It seems like the wine industry is about to live through another era of tariffs. This sequel presents a strange reversal of my favorite Twainian maxim such that the first round played the farce and this round, the tragedy. Where the 2016 version felt like more of an American wedgie enacted upon the European snobbery of fancy cheeses and other rotten, French delicacies, today’s news seems to threaten an all-out trade war where certain cartoonish line-items like red wine, olive oil, and chocolate cigarettes are replaced with “all of your shit.” Alas, history rhymes, but more to the tune of another of my favorite idioms: “drunk words are sober thoughts.”
How can such a fate befall a beleaguered cohort such as ours? To what do we owe the pleasure? I capped off this season of wine fairs with a fancy Antonio Galloni tasting sponsored by Vinous and Citibank. It served as an outstanding counter-point to the litany of small wine salons in France that seem to multiply exponentially each year in the narcissism of small differences. Here, there were red carpets, fur coats, designer suits, and perfume (???).
It’s very easy to forget how bizarre and alien the world of fine wine in New York had been before the era of “natural wine.” There was not a drop of it in this massive hall. The event’s blatant silliness served as a reminder for why we work with small families, ethical agriculture, responsible viniculture, aesthetic quality, and ultimately a value system that outstrips the economics. The white-gloved, sweet sixteen-styled hors d’oeuvres, among a litany of other mall-styled accoutrements, gave the cards away. This corner of the wine world exists as far away from the farm as their Lamborghini’s can take them. And, for the most part, they weren’t pretending otherwise.
In a lot of ways, it was easier to see our purported modus operandi here at the Galloni tasting than at any sulphurless fair in Angers. The two scenes bare less resemblance than they could or should, which is a very visceral piece of evidence for the fact that the wine industry is simply enormous in a way that few other industries can claim to be. With a yearly gross of 350 billion dollars globally, the US market accounts for about 90 Billion of that. That’s bigger than the film industry, Formula 1, or the adult entertainment industry.
That the natural wine corner of the market is small, quaint, and ostensibly motivated by a spirit of egalitarianism won’t protect us from Supreme Global Fascism. In fact, there seemed to be far less hemming and hawing about the possibility of a tariff being levied at the big, conventional tasting as there was in the small rooms of France. One reason for this sentimental discrepancy comes from the Boomer Disneyland atmosphere of Pier 40 in Chelsea. They were piping Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith into one of the brightest rooms of my wine career, eschewing all vibes, often pouring from bottles with the names of biblical kings, behind iPads and branded brochures. The mood was remarkably good, and why not? I had donned a tie and felt wine pin, myself, happily basking in what would turn out to be an unironic joy. They had all kinds of ikea meatballs with 3 different sauces.
The other reason people at the tasting might not have been sweating tariffs is the fact that they were all remarkably rich. For the most part, we were talking about very large and storied domaines that sell their wines deep in the 3-figure range. That’s the producers, the middle men, and the consumers in a tax bracket insulated from a 25% fluctuation this way or that.
But at the time, I really didn’t know that nearly every wine we tasted retailed well above the $200 mark. It was sort of happy news, going over the list after the fact. Once again, I was reminded why the natural wine movement was so important to my generation. Still, despite all the inflation and all the hand-wringing over the price of good wine today, natural wine very clearly offers an enormous value against the blue-chip wines of the world. This went beyond preference as well. 3 things were striking to me:
I could always tell who was working organically and/or with native yeast fermentations. In a room like this, it was as as easy as discerning the color of the wine. It goes without saying that the organic wines demonstrated in the direction of quality.
All the wines, even those I really liked, showed a huge stylistic difference from those in the the “natural” world. At the start of my wine education, I’d have told you that natural wine gave the average consumer a way to experience terroir on a budget. I’d had the privilege of tasting some premier cru burgundy, some cru classé Bordeaux, and some other fancy things. What made these wines magical to me had been the same kind of soul that existed in a $30 bottle of wine from the Jura or from Beaujolais.
An enormous number of extremely expensive wines were simply off-balance and bad, and I think a lot of my conventionally-minded tasting buddies would have felt the same. Perhaps, in some cases, I was missing the 30-years-of-age perspective, but very often the wines were lacking in any fruit or acid, completely dominated by new oak, or both.
At one point, as we waited online for our second helping of P2 Dom Perignon, I pointed out to my friend that we were standing next to an unoccupied table of Cristal. It would be our first taste of the storied stuff, and for Americans raised on Champagne rap, that was kind of a big deal (all things considered).
“Huh,” he said, “It kind of tastes like model juice?”
Precisely. Later we would compare Barolo and Bordeaux to Porsches or Barbie Dolls. Ah, right, these were the Modernist wines: decadence, artifice, intellect; technical wines, flawless wines, etc. Why did I find that really cool?
I heard a C-level wine professional with a nondescript European accent giving an interview about wine later that day. He was asked about “natural wine” as a concept in general. He said something to the effect of:
“Natural wine doesn’t really exist. Wine is the result of technique and culture. To have a truly natural wine, you’d have to go into the forest, find some vines growing wild, that dropped some grapes that had fermented… and if that’s what’s you are into then good for you, but I don’t believe that that is what makes wine special.”
I found it funny that not only do our two groups disagree on what a good wine tastes like, but also what a bad wine tastes like. I found it difficult to think of a true wine lover who didn’t enjoy the idea (taste?) of a fermented grape. Ironically, it reminded me of the American SUV bumper stickers like, “Coffee Lover!” or “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my Starbucks!” “This Pontiac runs on Dunkin!”
These people seem to be coffee lovers but not coffee lovers, whatever that means. And more ironic is that the Decadence movement of Huysmans, Rochilde, and Wilde began in France, in defiance of nature, disgusted by it. Whose side are we on, anyway?
Besides the notion that we might benefit from our food tasting like food, I can’t help but feel a strong aesthetic pull in the direction of the wine that purports to be from a place, and has chemical/biological reasons to believe so. But and all, it’s hard to develop feelings for a wine that makes an argument over a wine that is what it is and nothing more.
It’s true, the natural wine salons this year were a little grim. The market in Europe is poor, and reliable partners like Japan, Denmark, and Canada have slowed significantly. For a few days, I tagged along to visits with an older, natural wine Virgil who delighted in gossip from the early days of the movement. Both fascinating and hysterical, what I found most striking was his bifurcation of wine characters into leftist and fascists (and sometimes “criminals”). As often as he invoked the punk, revolutionary nature of the early scene, he reminded me of a troubling phrase he used to hear a lot: “No sulphites in my wine, no foreigners in my country.” Yikes!
Despite the caustic character of the thought, the dichotomy it represented also seemed like an outmoded one for me. At least in this country, the vast majority of wine consumers would balk at a wine made by a winemaker with such a philosophy (And I reckon the same is true in Paris, Copenhagen, London, and all the other cities with a natural wine clientele). Moreover, I guess the coincidence of self-identified leftists and natural wine customers in general is a strong one. In other words, the issue of immigration in the United States is as passionate as it has ever been, but the folks who seem most concerned about the influx don’t strike me as the type to call their local wineshop for a L’Anglore allocation. Where are all the conservative natties?
I noticed a similar asymmetry regarding skepticism over vaccines. I suspect most (if not all) of the natural winemakers I know skipped any and all of the Covid jabs, but skeptical Americans I know don’t seem to be hanging out at Frog Wine Bar or hosting lectures at Anaïs, though that could change. The world of raw milk and regenerative cow farming is similarly red-coded, but shares a lot of essential ethos with the natural wine movement.
The point is that the left/right dichotomy may fail to capture just what underpins the difference between the natural wine crowd and the conventional/industrial/corporate winos. Economic class disparity does slightly better here. Compared to the most famous and celebrated “fine wines'“ of high point scores and price, natural wine does offer a value. However, on the other side of the equation, there is an ocean of industrial wine made such that it is far less expensive than natural wine, but bears a far greater resemblance to the blue-chip wines in both ethos and taste. Think about producers like Guigal, Jadot, Veuve, etc. These wineries produce liquor store wines and some of the most expensive wines in the world, and really very little in-between. So, what gives?
I have strong memories from 1996, when my father was selling knitting machines, the last parts of a business my great-grandmother started in Ridgewood, just a few blocks from our offices today, more than 100 years prior. For a time, Ridgewood was responsible for manufacturing over 90% of America’s textiles. In 1994, the free trade agreement was signed and two years later the knitting mills in Ridgewood could be counted on one hand.
NAFTA marked the beginning of the era of Globalism. The character of our trading partnership with Europe, and the subsequent quality of our respective societies is grounded by this agreement. More concretely, the deal led to certain disparities and surpluses in trade, particularly a disparity in goods in the direction of Europe, and an asymmetry in the direction of the United States for financial services, entertainment, tech, data, cloud computing, and of course, weapons — all of these services requiring very big corporate structures.
The result has been a fundamental change in the character of our societies. For Europe, the middle class (manufacturers, craftsman, farmers…) could afford economic securities like healthcare, paid leave, a generally robust welfare state… and subsequently, perhaps, an opinion about the bottle of wine they could afford to have with dinner. The kind of discernment my grandparents were afforded.
In the United States, the middle class was bifurcated into the “lower middle class” and the new 1%. France got a strong, “Golden Era”, middle class and America got billionaires and austerity. The illusion that the natural wine movement represents the leftist, egalitarian corner of the wine industry is little more than stolen valor from a society where the middle class can also afford its product. If the economic reality post-covid has taught us anything, it’s that we are selling a luxury product to the upper-class who can regularly afford to spend $19 or $20 a glass at our finest restaurants, in our most expensive cities. If and when the tariffs land, the situation will only get worse.
There’s a lesson to be learned here from the Galloni tastings of the world. The farming may be questionable, the styles may be gauche, the wines might be bad, but they aren’t lying. They are demonstrably selling a luxury product, and in my experience, when a non-wine person wants to splurge for a Birthday or for New Years or whatever… They aren’t reaching for a bottle of natural wine (this goes for most of the wine people in my life as well). No matter the price, natural wine is branded and sold as quotidian, which is a detriment to those looking for a transformative wine experience on a special day, a detriment to those of us losing sales to plonk from big corporations, and it is a lie from an industry built on transparency.
Until we can mitigate the price of the most beautiful and thoughtful wines in the world, we should be more honest about the economic realities of our industry, especially as this new (old?) paradigm looms.
Of course, there is always the sweater business. I discussed the idea with my cab driver on the way to the airport. Gurmukh came to the states from Mumbai a year after Obama’s election. He said, “This notion of yours is a dream. There’s no infrastructure. Where will you make sweaters? Who will pay for it?”
I thought about possible investors.
“You have a bigger problem,” he said. “You now have a gap of two generations between your family and the next generation. You don’t know how to do it.”
So, look out for Steven Graf LLC. sweaters and keep drinking, folks. It looks to be a bumpy ride.
Twain? That’s Karl Marx speaking, perhaps he would have something to say about the situation. Enjoyed the article :)
Touching on a lot of themes and parallels in politics and natural wine I’ve been contemplating on heavily lately. Great read.