DROPLETS is an irregular round-up of quick takes, clapbacks, shout-outs, and other miscellany related to natural wine, wine-at-large, and the restaurant scene in Paris and beyond. It’s a smorgasbord of natural wine counter-propaganda to the Anglophone and French wine media. The first three topics in a given week are free, with access to the full deluge of ten topics limited to paid subscribers.

1. NEVER AGAIN

Writing for Decanter, Andrew Jefford compares the widely acknowledged swing towards fresher, less extractive winemaking in the fine wine sector to, ahem, the slide towards autocracy and protectionism in western democracies.

He seems to conclude in favor of “democracy, free trade, and mutual aid” for permitting a society’s “potential” its “full and unfettered expression” - but in this reach for timeliness, one can hear the ligaments tear. He suggests the winemaking equivalent of democracy involves taking “every opportunity for juice skin exchanges during the winemaking process.”

There are surely a number of different ways to read this prescription, but on the surface, it sounds like most of Jefford’s favorite producers of white wine might disagree.

As it happens, a similar conversation has come up with many natural vignerons of the Languedoc and the Roussillon in recent years, as figures like Fabrice Monnin of La Mazière and, more recently, Joe Jefferies of Les Bories Jefferies, have begun practicing abbreviated macerations of red grapes. Jefferies posits that if we accept that white grapes can express terroir perfectly well without maceration, surely the same must be true for red grapes. The extraordinarily expressive blanc de noirs work of Les Frères Soulier in the Gard lends further credence to this idea.

“You might assign this trend [of lighter, less extractive wines] to the retirement of Robert Parker and the arrival of a new generation of wine critics with different tastes; you might also conclude that it’s a reaction to the climate forcing that’s clearly underway in our atmosphere,” Jefford offers, by way of possible explanation.

Neither factor is irrelevant, surely. But I think we misread this phenomenon when we chalk it up to a mass change in tastes, or call it a “trend,” for that matter. Rather than constituting a simple market-wide swing between one broad style to another (ripe, rich, and low acid to fresh, bright, and high acid), I think what we’re witnessing is the normal stratification and diversification of a better-educated wine market, or, at very least, a wine market finally containing a better-educated segment, one able to discern where concentration and complexity diverge.

When considering the history of wine appreciation in Anglophone markets in the 20th century, it is important to recall that before websites, iPhones, YouTube, social media, Substack, etc., the vast majority of the flow of information about viticulture and winemaking bottlenecked with the importer, and bottlenecked further with retailers and sommeliers. Books written with mass-market audiences in mind generally offered more of the same rote repertoire of soil types and fruit-flower metaphors when it came to “wine knowledge”; this latter represented an impoverished discourse born of widespread ignorance of viticulture and winemaking within what were its fastest growing markets.

Today, by contrast, a wine drinker interested in the work of a given wine estate usually has immediate access to further information about its size, its viticultural methods, its winemaking practice, its general commercial posture, etc. All of this is invaluable for going beyond mere descriptors and subjective judgement and getting into the whys of wine appreciation: why something tastes or smells or interacts with air like it does, and why it is pleasing or not. Wine drinkers are just way less in the dark than before, and a choice among wine styles is not as binary as that offered by our political system. This is why there will never be another Robert Parker in the USA, despite very strong evidence that we remain, on some level, a nation of dupes.

2. EXACTLY BACKWARDS

Pseudonymous British wine writer Peter Pharos, writing for Tim Atkin’s website about the conspicuous failure rate of winery start-ups, lands on a hugely important truth for understanding the wine market - only to apply it exactly backwards, thereby somewhat blunting the force of the insight.

“Wine does come with a set of unusual conditions,” notes Pharos. “Starting from a rather peculiar one: not everyone is in it to make money. I am not saying many enter it with a financial death wish; just that, for a certain type of super-rich, a winery is just a nice thing to have. It must be very frustrating to see someone setting up shop next to you, and then not running it as a shop. Realistically, however, those cases are a small, if disproportionately noisy, part of the wine world.”

I know nothing of Pharos’ biography, but this passage suggests a certain innocence with regards to the affairs of the super-rich. It is tempting, when one is not super-rich, to imagine that such people must be okay with losing small amounts of money here and there; surely they must live with a carefree abandon regarding the tedious pecuniary minutiae that consume small business owners. Yet the entirety of my own experience with very wealthy winery owners - and the very wealthy in general - testifies to the opposite dynamic. The super-rich tend to engage large staffs to ensure, above all, that nothing in their investment portfolio loses money. The bottom line is the one thing they look at closely. People on salary at wineries owned by the super-rich, meanwhile, wish, above all, to keep their jobs; very few are entitled to take the financial risks necessary for the production of, say, low-yield, well-ripened, naturally vinified, well-aged, unsulfited wines. This is one of the key reasons why wineries belonging to distant, disengaged super-rich owners generally produce terrible, overpriced wines.

If experienced wine aficionados can recognize this, it is partly thanks to the continued presence, in the international wine market, of outstanding, world-class, extremely affordable wines, generally produced by independent paysan vignerons whose small estates employ little to no full-time staff.1 These vignerons tend to live simply. They drive modest cars; they rarely purchase new equipment; they repair things that are broken. Their marketing budget is close to zero. They take minimal vacations. They work themselves to the bone, and yet they want for nothing in particular.

“Not everyone is in [wine] to make money”: Pharos’ observation is true, and it certainly has an effect on the failure rate of overcapitalized new winery start-ups. It just doesn’t apply to who he thinks it does.

3. PITY THE CULPRITS

Among the most commonplace templates for mainstream wine “journalism” nowadays consists of product placement masked with a thin beard of ecological anxiety. The Guardian’s avowed emphasis on reporting on global heating ironically makes it a very reliable mark for these sort of concern-trolling, pity-placement pitches. The most recent example - and among the most shameless in recent memory - consists of international mega-producer Familia Torres proclaiming they “maybe” will have to cease producing wine in Catalonia “in thirty to fifty years’ time.”

This is non-news of staggering banality, like a restaurant announcing plans to possibly close someday. The lack of newsworthiness is the giveaway that Sarah Butler’s article’s primary purpose is product placement for Familia Torres. For the small price of fretting aloud about part of the business’ distant long-term future, Familia Torres attains front-page coverage in the British newspaper of record, and owner Miguel Torres gets to pose as someone concerned about the environment, insofar as it concerns his business prospects.

Familia Torres is a gargantuan wine company - the largest in Spain - with interests throughout that country and as far afield as Chile and California. It is no exaggeration to say that the only conceivable way for the company’s mega-wealthy owners to elicit any sympathy whatsoever is to actively evoke the specter of their own imminent and unavoidable financial ruin due to global heating.

Unfortunately, the company’s central historical role in the Spanish wine industry renders explicit the Orwellian character of this PR initiative.

“The family business has been making wine in Catalonia since 1870,” Butler recites, failing to note that a major agricultural business working throughout the 20th century may bear some small responsibility for soaring carbon emissions during this highly profitable period of widespread mechanization and rationalization of agricultural production.

Familia Torres “invests 11% of its profits every year to combatting and adapting to the climate crisis,” she notes later. It is a textbook example of an unverifiable statistic, and an unintentionally hilarious moment in an article purportedly concerning the non-viability of winemaking in Catalonia the near future2. Should the situation become truly grave - if the seas were to swallow Barcelona and the desertified vineyards of Catalonia were to become littered with the desiccated corpses of climate refugees - one supposes Familia Torres could dial up the climate change combat budget to a jaw-dropping 12% of profits, and still please shareholders with the other 88%.

No, the ratio doesn’t bespeak much urgency. At what point does a business headed for catastrophe renounce most or all profits in order to maintain the environment upon which its activity is predicated? Probably never. The unstated context for Torres’ fretting and for the entire genre of climate change reporting in the business section is the idea that handsome profit margins are literally the only reason to conduct any activity whatsoever.

“In the future if we want to have more continuity in the harvest we have to stop the warming,” says Torres in the article. “The warming is killing the trade.”

And, wouldn’t you know it, our fixation with massively profitable trade is preventing us from doing much about the warming. It’s a huge pickle.

Thank goodness Torres’ company presumably has 150 years’ worth of gangbusters earnings - from what turns out to have been extractive, environmentally destructive trade - to tide it over while it transitions to despoiling new areas. By no coincidence, the company also recently made news for its 6 million euro investment in non-alcoholic wine production.

Subscribers can scroll down for 7 more quick takes, on topics including Eric Asimov on “non-alcoholic wine”; the Fine Water Summit; non-sparkling Prosecco; La Cave du Centre in Le Journal de Saône-et-Loire; me in Fantastic Man; whether natural wine is “over”; and more.