The facts were meticulously constituted, but very little emerged. Everything that was the case.

It’s an office day, but we’re at the bar, or the garden outside the bar, and the bar is closed. An abandoned, Dominican Cohiba rests between the slots of my bench-seat. There’s a full glass of water on the ground from last night’s service or because the daytime manager’s pit bull came to run around while the bar is closed. I don’t see why they’d make a pit bull drink from a water glass.

The wine that we’re tasting must have died twenty years ago. Nevertheless there is a little crowd forming to make some sense of it. They are assembling in a circle around the bottle and I keep wincing at the water glass on the floor. I’m going to knock it over later, absentmindedly. The old wine seems to carry more truth in it — a wine as old as some of us are has a special aura. We’re tumbling over the dog to play the game.

The dog is blind too. Can you believe it? The game is to guess the wine. The sun is shining and it’s chilly in the shade of the cherry tree, still pink and handsome with half its petals in piles on the floor.

The guy with the wine bottle loves to dust off these kind of ancient bottles. He has a foolhardy audience of equinumerous age downing the 30-year-old liquid without question. I venture to guess that a decent chunk of them would refuse an aspirin past its expiration date, but for vino they are full Dionysians. For this I applaud.

Blinding a wine is remarkably difficult but not so difficult that 1 in 4 blinds might be deduced in a timely enough manner to signal genuine deduction. One or two times today someone will guess a wine’s small region, producer and vintage. Someone who is not me. But I’ve got ideas, and I’m huffing my glass accordingly.

It’s good that the weather is nice and that we’re in a pretty place. I feel for the new contestants and the strangeness of the days we spend in the office. Here abroad, everyone is walking around the garden of the bar with enough familiarity. The swirling, slurping, spitting, and the wine babble are at least sun soaked, and everyone is catching on.

We’re calling out guesses in a didactic order but it’s hard to make sense of what’s left of this failing wine, and what’s come to fruition doesn’t quite line up.

An early consensus is found and defeated. The tannins are soft but still gripping, there is alcohol and body, though the ripeness has soured. The fruit is dark, and not completely oxidized. It feels of its time in substance and style, that is 80s or 90s era tough-guy wine if and when ‘tough guys’ means rich guys and “Anglo” includes Bordeaux.

“Oh, it’s Bordeaux,” a scrawny wine teenager shouts, and I concur, silently, internally, in a debonaire fashion. I think: This gang of criminals has learned something yet! Surely both of us are right and everyone will enjoy the glow of our wisdom.

But no, replies our tester, “It is not Bordeaux,” and a sadness falls upon the place. Cherry blossoms fall like tears and not a selfie is snapped for what feels like minutes.

A curious thing happens now. Questions become haphazard and shots are taken from the hip. There is an urgency towards resolution borne out of the anxiety of ignorance. I like the dramatic tension, but it’s a lot for some people and it burns off quickly with leading questions and scattershot guesses.

This is a skill I neither possess nor desire to obtain. I’m half-listening, watching the blind pit bull make a path towards its owner , dodging a thousand waves of flippant affection, pitifully gaze-less, brushing a dozen or so wooly sweaters.

I hear that we’ve zeroed in on Burgundy, premier cru. The businesslike and unmussed rationalizing begins. Of course some Parkerite Pinot Noir presents as discontinuous with Bordeaux 30 years on! In our age of elegance, tannin-free Burgundy could never be mistaken for the Cru Classé. With this bottle, forged in the era of “legs” and robustness, who is to say?

Suddenly there is less fear in the group and one-by-one eager players lose interest. It’s harder to hear what’s going on as smattering conversations peel off, and the promise of the next wine having some living fruit steals our interest.

There is but one hanger-on with a deeper knowing than the rest of us, confused and skeptical. He’s a young wine professional and a fisherman. We’re often cornered on these Monday afternoons discussing gear that I pretend to know something about. In this game, he’s competitive and won’t drop the bone. So much so that our tester questions himself and peeks at the label. He surprises himself this way every so often. I see the problem. He takes a long drag of his cigarette.

“Sorry,” he says, “It is Bordeaux.

The folks have a laugh in the excitement of a revealed thing. Quickly, the moment is lost as trays of buffalo chicken wings enter the garden. I’m only saying, you should come one Monday. It’s a pleasant afternoon.

They’re talking about our parents’ era in wine, but actually just a set of prolific wine dorks from our parents’ era. When we talk about style, we engage in a pernicious and necessary synecdoche. This loud and influential crew of Wine Spectators speak clearly to a time and place not because of the style’s ubiquity, but just because of the opposite fact — the constraint of the influence to a handful of wine regions, in a very specific stretch of time. (We should recall that Parker was essentially persona non grata in Burgundy).

The vindicated fisherman says, “I knew it couldn’t have been,” for he knew.

“I felt crazy! I guess we know the next bottle that you brought will be Burgundy…”

We will taste the bottle later on. It also shows like a gutter full of dead leaves and soy sauce. If either of these wines ever instantiated a style, it was a long time ago.

Triumph of Death, Bruegel the Younger

Next we blind about a dozen Jura wines. Will this style ever die? Ten years ago, at a wineshop in Brooklyn, Trousseau and Poulsard caught dust on the shelves. We liked to crowd around the Loire Valley section, but these Jura reds were often a relative value and moreover something unpredictable. We liked that. Now, the varieties are a vocation.

The Jura drinkers’ elements of style include a brightness and transparency of fruit. The acid is cut and angular, and the body is remarkably light. This all refers to the red wines. Really, the reason for this profile is as terroir driven as it is stylistic. True, innovations in the Beaujolais inspired winemakers in all parts of the country, but the red wines of the Loire Valley, Beaujolais, Jura, Savoie… are all from climates where many noble, red varieties struggle for ripeness. Lighter varieties do well, and their vinification serves to treat and highlight this quality.

Also, you can drink a lot of light wine, so our festive Monday evenings often attract an array of specimens that don’t weigh so heavy on the palate. The lush nature of our natural wine community is culpable here, but the recent rise of the burg hounds betrays a similar proclivity.

Maybe for a lot of people, this style has taken the place of anything important happening in the natural wine sphere, but this is an opinion from someone who doesn’t get to drink as well as me.

Georgia asks if the wine is Austrian.

No.

“Is this an Italian variety?”

No, maybe? They have it there.

This goes around and around until we’re all properly confused and our tester reveals a Grüner Veltliner from Sicily and we all moan a lot. Aaron is scratching at his 5 o’clock shadow while the cigarette smoke starts to take over the little courtyard and the poorly layered drinkers find their way inside the bar for one of the more beloved rituals of industry inclusion, smoking indoors.

Here we sit in the time machine with our psychic companion adjusting the lighting for proper temperature and historical accuracy. Special occasions such as these bring out some industry names who love only smoking indoors above wine. I allow for my nasty cigar habit. I knock over a glass of water.

The names talk shit about winemakers and the industry they pretend to hate. Less a style and more a mode. Less a new chapter than a truism. There’s a group of young winemakers in the south balancing their volatile acidity with residual sugar. Everyone wants to talk about their new red under floor. Oloroso is on the tongue far more than whole-clusters and stems and the wine keeps coming and we keep talking about it.

‘Natural Wine’ has a very simple and useful definition. Natural wines are fermented spontaneously without inoculation and are finished without additions, fining or filtering. That’s it! Over the course of some years, the term has been stretched and strained, but that does not detract from its essential usefulness nor practicality.

If you work in the wine industry, you are very often asked what ‘natural wine’ means, or indeed if it means anything at all. The question is often qualified by the word, ‘exactly’, or ‘actually’, as in “But what actually is ‘natural wine’… exactly?” And it gives an air of skepticism or bemusement — a patronizing tone. Lately, the question is posed in a knee-jerk way to jiu-jitsu the conversation into a semantic direction, pejoratively.

The move works like this: if it can be shewn that ‘natural wine’ is a meaningless or ambiguous term, then it is nothing more than an empty moniker, undeserving of attention, a waste of money, or a gauche marketing term. In addition, proper concepts to ‘natural wine’ like sulphur additions, fining and filtering, herbicide, soil health, etc., ought to be ignored or are unworthy of conversation.

Semantics is actually a field of linguistics. It concerns itself with the meaning of language, or how words function to make meaning. A lot of the time, arguments are criticized for being purely semantic when the argument is only about the definition of words. Semantic arguments do not propose a synthesis of concepts nor predicates that are non-tautological. The proposition, ‘Champagne is wine that comes from the Champagne region’, is purely semantic in that it doesn’t tell you about the world, just about the word, ‘Champage’.

Two wine waiters are arguing about a white wine. Jacques says, “Orange wines like this one really have the perfect amount of structure. I wish more winemakers had this delicate touch.”

Pierre replies, “but these cannot be orange wines! This one is yellow, and that one is almost red.” This is a purely semantic argument in the bad sense. They are using two different definitions of ‘orange wine’, and were they to go down a rabbit hole about the color of wine, they would be missing the thrust of Jacques’s point, that ‘orange wines’, or ‘macerated whites’, or ‘skin-contact wines’, are better or worse based on the amount of maceration, regardless of whatever arbitrary term you use, regardless of their color.

Semantic arguments are often useful. A few years ago, wine writers were going back and forth about the definition of ‘pét nat’, with some arguing that a wine cannot be a true pét nat if the wine had been disgorged. In other words, disgorgment is not part of the definition of ‘pét nat’. The choice may be an arbitrary one, but it points to a substantive conversation, and furthermore it points to the way in which words can be useful even when the definition isn’t settled or fixed.

We’ll consider some examples below where the definition of ‘natural wine’ is either ambiguous, contradictory, or relative and yet still extremely useful.

1. Scalar predicates

The word ‘tall’ has a lot of use in English, but there’s no fixed height or length that makes something tall or not. A lady at 5’ 10’’ is pretty tall, but a man at 5’ 10’’, maybe not. It’s a relative term. Jones can be taller than Smith even if Jones is only 5’ 4’’, isn’t tall per se.

SP68 from Occhipinti in Sicily is considered a natural wine by some and not others. Still, one can easily and meaningfully say that the wine is more natural than Ruffino Chianti, but maybe less natural than a Trebbiano from Le Coste. This claim is intelligible to anyone who knows the wines on the basis of the definition of ‘natural wine’ as spontaneously fermented and made without additions. Ruffino is the least natural because the ferments are inoculated and they add all kinds of things in the cellar. Occhipinti is more natural because the ferments are spontaneous, but still less natural than Le Coste’s zero-sulphur wines. These are conversations I have every day with buyers and sellers that speak to the utility of the term not just in describing our lexicon, but the wines themselves.

2. Indeterminacy/Vagueness

Proponents of the proposition that ‘natural wine’ has lost its utility on the basis of indeterminacy argue correctly that there is no formal or juridical body to define the term or protect it from obfuscation. The AOC system tells us what is and isn’t Fleurie, like the Prädikat system tells us precisely how dense the must should be for Spätlese, but there are no rules about the quantity of So2 or use of copper sulphate in a “natural wine.”

Vineyards might have Demeter certification, but the wineries may use a lot of chemicals in the cellar. Winemakers might make wine without So2 additions, but they could be buying grapes from a nasty, industrial farm. Which ones are the “natural” wines?!

Again, the answer is simply all the ones that use zero additions and ferment spontaneously. This would be the case regardless of either legal or epistemic indeterminacy. Maybe it’s impossible to determine how many turtles hatched on the beaches of the Galapagos in the 13th century, but nevertheless there is a determinate number. Meaning works this way too; a word or phrase can mean anything that we decide. The important question is whether or not the definition is useful. Is our definition useful despite this indeterminacy?

I most often face this conjecture from older, male, in-laws or people who make a lot of money doing real jobs. The concern, I therefore presume, comes from the term’s potential unintelligibility in the market. If it’s vague which wines are the natural ones, then the market cannot pick them out and they can’t turn a profit by dint of said quality: genuinely “natural wine.”

But as we all know, this is actually a huge benefit to the market because wines that aren’t natural de re, can surely be treated as such by the market. Recall The Great Gulp Hablo controversy of 2025. The experience of drinking Gulp Hablo is remarkable in its lacking. Some wines lack fruit, others could use more acid, Gulp Hablo is absence par excellence. Grocery store wines of the past sacrificed quality of fruit for consistency in one or more of these categories: sugar, tannin, purple, vanilla… whatever. Gulp Hablo is non-intervention at its purist, allowing not even the flavor of wine to make it to bottling. The wine without qualities, except for one: color, but even color is too strong a word. The wine instead has a shade: a turbid, straw-colored cloud that mimics unfined and unfiltered stuff like Cornelissen’s macerations, Dole pineapple juice, or piss, as the case may be (though I suppose Cornelissen is filtering now). It is a decidedly industrial product that makes a lot of money looking and smelling like the genuine article, and not because it was such a great wine or excellent expression of terroir — because it purported to be a genuine “natural wine” in the sense that we define above. And it was cheap.

For the cynics, the strict definition is thus extremely useful, since it sells a product that purports to be just that, despite the cost. Good deal! However, unfortunately, this indeterminacy often cuts the other way.

3. Eliminitivism

For those of us who do and have sold a lot of “natural wine,” it’s been reasonable to take a kind of eliminitivist position. Indeterminacy allows for far too many instances of natural wine, most of which having contradictory qualities. What is worse, so many wines that taste bad. Better, many of the canonical purveyors and importers have decided, to eschew the term altogether and let wine be wine. Some are made like this, some are made like that; to categorize them on the basis of ‘natural’ or not is a waste of time, and moreover no evidence towards a wine’s quality.

I find this wrongheaded for at least two reasons. First, and again cynically, there is genuine market value connected to “natural wine.” It seems a shame to throw away all the time and energy spent building that value despite its adulteration. When the punk movement popped out Green Day or when “Abstract Expressionism” produced Jackson Pollock, it might’ve undermined the original intension of the movement, but it did not make the term useless or impractical. On the contrary, in the juxtaposition or parallax between the phony version and the real thing, meaning gets stronger and purists are driven towards the genuine article.

There’s a lot of daylight between Didier Chiffardon’s Chenin and Gulp Hablo, certainly, but wines like “From the Tank”, Foradori’s “Unlitro”, many cuvées from Meinklang, all serve to open the door for quality consumers on the basis of the definition of natural wine as spontaneously fermented, without additives, and without filtering. In other words, this phenomenon of attracting new drinkers from the periphery would not function if we were to throw away our definition or deem it totally impractical.

Trends often spread out from an epicenter, and the crest of each new wave bears a particular relationship to this center. Some are cartoonish, others preserve a certain fidelity, but always they point in the same direction. Thus, even the purists, originals, conservatives, whatever, benefit from even the more egregious aberrations of the usage.

Secondly, the gesture of abandoning the term ‘natural wine’, merely kicks the can down the road. As we see now, a number of alternative terms are popping up to fill the void imposed by elinimitivism, including, ‘real wine’, ‘zero-zero’ (zero sulphur, zero chemical treatments, I think?), ‘minimal/non-intervention wine’, ‘raw wine’, and even ‘naked wine’.

Despite all of these names being categorically worse in terms of snappiness, each of them are equally susceptible to vagueness. Moreover, the splintering is arbitrary since each name points to either the exact same set of wines that ‘natural wine’ points to, or else some arbitrary subset that exists only in the mind of the speaker. In other words, they also lack a fixed definition and so amount to something as practical as saying “really natural wine,” or “very natural wine,” which is quite obviously meaningful to anyone utilizing these newer terms. And we get it for free by using the more generic, more widely adopted term.

The exception is maybe ‘zero-zero’. ‘Zero-zero’ has a semantic transparency insofar as zero is here a name and a number and thus a precise limit. Is your sulphur usage any number beside zero? It is very easy to pick out the zero-zero wines. For this reason, we’ve seen some useful adoption of this term, but still as a qualifier for the concept of natural wine. All things being equal, ‘zero-zero’ does a better job of picking out a particular set of wines, but it fails at something ‘natural wine’ can do which is to describe not only the wines themselves but also the winemakers - particularly those who don’t always make natural wines.

4. Regulative Ideal

It makes sense for natural wine to have a hard and fast definition because the wines themselves, though living and dynamic, are fixed tokens with determinate histories and qualities. Winemakers and their respective domaines are different. Most will be responsible for tens of thousands of bottles in their careers. Is the domaine or the winemaker only a natural one (or following the principles of “natural wine”) only when they are making natural wines? What if most of the wine they make is natural? What if they only make one natural cuvée per year? The choice seems very arbitrary and forces further semantic drift.

For example, Dominique Derain spent many years making wine in St. Aubin as a pillar of the natural wine movement, as progressive as any of his peers. Some years he bottled wine with sulphur, other years he didn’t; some years bottling with sulphur as a principle, and other years refusing to use it. Some years he had one or two problematic ferments and would use sulphur in just these. This behavior is extremely typical, and probably more typical than not. To state, “as a result of this history, Derain is not a natural winemaker,” would be semantic in the pejorative sense, a pure technicality. Derain is clearly a natural winemaker to anyone who speaks the language — a paradigmatic case.

The tension is obvious and I think here is where most drinkers’ frustration lies with the term ‘natural wine’. Folks presume a loose definition of ‘natural wine’ because a lot of the archetypal winemakers in the movement make wines that don’t fit the strict definition, aren’t “zero-zero,” aren’t this or aren’t that. Otherwise, the hard definition is applied to the winemakers themselves and the result is something far too specific and useless.

To mitigate this tension, it is crucial to separate the first-order wines (the “natural wines” themselves) from the second-order philosophy that produces it (natural wine as a philosophy or procedure). The first-order wines ought to have their strict definition, but a winemaker either accepts or rejects the second-order philosophy as a regulative ideal. The regulative ideal means that the first-order definition exists as a guiding standard. It is an orientation, even when circumstances make implementation of the rule impossible or impractical. In other words, Natural winemakers are those who strive to make the natural wines. We lose the tension and are able to keep the strict definition and our intuitive understanding of who the natural winemakers are. Good conversations are thus possible about the contention of a winemaker being natural or not on the basis of his or her effort/success, not by arguing semantics.

5. Thick Concepts

To preserve meaning and practicality we should keep our beloved phrase. ‘Natural wine’ represents one of the few brights spots in a depressed industry both in terms of sentiment and in terms of market share. People are drinking less wine in general, but they are drinking better and interest in the topic is clearly growing. So why are all of our colleagues and friends so down on the movement that’s brought so many young people in? As a term, we can discuss its practicality and sense, but as a concept it is thick. It includes characters like Derain, the Gang of Four, the Puzelats, the Pfifferlings, Tschidas, Souhauts and a million others. It includes your local shop and the grumpy guy at the wine bar. Very often it associates with a flavor profile or style. The wine faults are different than the faults in conventional wine and so they become analytic in the minds of many.

It includes a lot of good things too, like joy, community, anti-corporatism, and cultural diffusion. It supports organic and regenerative agriculture as well as the clean food movement. As a cottage industry we should stop hemming and hawing and be more clear about what natural wine is and isn’t by definition — as we have discussed ad nauseam— and highlight the most positive cluster of familial semantic attributes. Both things are possible.

Who are these negative connotations really a problem for? Certainly not folks in the industry who know that an infinity of incredible, natural wine exists - most of which we’ll never get to taste. It’s a problem for our customer who is facing fear from the true believers and insincerity from the cynics. We should own this kind of funny space we’ve so deeply bought into and let the nonsense pass us by because unfortunately there isn’t an alternative. Natural wine isn’t the cheapest, it isn’t the most consistent, it is not a produce that corporate buyers or even court sommeliers of this generation are about to endorse. We sell it and promote it because it is the best (among other good reasons).

I feel for the people who don’t recognize the market any longer, or the community of people in it. Lot’s of these folks got a bad deal, but I just can’t believe that there is a solution in throwing the baby out with the bathwater and playing into the hands of a 100 billion dollar industry trying to convince the market that ‘natural wine’ doesn’t mean anything.

This year the wine fairs kicked off in Catalunya and I set myself the task of discovering Xarel·lo, a grape with an exotic name that I’d thought very little about. Actually, Xarel·lo goes by many names in both Spanish and Catalan, including Cartoixà, Cartuja, Pansa, and Pansal. Nevertheless, the strange ‘x’ and punt volat conjures a treasure from a forgotten past, so I had a look.

The letter ‘x’ represents sounds that don’t exist in Spanish, but in Catalan, it is a vestige of vulgar Latin, denoting the ‘sh’ or ‘ch’ sound. ‘X’ is a particularly meaningful letter, prominent in mathematics after Descartes decided to choose letters from the alphabet, frontwise, (a,b,c,d…) to represent constants, and backwards (z,y,x,w…) to stand for variables. It operates this way in language to take the place of common verbs as in ‘x-ing’ for ‘crossing’. It is used to indicate botanical hybrids as in Magnolia x Loebneri, or Cabernet Franc x Sauvignon Blanc. It is meaningful in describing dimenisons like the common ‘2 x 4’ for a piece of wood. It stands for a strike in baseball or a capture in chess. In its highest order, it is the letter which represents Christ for the Roman Catholics, and therefore wine for us.

The variety is a cross between two outmoded parents: Gibi and Brustiano Faux. It was bred for its utility in the trinity of Cava varieties (including Macabeo and Parellada), giving structure in its strong acidity. It is lythe, linear and sometimes metallic. It rings in your head like the metal wire fisherman put through the heads of trout to suspend rigermortis. Can you believe it?

You might also think about, ‘EXTRA’, ‘EXTREME’, ‘X-Factor’, ‘X-Files’, ‘Chemical X’, if you want…

Montserrat means jagged in Catalan. Driving up the switchbacks from Barcelona, this mountain chain looks really weird, thin and serrated, like it was formed with wet hands on a beach. Up close, it is pink, variegated and somehow living. It’s January and raining a lot so this effect is highlighted with gushing mountain streams, thirsty desert tufts of grass, and silvery puddles. The air is sharp and humid. The locals are freezing and talking through clenched teeth despite it being around 40 degrees F.

I’m about 300 meters up, in a particularly bleached and limestony part of the hills while Olga Betrián has her hands deep in her jacket, an indication that we would look upon the massive 100 ha farm, but not traverse it. Like a lot of winemakers, she apologizes for her perfectly scrutable English x my three words of Spanish, and one word of Catalan: ‘Xarel.lo’! Though I try not to pronounce it in her company.

Normally, I feel plenty dumb in France, but my ignorance here was piquant and my head felt like it was slowly filling with battery acid as I searched for words that existed nowhere in my brain — looking for the Spanish word for x and finding only a spinning pinwheel.

For almost 20 years, Olga heads up a remarkably small team of farmers and cellar hands at Castell d’Age. Their number does not exceed 10, which leaves as many or more hectares per worker — which is a lot in a way that is hard to overstate. Moreover, the farm is certified, and virile as it is manicured.

She is happy here, still at her first job as a winemaker, because the family that owns these vineyards allows her to make wine with grapes and nothing else. The cellar was as spotless as I’ve ever seen. She told me that they spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning. They use elemental sulphur, water, and nothing else.

The celler sells the vast majority of their fruit, which is a shame since more fruit should be vinified under the quiet brilliance of Olga Betrián. Most wineries that work with a tenth of the volume at Castell d’Age struggle greatly to not intervene in the cellar. And while I’ve tasted missteps and juice gone awry, offener I marvel at the consistency of Castell d’Age and its honest dedication to clean and transparent wine.

At the center of it all is our aforementioned Cava, none of which is produced outside of the Grand Reserva specifications, calling for a minimum of 30 months of aging on fine lees. Olivia Junyent is the third generation proprietor of the bodega and a veritable sister to Olga. My very deep cynicism regarding “Identity Marketing” could not belie the strong impression that a group of passionate women were running the show and that the wines were showing better for it.

Often, I am nagged by the intuition that circumstances too good to be true are just that. For years, I vassilated on my time and attention regarding Castell d’Age for just this reason. Today, I’m not sure how or why to hold onto any doubt. The production is big; maybe that is what makes natural viniculture better or more efficient? The place is run by a group of women who love each other and their work; maybe that makes the difference? Frankly, it might just be how very far away they exist from the natural wine world of Beaujolais and the Loire valley where I’ve spent most of my wine years. Regardless, this odd, functional variety of Xarel·lo was so impressive here, and it was easy to fixate on it as a way to solve the puzzle and see how they were so easily breaking all of the rules.

The difference, really, is that Olivia and Olga are not cultivating a variety for a wine that will be the grape and nothing else. They are growing one ingredient for a century old recipe. This requires a different perspective. It takes humility, foresight, a consciousness and faith in tradition, and generations of experience. With Xarel·lo, they are growing the skeleton of their cava — its scaffolding in acid and minerals. They have to grow, pick, and taste for this ingredient with the dream of the whole in mind, two or more years in the future. It is a powerful display of faith, intuition and blind love for the nature they foster. At least, it could be that?

Tasting Xarel.lo at Castell d’Age is like this: The nose is pure citrus, particularly bright lemon, or however its proper flower might smell. On the palate, the sides of your mouth are coated with a bitterness which can also read like oxidation, or deep ripeness. Surely, the acid is undeniable, but more chalky and dry than the tacky sweetness you get with even dry Riesling or Chenin. The pith reads almost like tannins, intensified by its minerality, but softened by a kind of olive brine that makes the whole thing remind you of those bits of orange zest on a plate of greasy olives. It’s hard not to consider that Cartesian grid of acid x base, sweet x dry, rough x soft. The intuition is to instantiate an instance, or find a token for a type.

It’s hard to catch either Olga or Olivia without a smile on their faces. Life seems good on these pretty hills in Catalonia. Still, Olga is usually quiet, slightly less conversant in English than her boss, so I was happy to catch her alone on this visit. We were tasting some of her new experiments and I sort of rudely peppered her with questions about anything but the wine. I asked about the golf course across the street for which she had zero interest (perhaps the secret to the Bodega’s cleanliness, stability, and beauty comes from the chemical runoff from the manicured fairways!). I asked about music and the villa, but finally, unsurprisingly, food was the subject to light her up. She admitted that she preferred more traditional, extracted reds to the trendy clairets the market was demanding. She recommended, with almost a touch of shame, restaurants heavy with a heavy focus on meat, fried food, and more traditional Catalan preparations.

Olga doesn’t make beautiful wine because she is dreaming years in the future of some gustatory innovation. She has a kind of Platonic memory informed by her life and its cultural rhythms. She lives less than an hour away from Castell d’Age, on a very enviable beach, delighting in fried anchovies and grilled pork. Her work, like so many of the winemakers I admire, is a love for a small, epicurean culture such that they represent one voice in a local harmony. Perhaps, it’s like this?

In the same way that Xarel·lo contributes structure to a balanced Cava, the wines of the Penedès are an aspect of a wider culinary ideal. And while the flavors are beautifully small, precise and local, the balance is ideal, such that any curious palate might feel at home in recognition. Constants and variables, abstractions and the ineffable, this is how we seem to discover new wines, new varieties, novel experiences.

Happily, I often have these moments of recognition with Cava, jamon, salted almonds, and flaky breads fried in fat, but to some extent, you can substitute any kind of bright, acidic bubbles with a gout de gras and summon a familiar love. Same too for charred beef with fruit-soaked tannins. So too for briny seafood and chalky white wines like Xarel·lo. Creativity in our job comes from finding a balance between these structures and their irreducible parts — how those pieces relate, and what relations matter.

J.R. and I were at the Butcher of Paris. The cat’s out of the bag now, but that was early in its illustrious life, our first time there, and it was pretty great. We chose a Pinot Noir from Ganevat and the men behind the counter introduced us to a bottle of Domaine Chevillard. It was either Altesse or Jacquère and we were about halfway through our first slab of French beef since landing. The wine was so, so good.

In the same way that certain wines can provoke your appetite, the blunt muscularity of grass-fed and finished beef really wants for a glass of wine. Its gaminess, its sourness, its spartan preparation here… all of it calls for juice. And all of it enhances those serial moments of pleasure that a surprising sip of something new can provide. A white canvas flatters its colors; when your mouth is filled with blood and fat, it is primed for fermented grape juice.

This alpine treasure was stately in its polish. Its subtlety and elegance were betrayed by the meat and potatoes such that all its masked tricks were revealed. These fleshy, moutain varieties tend to seduce rather than provoke. The lines are soft but solid, humming without vibrating. I felt very lucky to be sitting in this outdoor market steeped in perfumed tandoori, cigarettes, and suspended rain. It was a few degrees shy of room temperature, our senses were piqued and slowly warming with a full belly at around 5AM New York time.

All of that fails to mention the strange comfortablilty a glass of wine wears so close to its home. The weary, American, “Economy-Light” traveller is the most susceptible person to this phenomenon. In the throws of jet lag, I always think of William Gibson’s romantic explanation from his 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition: “That [one’s] mortal soul is leagues behind […] being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought [you] here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.” It explains so nicely the rawness of my senses in these moments, and also the supremacy of my body in its desires and discursions. Wine, conveniently, puts a label on these conscious moments and the quality of a wine increases in coordination with the length and fidelity of that sustain.

This wine was truly pallid and watery and grey. These grape varieties often give off a touch of green, but nothing like the Gatorade neon of young Chardonnay and more like a murky, blue, bog water. What’s a bog? I think it’s like a cold, British swamp, and so if you distilled that you’d have the clarity and color of this wine.

This very good restaurant subscribes to the philosophy of just kind of leaving its bottles out in plain air (this was March) so the reds are a little colder than usual and the whites are less than “frigid,” which I want to mean ‘of the fridge’. The “aromatic whites’ are properly suited to this decision and the Chevillard’s vespers inhabited our sinuses with honey, ripe mellon, white flowers and sage. Up high in my nose it was concentrated and tropical bordering on citrus. I recall throwing back the small glass and having this pretty sensation of paper whites, lilles, or goldenrod creep up, behind my eyes, and crack my skull open like an egg.

But what was holding the whole thing in suspension? How do these lower-acid varieties make up for the missing skelature? Something in the wine creates a space, transparency, latitude… a means to perceive the finest of grain. Something prevents the wine from becoming some mess of perfume soup. Something prevents it from it becoming a fruit jam. Instead, I’m recalling all of my drives up into the French Alps of Savoie, in diffuse sunlight and mist, catching mountain runoff in empty wine bottles and feeling electrically charged. The experience of distance, depth of field, guessing at which peaks had famous names.

I tasted the quenching sensation of salt. The back of my palate and beneath my tongue there was an ache like recalling a sudden, shameful memory. We can invert the famous Maya Angelou quote to say, “ The salt in your food is like the jealousy in romance.” There is a flooding of limpidity and your mouth waters and you reach for another gulp. It’s a physical reaction. Instead you pause, surprised because the spasm fades and all these delicate fruits light up your imagination, slowly changing like passing clouds.

These are, very simply, the wines I travel to meet. I spent years and years delighting in the most acidic, bracing and electric wines — the wines Andrew Jefford calls “close shaven” — austere, bright, confrontational, and undeniable. There is a poetry in the simplicity of Weiser Kunstler’s Mosel Rieslings or Thomas Popy’s lean Chablis of yore. My generations’ fixation on volatile acidity comes from this fascination with the bluntness of such a sensation and its affronting nature. I still believe there is a lot more information than we yet know how to talk about regarding acidity. When we can more deftly parse character from quantity, we will open a new world of pleasure, but I digress. Before me was a wine whose acidity took a back seat, and structure came from something deep in the soul of the wine.

“Damn good!” J.R. said, betraying his corn-fed roots. He’s taught me everything I know about wine so on these trips of discovery I like to have him along. I remember him snapping and making two Texas six-shooters with his thumb and fore-fingers when I reminded him we’d be in Savoie. Fate would have it that our journey was planned to end at a wine fair just outside of Chautagne and you might guess who would be there. Mattieu Goury would be presenting Domaine Chevillard’s 3rd vintage, and still in search of an American wine importer (that’s what I do).

J.R. was enthusiastic. I was suspicious to have a win so early on in the trip, but I liked the coincidence and I can’t really stress enough that I really liked the Butcher of Paris. So, I allowed myself to be enamored, which is always a cardinal sin.

From Paris we drove west to visit some of my friends and producers in the Loire Valley. We asked everyone about Chevillard.

“Oh, you haven’t heard of them? The wines are all over Paris.” I kept hearing myself say.

One or two people knew the name. A couple of young winemakers in Vouvray had tasted the wines. Mostly, I was very thoughtfully advised on winemakers known by my collegues and who I should look out for at the fair. I jotted down names and went back to thinking about Chevillard.

From the Loire Valley we shot south towards Bordeaux, all the way stopping in shops like the Terminator with a photo of the bottle we’d had. “Do you know this boy?” We listed to a lot of car music like Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughn, admiring the slick yet classically-styled labels on the Chevillard bottles, their remarkable value, their crossover appeal. You know, the wine sort of tasted like those effortlessly cool labels? We were very good at wine

Finally, at our tried and true caviste in a top-secret location, we met a fellow head. He knew Mattieu and had admired his work from even before the inception of the Chevillard domaine. All he had left in his shop was the single-parcel Roussette (a slightly different value proposition) and the red (Mondeuse). All of this was very fortuitous since we were bounding towards another, very exciting prospect in Cotes du Cadillac who just happened to own a winery and a regenerative cow farm. He promised steaks and we dreamed big, but not big enough. We had chased the dragon down the nights and down the days; once again we were ready to meet that surprising pairing and toast to our good taste.

The steaks at the Chateau were Flinstonian in dimension, a sight I’ve longed to see ever since. Never has the height of a côte de boeuf so rivaled its length. Pretty cool. When the bottle of Roussette impressed the admittedly conservative Bordelaise as much as it did J.R. and I, I felt a bit like Fred Flinstone himself. What a life this was! and the steak!

Our zeal was not to be abated, and after dinner we pulled the Mondeuse from the car, slightly chilled, perfect. Him or I pulled the cork loudly amongst fanfare. I won’t dramatize and say we disliked the wine or that it was in any way bad, but for the first time in a week our feet touched the Earth. I couldn’t recall it now, but the wine was either a bit too extracted, riper than I anticipated, or else just needed a little air. Whatever it was, we forged ahead with our mission unabated. All through the Aveyron, Auvergne, Beaujolais and finally Savoie we kept up our inquiry and so wanted to land this plane and take home this wine and this story.

At the fair I was in typical form: extremely nervous and embarrassed by my clunky French. J.R. is always extremely inquisitive and attentive to all the winemakers. I’m translating, which is great for my French and medium for my anxiety. I needed to taste with 10 or 11 other winemakers before I worked up the courage to speak with Guillemette, the wife and partner of Mattieu who turned red when I asked her about exporting and said that only a week before she had made a deal with another American importer. Damn! Sometimes it goes like that. Actually, most of the time it goes like that, and today I drink the wines whenever I see them and remember this very fun trip and the steaks.

I’m of two minds when I think of this trip and our Chevillard dream. I found it difficult to get excited about some other incredible producers at this fair, some of which I work with today, and some of whom I think make the most fascinating wines in France. I was blinded by the symmetry of this idea coming together, and about the cowboy and I coming home victorious. That was maybe bad.

Had the wines at the tasting held up to our superlatives? Actually, kind of, yes! But like any lineup of wines at any tasting, there were some barrel samples and kind of problem children that firstly speaks to how challenging it is to make wine, and secondly highlights how very good the successful cuvées are. Mostly, what one learns is that the taste from one glass to another isn’t purely relative, but it is relational, and as a result a wine fair is a very bad place to discover something elegant and subtle. The wines that stand out are often the opposite of that. I met some geniuses in that big, oaken Chalet whom I’d visit for years to come, but all of it was spurred on by one brilliant winemaker I had a relationship with in reverse. It’s common. "

“I would rather discover one true cause than possess the kingdom of Persia,” Democritus said. Few people today know that he was talking about salinity in wine and its ability to provide stucture where acidity is lacking. Regardless, I share his sentiment and seek with keenness the next cause hiding in a wine I like too much.

James McNeill Whistler “The wine glass”1858

I had a friend and wine buyer who liked to finish his day by pressing ‘print’ and letting the pages of the new wine list fall to the floor like leaves to the ground. Often, afterwards, we’d drink beer and talk about other stuff.

After a day of fishing with wine reps for placements, the seas needed to part between the wine-of-it-all and alcohol proper. A pint of Guiness usually served a proper filament between worlds. He started early in the day. The wine bags arrived at 9, a long and shining line that coursed throughout the day. He tasted way too quickly, often from the same glass without a rinse. He’d throw the thing back like a rip of tequila, almost careful of his tongue, and by degrees level his head with a great and spontaneous opinion fully rendered. These were really the only words we’d share about wine and, rounding up, they fell exclusively into 2 sets:

(1) {“That’s so fucking good.”}

and

(2) Nothing

I’ve seen him sail through massive tastings with hundreds of wines, all in the same tireless profluence, crossing from table to table, bobbing neck first like a toy drinking bird, daring an ounce or two of liquid to register in the maelstrom. It was kind of weird.

For me, his was a project of sentimental empiricism, more in the style of Hume than Locke. He might have poured a beer on my head if I’d proposed that to him, but more likely he’d propose one down his throat until I stopped talking. His was a stark and icy world of {good, fine, and bad (which was fine)}. He owned a great deal of knowledge about wine, producers, farming, and the business, but he held it all as far away from his taster as possible, as far away from the open, oxidizing air of conversation as his career would allow.

The acolytes of this sentimentalist friend exist on a spectrum. At the far left, I think about a buyer and friend known for carrying around an unsharpened no.2 pencil in his ear. It is an ancient style choice that predated our friendship, and one that flies boldly in the face of his buying philosophy. For him, nearly every bottle of wine (barring real industrial trash) that has made the uphill and circuitous route to the New York market can be conceptualized in 3 porous categories: {‘totally fine’, ‘super good’, ‘little funky’}. It’s a simple and elegant calculus. Wines can be one or all of these things, and their status can change throughout the course of a glass. There’s almost a Christian notion of a unity of three persons.

He proved this to me over cases and cases of the last Clos Roche Blanche vintage that our manager had holed up in the wine store’s1 basement for posterity. After particularly grueling and hungover stock shifts, he and I would pass by the mountain of Pineau D’aunis that had been in our way all day, and he’d wack it a few times with his pencil. I’d pull another bottle out. Each was totally fine, super good, and/or a little funky. He knew that good wine is a function of the people in your immediate proximity. He liked to say, pleadingly, “just drink the wine.”

To this day, he’s my favorite person to drink wine with. We never have a bad bottle because they don’t really exist. He laughs at me for chasing highfalutin, rare bottles I can’t afford, asking a question I’ve learned to ask myself periodically: “Why do you hate money?”

Buying in the style of the pencil benefits the shop or bar that wants to stock something unique or complicated — all the wines that intrepid, adventurous customers want to drink but scare other, professional wine jerks away. A salesman or small wine portfolio will always have a chance. This will also put expensive wines on a more equal playing field, which categorically disadvantages them. It is a slight disadvantage to servers and shop-workers as well who have to deal with probing wine questions. Given the current climate of conservative buying, more buyers should be like this.

Jean Francois Raffaelli, 1870-something

At the far right of the sentimentalist spectrum we have the buyers with distinguished, hyper-sensitive pallets — the kind of king-makers, deciders, who grade on the same curve as Roger Ebert or a Roman emperor at the circus.

I’ve had friends, business partners and bosses who work like this and while they are the easiest type to critizise or tease, I often admire their self-assurance and consistency, and their harranging is often just a result of one inconsistency in their judgement against a clearly defined body of work. Their judgements’ end in a binary. You’ll hear phrases like, “It’s not doing anything for me.” I had an old boss who was a French hunter from Dijon who liked to ask, “But does it make you come?” Gross!

Still and all, their selection develops a character, a higher-order concept for a group of wines. To threaten an annoying pun, these buyers have taste. And that is a rare thing. They implore us to think normatively about wine. They give us vendeurs a target or rubric. Their restaurants garner a strong identity, in just the way a chef with real taste can with his or her cuisine. The downside, again, is a kind of flippancy whereby suppliers get support and loyalty with heavy conditions — often arbitrary or silly ones. Maybe you work with Lapierre’s Cote du Py for a decade, but in a bad vintage all bets are off. We may know what the lady from the Princess and the Pea is after, but we pity what she might be missing out on in her sensitivity.

Nonetheless, strong opinions and characters are sorely lacking in our retracting industry and lists so often seem to appeal to some or another arbitrary, objective standard. I’ll take 1000 more complicated palates before I’m sold another version of “It’s like Burgundy but from x.”

Courbet “After dinner at Ornans”, 1839

So, we pass in review a mindset that privileges appreciation about description. These examples are records of intrepid searching, charactaristically curious souls as eager for novelty as they are a hint of prowess or perfection. Their judgements are present-tense, fuel the discourse, encourage critique, suggest humor, and challenge staid themes.

I had another friend and wine buyer who was allergic to these new and exciting stories. He enjoyed ordering wines made by his friends, typically in the largest format available, at the deepest price breaks, and in record quantities. Our conversations inside and outside of professional tastings were only ever to do with wine, only since wine was made meaningful by the remarkable people who made the stuff. He’d descend upon the subject like a catholic theologian, speaking within the system of natural wine, its practitioners and its dogmas. Rich in fixed premises, this mountain of a man could systematize brilliantly. All existed within the context of a particular brain trust.

In just the same way that our aforementioned, tabula rasa empiricists tried to hip themselves to something completely unknown or without a history, this friend and wine buyer accepted all the concepts and players as axiomatic, which was a royal pain-in-the-a** for a wine salesman with new and exciting discoveries to pull out of his Herschel. If we weren’t tasting something recommended or following closely the project of Thierry Puzelat or Tom Lubbe, I was going to have a hard time.

As time has progressed, I appreciate more and more this approach. For starters, premise no.1 is a very good and easy premise to take up. It goes like, “For each middleman or salesperson downstream of the winemaker, every objective should be in service of garnering maximal material advantage to that vigneron.” What else could we be after? We want success for these farmers, such that God’s green Earth is more and more fostered by the hands that love it — those dedicated to its perpetuity. In my wine importer head, I internalize this premise like I’m the capitalist wing of this terrestrial enterprise and all of my salesmanliness is absolved.

Furthermore, this outlook generalizes beyond the world of natural wine. Parkerites, Italian Modernists, Steiner schüler and the rest all beget facsimiles of buyers like this. They support a set of principles and procedures over and above this bottle or that. These are the Rationalists a la Plato, Leibnitz and Descartes. Wines are ideas, crafted after and veridically tied to an intellectual ideal. Rudolf Trossen’s Riesling is an instantiation of the Steiner model. The buyer supports Trossen insofar as he upholds these principles, and as a collective movement with a common epistemic base, they build and enrich the idea.

Here you find wine buyers who don’t even drink; They don’t need to. They’ve done the research, know who to support, and taste merely to verify. Any that’s very cool! Sometimes these buyers buy wine just from emails. Wahoo!

They are remarkably proficient in modeling one wine in comparison to another. One gold-star example had me come and taste a brand new winery with wines from the first vintage. She was so struck by a haunting similarity to another winery she knew well. These were the wines of Les Cortis made in the Bugey. Still, they recalled so clearly to her the wines of Alice and Olivier De Moor. How, I still ask myself, could she have sensed that Jeremy Decoster of Les Cortis spent 10 years working with the De Moors? What was it that I couldn’t see?

These Rationalists champion winemakers and pledge loyalty to their intellectual compatriots. In that, I salut them. The tension for me comes with a particular economic consideration regarding the market that strikes me from time to time. The question is, which buyer affords the greatest economic equinimity for all parties involved?

This equinaminity could be pursued along three paths, in respect to the final consumer, in respect to the seller, and in respect to the farmer. We’ll consider each in turn, respective of the buyers we just examined.

-Affordability

Considering the price of a bottle of wine produced in an artisinal style, and the ratio it stands in to wages in the United States or in Europe, it is very difficult to argue that any of our efforts are working in service of the final consumer. Many of my natural wine collegues, particularly those in the older generation, still understand the modus operandi to be about affordability. How I wish this were so! Everyone should be able to partake in the miracle that is our career, but sadly we have priced them out. The working-class bar in your neighborhood is not serving natural wine, or any wine made by hand, and we all know why.

There is a sense in which natural wine offers value, as opposed to affordability. There’s a lot of beautiful wine out there, and it is priced like antique furniture. Why? Because it has terroir! It is typical and thus holds a consistent value over generations. They are honest grape ferments whose character has held up to the taste of both wide-eyed explorers and conservative collectors alike for many years. The natural wine movement took up many of the artisinal prescriptions of the most prized wines of the world (and pushed further), for a fraction of the price. To the chagrin of many, these wines displayed terroir cheaply, and a wretched generation like mine was able to leave the factory farm orbit for pennies on the Burgundian dollar.

The dream is that a combination of technology, intellect and a demand for quality will revolutionize agriculture and bring down the cost of production. Government subsidies will support what is of quality and meaning, and affordability will be something we can consider more acutely as buyers. For now, we need to incessantly taste wines made on the cheap that don’t necessarily fit all of our dogmatic principles, as well as find opportunities to expand are ridiculously limited pool of drinkers.

- Commerce

One thing I really like about our industry is the fact that a young person can come to a big American city without any higher education, learn a bit about wine, and earn a middle class income as a server or sommelier. Some of these folks can make quite a decent living, in fact. The 3-tier market allows for small businesses like mine, as well as a litany of small wine-shops in New York, where there are serious laws constraining big groups from owning multiple stores.

I toot my own horn in arguing that buyers ought to make considerations for these jobs in their buying. There is no reason, in our beautifully diverse ecosystem of alcohol production, to buy from a big corporation. There are hundreds of small portfolios supporting small farmers who make excellent wine, and the supply is huge. Young, burgeoning voices at wine bars and shops make their name discovering and championing these small estates, and a litany of small economies of scale are able to function this way. Buying in such a way that we approach each wine as something worthy of consideration is a great first step, but picking the thing that supports the right people doesn’t hurt either. In this day and age, with our wealth and abundance of good wine, it’s fun and easy.

- Production

I beat a dead horse when I advocate for the farmers who make our beloved wines. How can we work to further support the people who constantly make decisions in contrast to their economic benefit in service of beauty or ecological ethics? When they choose not to use a machine to harvest, when they choose not to use chemicals that kill the soil, when they choose to buy this or that container for elevage, they take the road less traveled, and our love for their product has to afford that gap in some way or another. Of course, this comes at odds to affordability and the possibility of a bigger, more consistent production.

The answer to all of this may be a genuine cop-out, but I suggest a kind of copernican turn in our thinking about buying. If we continue to regard wine as one, fixed and objective product, we’ll keep finding these antinomies in the economics, the aesthetics, or simply our enjoyment. The best buyers I know have absorbed all of these perspectives like tools at a workbench. Sometimes you buy the wine because it’s there and you can. Sometimes it’s just so good you can’t say no. Sometimes you have to support this or that winemaker, regardless of a trying vintage. Sometimes you just like the idea of buying this or that wine.

The best buyers know when to open these bottles, under what circumstances, and for which customers. There is an infinity of variables open to any shop worker, any floor somm, or any dinner guest that can contextualize any given wine. Just drink the wine is true, but it’s beholden upon the buyer to stop prejudging what’s in front of them at the tasting or in their inbox and figure out how and where such and such a wine can produce joy. Sometimes you need to tell a story, other times you need to pair it with the right dish. Mostly, you have to believe that wine is really about people, and that whatever bottle you select is a function for intrigue, joy, or whatever else you’ve projected onto the wine you bought. We so often have it backwards.

Is it relativism? Are all wines created equal? No, all wines have the potential to stand in a relation to two or more people such that an idea is generated or pleasure is shared. Some wines can beget an experience worth years of searching, but only for a few specific people. Some wines create a quotidian delight for millions. Sometimes those are the same wines. The point I’d like to make is that the content of the bottle, the taste of the wine, its quality, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for veracity. The thumbs up judgment needs also an attitude, context, and company that makes buying wine both really easy and really hard.

The hack for me, if I may be so annoying, is to look for what is good in a wine, not what bars it from perfection. IFF you can find joy in what you’re tasting, there will never be a problem selling it.

Unknown Artist, Enlarged Spleen, 1890

The other day, I watched a young lady stomp a Lantern Fly to death.1 It was a familiar thing: gleeful, shameless, and with prejudice. It had been a terrifically sunny day in Queens, and I said to my neighbor, “Look how much this young lady wants to kill. The Lantern Fly directive has unleashed something demonic in people — a license to murder, or what?” I felt one glass of wine drunk, sardonic, and funny.

She replied, “I think people are just happy to have something to do together. It’s a common cause.”

I thought about the remarkable compliance of our society as it regards sustainability, preservation, public health and the like. We’ve recycled and cut apart those plastic, beer can rings. We’ve switched to reusable grocery bags. Styrofoam. One time, I sneezed into the crook of my elbow on the subway. A sweet-looking old lady turned to me and said, “Nice, you’re well trained…” Oh, the shame! Oh, the righteousness!

Never are these drives more super-charged than when they are factored into our own personal wellness. In college, I remember Europeans smoking cigarettes beside their children in restaurants. Today, Paris is banning smoking on the street. And moreover — Wine Wine Wine is here to report — that the legendary bottle of wine at lunchtime just isn’t as common as it used to be. It’s Bad For You! Despite all cause mortality in the West on the rise, alcohol and tobacco consumption are at an all time low. In fact, there seems to be no greater threat to the health of a reasonable Westerner. While I have no business defending the use of tobacco, I’m starting to develop a funny intuition, however criminal. As the question of wine is concerned, I think there are some facts to consider that I will now discuss AT LENGTH!

The spleen, shown in the 19th-century French anatomy atlas, Traite Complet de L’Anatomie de L’Homme.

1. Leaking

For a couple of years I lived with a fellow wine professional. Prior to that, I had small trepidations and both of us were warned against the idea for fear that our small, Ridgewood apartment might become a bacchanal for ethanol, volatile acidity, and insomnia. In fact, our home became a very peaceful solace for the two of us, and most of our wine devilishness occured “out there.” It was very comforting to have a fellow wine salesman to work out the vicissitudes of our slings and arrows. At the time, my stomach was a constant mess. I’d be in a huge amount of pain for days, followed by the severe anxiety wrought by heartburn and sleeplessness.

At the time, I attributed my condition to a study and obsession with Mosel riesling that lasted many years; first, because these low-ph wines would trigger my symptoms, and second because of the widely touted proposition that alcohol of any kind is a poison, detrimental to the proper functioning of the gut/microbiome/whatever they are lately calling it.

I recall a very pivotal day in the life of my lower dantian where Berlin, my roommate, said to me, “You know, Koreans never really get acid reflux, and we eat really acidic foods.” This seed of doubt grew into a lot of reading and changes to my diet that would ultimately cure me of my stomach issues. However, placing wine on either the nice or naughty list proves difficult when considering the confounding factors.

The positive argument for the proposition that “alcohol wreaks havoc on the gut” goes like this:

1. Alcohol denatures bacterial cells, killing “beneficial” colonies of your microbiome indiscriminately

2. Alcohol damages the lining of the stomach and esophagus by denaturing proteins that make up the joints of this lining, causing inflammation and shit in the bloodstream that shouldn’t be there.

Ultimately, alcohol seems to have a coercive effect on the living cells that it comes in contact with, so these effects are as intuitive as they are empirically verified.

Some other things with this kind of corrosive effect include vinegar, soda, fruit juices, lectins (concentrated in raw vegetables), coffee; food additives like citric acid, ascorbic acid, acetic acid and sugar — also highly processed grains like wheat. As with most things, the dose makes the poison. Were you to fill your empty stomach with pure ethanol, you would expire quickly. Do the same with vodka at 40% alcohol and you’ll experience chemical burns and ulcers. A couple of glasses of wine before a meal (10-15%), probably not so alarming.

Still, the risk of harm is non-zero and it would be reasonable to moderate your drinking — as regards your gut — were it not for the substantial benefits. I’ll just mention two very straightforward health benefits to your digestive system, but there are others. First, for reasons that remain unclear, small amounts of alcohol like we find in beer and wine (~5-15%) trigger a significant production of gastric acid in the stomach which helps your gut prepare to break down a meal.

Very often, I find that cultural habits and traditions around eating seem to confer these kinds of benefits to one’s health. Apero before a meal serves a similar purpose as acidic, vinegary appetizers (literally) at the start of a meal. For example, banchan in Korean culture confers these gastric benefits. Furthermore, banchan like kimchi, pickled vegetables, and other fermented foods are rich in the probiotic cultures that are purportedly so good for a healthy microbiome and stomach lining.

For my money, there is no product that you can buy in these United States with a more diverse and living culture than natural wine without added sulfites. If you buy fermented products in the supermarket like kimchi, sauerkraut, yogurt, kosher pickles, etc., they are all highly regulated and demand that producers use cultured communities of bacteria that can be identified and labeled (this is true of probiotic supplements as well). In short, most of the cultures on supermarket shelves are dead. Ask anyone who has ever tried to culture store-bought yogurt and they will tell you of the paucity of the yogurt after a generation or two. Try making your own kefir or sauerkraut and you will see how devoid of life even the “cleanest” grocery store products turn out to be.

Wine, happily, is not regulated in this way. Many natural wines are alive, active, and teeming with a community of microbes that your stomach has evolved to register and process. Those Mosel Rieslings I suffered2 were a lot like the litany of dead things we put in our bodies: energy in the absence of information. These foods become a solution our stomach can’t recognize, so the digestion slows and the most harmful aspects of these food rot in our stomachs and cause the havoc that is blamed on wine or alcohol. In reality, wine is excellent for the gut when wine is drunk before or during a meal (like most cultures traditionally do), and especially when the wine is natural and alive.

Spleen Painting by Jean-Luc Perrault

2. Electrons

Very many of our modern health issues are attributable to what’s called “oxidative stress.” In just the same way that an apple turns brown and breaks down, an old car begins to rust, or the way a glass of wine becomes nutty and bitter with oxidation, the living cells in our bodies malfunction, proteins fold incorrectly, and our DNA has trouble expressing itself in the presence of oxygen. Needless to say, this causes a litany of downstream disease like metabolic disorder, cardiovascular disease, and of course alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis!

No! Help!

Oxidative stress has everything to do with electrons and the balance they like to have in your cells. You’ve likely heard the term, ‘free radical’. These are the purported villains in your body with an atomic structure such that there exists a “free” electron without a pairing. Since electrons like to be in twos, free radicals leech electrons from healthy cells (oxidation), and then the cells deform and everyone gets sick and dies. Oxygen (O2) is just strange. Because of its shape, it tends to have two unpaired electrons that are electrically eager to react with other atoms in order to round out the lone pairs.

Antioxidants, the heroes, the blueberries, the superfoods… are able to mitigate this imbalance in a number of ways such that atoms are donated the missing electron (reduction) and become coherent.

Wine has alcohol, which is processed in the liver, and byproducts of this process include some free radicals. Most notoriously, Acetaldehyde, which millenial Instagram brands target for hangover supplements. Yay! However, wine is a special alcoholic beverage. Wine comes with its own mechanism for balancing out its production of free radicals. Polyphenols, like resveratrol and other ones, are famously able to neutralize these free radicals in particular, but also other, problematic, reactive oxidative species (ROS). Once again, the dose makes the poison. Too much alcohol, and the liver is overwhelmed to the extent that free radicals will outstrip whatever benefit you get from the antioxidants. Wine also contains DHM, a flavonoid which eliminates free radicals specific to alcohol digestion.

What’s even more important is the environment into which the vino is poured. If you are already experiencing a lot of oxidative stress from crappy food, poor air quality, (**parental advisory**, your cell phone, nnEMF, Wifi, prescription drugs, etc.), then you’ll have a much lower threshold for what little bit of alcohol you're trying to onboard. I have a similar intuition here as I do in regards to a bit of kimchi before a big meal. There’s probably a reason why our grandparents (and their grandparents) were better able to enjoy a bottle of wine at dinner followed by coffee and cake every night. Jobs with greater activity, more time out in the sun, less processed food, and less of all the other culprits we know are slowly breaking down our bodies' ability to manage oxidative stress likely made the consumption of wine a lot easier.

A bad hangover is a good thing because it tells you that something in this environment was wrong. For all who wonder why certain days of drinking lead to considerations of a hospital visit, while others barely have an effect, the context and environment is everything. Will your hangover be worse if you drink on an empty stomach? Yes, you’re corroding your gut. Will your hangover be worse if your body is highly acidified and your mitocondria are already at their oxidative limit? Yes, you’re adding a detoxification task to a system that is totally fried.

Be like the great Jules Chauvet and drink wine out in the sunshine, amongst friends, with some real food, away from your phones and other weird bullshit, and drink to your hearts’ content. Literally!

Hammering the Spleen by Gaston Vuillier

3. Heteroplasmy

Beyond resveratrol’s capacity as a simple, biochemical antioxidant, it is also fluorophoric, meaning its electrons absorb and emit light. Incredibly, beautifully, grapes absorb UV light from the sun (the sun we are told to avoid), which is then absorbed by resveratrol, and stored in water for our consumption and integration. Because resveratrol is fluorophoric, it emits light at a frequency that speaks to our mitochondria, regenerating confused organelles and optimizing the cells electric potential.

Wine drinkers consume a solution of sunlight and a special kind of water that is functionally much different than water that comes out of a bottle or tap. Everyone knows that water is made up of 2 Hydrogen atoms and 1 Oxygen atom. What you may have forgotten, is that Hydrogen has three naturally occurring isotopes: protium, tritium and deuterium, that refer to the number of electrons in the atom, and thus the atom’s charge and mass. So, there are at least three different kinds of water depending on the isotope of Hydrogen that’s present.

Each kind of water has a very different photoelectric effect, and functions differently inside of living cells. Just about all of the energy you consume on this planet comes as the result of a very familiar photoelectric system called Photosynthesis, where plants transform light, water, and carbon dioxide into sugar. This is a complex and elegant quantum reaction that’s by far the most efficient photoelectric system in nature or engineering, but plants aren’t the only organisms that function as a result of a quantum system of semi conductors. All living things do, and so the charge of the water inside the cell is extremely important.

In this context, we should think of photosynthesis as a kind of photoelectric charge separator. Photons hit chlorophyll and electrons become excited and bounce into a higher energy state, positively charging the chlorophyll (because it has lost an electron), and negatively charging some one or another acceptor molecule (because it gains an electron). The yield of this reaction is directly proportional to the amount of deuterium in the water just because the heavier water can’t be excited in this way.

Water with a lot of deuterium is called ‘heavy water’, because this isotope has an extra neutron in its nucleus, and so it is more massive. This leads to a number of downstream effects on the proper functioning of most living cells, but the effect is usually deleterious. At a very macro scale, crops that are watered with heavy water often yield half the produce with all other things being equal. Water with high amounts of deuterium is more massive, and thus lower energy/less excitable, and for biochemical purposes, that’s bad.

Mitochondrial respiration (including our own) is simply the reverse of this photosynthetic process, and is equally quantum coherent. Mitochondrial respiration only creates deuterium depleted water. This is the only kind of water that your cells can use for essentially the same reason as plants: deuterium is too big. Protium, or ‘structured water’3, is the water inside your mitochondria because it is small enough to fit inside the atomic channels proper to mitochondrial respiration. Deuterium gums things up and destroys the coherence of the system. Deuterium is heavy and holds onto atoms, where healthy cellular respiration wants electrons to move freely and effectively.

What’s the point?

1. Since resveratrol absorbs light at around the same spectrum that our skin does when it converts LDL Cholesterol into Vitamin D; it has a similar photoelectric effect on our mitochondria, and it is proved to enhance the function of our mitochondria’s vitamin D receptor. Thusly, we are better able to convert cholesterol to vitamin D with less direct sunlight.

2. Since the water in grapes are naturally deuterium depleted from photosynthesis (particularly in high altitudes where the groundwater is “lighter”), wine gives us an endogenous source of deuterium depleted water that gives negative charge (more free electrons), and thus more structure to our cells and proteins.

So, those beautiful alpine wines we love so much not only can help tune our bodies to better absorb the most beneficial aspects of sunlight, but also hydrate us with the water our cells need.

4. Godliness

Commonly, I say that my brothers and I were raised Italian. As the children of 3rd generation immigrants (you might say ‘fourth generation’, and stress a contradiction of terms), heritage is a sort of strange concept for us. But, since the four of us are all different colors, people love to ask, and for me this has been the simplest answer.

As a point of fact, I have a couple of Calabrian great-grandparents who very likely held a near-zero affinity for the burgeoning nation state of Italy, instead focusing on a small populace of their own, the 15th and last of whom was my grandmother, Elanora, which must have become Eleanor, who everybody called Pat because that was maybe less exotic.

All of that to say that I’m about as Catholic as I am Italian, but in just the same way that antipasti, the importance of “sauce,”4 and/or having an Uncle Leo has an outsized effect on your intuition throughout life, Catholicism has left me with direction in a moral and sensible place irregardless of whether The Creator was begotten by a Virgin Nazarene in the old country. More precisely, it has been strange to grow up in a country ruled by Ryans, McCains, Kennedys, Clintons and Grahams. This puritanical weirdness has very little to do with the Romans’ drunken Master, who literally turned himself into Italian bread and wine to prove that the universe is made of love and such. It is the infamous, Catholic lush, Gregory Hesse, who reminds us that it was the finger-wagging protestants who gave us the ‘pub’, a derivative of ‘public’, owing to the fact that drinking was to be done in public, not behind closed doors, in communion with one’s community, even if all the transubstatiative magic had surgically, Germanically, been sucked out of it.5

And if this ecclesiastic tone is too mystical and severe for your Bushwick sensibilities, I’d like to proffer only a practical reality to the Goodness of wine in the style of the great, pragmatic sage, William James, and take a look at the force of its argument. Here’s a favorite poem of Hesse’s to our point:

Heretics all, whoever you may be,
In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea,
You never shall have good words from me.
Caritas non conturbat me.

But Catholic men that live upon wine
Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine;
Wherever I travel I find it so,
Benedicamus Domino.

On childing women that are forelorn,
And men that sweat in nothing but scorn:
That is on all that ever were born,
Miserere Domine.

To my poor self on my deathbed,
And all my dear companions dead,
Because of the love that I bore them,
Dona Eis Requiem.

- Hilaire Belloc

In the words of William James himself, lecturing on Mysticism and Christianity:

“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to simulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the greater exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognise as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.”

Even our most secular pursuits seem beholden to this logic. Wine for James is a source of presence, a fixing function for our consciousness that is an end in-itself. In Psalms, liturgy, Catholic prayers and scriptural proverbs, wine stands as a literal and figurative symbol for this psychological truth, but surely other cultural flavors exist. Tell us in the comments your favorite cultural correlate to the “the great exciter of the YES function in man!”

The Power of the Spleen, 1931 Klimt

5. Wine

Finally, briefly, an acknowledgment of the most healthful aspect of wine. Many of the most pinned and prominent voices in our field will insinuate that wine is about one thing or another: terroir, or something. Wine is essentially and always about people. Not winemakers, not the committees that decide what is Bordeaux and what is Barolo, but the person you clink your glass with and bless their good health.

From Socrates to Kant, the function of wine as a lubricant for conversation has been evident and regular. It’s sad that we seem to live in shame for this fact, or at least that we’re meant to feel that way for an ethic that turns our intuition against us. If you wake up after a night of sharing bottles and feel drained and unmotivated, the problem is with your company, not your wine. Good company gives you energy, and that exchange is made more efficient and more coherent with a glass of wine. Anyone who would choose to taste a rare or lauded bottle by themselves over the company of another person has a sickness, and you should avoid them. All real wine, the wine we are so graciously blessed with in our modern reality, is good. Your company, often, is diseased. I implore you not to forsake one for the other and to open your mind to something outside of your taste for the sake of pleasant company.

Further Reading

Bellanti F, Coda ARD, Trecca MI, Lo Buglio A, Serviddio G, Vendemiale G. Redox Imbalance in Inflammation: The Interplay of Oxidative and Reductive Stress. Antioxidants (Basel). 2025 May 29;14(6):656. doi: 10.3390/antiox14060656. PMID: 40563291; PMCID: PMC12189482.

Chauvet, Jules, and Hans Ulrich Kesselring. Le Vin En Question. Jean-Paul Rocher, 1998.

Goode, Jamie. SCIENCE of WINE : From Vine to Glass. S.L., Univ Of California Press, 2021.

Kelebek, Hasim, et al. “HPLC Determination of Organic Acids, Sugars, Phenolic Compositions and Antioxidant Capacity of Orange Juice and Orange Wine Made from a Turkish Cv. Kozan.” Microchemical Journal, vol. 91, no. 2, Mar. 2009, pp. 187–192, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.microc.2008.10.008. Accessed 13 May 2020.

Kruse, Jack. Epi-Paleo Rx : The Prescription for Disease Reversal and Optimal Health. United States, Optimized Life Plc, 2013.

Planck, Max. “The Meaning and Limits of Exact Science.” Science, vol. 110, no. 2857, 1949, pp. 319–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1676004. Accessed 20 Nov. 2025.

Pollack, Gerald H. The Fourth Phase of Water : Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor. Seattle, Ebner & Sons, 2013.

Spanagel R, Siegmund S, Cowen M, Schroff KC, Schumann G, Fiserova M, Sillaber I, Wellek S, Singer M, Putzke J. The neuronal nitric oxide synthase gene is critically involved in neurobehavioral effects of alcohol. J Neurosci. 2002 Oct 1;22(19):8676-83. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.22-19-08676.2002. PMID: 12351742; PMCID: PMC6757777.

William, James. Varieties of Religious Experience. Longmans, Green & Co., 1902.

Welcome and thank you for being here. It’s been quite nice to garner this little audience. I enjoy writing about wine. Drinking it can be a very complex and emotional experience for me, so putting it all to words helps me to make sense of it and figure out what it is I really think of the thing. Next, I spit it all up to my sales representatives at inventory meetings, hopefully get money, and Bob’s your uncle!

One such Monday afternoon, I looked up during this talking ritual and gazed out the open window, fearful that the blue light from my excel spreadsheet was disrupting my mitochondrial DNA. I watched a Dorito truck drive past. I appreciate the Dorito people for hanging onto a really psychotic logo in the age of extreme Blanding. I thought, “Good for Nabisco or whomsoever! I know what it’s like to fight against the moralizing tides of nutritional optimization. We’ll see whether alcohol or whatever-the-hell a Dorito is made out of gets a government warning first.”

Besides the logo, there was a slogan that read, “Doritos, driving towards a sustainable future.”

That put a succinct end to my sympathy. It was funny to think about the flaming nacho company brand their version of the deleterious product with the same moralizing tune that we like to use selling alcohol. It was not funny to see my dinky little wine company’s ideological sales tactic writ large on the side of a megacorporation’s truck.

Still, I can name more than a few somms or professional tasters who, after a long shift, enjoy blowing their palates’ out with Dorito-like products from the Frito-lay people, or someone And the reason has very little to do with the company’s drive towards a sustainable future. I’d venture to guess that the reason is exactly the opposite — more akin to our chef friends crushing junk food on their nights off. You can like it or not, but there is an inverse relationship between moralism and pleasure. If you need to be given a reason to enjoy something you’re consuming, then something is backwards.

I have a bad, and I think common habit of being very impressed when I hear someone talking about something I don’t understand. It’s maybe a kind of reverse narcissism from ignorance where I find it incredible for someone to be versed on a subject I know nothing about. I become competitive and also enamored. I can do that. Who does this guy think he is? This guy is brilliant!, etc. It’s a lot of these thoughts followed by a lot of shame and a litany of reminders of my ignorance from past embarrassments. I call it, Catholicism.

Anyway, if I’m honest, this is the really dumb way that I first fell in love with wine: a silly trick of the mind. In a wine shop, I watched a lot of red faced bozos (my dearest friends) rattle off jargon and predicates from the top of their head like birds, completely thoughtless and without contemplation. I get really stupid when people can also sprinkle in aesthetic judgements here and there, thinking of how badly out of the know I must be, allowing shame to supercharge my ego. I can know about this alien set of information. Just give me a few premises? A list of bottles that’ll make me sound like I know something and why? Which wine do we hate? Which wine will make the wine waiter send my girlfriend a free dessert? Give me the Lou Reed wine, the Mozart, the Michael Jordan…

Tonight, I’m writing on the eve of my 5th year as a vested wine LLC. Marian is putting red poppies in bud vases for our anniversary tasting, and I have become a genuine wine bozo myself, but more long-winded. I’d be foolish to admit that there isn’t some profound joy in the intellectual aspect of wine. Its morality but also its aesthetic nature, the normative aspect of balance, trends, styles, and characters. When a wine conforms to my understanding, or when a wine completely surprises me, there is a perverse pleasure that is antithetical to the thundering consistency of the Dorito and its counterparts. In the words of Lou Reed, our love is chemical: dextrose, maltodextrin, disodium inosinate, various dyes… we love it because we can’t help it! It is the opposite of surprise. It is the meeting of your tongue and its counterpart.

Sure, some of you very cool and interesting people may deny that you like or derive pleasure from foods like this. You are very likely the same type of person who pretends not to like the Beetles or Rembrandt. You make a category mistake conflating an aesthetic judgement and pleasure.1 Of course Doritos are bad insofar as they are evil and manipulative, but this judgment is derived purely from the fact that a Dorito (or an Oreo, peach ring, or whatever such industrial food-type you allow in your life [Sancerre?]) just is whatever ‘Good’, in the sense of pleasure, must be. Were the brilliant artists who develop such flavors to discover that a touch more or less Sucralose produced more dopamine in consumers, then that would be the Dorito.

The point being that, just in this sense, Fine Wine is the anti-Dorito. It values complexity, authenticity, and novelty. Industrial foods value decadence, artifice, and addiction. “Driving towards a sustainable future” came off as such a laugh simply because it so deeply betrays the shameless, demonic, zeal of consumption über alles. Not for the sake of beauty or curiosity, but for the shortest and simplest path from package to face. There’s an elegance in the honesty of this principle, and one that is betrayed by the limiting notion of a sustainable/progressive future — a betrayal of the contract that you will treat me like the pig I am and tailor a product to that thing inside of me.

Or, I speculate, it is a lie so bold and so ludicrous that the underlying fidelity of the brands’ mean principles are psychologically reinforced. Hegel’s famous “Spirit is a bone” aphorism is relevant here. Also, the famous “pee is stored in the balls” graffiti. Some things are so untrue on their face, they speak to a stronger fidelity.

It reminds me of my very favorite corporate lie, given in every hotel bathroom across the western world. Here, every upstanding citizen of Mother Nature’s green Earth is asked to help fight Climate Change by reusing towels. Nothing to do with the cost of labor or energy to run washing machines, just ubiquitous solidarity around our utopian future.

Sadly, it really makes me want to use every towel in the room, each and every day, all against my superlative, moral character. And in this stupid and contrarian headspace, I identify with all of our staunchest haters. Natural wine is as obnoxious as all the rest of Fine Wine, but with an additional dollop of moralizing re. sustainability, anti-capitalism, labor, ecology, and whatever else we may find to wag a finger at. It doesn’t matter that our industry is genuinely interested in doing better on all of these fronts, nor to what extent that we succeed.

The problem is that doing the right thing is not something you can appeal to in order to sell a product, especially one like alcohol. No one is rewarding a salesman for not being an asshole. Exploiting labor and/or resources, lying, or cheating are all things one is expected not to do. Drawing attention to the fact that we don’t do this or that evil only draws attention to the fact that we take the low road as a viable alternative at all. It’s sort of like if that Doritos truck instead read: “Hey, we could have used an even more potent carcinogen to make it even more difficult to stop eating, but we didn’t. Can we have 5 bucks?”

Of course we buy from small, family farms that care about the earth, don’t put shit in your food, and want to make a genuinely aesthetic artifact. Why else would anyone buy wine from us? It certainly isn’t the cheapest wine in the market, nor is it consistently the most straightforwardly “good” in the sense that a Tropicana product strives to be. Natural wines, even in the broadest interpretation, don’t only come from famous/prized terroirs. Yes, it matters to our consumers that there is a moral sense behind the people who make and distribute this product, but the more we say it, the less it seems true.

What’s worse is that we also obscure the things that actually sells our wines: the positive aspects. Here, we’re free to choose from a very long list, but my favorite is sort of the obvious one. A natural wine almost always tastes better than its industrial facsimile. Yes, for various reasons it is easier to drink more of it, it has way less detriment on your health, it’ll get you drunk, on and on, but this point of quality is one we gave up on too easily and too long ago. We do so much apologizing and justifying that it’s no wonder every order of natural wine and charcuterie has slowly morphed into a martini and a Caesar salad. Yes, modern science can chemically manipulate us into a metabolic fever dream of unearthly delights, but nature has been working on that one for a few million years and the results can be pretty good?

But Steven, I just don’t like the taste! For that, Hegel has another helpful line, “Uneducated people delight in argument and fault-finding, for it is easy to find fault, but difficult to recognize the good and its inner necessity.” Children are good at deciding, “I don’t like it.” If you can’t convince yourself that it’s possible to acquire a taste for fermented fruit that hasn’t been “cleaned” for you with a cocktail of industrial chemicals, then you are maybe not interested in the kind of joy that wine offers in the first place. Yes, some wines are complicated (not only the natural ones!), and part of the enjoyment is having the modicum of knowledge that tells you when and where certain wines work or don’t. The wine you order might not be right or ready, but sometimes being wrong is better than being a fool.

Further Reading

Crane, Tim. “Wine as an Aesthetic Object.” Questions of Taste

Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1979

Pollan, Michael. “Opium, Made Easy, by Michael Pollan.” Harper’s Magazine

Piacenza was invented by an American wine importer in 2016. At the time, it was known as Emilia- Romagna and it was a place where Italians made an ancient style of pet nat from red and white grapes, both. They were sort of like Lambrusco, and came from - sort of - near Lambrusco but not really. Don’t ask him why.

The bliss began at a wine tasting in Paris, organized by T. Puzelat & family with a focus on natural wine from Italy. It was the breakout event for Valentina Passellaqua’s rainbow of sparkling wines from Puglia. The states were in the throes of Pet Nat Fever and anything that wasn’t squarely red or white, and had a bit of fizz, was basically free money for the natural wine salesman. Like, me! As Phil Sareil liked to say at the time (he really liked to say it), “clear bottles are the new terroir.”

As I’m writing, 10 years on, I’m putting together a playlist for Marian’s birthday party, which includes wine friends and not. She is sitting in the kitchen, trying to save NYC community gardens from the most loved mayor Eric Adams, and I am blasting Peter Gordon and yelling “I think the pet nat is kicking in!” This is a reference to a fun time I once had with an American Master Sommelier and winemaker who liked to drop a tab of LCD into his pet nat before serving it to friends.

Playlists are hard in the ‘post-’, ‘post-’, ‘post-’, after-modern era of streaming cloud music, especially when you don’t know 2/3rds of the guests at the party. Maybe pet nat post-punk is too spicy for the octogenarian gardeners of the “Down to Earth Garden,” East Village? Will we dance? Will we eat? Will we play parlor games? How will we drown out the squawking sound of our wine geniuses shouting “mouse!” at one another across the room?

I’m scrubbing through old playlists looking for the gems: the “good” songs. The songs that cross all the train tracks and play when cats and dogs are living together - the number one song in heaven. In that sweaty little salon in Paris, I had a little taste of heaven that I dip back into as often as I can. Including today. “Bonissima” was and is the wine. Any english speaker might surmise what that name means. It is a wine from Malvasia di Aromatica, which contains another delightfully transparent cognate. I never had more fun at subsequent wine tastings than pouring this cuvée over and over, saying, “Malvasia di Aromatica from Elisabetta Montesissa in Emilia- Romagna,” feeling like Pavaratti and Casanova in one. Try it for yourself at home.

In any case, we’ve bought “Bonissima” to the states every year since, and usually as much as we can afford. But from that day on, the dream of the place would grow and grow in my mind. A place where they thought, “Fuck it, we’ll just make all the wine sparkle,” Where they thought, “Let’s put meat and cheese inside the pasta. Where they first did Lasagna. Where salumi was a food group. Balsamico was a way to describe the flavors of all kinds of things — all a paradise of opulence and richness. You don’t like the wines? You can’t handle the wines! You don’t know how to couch a wine’s acidity in fat, or bitter tannins in umami. Put a ravioli in your pie-hole and tell me about volatility… Have you ever even been to Emilia- Romagna? I had not been. And it took me a long time to get there.

I think, vacillating, who am I to ask a roomful of strangers to listen to “Dinosaur Sex” for 9 minutes straight? Even if it is good for them. Who could really get mad about dinosaur sex? Why am I bothering people who just want to enjoy Paul McCartney like the rest of us?

One beautiful morning, I woke up and my dream of Emilia- Romagna had come true. It was on a short flight from Palermo with Frank, who I’d recently discovered spoke very little Italian. Fortunately, he did have great credit such that when my passport was eaten up by that small, delayed flight, we were able to rent a car and pull into Piacenza only 7 hours late for antipasti.

We pulled up a typically crunchy, low gear kind of road in the pitch dark, then walked on soft ground down into a cellar filled with plates of cured meat, Frizzante wine (that’s what I called it now [because that’s what it is]), and a lot of sleepy grape growers waiting to meet us, or waiting to eat dinner.

And these folks like to eat! The lunches and dinners were enormous, similar to the winemaker dinners in France, but with a medium-sized pasta dinner snuck in-between courses. Simple, transparent, typical meals. You didn’t have to think about pairing or when to open the red or the white. Hundreds of years of tradition had figured it all out. It took me years to understand that these wines had almost nothing to do with pet nat culture in Paris or the United States. Massimilliano Croci told me, “I want to put on the label: THIS IS NOT PET NAT.” These wines were part of a bigger, culinary experience, a cultural one that’s easy to admire when you’re stressing about a disparate group of New Yorkers coming together in a tiny loft to eat, drink and be merry. There are no rules here, but it’s stressful.

One of the very cool results of this tension is the necessity for a position that is often maligned or laughed at in the American wine world. The sommelier is a hugely important position in a world where all these wines are available from all these very specific cultures. For years, we fought an uphill battle selling these unique Frizzante wines as pet nat, based on a very superficial similarity. And sometimes it works and you get very interesting pairings and combinations, but life got much easier with a modicum of knowledge. Taste may be subjective, but there is a great utility in the priming one gets from a knowledgeable shop employee or a bartender who’s spent a summer abroad in a tiny corner of the wine world. The real wine heads that I admire almost always lean on the expertise of these professionals, and the people who know nothing about wine almost never do. Weird!

Jean Baudrillard is a weird, French thinker who likes to talk about a particularly American genre of representation I often like to think about. He describes the world of the “Hyper-Real” with an allusion to a non-wine fruit beverage. On planet Earth, you have a thing that grows called a raspberry, which has tastes and qualities. When companies develop a product like raspberry soda, they make some more or less superficial reference to an actual raspberry, or else the flavor of one. What Americans really like to do (says he) is develop things like, “blue raspberry soda,” which completely leaves reality to reference some essential “berry-ness” and “blue-ness,” that transcend all the possible or contingent fruits in one.

I always found this a funny idea because the concept inoculates the representation from veracity just because it ranges all the categories in total. There’s no such thing as a blue raspberry so how could the flavor be false? Yet still, these sodas often taste more "berry-like” than any raspberry on its own. ‘Blue raspberry’ provides a cartoonish, American picture of a thing, but the idea really describes the way we talk about think about wine. Baudrillard himself often took these hyperreal simulacrum as more real, or truer than other aspects of our life. Wine drinkers love to range over the entire taxonomic rank of fruit in order to describe a grape. What is more lemony than Aligoté or a better example of green apple besides a crispy Chardonnay. I even called a liquid crispy!

Did any of this mumbo jumbo play a part when the Romans decided to pair their pork with grapes from… over there? Who’s to say, but they sure have stuck with it for a long time. Does that make the pairing more correct or the wine more real? Who knows? As I sit at this party, stressing about the volume of the music slowly going down with the host’s disapproval, a young wine rep is mixing some pet nat surprise in the corner. Marian is debating wether or not to project Pee Wee Herman onto the walls. My brother is describing a video game he’s working on to a museum appraiser. The food is being plated in such a way to inform those of us with food allergies. So, all the wine tastes like whatever it tastes like, and that’s also fine.

I start talking about my recent trip to Piacenza, pouring some foamy, red Frizzante wine. I say things like, the bubbles really cut through the fattiness of the local cuisine. Polite florists nod. Fun is had by all. I implore you to make use of our rock and roll playlist if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. All things seem to go with all things, so long as you’re willing enough to blather about it.

Believe it or not, the tariffs have landed as promised and us sleepy, U.S. importers are on the hook for 20% of the value of any product that crosses the border of these United States. Maybe that number will go up or down (most notably, an existential 200% figure for wine has been floated to much chattering molars), but pay we shall. Those with eyes and ears will have noticed the subsequent hemming and hawing, guffawing, pearl clutching, and the rest of the present-perfect, timeline reactions.

A tariff is a simple tax, a kind of self-sanction meant to discourage the importation of international goods in favor of the sale and production of domestic products. In the 20th century, tariffs were levied against foreign nations as a means to bolster fledgling, American industries like coal, steel, car production, and textiles which my family produced in Queens, New York for 100 some odd years. The free trade agreement of the 1990s did away with tariffs such that American companies would have to compete in a global market, and sweaters, stereos, medicine, and even agricultural products could be made abroad for a fraction of the cost. My family and thousands like us lost their business completely, and orders of magnitude more lost their jobs for this dream of cheap stuff. And so, the neoliberal era was upon us.

At the time, this was a deeply troubling development for the Democratic champions of the working class left (including the likes of Ralph Nader, Barney Frank, and Bernie Sanders). All the good leftists were advocating for tariffs. In 2025, at its most simplistic, the motivation behind tariffs is to throw the damned thing in reverse — the global economy, that is — along with the likes of plastic straws, incandescent bulbs, and “merry Christmas” (quaaludes? rubs chin).

While the current administration attempts to CTRL-Z the last chapter in the enterprise of human, global trade, here at Wine Wine Wine, we’d like to consider this course of action with a few minor caveats, namely an exception for Natural Wine.

Criticism for the tariffs as proposed come in two major classes. First, that there are a multiplicity of goods that simply cannot be produced in the United States for categorical reasons. Think of tropical fruit or coffee, for example, but consider more importantly the “rare earth” minerals we’ve recently been reading so much about. The second class of criticisms broadly argue that fledgling industries for certain products do not exist domestically, but more importantly that the conditions for such-and-such industry to instantiate have no way of being met. Be there a lack of cheap labor, capital, resources or whatever else might be the case, industries like tool manufacturing, chip production, and textiles have almost no clear path for a return to domestic success (if there ever was such an industry).

These criticisms may be further distinguished by their left-wing or right-wing flavor, as well as their populist or neoliberal (globalist) dimension. As regards tariffs, exceptions in general may serve to answer one or another of these issues, and as a modest thought experiment from a wine drinker without an economics degree, we’ll here consider how a tariff exception for natural wine might help serve to protect American industry without imploding the free-trade economy we’ve (problematically) derived an enormous amount of value from.

Harebrained as it may seem, I’ll note that there are already a number of exceptions to the new tariffs. I scrubbed for mentions of ‘wine’ or ‘grapes’ like the desperado I’ve come to be. But I contend that as valuable as “lubricating grease” may be to our historical economy, so too may the products of a small ethical industry be.

If we are considering an exception for a category of goods, we should be able to define it. So, which are the natural wines? I’m glad you asked! As of today, we really have no legal definition for ‘natural wine’ as such. Therefore, we not only have some latitude in finding a category to range over all of the wines we want excepted, but we will have come up with a hard and fast legal definition in the meantime if we do so.

math

1.

Let’s start with a kind of right-wing, neoliberal argument from free trade, against the tariffs. The criticism is that the “retaliatory tariffs” as proposed are not calculated based on a 1-to-1 relationship with the countries that have imposed tariff on us, but rather are calculated based on a general trade disparity. In other words, you don’t have a free market if there is a tax policy that forces our partners to have a balanced dollar amount of imports and exports.

Good news for wine! This is actually a good argument for an exception on alcohol/wine in general given the fact that we both sell and buy an enormous amount of alcohol to/from the EU. This is evidenced by the fact that wine and alcohol are very often targets for tariffs and levies in both directions. The exchange of wine from France and Italy combined with the sale of whisky and bourbon has been an example of the best of the neoliberal trade order and its preservation serves an enormous number of small businesses on both sides of the ocean.

Natural Wine =df alcohol

2.

There’s a criticism from the left of the neoliberal order that a more open trading environment (the last 20 years) allows the U.S. to pressure trading partners to follow certain liberal virtues regarding wages, climate, organic agriculture and the rest. Here we find a great reason to leave the free trade of natural wine as open as possible, especially contra big industrial wineries. At a minimum, we can incentivize other countries to make wine from healthy, organically grown grapes, and without the addition of industrial yeast strains.

Natural Wine =df alcoholic fermentation of organic grapes from indigenous yeasts.

3.

There is a funny pro-tariff argument from right wing protectionists regarding the di minimus clause in the old tax law for small imports (less than $800). The new Trump tariffs will close this perceived loophole on the basis that much of the country’s illegal fentanyl was coming through this channel. The reality of this claim notwithstanding, boy is this a remarkable reason to exempt natural wine from punishing tariffs! Even the prohibitionists must admit wine makes people happy. European countries who consume more wine have a far lesser incidence of depression, addiction, and pharmaceutical abuse. So, less criminals for the protectionists, and the “pain-killing” market share is moved towards small, organic farmers: a bi-partizan win…

4.

Natural Wine =df a good, alcoholic fermentation of organic grapes from indigenous yeasts.

Speaking of huge, multinational corporations, right wing free market capitalists are in a complete panic concerning the stock hit that Nike, Apple, Amazon and others have taken since the tariff news hit, but I think you’d be hard pressed to find Americans that don’t believe some of the biggest corporate players shouldn’t lose market share to small and medium businesses. Nearly 90% of the market is owned by 10% of the population and for an abundance of reasons this is extremely dangerous. We should give small businesses of many kinds a break in this regard in order to level the playing field and rebuild a working class that was lost after NAFTA. By dint of the product itself, natural wineries are mostly small, family run businesses without an ability to scale in an industrial way. Making healthy, happy grapes that can be used in a low-intervention fermentation is extremely expensive, time consuming, and attentive. A 30 hectare estate is large in the natural wine community, and where it isn’t, a tariff exception can make it so.

In addition, the capricious nature of natural viniculture (due to climate, vintage variation, lack of supply, etc.) makes it such that importers like myself are not easily able to scale. Natural wine companies are small, on both sides of the ocean.

Natural Wine =df a good, alcoholic fermentation of organic grapes grown on small farms and fermented with indigenous yeasts.

5.

Every corner of the political spectrum has major criticism concerning the messaging behind the tariffs, in particular their inconsistency. The administration seems to vacillate between extremes of tariff rates, and then make hints that a negotiation might completely take them away. The Dow Jones fluctuated today by 600 points in both directions based on a rumor of a tweet from a FoxNews host. This inconsistency isn’t only a problem for the stock market. If the idea behind tariffs is to bolster the spending of money on domestic production, volatility makes the prospect of making a multi-decade investment extremely unattractive.

In general, exceptions will strengthen the resolve of the new tariff regime. If certain exceptions are made, the effect on the market should be categorically weaker with less players affected. In particular, natural wine is too small an industry to push the market in any direction, but more importantly the infrastructure for wine is as old as any mercantile pursuit on either side of the ocean. There are an enormous number of bars and restaurants that benefit from the importation of natural wine, and the production of grapes grown organically in Europe is at an all-time high.

Moreover and more importantly, the domestic natural wine movement has been growing here as well, and preferential treatment for imports can and should offer a boon for domestic growers. The biggest obstacle to the growth of natural wine from any country is exposure. Conventional/industrial wine is such a massive business with generations of market exposure that any tipping of the scales will help small growers compete. More cynically, if the tariff hits industrial wineries in Europe, industrial wines made in the US will become far more competitive in terms of pricing. This would help the domestic wine market as the current administration envisions, while carving out a space for the abundant and variegated wine industry that makes ours the envy of the western world.

Natural Wine =df a good, alcoholic fermentation of organic grapes grown on small farms and fermented with indigenous yeasts, without industrial additives.

6.

One of the most severe criticisms of the proposed tariff comes from a populist, anti-corporate corner who argue that the tariffs are susceptible to a capital strike from big business. It behooves big agriculture, pharma, and retailers to raise prices on consumers to make their case about the failure of the policy in a self-fulfilled prophesy. In the Nixon era, price controls were put in place to prevent gouging the price of things like milk and eggs. This could easily be done in combination with an exception for natural wine, but is probably not necessary because small margins are built into the natural wine cake as a function of competition with cheaper, industrial products that share the name, ‘wine’. Farmers, importers, distributors, and liquor license holders all run very slim margins on these products as a matter of course, but I don’t think a governmental control on such things at the border is antithetical to a common-sense notion of what makes natural wine interesting and distinct.

Natural Wine =df a good, alcoholic fermentation of organic grapes grown on small farms and fermented with indigenous yeasts, without industrial additives and sold at no greater than X% margin.

7.

Neoliberals are concerned that tariffs in general will isolate the U.S., and our traditional trading partners will find other countries in which to do trade. Fortunately, wine is a cultural pastime that ties citizens of the United States to many of our winegrowing neighbors. It is part of what it means to belong to “The West.” Support for the wine industry is support for maintaining our closest cultural allies. This is so much so the case that the similar fear of “Tariff Jumping” is equally avoided just since wine is necessarily tied to the place it comes from (Champagne must be from Champagne and all that). Very often French or South African winemakers come to the states to exploit the unique and incredible terroirs of California and the northwest, for example. Wines are not widgets, and just like a tariff on coffee cannot ameliorate the fact that coffee cannot be produced in the U.S., wine has value insofar as it comes from a certain place.

Natural Wine =df a good, alcoholic fermentation of organic grapes grown on small, local farms and fermented with indigenous yeasts, without industrial additives and sold at no greater than X% margin.

8.

Finally, and most brutal is the criticism that any and all extra resources that might be afforded by the tariffs domestically will be sucked up by the financial sector. This is the contrapositive to many of the other anti-corporate criticisms, but I take to be the most pernicious, and most emblematic of the problems in our economy. Profits will undoubtedly go to stock buybacks and dividends. Here again, we can easily argue that natural wine is too categorically small to risk such a thing.

Natural wine is an interesting category because of its antithetical nature to massive centralization and scale. We should protect these cottage industries that make room for small and medium sized businesses. Both sides of our political spectrum beat their chest and name small entrepreneurs as the heart and soul of our economy, so who knows? A man can dream.

This article is dedicated to my father, a third generation “sweater maker.” The photographs in this article are his. They come from our family’s defunct knitting mill in Ridgewood, Queens.

Further Reading

Matt Stoller’s very good article on tariffs

Fine, Kit. Semantic Relationism. Chicester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Hudson, Michael. ... And Forgive Them Their Debts : Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year. Dresden, Islet-Verlag, 2018.

Krugman, Paul R. End This Depression Now! New York Norton, 2013.

Noam Chomsky. Who Rules the World? New York, N.Y., Picador, 2017.

Yanis Varoufakis. And the Weak Suffer What They Must? : Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future. New York, Nation Books, 2016.

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

I was blessed to have a wine Christmas in Piacenza, Italy this year, where a friend and colleague gifted me an improbable treasure. The Pentagon is a treatise on agricultural philosophy as it relates to “vine and wine.” It’s a collection of thought from Rainer Zierock, former partner of the famous Elisabetta Foradori and the eponymous winery. In a series of Aphorisms, Zierock develops a kind of symbolic meta-philosophy for thinking about wines and vineyards. The five points of the pentagon are:

1. Viticulture

2. Oneology

3. Soil

4. Climate

5. Tradition/Culture

It is a very beautiful book that speaks in metaphor, with very few analytic propositions. For example, the 5 point structure comes from an observed fact that many parts of the grape plant come in fives:

The starting point for the Pentagon is the vine itself. It has so many anatomically pentagonal arrangements that it can be called a pentamerous plant.

Let us take for example:

The blossom:

Around an upper ovary with two carpels and two double Ovules there are:

Five Sepals

Five Petals

Five Stamens or Anthers, and

Five Nectaries.

Five-lobed is the leave of the vine of Vitis vinifera with:

Five principal Veins. -Zeirock, p.51

Something I find very beautiful about the wine world is its disconformity with photography and the moving image. If you’ve seen one glass of wine, you’ve seen them all and it just isn’t any fun to watch the spectacle of slurping and spitting that saturates wine T.V.

Wine is the ultimate “you had to be there” thing, so films and photographs remove something essential in their naked objectivity. Wine needs a little bit of humanity, a touch of poetry, to be properly represented. Caravaggio’s Bacchus somehow rings truer than any photograph or instagram reel I’ve seen with a glass of wine. Best of all is the ancient genre of wine writing that’s made up of an ocean of metaphors from Pliny the Elder, to Pope Paul III, Goethe, Casanova, Kingsly Amis… There is simply no second place in the devout’s history, except perhaps the ephemeral art of conversation, which is the very reason why wine is so amenable to the written word. Good wine is as conversant as any literate man, but moreover, it is a potion for making good conversation, lauded by Socrates, Napoleon, and Immanuel Kant alike.

The weirdness of its literature is a miracle unto itself. Such strange treatises on the fringes of science, art, religion, agriculture… I doubt there’s a counterfactual world with men and not wine, but for those Rablesian minds who have put pen to paper in the service of fermented grape juice, we seem to be given a pure gift.

The Pentagon is just such a strange yet potentially useful thing. Besides its very scholastic architecture, there are bits of practical wisdom about grape varieties, soil types, and even the use of sulphur! The book is a beautiful thought cloud that kind of floats above all the wine glasses of the world like the angels dancing on the head of a pin.

Can it be the case that this delightful bit of brain entropy was made solely for the extremely rare reader? Who might stumble upon this self-published issue of a few dozen? But, then, for who else?

I’m staying at the apartment of a fellow wine importer, gearing up for this round of wine fairs and it is remarkable how many textbooks and histories and surveys he has got on the subject, and moreover how there is almost zero crossover with the wine books on my shelves. I recognize some familiar spines in Camus, Le Guin, and even some funny philosophy books I’ve also kept around since college, but Vinifications & Classifications vol II? Not so much.

American Wine, Vino, History of Geology, are a unique constellation. Despite titles that suggest an objective permanence, so many wine books are nearly obsolete by the time they are published. They are better thought of as performances, or to use a very disparaging phrase, “works of art.”

While there are certainly some breakthrough classics in the canon, most of the wine folks I know tend to delight in the rarer, obscurantist texts which bear as little relation as possible to our notion of wine today, which bottles matter, and what makes a good wine great. I have a couple of prized possessions in the genre, but none more precious than a couple of tomes from the early 50’s that recount the inauguration of the Luxembourgish wine festival.

I was 22 years old when I first got to visit Europe. I had finished my undergraduate degree in New York, where I was born, and was desperate to find myself anywhere else. A liberal arts program at a fancy university in Manhattan had revealed to me a lot about myself. I was extremely unexperienced and naive next to an army of intelligent, cultured, and boarding school educated young people. It was a very lonely and isolating time that I knew might only be remedied by some radicle change in my perspective. It’s both painful and exhilarating to be the most ignorant person you know, but I sort of became addicted to it and jumped at a really funny opportunity to live in a place I couldn’t find on a map.

Luxembourg was a trip. I got off the plane and tried to find my way to the hotel, speaking my college-level German. Nope, wrong language. They spoke Luxembourgish here. Ever heard of it? Or sometimes French, but rarely German (though they all could. Most of the Luxembougers I know are conversant in all three languages, and also English.). I knew absolutely nothing, and that was an immediate heaven.

My first weekend as a Luxembourgish resident coincided with the annual wine festival. Would that it had been a conference on finance, or some kind of wellness retreat, but no. My personal trip to the European, outer-limits of delight would, of course, take the form of a bacchanal: a mainline of European wine culture at its most piquant and bizarre. It was affecting and I remain intrigued.

I took a bus to a tiny village called Schwebsingen where the fountain at the center of town was drained, covered with ice and stuck with hundreds of bottles of cremant, riesling, and local beers. One was given a glass (it was a rental) and a poker chip to reclaim your deposit for said rental. Why the glass did not suffice as collateral is maybe the first piece of European bureaucratic redundancy I enjoyed. How much could be made collecting abandoned glassware and returning for 5 or 6 euros a pop?

Bottles were sold whole. Glasses were to be shared post-transaction. Flutes clinking the empty rims of clutched, little tasting glasses and the muffled sound of one cork after another was the only noise over the polite hum of a very happy group, speaking an ancient-sounding language I’d heard for the first time maybe 72 hours prior. No music! Just a lot of these beautiful noises and the sing-song cadences of the reddening Burgers.

So many strange scenes would follow that weekend like a fitful night of dreaming. Soon after I arrived, the square filled into a school gymnasium (where I would discover the German/Luxembourg word for High School: ‘Gymnasium’!) A panel of competing, teenage wine queens dressed in glimmering, Lynchian ball-gowns made speeches into microphones which would feed back in their ungodly, fish-bowl-sized wine glasses.

Drunk men in tuxedos grabbed each other tight and danced a kind of sped-up Tarantella. Wine “knights” and elaborately costumed vino-dignitaries from nearby regions paraded around behind coats of arms, carrying bottles of wine and also local wine queens. Adult men and women of means I’ll never know would sleep outside on the hillside vineyards if they weren’t burning the morning hours at the secret 4am spaghetti party championed by said queens.

There is a joy to experiencing novelty, but also a pain in ignorance, or a nausea of uncanniness. I’m very often reminded of a line in We from Soviet dissident Yevgeny Zamyatin,

Ouch! Still, the point is clear: It is the recursive nature of our lives that makes experience comfortable, predictable, and ultimately intelligible. Our language, our science, our objective reality relies on the recursive essence of our concepts and words. A tree is something wild to behold the first time, and almost nothing to behold the 3,000th time. A scale on the piano is a motor-intellectual feat until it is second nature to the player and happens in an empty way, without a will.

I think the very interesting question we all grapple with at night when we go to sleep, or when we wake up in some totally foreign place, or read some completely life altering novel, is how real or unreal that second nature may be. Is nature itself recursive or is the world constantly something novel that we fit into our comfortable frame.

I know a vigneron who likes to say, following Goethe, “Plants take light and water and make shapes.” A non-recursive picture of nature takes this truth to be a semantic one about a very human concept of ‘plant’, such that if we’re talking about ‘plants’, we just mean those things that make shapes out of light and water.

A 100-year-old grape vine or a 1,000 year old oak tree has been known by an infinity of such names. They’ve been spiritual objects of religious rites, Vitalist mechanisms of biology, Materialist tinder, electromagnetic ground, and everything in-between. Everything and nothing. Maybe nature is like this, like our dreams, where your wife’s head is really a pumpkin but also a jar of hot sauce, but also a poem your aunt wrote and you are your aunt but it’s all happening at Geothe’s house in Penn Station… on and on. In our dreams we can accept all of this. In the morning the patterns are imposed: Coincident (“I swam through that ocean of spaghetti because I was thinking about the secret spaghetti party earlier”), Psychological (“I drove my golf cart into the bubblebath because I felt guilty for…”), Astrological (“Saturn made me do it.”), Sexual (“Whoops, I kissed grandma on the lips again.”), and the like. Stories that make recursive a nature that simply is not.

All the more funny to spill all this ink for something as novel and ephemeral as a glass of wine. Any amateur knows how even one glass of wine to the next, from the same bottle, can make for a remarkably different story. 95 points! we say. 50,000 words on a patch of dirt from the Jura Alpine orogenic wedge! What is the nature of these objects? These stories?

Under the David Bowie interpretation, it all makes for great Martian television. Maybe, up in the clouds, haloed angels in white robes play the harp and read Steiner in a harvest of terrestrial life the way we enjoy the sweet harvest of vegetable life? That’s a romantic notion, but the AI lunatics in my life seem to be making that picture into a concrete reality. These minds, orders of magnitude stronger than ours, can read the world history of wine writing 100 times before I finish typing this word. They might wait 1 million lifetimes between Andrew Jefford typing the word ‘Syrah’ and ‘is’! Now, that’s cool.

But more than cool, it’s a load off! Someone else can figure out the point of all this word soup. Meanwhile, we can enjoy the bizarre novelty that is a story about this or that glass of wine as everything and nothing — a thing we just do. The stranger the better.

Further Reading

Albu, E. (2018). Pliny the Elder, Natural History. In Amsterdam University Press eBooks (pp. 43–48). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781942401223-008

Allhoff, F. (2009). Wine and philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking. John Wiley & Sons.

Amis, K. (2010). Everyday drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Campanale, J., & Stein, J. D. (2022). Vino: The Essential Guide to Real Italian Wine. Clarkson Potter.

De Seingalt Seingalt, J. C. (2018). The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt 1725-1798 Volume 1 Venetian Years. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform.

Lancerio, S., Ferraro, G., & Pallottini, M. (2024). The Wines of Italy judged by Pope Paul III (Farnese) and by his cellarer Sante Lancerio: On the Nature of Wines and the Travels of Paul III. Independently Published.

O’Hara, K. D. (2018). A brief history of Geology. Cambridge University Press.

Pollman, M. (1998). Bottled wisdom: Over 1,000 Spirited Quotations & Anecdotes. Wildstone Media.

Robinson, J., & Murphy, L. (2013). American wine: The Ultimate Companion to the Wines and Wineries of the United States.

Von Goethe, J. W. (1978). Readings in Goethean Science. Biodynamic Farming & Gardening Association.

Every monday at the offices of Steven Graf LLC., I live out my fantasy life as adjunct professor at a small but eagar community college. I wear busted, leather derbies and host "Office Hours" for fledgling somms, shop workers, reps and importers. Here we blind taste wines from far-flung places and well-trodden terroirs alike. It's a round-robin, 20-questions hybrid where the imbibing cadre guesses one after another:

"Is this Pinot Noir?"

"Is this from a hot climate?"

"Is the winemaker in the room with us right now?"

"Steven, where did you get that smart-looking blazer?"

Nearly always, the first question is this one: "Is the wine French?"

When the blinder says, "No," There is usually a collective groan, cries of "Oh God!"

What they are bemoaning is a guessing game outside of the prim and polished AOC system of France where grapes like Harslevelu, Pignoletto, and Delaware exist; In the terroirs of Liguria or the German Ahr. As a Francophone in my own right, I feel a sympathy for my beleaguered tipplers. Thus, apropos of nothing, I present to you a Francophone Guide to Italy. May it serve you where your bearings are low, where your taster is wanting, and where the price of pleasure is a soupçon of knowledge.

I. Grapes

What with our uniquely American fixation on race, it might be news to you that the overwhelming majority of wine grapes (red, white, and otherwise) are all from one species of vine: vitis vinifera. It has become a custom here in the new world to categorize wines by the grapes that make them, so let's start with some Italian wines made from french varieties. They come in basically two categories: The first are historical plantings from northern areas that hosted french merchants who sold seeds and clippings of varieties like Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Pinot Gris (griggio), and Pinot Blanc. Like squirrels hiding nuts for the winter, many of these forgotten interlopers have taken root in the identity of these northern regions.

The other case is a more modern version of cultural diffusion most epitomized by the "Super-Tuscan" revolution of the 80s and 90s. These are international varieties (see, French), looking to appeal to the American palate under the influence of the "Wine Spectator" years.

Wine 1.1

Elizabetta Montesissa's plots of Syrah are new plantings of a variety that has grown and thrived in the young soils of Emilia Romagna since before Betta, her father, or grandfather can remember. The vines are rooted in a pleistocene-era beach, which today is covered with 3 and 4 million-year-old oyster shells. As soil goes, 3 or 4 million years is quite young, turns out. For instance, all the surrounding bedrock is over 300 million years old.

The wine is Rio Fratta, 100% Syrah from limstone soils, pressed, fermented and left completely alone to be what its phenotype wants it to be. The result is a wine that even the most craven Syrah freaks will experience with a sense of shock and revelation at this rustic and baudy interpretation. Unlike her neighbors/cousins in the northern Rhône, Rio Fratta does something a lot of Italian wines can do with these indigenously French varieties. It is unabashedly varietal. High notes strike the back of the eyes with eucalyptus, pine, tomato water, and blood. The bass is bacon, smoke, mushrooms, baked apples, stewed blueberries, and old books. There is a managery of Syrah-stuff in-between, for to which the bold may stare into the soul of a thing that, too often, is treated with kid gloves.

(Pretty cool? I'm biased as I sell these wines for a living. Don't trust me? Try "Rio Stoppa" from the same region, from a blend of french varieties, of which much of all of these ideas apply.)

Wine 1.2

"I CLIVI" Cabernet Franc

In a sense, this Cabernet Franc from Venice performs a similar task. Where the cabs of Chinon and Bourgieul can be as green, stony and angular as the great chateaus of the middle centuries, this wine tastes like, ahem, fruit. It's important to remember that these French varieties in Italy are growing in a climate thousands of miles south of their native homes, so ripeness is much easier here and that heat is often felt in the fruit of the wine.

Here I'm sort of reminded of the difference between some new wave coffee and "coffee coffee." In some new wave and natural productions, producers will let coffee beans ferment with some or all of the beans’ fruit still in place. Coffee coffee, as I'm told they say in the biz, removes all the fruit before fermenting and roasting. The bones are the same, the phenolic structure is all there, but the extra fruit in new wave coffee gives a bright and juicy dynamic to the experience that I think is relevant to this very modern, drinkable style of Cabernet. This extra bit of juice generalizes over many such cases, particularly so in the natural wine world. Hard to find an easier pleasure than a bottle like this.

Wine 1.3

Tunia "Cantomoro" Cab Sauvignon

I don't pretend to know too much about Super Tuscans despite my subjection to countless bottles of arbitrary Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot from Italy, sitting around bowls of Ragu with brothers and cousins on Long Island (not a bad pairing!). Most of those tasted like cheap Montepulciano and nothing. You can find these bottles anywhere. They are heavy, have regal Italian names, and display their French varieties prominently on the front label.

But! And this will be the last one, we work with an amazing pair of friends in Arezzo, Chianti, who make a very beautiful Cabernet that drives both of our aforementioned points home. The phenolic character of the Cabernet is at its most profound and dense. The fruit springs from the glass and buzzes on the palate like a confection. For this reason, Tunia and many other winemakers in Italy hold their wines back for many years in order for these bombastic flavors to integrate. After 10 years, mostly in a very large barrel for micro-oxygenation, the sharp tannins are saturated with flavor and the fruit has stewed and rasinated like a fine amaro. The energy comes from the structure and autumnal cornucopia.

2. Place

Some winemakers are real terroir-heads and make a lot of tiny differences in soil composition, exposition, the way the wind is trapped by this or that hill, etc. Others are less convinced. I recall a very prominent, natural wine legend on the Mosel feeling kind of disappointed that his riesling from the flat vineyards was more or less the same quality as the riesling from the steepest, more dramatic slopes. But lucky you, intrepid francophone, who can taste the dirt rainbow yourself and decide.

The next wines are all from terroirs that bear some significant similarity to some other famous terroirs in France. A lot of these wines are also made with French grapes, which is obviously no mistake, but I tried to pick wines that very transparently show you their provenance -- some aspect of the soil or whatever.

Wine 2.1

Stefano Amerighi 2020 Syrah

This fantastic Syrah from Cortona bears little resemblance to the Syrah from Elisabetta Montesissa or the haphazard vineyards elsewhere in Tuscany. Unlike the majority of those plantings, which are from very young soil of the ancient seabed, the silk, clay and humus here are a few hundred million years older, and (more importantly) remarkably similar to the soils you find in the Rhône where Syrah is king.

Stefano's Syrah is remarkably elegant and Modern in style. It does not share the rusticity of its Italian counterparts, nor the phenolic digressions. Here, black olives shine with some bright blueberry fruit a blinder might easily mistake for Cornas or St. Joseph. It is an international wine made with the subtlety and intellect that has beguiled collectors of Syrah in the Northern Rhône for generations, but with a natural technique rooted in biodynamics and radical non-interventionism. It makes for one of the more friendly and pleasing wines in recent memory.

Wine 2.2

Davide Xodo TAI ROSSO 2023
This wine is made in the Vicenza region of the Veneto, which is one of the most important wine regions in Italy, producing everything from Prosecco to Amarone. Yes, it is a region that shares a lot of wine grapes with France, but it is also a facsimile for many different microclimates in France. Lot's of Northern Italy is covered in mountains, but Vicenza is basically flat, with a few hills and so it is protected from rain by the Alps. It is thus a very dry region rich in limestone, and baked in sun.

I'm reminded of a few different, lesser celebrated places in France with poor soils and dry climates, like parts of Anjou and Saumur, Bugey, or the Macon. Mostly you see these decomposed sedimentary soils and limestone in flat parts of Languedoc between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean Sea. But in all of these places, you see a penchant for semi-carbonic wines with lots of amazing primary fruit. Tai Rosso is a local name for grenache which, in this wine, gives bright strawberry at the outset, but finishes with salt and minerals proper to this natural and easy-going style. It would delight in any Parisien wine bar.

Wine 2.3

Pavese e Figli 2020 Blanc de Morgex et de Salle

Valle d'Aosta is a wine region squarely in the Italian Alps and this stunningly crisp yet complex wine comes from some of the very highest vineyards in Europe. Depending on where you are on the mountainside, you can have more or less sand, and more or less limestone. This cuvée comes from very poor soil with nearly no topsoil, and thus the wine is very subtle in terms of fruit or acidity, while all its structure and charm come from a stony mineral character, and the memory of a very cold and crisp place.

For those, like me, who are enchanted by the low acid, yet brilliantly gleaming wines of the Savoie and Haut-Savoie, these vineyards are the Italian version. The grape, Prié blanc, contributes the slightest bit of fattiness to an austere pleasure of cold, mountain springwater. It is elegant, subtle and as beautiful as the place where it was made.

3. Culture

Finally, in discovering wines from a new part of the world, there is not always a one-to-one comparison to place or variety so you have to look to fashion, style, or cultural resonance, in that order of importance. There are a number of very superficial fashions in wine that pop up in France and Italy and elsewhere. If you see a self-described Pet Nat in Italy (not Frizzante!), you can be sure that you're in for a wine styled after Mosse's Mossamousettes or something like it. The aforementioned Super-Tuscan style has become remarkably popular among the American Collector class, as has the Barolo from French Barrique. These are styles of winemaking that reflect a generational or critical period, and may point to more than fashion but are less meaningful than cultural or philosophically aligned wines that share an intellectual approach to winemaking that is born out of tradition and reason. Perhaps the great Spumante of Italy and Champagne bear this kind of resemblance. They are deep and meaningful cultural methods that are shared across borders. These are the most interesting comparisons to focus on.

Wine 3.1

Pietracupa 2021 Fiano

As an imbiber raised in what I like to call the “Chenin Generation,” this bottle of Fiano cracked open a whole new world of Italian wine for me outside of macerations and bubbles. This is a reductive, white wine. Crisp, clean, and racing with acidity. Very similar to a Loire Valley Chenin, deep and wooly.

More and more, white wine of this style seems to be the standard-bearer for wine folks in the know, particularly those who are allergic to "orange wine" in all its guises. This wine is as elegant and crystalline as anything in France. As southern climates are concerned, Fiano is maybe an n of 1, and no better represented than this small, 3 hectare estate.

Wine 3.2

Cantina Margo 2022 Rosato

For the natties out here, we have a beautiful example of a wine culture dedicated to easy, simple, nonchalance. We are in the land-locked region of Umbria, where Sangiovese can be rustic and tannic, but in the hands of Carlo Tamborini, is a pink ray of delight. A short carbonic maceration brings out a color of light watermelon juice. Think Tavel, or the chilled reds of the Jura.

This wine isn't just a simple carbonic ferment either. Its minerality is remarkably complex, structuring the character of this noble variety in a way that sings on the pallet. This is natural wine of yore, at its very best and happiest.

Wine 3.3

Cascina Pugnane Barolo Bussia 2018

In truth, you may choose from any number of Barolo or Barbaresco producers here: Roagna, Fabeo Gea, Produttori, Sandri... the fact is that the idea of Barolo as your parents know it, is a modern invention. A few hundred years ago, these Piedmontese vineyards were making sparkling wines and macerations like everyone else in this region. And while the French Barrique of the Barolo boys may be a bit of Winespectator fashion, the botti style of still Nebbiolo is here to stay and thank goodness. For all the burgundy hounds out there, Piedmont offers another dimension of a very familiar thing. Transparency, grace, structure, fruit, and, most of all, typicity. Lifetimes are spent comparing vintages and vineyards in a more than worthy pursuit of analytical deftness and wines of true terroir.

So, while we've only given a slight gloss of a few wonderful wines to get you started, I hope you can use this as a little guide to start looking at the wines of Italy though a new lens, taking what you know from the didactic AOC system of France, and maybe using some of that knowledge to find new and life-changing wines in a place that's just a big less relegated to conceptual boxes.

The sun is always soft and diffuse in the massive valley between the Alps and the Apennine mountains, hazy with the smell of burning wood and oil, colors in the atmosphere smashed and dilute. A sprightly and loud glass of Frizzante Trebbiano surprised me with the way it cut through the cold afternoon, 500 or so meters up, a touch above the heavy smog of Milan.

We’re on the hill of Denavolo, between two tributaries of the Po river, in a very quiet and remote house, listening to bubbles pop in elegant glassware, stumbling over 3 languages badly, and visiting old friends. We clink our glasses about one minute into the door because wine people like to get right to it. Giulio flicks the corner of his glass again to bring our attention to the pleasant sound, smiling warmly.

“Zalto?” he says, “bong,” frowning demonstrably. The wine talk has begun, and I recognize the wine in my glass as Tunia’s, a winery we work with and the winery of Giulio’s “copine.”

Shamefully, it is a wine I wouldn’t have dared pour into such a wide and transparent stem, worried that its essential playfulness would be obscured by its overwhelming breadth and complexity. It bears no resemblance to Champagne or pet nat or Spumante or Prosecco, and the mystery of its specific life admittedly scares the salesman in me.

But that was a beautiful glass of wine, in a stunning home, in a remarkable place, where this mountain of a man fit like any craggy exposition of these uniquely calcarious hills.

Natural wine doesn’t make the notion of terroir meaningless, but lining up a wine with a place is no longer so simple, and maybe the notion that one could was only ever a Modern myth. That Chave means Syrah from the Northern Rhône or that Tempier means the pebbled soils of Bandol might be the Lynchian dream of a visionary salesman, or the poetic license of a capitalist describing what a wine means “for me”, is relativized by interlopers in formal appellations, ontological rebels, mavericks, traditionalists, dogmatists, or all of the above.

As goes the idea that a wine just is its terroir (or else refers to its sense of place), the rubber often fails to hit the road. Still, it’s hard to discount the confounding factors as totally and only the aberrations of natural winemaking.

We were tasting bottles from Giulio’s cellar in a very didactic way for people who shared 1/3 of a language between them. Onomatopoeia was heavily employed. We drank some good wines, and some less good wines. Only one bottle came from the Denavolo domaine, and zero bottles from La Stoppa.

Tasting and comparing, a few principles seemed to appear as regards Giulio’s philosophy:

1. Wine needs a significant amount of age to reach its quality potential (5 years at a minimum).

2. Any addition of sulphur inhibits a wine’s ability to age.

3. White wine cannot age without some maceration

The north wall of the apartment is made up of two huge windows that look out on the valley, but captures most dramatically an enormous amount of sky. Blue and silver warmed as the sun crowned around the mountains and I noticed a large window on the perpendicular wall that framed the spectrum of daylight from 15 or 20 minutes prior with perfect contrast to the sky in the north wall in front of us.

I thought about the Russian blues, goluboy and siniy, light blue and dark blue. In 2007, John Hopkins ran a famous study that showed that Russian speakers were far better at deciphering between these two shades of blue than non-Russian speakers who only had a general word/concept for “blue” qualified by light and dark. The study gave credence to the broader theory of linguistic relativity: the idea that the language we speak can influence the world around us or even the way we perceive the world.

Words do seem to precede the world in funny ways. Earlier in the trip, in the nearby Palazzo Farnese, we saw an odd replica of a storied wine cup cherished by Pope Paul III Farnese. The real thing had been lost, but the curators decided they’d have a crack at making it as it probably looked. Why not? An historical fiction.

At the time it recalled scenes from my favorite work of historical fiction, the culty Wolf Hall trilogy. That day, for some arbitrary reason, I could not summon the name of the main character while chatting with the other courtiers. One of them was familiar with the books, but similarly spot-blind for the name. We named other central characters of the novels and waited with a kind of serene pleasure for the memory to slowly float back into our minds, the first letter, the initials, and then the whole thing. Where had the name gone? Where was it waiting? How had it been summoned?

We’d been silent for a few sips of something really beautiful when the sun sank completely behind the ridge-line and Giulio says, “Now it will all turn red,” which it did. We talked about the word for ‘sunset’ in different languages. I always loved the German abendrot or evening red. It seems to imply the existence of a morning red as well, which feels intuitively veridical, like the Russian blues, but betrays the semantic value of the word ‘red’, which has very little value otherwise.

In Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on agriculture, he asserts that any and all of the red things in nature are under the cosmic influence of the planet Mars (marzrot), from the tomato to the beating heart, or even that fancy gamay clone with red skin and white flesh. He says

“Just take a look at the green leaves of a plant. In their shape, their thickness, their green color, a plant’s leaves are the carriers of the earthly factor. However, they would not be green if the cosmic force of the Sun were not living in them too. And when you get to the colored blossoms, it is not only the cosmic power of the Sun that is active there, but also the support that the cosmic Sun-forces receive from distant planets — Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. For instance, if we look at a rose, we see the forces of Mars in its red color. Next, look at a yellow sunflower. It is not quite right to call it a “sunflower” — we give it that name only because of its shape. It ought to actually be called a “jupiterflower” on account of its yellow color, because the Jupiter-forces supporting the sun are white bring out the white and yellow colors in the flower.”

Can you believe it? It’s easy to see the green of a plant as evidence of the sun’s radiance, less clear how the red of a rose is relevant to Mars, but the idea of the jupiterflower is a nice one.

A few days after my visit with Giulio, I had another funny encounter with a great artistic replica. Outside of the Uffizi galleries, the would-be statue of Michelangelo’s David was baking in some afternoon red. It recalled some very kooky lectures from firebrand and genuine madman Jack Kruse (an admirer of Steiner), who had an epiphany in front of the real statue of David that would lead to his mitochondria focused theory of metabolism and medicine whereby our exposure to the sun’s radiation is the most consequential aspect of our health and wellbeing. (I have purchased and wear blue light blocking glasses in a Pascal-type wager.)

What puzzled me about this David was his statue and great beefiness. Who was this muscular freak with enormous hands and bulging eyes? Isn’t David meant to be the wimp who beats the odds to kill the giant? Whose the giant anyway?

Then, in my mind’s eye I imagined what Goliath must have looked like in Michalangelo’s world. He got a lot of sun. I saw him like an ancient and terrible ghost towering above the city, dwarfing the statue of David. I like thinking that I shared that invisible thought with some renaissance-era cool guy, high on orange wine.

Significance so often takes this circuitous path. Homer Simpson, the David of my time and culture, is beloved not for his oafishness and stupidity. We love him because Marge loves him and because Marge is the easiest character to love.

Ghosts of prejudice abound and color our experience for better or worse. And because wine is a bit of a psycho-active thing, set and setting can almost always overdetermine what you, or I, or the DOCG might hold to be true. My Christmas punishment was to stray from my Italian wine study (in Italy) to indulge in a bottle of 2021 Thibaud Boudignon Savennières beside a plate of Coppa and ultra fatty Salame. What a crime!

My last night, at Cafe Brunello, I asked a confused somm for a Brunello with age that was also “maybe…slightly…more natural?” in some sense? I’m sorry?” Poor guy.

“Well, that is difficult because natural wine is more of a new thing, so it makes it difficult to know about the old wines.”

Tell that to Massimiliano Croci who tells me that macerations and naturally sparkling wines were made in Piacenza probably since the Romans or earlier. It was just a part of the place, the cuisine. His partner, my dear friend Elisabetta Montesissa, is also one of our winemakers and the Marge to many more impressive Homers. She likes to open special bottles together and braid hearts of bread from wheat she grows to welcome you home. Pretty good.

Massimiliano and I, in a different but similar style of language difficulty, were tasting besides maps and rocks. He thinks nobody outside of these traditional regions need bother with macerations, worrisome of trends uncoupling wine from its great and beautiful tradition. He isn’t afraid of sulphur when needed, though he does agree that age is important in wine.

Betta, the wisest of all, says the point of wine is to finish the bottle, for joy, for pleasure. I think of grapevines evolving to climb trees to delight birds who expend all those calories chatting and singing away, without grammar or meaning. Betta’s remark seemed to recall something in Massimiliano. He says, in a funny voice, “wine philosophers…”and like a cartoon starts to swirl his glass, hold the wine to the light, sniff emphatically, furrowed brow, stroking his chin saying, “hm, hm, yes, hm,” while we laughed a lot.

Further Reading

Baker, J. A. The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer and Diaries. HarperCollins UK, 2011.

Kruse, Jack. Epi-Paleo Rx: The Prescription for Disease Reversal and Optimal Health. 2013.

Lancerio, Sante, et al. The Wines of Italy Judged by Pope Paul III (Farnese) and by His Cellarer Sante Lancerio: On the Nature of Wines and the Travels of Paul III. Independently Published, 2024.

Steiner, Rudolf, and Catherine E. Creeger. Agriculture. SteinerBooks, 1993.

This week, a couple of interesting pieces of news stoked a wine fire in my belly. First and foremost is the news of the FTC lawsuit against Southern Glaziers. It is an anti-trust case of sorts meant to rebuke big, corporate distributors from offering preferential pricing to giant, corporate retailers. You can read very good summaries here. It was wild to hear that half of the wine sales in the US are coming just from Southern.

In New York, we have some pretty strong laws surrounding liquor licenses. For instance, on-premise and off-premise liquor licenses are mutually exclusive such that wine shops are barred from selling any glasses of wine, and bars and restaurants cannot sell you a bottle to open at home. There are pros and cons to the structure, but in conjunction with a strict law allowing just and only one off-premise license per person, our state definitely has the most interesting and diverse range of wine shops in the country.

It keeps things small and very personal. The difference between Chambers Street and Henry’s speaks to size, locality, and the personal service of small communities. Coupled with a more and more widespread value placed on small production wineries, this makes for really unique shopping experiences, and very annoying excursions for our non-affiliated lovers and friends. Thirst Wine Merchants may have passed on that funny little Austrian pet nat that you buy once a week at Forêt, but they maybe snagged an Amunini allocation that hadn’t been shopped around at your local? Keeping the nodes of entry small and numerous makes for something lively and diverse. Furthermore, lot’s of people can make an honest living owning and operating a small shop, as opposed to a couple of massive corporations absorbing that capital into the black hole of its ledgers.

Keeping things small, thus, has had these virtuous effects. Of course, there is one aspect to this story that is so glaringly obvious it is easy to miss. The small here is also the expensive. Savings for customers of Total Wine and Wine.com are so great, that they are seen widely and aptly as a kind of consumer coercion. Where small is expensive, big is cheap. Big, quantity discounts for corporate retailers, from industrial grape farms, using “Big Ag” chemicals, “Big Pharma” fixes, on and on. The vast majority of retail wine sales in the United States are between $8-$15 a bottle. You’ll have a very difficult time finding too many options in that price range that don’t represent something big.

In a kind of European-styled Utopia, price and size might be fixed in both directions, and wages would be demanded commensurate with the cost of basic goods like natural wine, but that’s a very far away idea from where I’m sitting. More and more, I find this economic tension to be the most pernicious in American life, and a line for which a political divide is drawn.

I’ve followed Joel Salatin (from some distance) for years. I came to his polyculture farming approach first through an old interview with Michael Pollen describing alternative farmers in America. They focused on a wholistic approach to agriculture, and a lot of other things I took to be common-sense reactions to industrialization that I’ve broadly adopted from my biodynamic winemakers. It was novel and nice to hear a lot of the same things coming from the mouth of a genuine, American cow farmer (grass farmer, he might say). The Post-Organic people, let’s call them.

For Joel, like many of his colleagues in the growing “Regenerative Agriculture” movement, just like very many winemakers an ocean away, their solution to this economic conundrum is a surprisingly libertarian one. They reject the notion that a top-down approach can mitigate these kinds of economic disparities. As a result, at their most extreme, they tend to align themselves with politicians of an expulsionary bent, i.e. those interested in getting rid of as many government agencies, regulators, or bureaucrats as possible. MAGA, here in the States, the famous truckers in Canada, the Gilet Jaunes and greater farmers’ protest in the EU, all share in this anti-government sentiment, at least as these broadly economic issues surrounding agriculture and farming are concerned. (They seem to share other opinions I’m not qualified to speak on as well.)

In any case, I caught a clip of Joel in a podcast interview and was very surprised to hear him disparaging the efforts of a man I thought might have inspired some confidence in a kind of “horseshoe” character like Joel. As regards the potential agenda of Robert Kennedy JR, “It all sounds nice, but aren’t we just replacing one nanny state for another? Is that really what we need?”

I was reminded of all my anarcho-communist professors from Europe and NYU and realized I was confused about whose side who was on, which I think is rare these days.

The second piece of writing that intrigued this undergraduate swelling in me came from Matt Taibbi’s review of “We Have Never Been Woke.” This one actually involved my undergraduate life directly. In the Must al-Gharbi’s left-wing, post-election critique of “wokeism,” the Occupy Wall Street movement is chosen as the inciting incident for this funny ideology. Taibbi was a champion of the movement and radicalizer of so many of my generation with his coverage of Wall Street in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis and beyond.

Taibbi, a recent horseshoe character himself, wrings his hands over his involvement with Occupy, implicit in Musa al-Gharbi’s argument that Trump won and democracy failed because sparkle-hands, drum circles, and post-modern queer theory were all too cringe for any of the nice, anti-corporatist ideas that might have gone along with it. Hm?

Can we return to the idea where natural products are subsidized and everyone gets paid enough to buy real food (wine)? Is there a way to relieve the tension between the luxury price of an “ethical product” and the inexpensive price of a cheap product (that exploits workers, taxpayers, natural resources, and very likely contributes to metabolic illness and cancer), while also dodging all the cringiness of brow-beating, snobbish moralism? Maybe the people who truck our fancy wines across the globe would be interested in spending a little more for a bottle if we didn’t make it seem so lame and patronizing?

I think there’s a certain kind of lefty perspective that’s sympathetic to an RFK-style critique of corporate capture in “Big AG” and an anxiety to ultra-processed foods that comports with a lot of what I liked about the Occupy movement, and the following Bernie years. There’s a good case to be made that these inexpensive “foods” are really bad for you, bad for the planet, and evidence that someone along the supply chain who should be getting paid, isn’t (whether or not that person is a state-sanctioned nutritional-climate czar, notwithstanding).

In other words, I’m less and less convinced that these critiques and policy initiatives are as controversial as the mouths they are coming from. For our own part in the natural wine world, we’ve done a lot of finger wagging and proselytizing these past few years. In a way, that’s been great. I think one solution to the tension between big and small is to sell our luxury products to rich people as a guilt tax on all their other exploits. The good news here is that, if you can’t afford to take a risk on an ethically produced piece of agriculture that might be a bit mousey (god forbid!), maybe that bit of class-guilt-soda isn’t for you?

At the same time, I grew up in the egg-white and “I can’t believe it’s not Food!” generation, where the more bland and saltless your food was, the better person you were. How wrong that was! How many social credit score points might we allot ourselves for eating the bruised and mushy “Organic” apples that flank the food desserts? This is no way forward.

Of course, the answer is probably a boring mix of everyones’ very good ideas. A little push for wages, a reasonable group of regulators that ban food that isn’t, a lot of attention and influencing regarding the amazing farmers we have in this country already, blah blah blah. For us metropolitan imbibers, I think we’ve lost a bit of our zeal and joy for the thing we love most. If we’re having the most fun, feeling amazing and having one remarkable wine experience after another, then other people are going to want that too. I think the last few years have taught us that there is no shortage of brilliant wine in the market, despite the scarcity story so many of us often tell.

There’s a silent and pernicious prohibition movement happening in the west right now. I’m only so happy to take on what is sure to be the least cool, least revolutionary, least human, and least interesting group of body optimizers I can think of. The more we hear about young people avoiding social contact for the slavery of their cell phones, the more I’m sure that a few glasses of real wine a day is as good a prescription as any other. Wine is good because it makes people you don’t like into people you do like. Drink more, force it on others, then wake up in the morning and take a nice brisk walk. You’ll be fine. Do it for all the Sutter-home hangovers out there. You owe it to them.

In the 9 months since I’d last seen the Trossens, I’d forgotten how to make my way up the short path through their overgrown, biodynamic garden, to the mustard-yellow house where I’d stayed for the 2017 grape harvest. Rudolf Trossen waved from behind a bunch of vertebrate sunflowers. He says ‘hello’ in German and my travel companion looks around for the source of the voice, questioning her approach, too.

Past some trellised, sun-soaked, grape vines, near the half-timbered entryway, sits the long and faded tasting table where I’d quietly shared a few Mosel lunches and dinners (buttery cheeses, cured meats, mustards, apple and horseradish spreads, dense black bread, sausage, blood sausage, white sausage, soft, hard, thin, thick, spicy, sweet sausage…) after a long day of picking Riesling on the steep river banks, all covered in shattered, slate tiles, gray and iridescent blue.

I knew this bright and quiet place, but the arrangement was different. Rudolf smiles at my friend and me, either charging up his practiced English or holding the moment still for some poignancy, which he likes to do. He’s prone to slowing things down. He does it with a grace and charm that only seldom yields a tone of severity that the blue-eyed farmer wears well.

I hate to be verbose, but it’s a place that lends itself to a sense of presentness I rarely get to enjoy in New York. It’s a place I visit regularly in my mind, and far too little in person. I was there to visit a friend who'd changed everything I knew about the world, in ways I’m still trying to sort out.

Back in those days, near the end of my retail tenure at Uva, at the start of my career as a traveling salesman, I was excited about wine but lost in a lot of insecurity and ignorance. Still, I was extremely lucky to have a lot of guides and teachers, none less formative than Mr. Phil Sareil. Very early on at Uva, Phil seemed to take a shine to me. In 2012/3, he was becoming very interested in Germany and Austria, since I’d lived nearby in college, maybe he thought he might be able to inspire a young and hungry wine professional (i.e. stock idiot).

Today, years later and myself a cynical salesman, I know that Phil was under the mistaken impression that I might have served as some kind of stepping stone on the road to a sale, but only God can judge a man, even a salesman.

I remember standing awkwardly at the table, with the first three fingers of my right hand hooked around the back of a splintered and knobbed chair, faded gray by the sun. Rudolf wasted no time, pulled a bottle of Pet Nat from the fridge, and poured three glasses. It was about 4:30pm and we had just finished a 3.5 hour drive from Cologne where the 2018 summer seemed to be baking the famous Domm Cathedral. We sat in an ancient brewery, hydrating with sweating beakers of cold Kölsch. I couldn’t remember the weather being so warm in this part of the world.

But weather is funny then and since, and as I sit down across from my friend and farmer, we’re slowly abstracting from the anecdotal nature of ‘weather’ towards ‘climate’, his climate, his terroir, and “how’s the seasons going for you?”

“Early,” Rudolf says after a very long pause. I’m reminded of his pace and I’m trying to adjust. My friend looks concerned with the beat, and drinks.

“We had a very good spring, but it has been very hot. And we need rain.”

Phil was the reason I found myself back in the Mosel Valley. He would taste with me long before I had any buying influence and insist that I taste certain wines during the more sanctioned gustations. One cloudy afternoon on that glass corner of North 6th and Bedford, Phil brought in bottles of the Trossen wines for the first time. Unbeknownst to me, he’d been talking them up for a while, so all the buyers were there and interested.

Nearly every bottle was a disaster. All of them were flawed in one way or another, and some of them so spectacularly that I was educated on things like rope taint and TBA infections. Our buyers, who could be tough, slowly had the weight of spending any of their precious budget lifted. They started to laugh. The wines were funny.

Phil was not laughing. All these years later, it’s easy for me to put myself in his shoes. For the first and only time, I saw Phil sincerely upset — not angry, but disappointed that we couldn’t see what was so clear to him.

“You guys don’t like natural wine. You don’t get it.”

That prompted laughter too, from Phil as well. It was a funny situation. Some wines show kind of funny, and to me, this was just one of those moments. Phil started shaking the ropey strands out of a bottle and tried to educate us. Gas sprayed from out from the space between his thumb and the neck of the bottle. That was funny too.

I wouldn’t be laughing long. A few nights later, Rene and I would close the the shop and walk over to the Four Horsemen where Billy would greet us with that same cuvée of Pet nat. Of all the ways I’ve embarrassed myself in front of Billy, this was the only reproach I ever suffered in front of the man. (This says a lot). My skin crawls as I remember saying, “You guys bought this wine? They are all completely fucked-up!”

I found out in that moment that Billy was from the south.

“Y’all are haters over there.”

He said some more warranted things and I felt totally ashamed. My last week at Uva, Phil ventured to right this great wrong and asked if I would like to go do harvest with Rudolf that next fall. In that short moment, it was so obvious how ignorant I had been. Just the thought of a man picking grapes to make wine, the reality of it, showed me the breadth of what I was missing, and I went.

Most of that 2018, summer trip was very difficult. It was incredibly hot and people were praying for rain through the rest of the visits, moving south through Luxembourg and into France. I recall that Rudolf liked to say that he hadn’t had a “normal” vintage in 12 (now 21) years. He’s purposeful in his language and emphasizes the fact that “climate change” is a far more complex than we understand, or at least it isn’t just one thing. Making a consistent wine in capricious vintages is a problem, even with 30 years experience.

It’s difficult to know what to do: When do you treat the vineyards? What treatments are justified? When do you pick? Should you hold out for that rain in the forecast? Will it rain too much and drown the fruit?

I got to see how self-evidently difficult the task of honestly sustainable agriculture really could be. And for the winegrower, it isn’t enough to get some quantity of edible fruit. He needs healthy, clean fruit of some quality, deserving of the name he’s built for himself, but also the name of the ancient wine growing region imprinted on each of this bottles with a legal scrupulousness that is aptly described by the word, ‘German’.

Which renders a further, cultural obstacle clear: as Rudolf and Rita turn their backs on the technological convenience of industrial agriculture, and the stylistic hegemony of Modernist vinification, so too does he invite the ire of his winemaking neighbors, who in the middle-Mosel consistently produce some of the most prized wines in the world.

We’re looking Northeast, across the Mosel River at the famous vineyards of Kinheim, around the bend from Graach, just north of Bernkastel and Wehlen. It’s a special place. The river is like a sine wave and each turn folds over on itself beneath steep, vine-trellised slopes. It’s a funny sight, paring natures softest curves with the kind of dot-matrix laid on top. It’s a romantic place whose beauty and contradiction is reflected in the tension of its Riesling. What may well make Mosel Riesling the best in the world is this paradox of tension and transparency — wines of rich, decadent fruit bound up in an uncompromising structure of racing acidity and mineral clarity. Mosel wines are special to wine lovers because they are very obviously of a place, and very happily that place is a beautiful one.

Trossen knows this and makes very little apology for his dedication to this place and to this grape. He’s pointing out his plots. They are called, “Lay,” “Scheifer-Stern,” Schiefer-Gold,” “Pyramid,” “Eule,” and “Madonna.” Each has their idiosyncrasies, tells their story. Rudolf and Rita’s approach to the question, what kind of story can you tell about an arbitrary plot of dirt in the middle of nowhere? was and is surprisingly unique.

Though I hand’t been smart enough to ask, this was the very first question Rudolf set out to answer when we had first met during harvest, when he first picked me up from the train station. It’s a question he began lecturing on that afternoon at the table outside his home as well, and many times subsequently.

“It’s a funny little plant. Thousands of years and generations of dedication to hear what this weird little vine has to say. You couldn’t say the same about the carrot.” He luxuriates on these words. They come out slowly.

And while you might argue that the predominance of grape juice is maybe an arbitrary one, there is still something compelling about this line. The mind bending difficulty of the vintage growing before our eyes was just one case-in-point.

But Rudolf and Rita have a better reason. They communicate with their plants, in a holistic communion of biodynamics practiced without pretense or irony. Where so many of the winemakers I’ve met will utilize this or that technique of Biodynamics (almost always making a hand-waving apology for referencing the concept) Rudolf is a true scholar of Steiner who was maybe one of the first to adopt his practices in a modern, commercial vineyard. His dedication to this philosophy is fascinating and impressive, and his metaphysics is one of universal love and idealism.

The world according to Trossen is a thinking, feeling one, from the stones in his vineyard to the vines, the strawberries, the roses, and us. The world is a mental thing, with consciousness at its root, not a physical one. Discussing idealism, telepathy, reincarnation, meditation, Saturn, its clear that this Biodynamic garden is a bit different than most of those you hear about with a Demeter certification. Trossen likes to say that he might have lived a past life building the pyramids, or defending the Alamo. “Why not?” he says, slow and wry.

In all of our discussions, in the books and articles we shared, I got the impression that his mission was to make wild my staid consciousness. He wanted to liberate me to dumb ideas and ways of being conscious that were redundant or frivolous. He gave me the gift of doubt, something different than rational criticism. Why did the wild strawberries, fennel, and clover make his wines so much more transparent and beautiful than his neighbors who killed everything but the grape? For many interesting and useful scientific reasons, surely, but also because the idea is good and beautiful. At least as wine is concerned, we don’t risk too much in acquiescing to beauty.

With great joy, I’m slowing drinking the latest arrivals from the Trossens. Simultaneously, I’m enjoying our New York, winter flu, and this mind-boggling podcast that puts me right back at that table with Rudolf.

I’ll end with some nice words from my friend. Please enjoy these wines when you can. They are a treasure of beauty and freedom:

Further Reading

Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

Kühlewind, Georg, and Michael Lipson. From Normal to Healthy: Paths to the Liberation of Consciousness. Lindisfarne Books, 2023.

Steiner, Rudolf. Philosophy of Freedom. Lulu Com, 2011.

Recently I found myself defending a very buttoned-up and farty bottle of Dolcetto at my new and ideologically-unaligned, neighborhood wine bar. The wine had broken no rules, it had broken no records, but it was just what its die-cut, gold leaf label had purported it would be. The acid was like a frozen lemon. The tannins were grippy and prevented drinking with our usual speed and purpose. But there was beautiful red fruit at the center of it all. It was a simple wine; even short. It was sulphur dead, beyond a doubt, but committed no other great crimes.

God help me, I liked it! Most of all I liked it because it was a copy of something, a version or a cover. It was a kind of dumb iteration of a thing I really like. I was sort of being advertised to, designed for, and that I found exciting, if troubling. I had to admit that I enjoyed the simple pitch, the passivity and the friendliness. I wasn’t challenged, I wasn’t moved, but I saw the ball go in the net and that gave its own strange satisfaction. Here, here! I might’ve blurted above my cravat and ballooning paunch. Racking up years of life, one finds that you can age into certain ideas. At my barstool, surrounded by Carhardtt, I thought I’d try to do so with grace.

But I’m not so old! Sitting there, I’d done an astral projection onto a place outside of the outer-boroughs, where my thirty-five years might have yielded something more adult, a position in my community, or at least a calcifying and conservative ideology about natural wine. I should have sons? Someone at whom to lecture.

I read “Authentic Wine,” by Jamie Goode when I really want to get confused. You can only imagine (or else simply read) how much ink is dedicated to the question of American rootstock as it pertains to the quality of European wine. Even and up until the teen aughts, this seemed to be a theme in critical wine writing. This fact speaks to my tender young age, I think, since all the pre-phylloxera vineyards are mostly dead or re-planted and I’m too young to remember enough of them to have formed an opinion. Soon enough, we’ll all be too young for such a thing and the point will have been made mute — if it isn’t already.

Later in the week I hosted dinner for a friend in the neighborhood. She brought a bottle from a tiny, natural wine shop where she is a regular customer. Sadly, she was dismayed because she’d picked a bottle from the “$25-and-under” shelf and, out of politeness, asked the teller what she thought.

“Oh, yes, that’s dumb girl wine. Simple, basic, Sauvignon Blanc…”

What could be more fun than choosing a wine based on your tax bracket then being called dumb for doing so! Happily, my guest found great enjoyment in this wine because she, like so many of us, are very exhausted by this kind of madness — these ridiculous pockmarks of wine hell . And boy howdy I’d have thought that Natalie Gaubicher’s “Suzette” might’ve had enough natural wine bona fides to garner a bit more respect than that. My first week at Uva, a drummer and natural wine expert described her pet nat to me as, “Hippy vinegar.” How far we’ve come…

What’s clear is not much:

1. The old man wine I once loved to hate, I am suddenly hating to love!

2. The seasons of wine fashion seem disjointed, with one grandiose non-sequitor following the next, and very little epistemic base shared between.

3. Wine’s ethical/political/class coding strengthens at its ends into a kind of zeal about wine "good” and “dumb.”

The code shift in the international style of my youth serves as a partial explanation here. Where we once sought out tannin, structure, and longevity; tension, acidity and downright fruitiness seem to be synonymous with what the wine waiters tell me is “a more classically styled wine.” Once, the classics were Bordeaux, Napa, and Amarone. Maybe “classical” means “neo-classical” like “before the modern era,” as in, “wine like Plato drank.”

No, it just means Burgundy. The center of gravity has slowly, then quickly, moved away from the Cru Classé to the Côte d’Or. Take that, Robert Parker! You’re not my dad anymore. Paul Giamatti from the popular 90s wine film is. And we’re still not drinking any blanking Merlot.

Terroir, age, and culture be damned, most regular wine today seems to follow a kind of FritoLay slavishness to deliciousness. Boy, that’s good, I think a lot before being kind of bored. What the heck? This wine tastes like a fruit and has no bad parts! Even, the use of oak here is really quite measured (somms nod in approval of my good opinion).

But hey now, wasn’t it the Gaubichers, the Puzelats, and Pfifferlings who had the idea to make wine taste like fruit? Weren’t the cool kids of natural wine the ones pushing for purity of fruit, and getting rid of new oak, and eschewing the winemakers’ hand, and obeying styles, and making wine to drink today? Doesn’t our team deserve credit for making all the wines so… good? You know, DRC practices biodynamics. Perhaps you’ve heard.

There’s a very lazy argument to be made about purity tests and dogmatism obfuscating the quality and importance of natural wine (or quality wine in general), but this is a straw man argument and we’ve come a very long way from the fever pitch of 2020. This was the year of head-scratching takes, like the wine director at Jean Georges telling me that all natural wine was categorically mouse tainted, a Bostonian distributor asking me if I imported any “African American” wine, and a hip natural wine store owner telling me not to waste their time with anything that had been “dosed.” These people were few and loud and represent an extreme rarity in my professional life. Less and less, in fact.

Moreover, the younger my drinking companions are, the less ideological. They seem to scrub through a wine list the way a Spotify algorithm puts together a playlist: folk songs from the 70s, goofy British rap, Big Country, something classical… Lawless! I’ve seen as much Bitouzet-Prieur on the Super Vino Bros wine TV show as I’ve seen Mythopia. I find that a very beautiful thing, with a few caveats:

1. Superfluity

   I have memories of sitting with one of my parents’ LPs for weeks on end, or living with the same CD in my car for 6 months. When everything is equally accessible, a kind of devaluation occurs. The economic concept is that of diminishing marginal utility. There’s a fear that we lose what is special in subtle or complex wine ex abundantia, in the superfluity of “what’s next?” If the metric for a wine of quality becomes simply its ability to please us in the moment, we will be missing out on most of the great wines of the world. Wine takes contemplation, comparison, and even derision to understand its utility. Nowhere is this danger more apparent than at our crazy wine fairs where we can taste hundreds of wines in an afternoon. Do we think the best wines are the ones that stand out?

2. Continuity

   Variety and novelty are qualities in wine to be sought out for their own value. For many years, the natural wine community proffered bottle after bottle of life-changing, mind altering experiences I would think about for days. When the Four Horsemen opened in Williamsburg, we used to sit at the bar after our stocking shifts at Uva and Will would ask if we had any stories for him. He wanted to know if we’d tasted something new or surprising. It was just like that. It was a time of discovery and intrigue. I seek that out continually, but I’ve learned to find it in wines without bombast or funny atonality. Subtle changes in stories I’ve followed for years, emblematic examples of specific terroirs, a familiar variety in a new place, or any number of intellectual things. I blush to admit that I’m basically only ever capable of learning something about a wine if I’ve tasted something nearly identical either immediately before or after. I lack the talent or memory to really do it otherwise.

3. Virtue

   Yes, it’s fashionable and even right to criticize the most zealous amongst our ‘natural wine’ colleagues. We hear these critiques constantly from whinging court somms, popular wine personalities, even winemakers. I think the purity tests are important and essential insofar as they target the right things. Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and copper sulfate are a categorical detriment to a healthy soil. We can make compromises, but that’s simply the truth. About half of the nitrogen in your body (the most abundant element in the atmosphere) was produced artificially in a factory in order to produce ammonia for the fertilization of depleted soils. Would we be able to maintain our food system without it? Unclear, but it’s a fact I find troubling.

   And, so sorry, but the same argument can be made about additives in the cellar. The more sulphur we put in our wines, the more microflora we kill in the wine (indiscriminately). The result is something that is less and less recognizable as food to our digestive system. Again, there is a compromise to be made, but these are the facts. Adding sulphur to wine is a categorically subtractive process as well (to make no mention of the other ways you can kill off bacteria in wine). Maybe you kill off whatever is producing the acidic acid, but maybe you also kill a weaker yeast strain that is what makes your wine worth drinking in the first place.

   In my home, all other things equal, I always opt for a wine made without sulphur, and with as holistic approach to agriculture as possible. This is not in spite of my snobbishness, but because of it. I prefer the full latitude of a wine, even with the blemishes. I see it as choosing the slightly bruised apple over the irradiated one, and I feel better because of it, no doubt.

   Of course, the biggest reason for this choice is the coincident fact that nearly all the natural wine being made properly is the result of a small, family farm and not a big corporation.

I understand and have sympathy for a kind of cynicism here. We’ve seen the craft beer and artisanal coffee movements turn into a fashionable penchant for Miller Highlife and deli coffee. Sometimes the only thing worse than living in Pepsi x Cola hell is siding with the sanctimony of the artisanal beverage industry. But, that’s stupid and we should just enjoy our embarrassing fanning-out for what it is. A Budweiser here and there is one thing, but I certainly won’t be irony-chugging a bottle of Josh for anyone’s approval anytime soon (I hope).

For all this, I think humility and curiosity are the antidote. We should choose wines without the notion that one wine is as good as the next. That may be true, but it’s a matter of perspectivalism rather than relativism. There are contexts under which certain wines make sense, and perspectives which bring certain wines to light. For this reason, now more than ever, it is so important to find wine professionals/friends that you can trust. So often, the relevant story or proper pairing can completely overdetermine the experience. Now more than ever, we need the truly talented somms and expert cavistes.

Rene Descartes put Ethics at the very top of the tree of knowledge, arguing that we would need all the knowledge of chemistry, physics, psychology, and the rest in order to make the best decision. As a practical solution he suggests finding the most trustworthy person you can and following them. Nice! I like the advice of Immanuel Kant better. He also believed that there was an ultimate right and wrong, and that one must categorically follow one’s duty towards the greater good. But he also believed that it was beholden on the individual to decide for his or herself what that duty was and what the bounds of right and wrong were.

In the United States today we lack the tradition and homogeneity of a bygone era. Moreover we lack the wine culture of our European neighbors. This is good and bad. Still, far too often, a bottle of wine needs to demonstrate its value but also the rules by which it is to be judged. These make for bad wines. Either because of a rudimentary adherence to the basest notion of pleasure, or because of a broadly political commitment. We should be more skeptical of our taste buds in an attempt to learn how to enjoy something new, and less skeptical of our hard-won values in an attempt to save our livers for wines that matter.

Further Reading

Curtola, Nick, et al. The Four Horsemen: Food + Wine for Good Times. Abrams, 2024.

Descartes, René. Discourse on Method. New York : London :Macmillan ; Collier Macmillan, 1986.

Goode, Jamie, and Sam Harrop. Authentic Wine (toward Natural and Sustainable Winemaking). University of California Press, 2011.

Payne , Alexander, director. Sideways. Fox Searchlight , 2004.

Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science Cambridge [England] ; New York :Cambridge University Press, 1997.

The Concinnitas Project Artists

Though mostly a normal person, I have a funny habit of reading wine lists from restaurants around the world. Sometimes, people send them to me when they want advice for choosing a good bottle. Really, wine lists are a semantic map, with an added dimension for time or vintage. Where on earth is the beautiful, inspiring, exceptional bottle of wine? Lifetimes go by in its pursuit, all against the irony that most of the very special bottles come to us unexpectedly, and very rarely after grand designs. A big reason for this is that surprise is an essential aspect of delight. It’s just part of the shape of a great wine. It’s a kind of a geometry and requires very little thought. The quality of a great wine is evident immediately, as you raise the glass to your nose. Where are these wines, and how do we find them?

When a wine is special, it is so for certain reasons, some necessary and some sufficient. For example, the 2014 “Bijou” from Jules Métras opened up with all of its necessary marks of greatness: purity of fruit, balance, complexity, structure, minerals, and typicity. Wines like these give me an almost cartoonish impression. An idealization.

Nick asks, “Is this wine corked?”

This is a hard and fast rule for judging a special wine. There has to be a brief moment where you take the wine to be hopelessly flawed. Compare this to the kind of off-putting or uncanny feeling you get when you hear a new song for the first time, one that you’ll eventually grow to like or love. It can’t be quite right? It demands an interrogative aspect of your attention. Who is this? What is this? Some of the best examples: Is this music? It’s as if, on the road to proper veridical judgment, a special wine or song or film must past through “perfectly wrong” before it is “perfectly right.” That cartoon shape of harmony supervening on the thing itself, more prior and more essential. We recognize that shape of cartoonish perfection before any of the individual qualities (flavors, notes, aromas, etc.), and that’s strange!

Lots of wines show beautiful fruit, are properly balanced, and all the rest. A special wine has this shape of pleasant perfection: a recognition in ourselves. For maybe the first time, drinking that bottle of Métras, I was cognizant of where that shape came from. The 2014 vintage in Beaujolais was so extremely important for me. I was working at Uva Wines in Williamsburg, surrounded by lots of talent and struggling to get a grip on the different terroirs of France. A few nights a week, Frank Locrasto and I closed the shop together. He decided we should try to taste through all the Crus of Beaujolais together, seeing how much our customers could take of the Flashstrap playlists.

With only 10 crus and one grape variety to contend with, the task didn’t feel so daunting. It was a digestible amount of information with clear lines of controls and variables.

The experience was also extremely pleasant. Frank was putting together his exotica band at the time, so the shop was full of Martin Denny and Les Baxter. The 2014 vintage was also immediately delicious, bottle after bottle. The Morgons were full of strawberry and cream. The Fleuries were more angular and purple, leaning ever so slightly towards the Rhône. Regnie was spicy and sometimes dank. Chiroubles was electric and sapid. A little model was forming in my head. I built a personal map of a place I hadn’t been, demarcated by only slightly arbitrary reasons, and once-in-a-while really logical ones.

The Morgon wines of Lapierre and Foillard just became those places for me, Regnie from Breton, Fleurie from Dufaitre, etc. Same for many of us. If you love French wine, it’s because of this mapping and correspondence. Pinot on limestone, Chenin on schist, this hill versus that hill, solar years and classical vintages, repetition with difference.

Beaujolais in 2014 served as a toy model I would apply as a function over all the great terroirs of France, from Champagne to Banyuls. I broke down the countryside into principalities of taste and shape. It became easier and easier to love the wines of France because they were easier and easier to recognize. What felt like an infinity (what is an actual infinity), became well-ordered such that there was recognition in novel bottles and glasses, not the wines I recalled from having tasted them. I even became slightly proficient in that parlor-trick type of blind tasting, but only really so in those tightly regulated pockets of France where these rules and models could guide me.

I’d go on to work for Fifi, an importer who represented Yvon Métras and his son Jules. I was very lucky to taste both of their wines over many vintages. I’m biased but not alone in thinking that wines from the Métras represent some of the best in the Beaujolais. So, I was even more fortunate to visit these places I’d mapped out and bring a more empirical perspective to bear. This complicated the picture as much as it shed light. Many of the “why?” questions snapped into place when one stood on top of Côte du Py or tasted a grape of Gamay, sparkling in a carbonic maceration — seeing anemic vines in alluvial soils or swollen grapes after lots of rain.

All these disparate pieces were coming together in this amalgamation that ordered each new piece. This was handy because, as an imbiber, I was never able to create an encyclopedic memory palace or recall how one or another bottle struck me after months or years. The analogy for me was Hilbert’s hotel, an illustration developed by German mathematician, David Hilbert, to describe the nature of infinity. Whenever a new guest walked up, there was always a free room at Hilbert’s hotel. There was always a room for each new bottle or glass, such that I had some notion of the small infinity of French wine all at once.

Probably all of that is trivial to anyone with a palate, but I often wonder if part of my judgment for bottles like that 2014 “Bijou” aren’t built into the architecture. When I tasted that wine, I knew precisely which room it belonged in, and that recognition, was shocking and uncanny, like meeting a stranger who feels like an old friend.

Weird stuff! and raises an epistemic question about our ability to share the experience of any given wine. It’s a question that sat in the back of my mind of a long time. Then, I read this very good paragraph from Jeff Patten in a Flatiron Wines mailer:

There are many things that I love about Croatian wine, but to keep this simple, I’m going to focus today on my very favorite discovery: the red wine grape Plavac Mali. There is a style of red wine grape in Europe that is powerful, tannic, fresh, aromatically alluring, and elegant all at the same time. Nebbiolo is the best example. Aglianico is like that too. You also find lesser-known versions like Xinamavro in Macedonia or Baga in Portugal. Plavac Mali is part of this family.

Wow, I was sure he was going to say Cabernet or Syrah! “Powerful, alluring, tannic and fresh,” I knew, or figured, might describe a wine or two outside of France, but I consistently found it difficult to apply my French model outside of the wines on France, and in particular in for many of the wines of Italy. I wanted to have this concept that Jeff had, but I found I was missing a certain, fundamental difference between the wines of Italy and the wines of France, and I’ve finally come to believe that this difference is a sort of mathematical one.

Annoying? Perhaps, but the thought has opened up the world of Italian wine to me in a way that was heretofore closed. I think the impoverished state of education in this country has robbed normal people of the beauty of mathematics and the concepts and beliefs it can allow a person to have. I digress…

At least one thing had been clear to me, working with a lot of winemakers in Italy: the approach to vinification was markedly different. Where the French winemakers seemed to be after this realized shape — this completed product — Italian winemakers saw wine as an aspect of a meal, even an ingredient.

Like many of you, I’d fallen in love with the wines of Emilia-Romagna and Piacenza long ago. With a big plate of Mortadella, Lomo, Parma, or Grana Padana, the wines completely cracked open for me. Their balance was immediately evident relative to the foods they were paired with. In this region and with these wines, it was very easy to see why. Many of the same yeasts that work on the sugars in Barbera, Bonarda, and Ortugo also give their signature flavors to the salumi. But more and more it is clear that this idea generalizes across the majority of Italy such that the few exceptions prove the rule.

The great wines of Italy (even those “aromatically alluring, tannic, fresh…”) did not fit into the hotel. They were different types of things. Admittedly, a kind of French chauvinism in me made me believe that Chianti, Barbaresco, and Amarone were somehow missing parts, lacking the requisite material that was essential to the French wines of great beauty. This is categorically wrong, but neither is the opposite true. In just the way that there is an infinity of French wines, so too are there an infinity of Italian wines, but the Italian infinity is bigger!

I don’t mean this in a superficial sense whereby I’m saying that Italy makes wine from 3,000 varieties compared to the few dozen in France. It’s a little counterintuitive, but some infinities are simply larger than others. This was proven by a German mathematician, Georg Cantor, in the 19th century. He used an ingenious method of diagonalization to show that some sets or groups of things contain more elements than we have numbers, making out mathematical idea of infinity {1,2,3…} somehow smaller than uncountable infinities like that of the real number like (which contains irrational numbers like π and e and stuff like 2.309284972384…)

In fact, the “real” infinity or numbers between 0 and 1 is much larger than the infinity of natural numbers or integers. How much bigger, smart guy? We don’t have a mathematical way to describe that; we don’t know. Though we make use of rational and irrational numbers together in the same calculus, they are fundamentally different kinds of things, and I always found that a fascinating notion.

So, while there are many “powerful, tannic, fresh, aromatically alluring” wines in Italy, the wines qua wine outstrip what makes a wine in France. There are just more qualities, different qualities, that bear no relation to any counterparts. The wines are free to exist as they present themselves in nature because their balance and harmony can be supplemented by the richness of a simmering risotto or salty Talleggio, or a million other things.

Freisa can have this wildly bright and citric acidity that borders on copper. Sangiovese can have a volatility like a rubber glove. Croatina is often so sanguine and ferrous that they are nearly undrinkable without food. All these wines are still some of my most beautiful experiences and can exist as wine because of this latitude of culinary soul that lives in all the great bottles of Italy. Anyone who has suffered through a vertical tasting of Amarone knows that our Francophone attitude about the way wines should be tasted and judged is a flawed one, but one that should be confronted with nuance and not pure relativism.

It is something very specific that makes the great wines of Italy irrational to the concept of “good wine” that we have for French counterparts. It is something very specific that allows wine in Italy to outstrip the concept of balance and harmony in France. We should investigate these subtleties in earnest, rather than discounting them offhand for either blanket dismissal or useless relativism. Some wines are good and others are bad, but we can be precise about how and why. For myself, ironically, the more discerning I become about such things, the more things I find I am able to enjoy with sincerity. Think hard about wine and enjoy life.

Further Reading

• Garner, Michael. Barolo: Tar and Roses. Steiner Books, 1988.

• Potter, Michael D. Sets: An Introduction. Clarendon, 1991.

• Bastianich, Joseph, and David Lynch. Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy. Clarkson Potter, 2005.

• Wigner, Eugene P. “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.” Mathematics and Science, Aug. 1990, pp. 291–306, https://doi.org/10.1142/9789814503488_0018.

Farming dreams are a modern seduction. For city dwellers, the vision of making a living from the earth salves the psychic wounds of a day job, and acts as an antidote to urban malaise. If you could just get out there on the land, far from spreadsheets and stress, cubicles and car alarms, things would surely be different.

Welcome and thank you for being here.

I don’t know how else to tell you why we were eating 60 oysters a day. Recently, my nutritional life has been preoccupied with the importance of eating and drinking a wide range of minerals. It began with a really fascinating and transformative article by chemist and oenologist, David Lefebvre, on the topic of minerality in wine. He says that as early as the Cistern vignerons of the 12th century, the conception of fermentation has been a twofold one. The first is our everyday understanding of sugar’s conversion of sugar into alcohol. The second is a decomposition of organic material, and a release of something known in those days as the spirit or “soul of the wine.”

Lefebvre convincingly argues that this mysterious and discernible "spirit” refers to the mineral signature left in a wine whose pectin has broken down into salts, iron, magnesium, and other trace minerals. He further argues that this particular signature creates typicity in wine, and that when we are blind tasting for terroir, it is mostly the wine’s mineral content that differentiates one glass from another.

This point is further corroborated by MS Nick Jackson, in his book “Beyond Flavor, a practical guide to wine tasting by structure.” The book is a tool used to walk the reader through his or her tasting experience with a special focus on the shape the wine makes in your mouth as a function of variety or place. He explores acid, tannin, and minerality in the great wines of the world, illustrating (literally) the spiky acid structure of Riesling, or the boxy tannins of California Syrah.

Chardonnay

The linear, mineral impression of a wine from chalky limestone was one I could easily identify, but in the book many other complicated shapes abound. The apparently demonstrative signature of minerals in wine, together with Lefebvre’s ideas, has opened a new dimension of wine tasting for me. Many seemingly simple wines with a straightforward fruit flavor have opened up to me as beautiful, glimmering constellations of complexity and microscopic rocks. My favorite wines today are those understated, subtle wines that hide their complexity in this way.

Riesling

Why do some wines have this signature of mineral complexity while others do not? For me, this is one of the central questions of viniculture, and one that won’t be answered by me. But I have to admit that I’ve developed a romantic notion following Lefebvre’s insinuations about the soul of Cistern Champagne. Part of fermentation is just about liberating inorganic compounds from the pectin and tannins of a ripe grape. It is about chemically re-arranging these parts in order to make these salts and minerals available to perception. Why? Because these shapes are pleasing, but maybe also (or in order that) they are more readily available for digestion.

Modern chemistry has afforded us an encyclopedic taxonomy of the vitamins and minerals that make up the constituents of our diet, but less is known about how and to what extent our bodies absorb these things. As someone born into the asthma, allergy, and autoimmune disorder generation, I’ve spent a night or two in hospitals struggling with different poisons. They’re called ‘intolerances’ today. Out of necessity, I’ve developed a sort of common-sense notion that simpler, broken down foods are easier to digest, and more and more I’m convinced that this was known instinctually for most of our past.

All of this lecture was great punishment on our 6 hour drive to Maine for a market visit. My unwitting victim was my friend and wine colleague, Zoë, who took all of this fun and interesting information with her typical grace. I was secretly gearing her up for the freak-show of oyster consumption. Apropos of my mineral dreaming, oysters have become one of my staple food groups, and fresh specimens from Maine were igniting great — talkative — excitement in me.

Zoë is a good sport. We went on to eat dozens from Damariscotta River to Freeport to Pleasant Cove! Pleasant indeed! and moreover, remarkably complex. They had a marked typicity and transparency the way great Riesling or Burgundy does. Also, they made us feel very good. Maybe this simple mollusk had a low digestive load? Manganese, Zinc, Selenium, Sodium, Potassium… but all of these not trapped inside complex sugars or carbohydrates. All suspended in water in a substance called, ‘liquor’. Hmm…

We stayed in a hotel next to the world famous Tandem Bakery. I woke up early to stand in line for coffee and pastries, but really I could think only of more oysters. Somehow, this much was clear to Zoë, and after 20-30 minutes of waiting on line, she approached me with an exciting alternative, reading me extracts from the copy above this article.

She says, “This will be so nice. It’s just outside of Portland. They raise their own chickens! It’s a farmhouse! They make their own cheese; it’s perfect.”

What luck! Some real and farm fresh food, something local, a breakfast fit for a natural wine importer.

“Oh!” she says, “They stop serving breakfast at 11. We’d have to leave now.”

I took very little convincing and we hit the road, myself very relieved, my heritage slightly wounded. Sadly, it wasn’t 15 minutes before we found ourselves in the parking lot of the Sheraton Hotel. As it turns out, the dream of urban farming was just that.

“Do we go inside?”

“Nowhere on the website does it say ‘Sheraton’.” How bizarre?”

“Maybe the farm is around back,” I said, “Sometimes hotels host amazing restaurants.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The magnetic strip below us triggered the sliding doors. It was clear why breakfast ended promptly at 11: We drove out of town to find ourselves at a continental breakfast a la Sheraton Hotel. Nice!

City Farmhouse welcomed us eagerly with droning, Morning Show televisions, a faux fireplace, faux wood-burning oven, paper napkins and room-service utensils. We laughed, but I was worried about my minerals! Sure, we’d been duped, but we’d make the best of it. We would get to the bottom if it. We would derive some lesson.

Neither of us had the heart to ask our sweet and matronly server about the chickens around back, but we noticed quickly that the tractor on the website was a photograph on the wall. I did ask for an extra side of bacon, which the woman assented to, after turning it over in her mind a few times. In the end, there were 4 small strips, and I did some silent arithmetic concerning the situation.

(Dramatization)

We’d been led astray by our quixotic fetishization of the authentic, essential thing. The dream of the urban farmer advertised by City Farmhouse was us, pretending we could use our cell phones to divine a healthy, local meal with lots of minerals. What the heck? Why were two people whose job it was to seek out authentic, real, un-fucked-with, anti-corporate, sulphurless wine so easily lured into this trap? Had the plastic finally traversed the blood-brain barrier? Was it all Zoë’s fault and I’m the smart one?

Back at the hotel, the golf channel whispered at me in a quaint, Australian accent. The overlapping shades of green calmed me. There wasn’t language left to describe the kinds of things that we were looking for. Words like ‘organic’, ‘natural’, ‘local’, ‘authentic’, and worst of all, ‘artisanal’, had all been appropriated into meaninglessness. How was I supposed to ask my AI powered search engine for real food with an abundance of bio-available trance minerals and expect not to be duped!

A special K commercial followed a smattering of polite clapping. It was the classic setting of a mother chasing after her children, cleaning a mess in their wake.

“Every mom deserves to eat some fruit… that wasn’t on the floor…”

Dear God! Don’t we want our fruit to come from the floor?! Where is it supposed to come from? This was a brand of propaganda I could understand, a fear of nature and a privileging of sterility and corporate oversight. What if these advertisers started stealing from our mode of speech, our language. What would our customers do? Wine is complicated enough, how can we parse what’s real from what isn’t? Where would they get their minerals!

Of course, the thought that I had simply gone as crazy as everyone else was near the front part of my mind. Was I avoiding dextrose, plastic water bottles, Saran wrapped sandwiches for my own weird sense of safety and control. Was I needlessly drinking wine without sulphur and eschewing Applebee’s, Dunkin Donuts and “bad vibes to my detriment? Why did I eat so many oysters?

I gave a shaky speech that night, extolling the virtues of level-headed winemakers who made wines under the auspices of a classical (read, Modern) balance of fruit and acid and structure. There is something beautiful in wines that taste like wine from the classical (read, Modern) terroirs, but secretly are merely grape ferments. I love to turn on new drinkers to wines like these. They can’t say what they like about this or that wine, but something makes them feel good. I thought, maybe all of it is just that. Like it or not, it just feels a little better when there isn’t a list of ingredients to accompany your wine ferment, whether you can perceive the difference or not.

Fair enough, I thought cynically, and returned to our offices in New York, all the while awaiting a sailboat that seemed to arrive just as the longshoreman strike was setting in. We got our wine, but it had been a real nail-biter for me. The wines of Marie and Florian Curtet had completely beguiled me in France, time and time again. They seemed to live on and on in my palate, followed by my head, and then my heart. They felt headful and alive, full of trace minerals.

However, these two were of a mind that no chemical intervention whatsoever, in the vineyards or in the cellar, would make for a wine of the quality they sought. No treatments, no sulphur, no tractors, no gasoline, nothing. Would the wines and their magic make the journey? Had I been duped by their magical little utopia of fancy dry toilets and family grown vegetables? I remember Zoë and I doubled over in laughter, leaving the Sheraton.

She asked, “What’s the lesson, here?”

We tasted the Curtet together when it arrived in the office, where she found enough of a solution for me.

“It’s worth taking the chance. It’s okay to be a little stupid.”

2023, step by step

Over the past few years, we have initiated changes towards a wilder, freer and more diversified “culture”. Here is a small anthology of our personal satisfactions for the past year and our current and future projects.

Our interactions with crops are now limited to pruning, sowing, planting, picking and harvesting. We had the intuition to be sometimes in the interference with the plant, in the dirigisme, and that did not seem to us completely founded but rather inherited from a questionable cultural baggage. Little by little we learn to refrain from acting. What freedom found for the plants, but also for us!

We lived as a contradiction in the fact of seeking purity in the cellar but still using the tractor (therefore oil) and treatments (certainly organic) in the vineyards. We have significantly reduced our dependence on a system that does not suit us. Not a liter of fuel, not a gram of treatment and fertilizer used to cultivate this year. We are immensely satisfied to have experienced this possibility.

Our 2022 vintage will therefore be our first pure vintage, from the vine to the cellar. A small harvest but what satisfaction! We have thus implemented our deep convictions: the vine does not need to suffer or be treated to water us. It now seems unthinkable to us to backtrack.

Trees are taking up more and more space in our cultures. Whether it is fruit, fodder, shade or support for a vine, tomorrow it will mainly be a food crop. From the vine to the olive tree, from the apple tree to the cereals, the plots where we only grew grapes yesterday, tomorrow we will also provide oil, flour, juice, ciders...

We continue to diversify beyond the tree and have grown different cereals: Chautagne rye, ancient wheat, millets from peasant seeds. Our challenge is to self-produce our cereals between friends and neighbors, to cultivate them, harvest them, transform them manually without oil or electricity. A bread oven is planned near the cellar to combine food autonomy and conviviality.

Between the urgency of finding solutions for tomorrow and the acceptance of the slowness of living processes, all these small steps allow us to feel in our rightful place. A place where man is part of nature and his main concern is to do no harm.

-Marie and Florian CURTET

Further Reading

Morel, François. Le Vin Au Naturel: La Viticulture Au plus Près Du Terroir. Editions Sang de La Terre, 2020.

Bouazzouni, Nora. Steaksisme: En Finir Avec Le Mythe de La Végé et Du Viandard. Nouriturfu, 2021.

Fisher, M. F. K., and Martin Mazorra. Consider the Oyster. The Prototype Press at Tranquility, 2021.

Lefebrve, David. “Concernant Son Analyse de La Mineralité.” N° 100, Spring, 2011.

Last week I had a nice visit with my friend and winemakers, Avi Diexler. we smoked a marijuana cigarette. It isn’t like me, and I had trepidation. I think it was illegal, but I didn’t care. As an importer of wine, a fisher of men, “down” for a multitude of radical situations, however harrowing, I had a duty to my cause. I wanted to enter the mind of a friend and colleague who supports the use of surfing and marijuana for intellectual and spiritual growth; and I wasn’t going surfing.

For what it’s worth, I think Avi Diexler makes some of the most beautiful young/new wines in California. The name ‘Absentee’ is a nod to a particular aspect of most young and exciting wineries in California right now. Avi owns no vineyards and buys grapes for his production.

Following a deep and meaningful mentorship with Baptiste Cousin, I found that this aspect of Absentee’s arrangement left a deep and useful chip on Avi’s shoulder, one he’s mostly shaken off in his new and enlightened state. It’s been quite a journey.

Prior to our “sesh” (re. marijuana), Avi and I were rolling barrels in his cellar. These were from the new harvest. This technique has become more common in recent years, but when we met in 2017, I had only heard of one other winemaker working in this way: Philippe Pacalet. Not bad!

Basically, Avi puts whole clusters of grapes in barrels and puncheons, which are sealed. He rolls them back and forth, twice per day, “to make the yeasts happy.” He says this in a kind of wry, sarcastic way. I don’t know if he’s serious or not. As two sensitive men, we have a hard time knowing when the other is joking. I know, at least, that rolling the barrel will often puncture the grapes and let out free juice that ferments in a different way than it would in the berry. I believe it tends to ferment faster, with oxygen as a catalyst. In any case, after the procedure, one can hear the soft, rolling boil of a happy fermentation very clearly.

In some years, Avi will buy enough grapes for 20 some-odd barrels. This year he’ll do only 8. It’s a little bit because demand is down across the board, and a lot of bit because of an episode I like to call ‘Magnum-ageddon’ (portmanteau of ‘magnum’, and ‘armageddon’.), but more on that later.

“The only thing you really have to worry about are the b—gs.”

“Bongs?” I said?

“Bungs,” he pronounced in an elevated tone.

There’s a hole in the barrel where juice comes in and out. It’s about a 4-inch diameter. The bung is the plastic or rubber thing that stops the hole. It can’t knock into another bung or barrel in case it is dislodged and there’s a spill.

In the days where Avi was rolling 25 barrels, twice per day, this could take 2 hours. It always seemed to me like the task could be automated in some way. Maybe the barrels could be on a track, pushed down a ramp or some such thing. The bung problem stood in the way of this solution, but I daydreamed as we gingerly rolled each barrel across the winery, stopping and pulling back to avoid problematic collisions. I imagined a Cartesian graph plotting out my idealized ramp system, with perfect arcs mapping out the barrels trajectory with time over distance.

… and then all the funny braids this graph would make with us rolling by hand, stopping and starting, crossing over and back again.

This kind of human messiness is something important to Avi’s wines and to all the handmade wines of the world. Removing what might be automated, and avoiding the regular lines.

At the start, Avi was admittedly dogmatic and extreme about this hands on approach. The story goes that he asked a french intern to move a dozen or so fermenting barrels from his old winery in Point Reyes to his current in Mendocino. Avi drove and asked the poor stagiaire to ride in the back of the closed cab with a walkie-talkie. This was hands on, quirky, and spiritually correct, just like Avi wanted. After a few miles, Avi heard a cryptic message coming over his walkie.

“Je vais tomber dans les pommes,” I’m going to fall into the apples!

“What?”

Avi pulled over, the rider was passing out.

(Incidentally, this story also tells about the great deal of oxygen exchange that takes place during fermentation in barrels. It’s a lot! Avi’s wines easily last a week or more open without faltering too much. This was the saving grace of Magnum-ageddon, but that’s another story.)

“Let’s get some lunch in Fort Bragg, then we can do the second punchdown,” Avi said to me.

He had mentioned ‘punchdown’ a number of times and I realized that he was talking about the rolling barrels procedure. Each time he said it kind of plainly, as if it might have already occurred to me what this phrase meant. By my lights, a punchdown is a procedure whereby you literally punch down the cap of grape skins and pulp and must that form atop juice during fermentation/maceration. This is done in order to introduce some kind of kinetic energy to a ferment and move things along, release carbon dioxide, add oxygen, etc.

On our way to lunch I started daydreaming about the 2-dimensional nature of my normal understanding of a punch down versus Avi’s 3-dimensional, spun version. I though about tracking a tiny yeast’s progress on our graph as it bobs up and down with a winemakers arm or wooden tool.

A yeast in Avi’s rolled barrel might make a funny knot.

Rolling back and forth, maybe the yeasts return back home in a strange loop. Or maybe it is wilder and the yeast never quite find a pattern.

Anyway, maybe the difference between these knots are meaningless, but I’ve learned enough to know that a meaningless statement is also one that implies everything.

Then we’re at a shop in Fort Bragg because we’re a little bit early for lunch and a lot of bit because Avi and I enjoy each others’ company in funny situations/interactions like the one he intuited we would have in this craft store. Here, a woman from New Jersey clocked my Long Island accent and tried to sell us knick-knacks from local artists. She was a photographer and gave us some advice about selling wine, about “getting out there.” Men and women from her generation, from my part of the world, are big into “getting out there.” This tickles Avi because — in deep-down fact — he’s also from my part of the world, but I didn’t tell you.

Avi buys an illustrated map of Mendocino and a frisbee for his dog, Balou. He says, “I’m in charge of art at home.”

(Incidentally, Balou is the name of one of avi’s most famous cuvées. Balou, the wine, is primarily Syrah. Both the wine and the dog share a rustic bouquet. He’s a good boy.)

“Do you know any interesting knots?" Avi asks, pointing at a kind of shoddy, arts n’crafts shadowbox containing labeled and tied cloves hitch, bowline, square knots, figure eights, binding knots…

This question brought me great shame. My poor father has tried countless times to show me a handful of knots he used to use on his factory floor, tying boxes. I am completely unable to retain one little monad of instruction here. Spatial reasoning is a skill of great importance to the famous IQ test, and a very reliable indicator of low IQ, but I’m going on…

“Let’s smoke a jazz cigarette,” He says eventually, when the time had come.

That may not be an exact quote just since it was right around the time I had nearly fell into the apples myself, “stoned” as it were. Soon enough and thankfully I’m recalling fond days in grad school, talking about topology and set theory and mathematical theories of knots. Avi and his wife Natasha are tickled by this because they prize me as the worst Rummy Cube player on God’s green Earth. I’m playing my favorite Louvin brothers’s songs, loud, and later I will demonstrate some interesting James Brown dance moves. What a life!

Avi Diexler makes some of the most convincing and truly great wines in California. He buys used barrels, shaves them raw to remove the influence of old wine, the gummy plugs of sulphites, and their vanilla scented torching. He puts full grape clusters in the shaved barrels and rolls them twice a day for 3 or 4 weeks. After, he presses the grapes and returns them to the same barrels for the wine to age. His wines see no sulphur additions or additives, and they render the beautiful climate of Mendocino like a dream of awesome weather, exceptional fruit, and modern bombast. In 2019, Avi had the vintage of his career and made excellent wine. He decided to bottle the entire harvest in magnum bottles. The influence of Magnum-ageddon stays with us to this day, with 5 and 6 day old bottles usually somewhere in my apartment, or on a by-the-glass list near you. What did it mean!? Certainly simpler bottling and transport, for an extremely hands on operation. Quirky and spiritually correct, yes. Truly one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard of a winemaker doing.

My friend and I like to strive for these kinds of funny tasks with no ideology or pretense. Years ago we started a project to try and eat some fermented food with every meal. Now, we’re going to try to eat meat from only one animal per meal, no ground beef, no sausage, no pile of chicken wings. I’m not sure what it means, but I know in retrospect it will imply everything.

Further reading

Frenkel, Edward. Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. Basic Books, a Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2014.

Heath, T. L. Apollonius of Perga: Treatise on Conic Sections. W. Heffer & Sons, 1961.

Satan Is Real. Capitol Nashville, 1996.

A quick note of appreciation to my friend and colleague, Jules Dressner, who has been a great source of encouragement and who writes the best producer profiles I know about. If you read all of his writing on their company website, you’ll know a lot about wine!

Welcome and thank you for being here!

There’s an infamous species of aphids with a funny sexual politic. When a colony is in working order, with host plants to consume and nary a predator in sight, the totality of the colony will be made up of females. They reproduce asexually as long as peace and prosperity reigns. It is only if and when there is some distress or interruption of service that the colony produces a male.

Don’t get excited. This isn’t Samson and Delilah, nor Mario the plumber and Peach, the mushroom blonde. The male is produced to bring about genetic diversity in the hope that some Darwinian advantage might result in the dice roll of sexual reproduction. Maybe a mutant offspring would have a longer proboscis, stronger legs, or a sword? I.e. some slight advantage to mitigate their diminished station.

These yellow and microscopic little flecks of snot had a good strategy. Phylloxera, the great destroyer, was genetically agile enough to wipe out stretches of vineyards the size of nation states, a huge portion of which would never be replanted. It’s true! I read it in this great article: on phylloxera.

As Jeff Goldblum (the only actor in Hollywood to ever portray a “Chaos Theorist”) would say, “Life, um, finds a way […].” Spooky. That’s him talking about hermaphrodite dinosaurs, or frogs, America’s most beloved sex-shifter: link.

For me, the best and most scrumptious is the humble, 2-valved mollusk, the oyster. These funny guys start their lives as sexless little spats (real word) that float around and mostly get eaten. Otherwise, they grow one foot, settle down in nice terroir and become female or male, switching from time to time as their environment suits them. Where I come from (Oyster bay!), there’s a rule of thumb about eating oysters only in months that include the letter ‘r’ in their name. Otherwise, it’s said, they can be kind of, well, spermy.1 I guess those other months are the masculine ones? The females, in any case, are delicious!

In part, that’s because, next to a glass of fine wine, there is no gustatory treat more transparent to terroir than that of the oyster. A mature oyster can drink up to 30 quarts of seawater an hour, filtering out and holding onto precious minerals and salts. A conscious taster can learn to determine an oyster’s latitude of origin with relative ease, and with practice become even more precise.

This weird creature represents a variety of places, environments, and flavors. Nature had to invent the human tongue to decode its wealth of information. Where the cleverness of phylloxera laid waste to our shiniest cash crop, the oyster put us in the chattel of servitude as protector, cultivator, and digester. (Read Micheal Pollen on Corn’s total domination of our species).

All that said, it doesn’t take a brain as big as ours to appreciate all the ingenuity of nature, or at least not to metabolize it. Oyster farmers use a very cool sounding tool called a ‘star fish mop’ to keep away starfish. Starfish pry open oyster shells and shoot their stomach into the opening to digest the slimy things en plein air. It’s a costly effort fighting those star mops. How do they know about all the great terroir in there?

Or consider the pea-brained Green Woodpecker. Maybe they know a thing or two? They slam their heads into solid wood around 2000 times a day with such intensity that they need a third eyelid to keep their eyeballs from flying out of their skull. When they spot their prey, it’s a hooked and grotesque tongue that fires out, not the whole digestive system. That tongue is so long and weird that, at rest, it curls all the way up along the back of the birds head, behind that tiny pea brain. Maybe its all the better to taste those ants with!

How weird we are then! who perform all these mechanical tasks, but at the same time have to hear about it in this little voice behind our eyes? In Loren Eisley’s “Star Thrower,” he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson on this thing, “I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn his head and hear the speaker.”

Much to the ire of our oyster farmers, the titular star thrower in Loren Eisley’s essay is tossing beached and forlorn starfish back into the ocean, preserving their life for no other reason than his own pleasure in the preservation of life: the little voice.

At the behest of my friend and winemaker, Mylène Bru, I started reading Marcel Pagnol’s novels about boyhood amongst the garrigue in southern France. They were light and nostalgic stories that summoned up many trips, many dishes, and many bottles. I couldn’t help but dream of Tavel and Bandol, in the tales of Kermit Lynch and others. Or of chewing on leak flowers and rosemary with the Ledogar brothers in Boutenac.

Like the woodpecker, we have an insanely complex system of muscles and nerves in our mouths to process liquids — a whole scientific discipline of fluid biomechanics — but most if it seems completely in the service of giving us concepts, names and stories. The smell of a golden flower, jeunée (Spanish Broom, Ginestra), in Mylène’s Syrah. Olives, lavender, savory, thyme; bacon, tobacco, cedar; pulverized limestone, mistral, the copper screeching of cicadas… all stories we tell ourselves in our digestion, in our place in nature’s economy.

Compared to the aphids who so thoroughly outflanked us, our own sexual politics can be quite rigid. Growing up a woman in the hills of the Corbières, Mylène knew the family estate would go to her brother, despite all her love for the place. She told a new story in a place still traumatized by the devastating blight, and threatened anew with draught, hail, and the rest.

She tells me stories of the table grape, Exalta, and learning how beautiful a wine it could make, nobody seriously having dared to try. It’s a hearty variety and will survive a lot of tumult that climate change will bring. It’s a table grape that suddenly isn’t.

So many of her cuvées are poems of films, songs, family members, and moments. There’s even a blanc de noir cuvée for our beloved Night Moves (already a reference).

We’re drinking old vintages of “Far West” outside in the garrigue. I say, “They seem to get more oak as they age.”

She laughs, “I find that, too. There’s no oak barrels on the domaine at all. Never. The taste of wood comes from here.”

She’s naming plants with French names. “Far west” puts such a picture in my mind.

“It’s a thing that isn’t,” she says.

Further Reading

Fisher, M. F. K., and Martin Mazorra. Consider the Oyster. The Prototype Press at Tranquility, 2021.

Fort, Tom. The Book of Eels. William Collins, 2020.

Lin, Tao. Leave Society. Vintage Contemporaries, Vintage Books, a Division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021.

Pagnol, Marcel. La Glorie de Mon Père. Association Pour Nos Aveugles, 1960.

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Penguin Books, 2016.