Not Drinking Garbage
Okay, now I’m furious. And you should be too.
I’ve been pretty tired of the holier-than-thou attitude of
the so-called natural wine movement ever since Alice Feiring brought it into
being in the late ‘90s. Chapter 22 in Postmodern Winemaking examines in great
detail why there is no such thing as a natural wine movement, because it has at
least eight disparate constituencies that want completely different
things. Will Rogers famously observed, “I
am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” The Natural
Wine Movement is like that.
But just as we Democrats have largely ourselves to blame for
the current chaos, the failure of winemakers to explain why we do the things we
do – reverse osmosis, enological oxygenation, enzymes, yeast inoculation – Alice
and her ilk are simply reacting to being kept in the dark. They can tell we’re
not being straight with them, so they figure the things we’re hiding must be
evil. Small wonder.
My position is, never do anything you’re not proud to shout
from the rooftops. I love the way Wolfgang Puck plays with “molecular
gastronomy” on TV. “Hey, I’ve got some gooey ripe brie I want to grate into my
puffed sous-vide potatoes, so let’s freeze it with liquid nitrogen. Wanna watch?” But winemakers just cop out – “I do the
minimum.” Half of them couldn’t even tell you what reverse osmosis is, apart
from knowing that it can remove volatile acidity (vinegar) and lower alcohol.
In truth, no winemaker wants to use additives and processes
if they can be avoided. For one thing, they cost money. By its very nature,
wine is the most natural alcohol you can drink.
In truth, all wine is highly manipulated. Those aren’t fresh grapes in
your glass. Yet no wine is as manipulated as any beer or spirit, and you don’t
hear trash talk in those quarters about unnatural products. Wine is unique in
its variety of styles based on sense of place. No beer lover ever discusses the
“terroir” of barley – maybe some chitchat about the provenance of hops.
Last fall I attended a Natural Wine fair – 36 wineries all
claiming that badge. Easily three quarters of the wines were over the legal
limit for VA. I’m sorry, folks, but benign neglect is not the road to great
wine. I did find eight wineries who were making spectacular wines. Just sayin’
— it ain’t easy.
Thus I thought I had made peace in my soul on this issue. So
why is my blood suddenly boiling? Well, I try to keep my eye on several
bloggers in this area, including Simon Woolf’s Morning Claret, Alice Feiring’s
The Feiring Line, and Aaron Ayscough of Not Drinking Poison. (If you really
want to avoid drinking poison, my advice is to stay away from natural wine.
Besides the VA, they average ten times the level of allergenic biogenic amines
with charming names like putrescine and cadaverine.) These writers all
alternate between useful advice (Simon’s recent treatise on wine scoring and
Alice’s Icelandic restaurant reviews come to mind) and off-the-wall nuttiness.
But Ayscough’s blog last week takes the cake.
If I may digress, I made the acquaintance of Master of Wine Isabelle
Legeron on a 2011 USAID trip to the Georgian Republic. We climb the ramparts of
a castle in Kakheti, she the instigator of the London Raw Fair going by the
moniker “That Crazy French Woman,” and I cast as Doctor Evil, the wine
technology heretic. Amazingly, we got along. She explained that she wanted to
bring natural wine back into the mainstream where it had been for eight millennia
before the post-WWII revolution. It reminded me of my ancient friend Charlie Barra,
“I’ve been an organic farmer for fifty-seven years, but I only just found out
about it twenty years ago. Before that I thought I was just cheap.”
So last Tuesday, I opened Ayscough’s blog entitled “Natural
Turncoats.”
“It has been striking to witness many prominent supporters
of natural wine renovate their language, some transforming, almost overnight,
from defenders of vigneron liberty into fairly typical hectoring wine critics
bent, above all, on consumer advocacy.
“La Dive Bouteille organizer Sylvie Augereau ruffled
feathers last year when she cautioned participating vignerons that
enological additives were preferable to undesirable elements in fermentation.
RAW Wine fair series founder Isabelle Legeron, while never a voice of
radicalism in the first place, adopts an even stricter tone in a slightly
fawning interview by Eliza Dumais in Swurl.
“I think
we really need to focus more heavily on delivering wines that are drinkable,
well crafted, and balanced. In the world of natural wine, it should no longer
be acceptable to pour wines that are mousy, unbalanced, or fragile, and expect
that the market is going to buy them,” says Legeron. “I think we’re seeing this
in all markets: people are leaning away from some of the crazier bottles and
returning to more controlled styles.”
Ayscough goes on the attack. “Why is it that wine must be controlled
to conform to the market’s demands, and not vice versa? For a renowned natural wine writer and events
organizer to insist that natural wine conform to market demands is to highlight
the limitations, if not the utter superfluity, of her own public platform. It
is rather too easy to blame unnamed but implicitly lazy or careless natural
winemakers releasing bad natural wines. I would instead point to the public
figures exacerbating public wine miseducation by insisting that truly natural
wines should taste just like filtered and sulfited “natural” wines.”
So let me get this straight. Consumers need to adapt their
preferences to enjoy spoiled wines by virtue of their puritanical hands-off
doctrines? Isabelle needs to get off her high horse, her willingness to
compromise the doctrine of zero intervention (what I would call “artisanal craftsmanship”)
in the name of (gasp!) drinkable, well crafted, balanced wines? How dare she?
I would start a blog called “Not Drinking Garbage,” but I just
don’t have the stomach for a weekly screed against this nonsense. I am proud of
my wines and open about the techniques I employ. In 1992, I invented the
reverse osmosis techniques for VA removal and alcohol trimming, and you’ll have
a hard time finding a winemaker who doesn’t think the world is a better place.
Even Alice Feiring says so.
I was taught how to determine ripeness independent of brix,
and I’m not shy about watering must to adjust alcohol. I’ve taught my system of
pH adjustment with tartaric acid to 5,000 winemakers. So shoot me.
I use untoasted, air-cured Alliers oak chips in the
fermenter for copigmentation, body and anti-oxidative power. My barrels are
over 20 years old. I generally chop the skins of musts with a robot-coupe stick
blender for quicker extraction and employ enological oxygenation at several
phases of development. I maintain a microbiome balance in the cellar to
out-compete Brettanomyces and I avoid sterile bottling of sound wines to permit
the development of soulful bottle bouquet.
I publish all these details on my tech sheets and don’t
apologize for them. It is through these techniques that I produce an array of
balanced, Eurocentric, terroir-driven, age-worthy wines from lesser-known
varieties. My wines are beloved by my 3,000 loyal fans and the rest of the
world can drink Caymus, the poor dears.
Don’t let the bums get you down, Isabelle. You’re my hero.
We’ve always been on the same side.