and the conventional estates that merely desire it (while boasting about greenwashing efforts like HVE certification). But the former do not give out wine writing awards.
In sum, I’m not sure Jefford's piece is really an olive branch in the culture war he invokes. It reads more like a covert op.
Jefford tips his hand when he faint-praises zero-zero vinification: “In skilled hands, fetchingly scented and juicy wines could be made this way.” If we could convince Maison Overnoy-Houillon to include this blurb on their back labels, perhaps the wines would finally start selling for real money.
Drink What
Vitisphere reports on a French start-up hoping to popularize consigned wine bottles. Founder Thibault Mallecourt identifies several hurdles, notably the practical impossibility of consigning champagne bottles.
I might add also that the research seems far from settled that sending trucks to retrieve empty wine bottles and subsequently washing and reusing said wine bottles is necessarily better for the environment than simply recycling the empty wine bottles in the first place. (I say this as someone who assiduously washes and reuses many, many wine bottles for my own tiny wine production. For me it is a matter of not making enough wine to justify ordering pallets of empty bottles, and having no means of receiving or transporting such quantities of empty bottles.)
Yet the greatest obstacle to widespread adoption of consigned wine bottles, at least for Mallecourt’s enterprise, might be his company’s name: Drink Dong. As Dave Barry used to say, I am not making this up. To all the farsighted French start-up founders out there: if you are going to use an English word as part of a pun in your company name, be sure to look up the English definitions of the other words in your company name. In business English, this is called “due diligence.”
Subscribers can scroll down for 7 more curated links and quick takes, on topics including a Bordeaux AOC name change; Alice Feiring’s advice for Alsace; and French dinner party etiquette.