The Natural Wine Revolution
Revolutions tend to go a certain way. After the overthrow of the status quo there is a bloodletting – a violent rejection of the previous order – internal strife follows as factions jockey for dominance before "order" is restored through consolidation of power.
And so we find ourselves in an interesting time for the revolution that is the Natural Wine movement. After battling for love and life, after the self-proclaimed overthrow of the ancien regime (the Roi Soleil, Robert Parker), and after watching the terror of innumerable faulty wines run riot on our palates, Alice Feiring (our Robespierre, if we must) recently penned a piece wondering if we haven't all lost our heads a little bit.
It is an important piece and can be read here, but its importance is not necessarily in what is being said – as Feiring herself points out, critics of the revolution (Michel Bettane is singled out here) have been making the same point she does in the piece for a quite a while now – natural wine should not be forgiven its faults because it is natural. It is important because no less a figure than Alice Feiring is saying it.
Indeed, she "laments the decline of the natural wine Utopia". Natural wine is in danger of being "reduced to a style"; it shouldn't be a market-driven product – it needs to be diverse; mousy wines are everywhere in the movement; wines can have structure and age, and still be welcomed to the fold.
And while I'm getting more Danton vibes than Robespierre here, we should look at who she attacks: "[d]istributors selling messed up wine"; importers for shrugging their shoulders and saying "the kids like it"; winemakers making wines "to a style, murky, leesy and unfinished..." ; even drinkers ("I hope they will begin to say no when a damaged wine is passed off as cool"). Everyone is at fault. Everyone, that is, except Alice.
I hope she'll forgive me the rhetorical flourish, but I'm not talking about Alice personally. I'm referring to all those in the movement with platform, voice and audience – basically, natural wine writers. Feiring's piece is, hopefully, the start of a new appraisal of their domain by these writers and personalities. Because if faulty wines have come this far (and if faulty wines are bad – of which more later), they should accept some of the blame.
For while natural wine was getting both funkier and funkier (geddit?), natural wine writers hadn't really worked out a way to warn consumers off the bad bottles. Naturally, a 100-point scale was eschewed. In fact, most notions of grading and rating wines were thrown out or purposefully ignored (something I'm entirely happy with); there did not, however, grow out of this a system whereby these things might be flagged.
I recently sat in the wine club that is 67 Pall Mall, London, fighting to work their tablet-cum-wine list (and losing) and catching up with an old friend in the industry. She suggested I write a piece on rating natural wines. "Isabelle Legeron [MW] doesn't think you can grade natural wine on the same scale as conventional wine – why not?"
I have to admit to being ambivalent on this point – Legeron is probably right: the whole set of criteria for judging either natural or conventional wine is likely to be angled one way or the other. But, at the same time, why can't it be done? Critics are supposed to take all considerations into account and arrive at a view on a wine that is as objective as their subjectivity can be (and if they are purely subjective, that works too). And if a natural wine takes their fancy, why can't they give it 100 points?
So why can't we call out wines for faults – why can't they lose a rating, or a star, or come with a warning? The closest I've seen to this is a (natural) wine list with little graphics of a mouse head next to the wines the sommelier considers, well, mousy. The problem – as I've talked about before – is that faulty wine is a minefield...
First, calling a wine faulty in some countries could be considered libellous. Second, are you right? There's a tank of Pinot Gris in the corner of a winery I know that both I and the wine's maker believe has brettanomyces. Not just a suspicion – a conviction. So a sample was sent off to a lab to get plated (this is where a sample of the wine is mixed, possibly diluted, and a swab drawn over an agar plate in order to view the colonies of yeast and bacteria in the wine). It came back brett negative. It smells bretty but doesn't have brett. Third, what about the inverse? What if a fault is there but no-one smells it? Fourth, we come to threshold: what if I smell a fault but you don't? Why should I ruin your experience with my over-sensitive nose? Faults are vastly problematic. Perhaps we should not even refer to them as such.
But let's be honest, if Feiring thinks there is a problem, she is in a better position than most to do something about it – even if that means adopting a more mainstream approach to natural wine appraisal.
In fact, I'm still somewhat bewildered that neither Decanter nor Wine Spectator nor Wine Advocate have purposefully published a "special edition" dedicated to natural wine. A solid, 150-page tome à la World of Fine Wine, featuring articles and a ream of tasting notes. Get Feiring or Pascaline Lepeltier or Isabelle Legeron to guest edit it and it would, surely, fly off the shelves. If only you could convince natural winemakers to pay to have their wines entered into the tastings. That's the problem with revolutionaries, though: they don't play the game. Furthermore, they haven't needed to – there's been so much unqualified praise of natural wines in the last 10 years or more that they could only really lose (both money and cachet) by putting their wines up for review.
This is my point: for all their rightful success, the prophets of the natural wine movement left the space between the consumer and the retailer a little too empty. In some cases, they actively participated in bringing the two together without the kind of Nader-ist skepticism so beloved of Parker. This is understandable – it was a (generally self-styled) revolutionary movement and it was, initially, reasonably small. Now I'd wager a lot of natural winemakers would welcome a bit more criticism of their fellow travellers. And if Feiring wants to right the wrongs she sees in this sector (a sector I'm a part of, I should point out), some people are going to have to put their head on the block. Dare I suggest consolidating power in a Napoleonic sort of way?
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